Literary scholars are generally suspicious of the concept of universals: there are presently no candidates for literary universals that a high proportion of literary scholars would accept as valid. This paper reports results from a content analysis of patterns of characterization in folktales from 48 culture areas, aimed at identifying patterns of characterization that apply across regions of the world and levels of cultural complexity. The search for these patterns was guided by evolutionary theory and the findings are consistent with (...) previous research on patterns of altruism, sex differences in mate preferences, sex differences in reproductive strategy, and differing emphases on male and female physical attractiveness. World literature, especially originally oral literature, represents a vast and neglected repository of information that researchers can use to more precisely map the contours of human nature. (shrink)

This article analyzes American television and American and British print news coverage of human rights using a combination of manual and machine coding. The data reveal that television and print news cover very few human rights stories, that these stories are mostly international and not domestic, that even when human rights are covered, they are not covered in detail, and that human rights issues are more likely to be covered when they are not framed as human rights. This suggests that (...) human rights is simply not a frame that journalists employ and provides support for government-leading-media theories of newsworthiness. (shrink)

Gene-editing technologies, such as CRISPR/Cas9, are internationally ethically fraught. In the United States, policy surrounding gene-editing has yet to be implemented, while the science continues to speed ahead. However, it is not enough that policy be implemented: in order for policy to establish limits for the technology such that benefits are possible while threats are kept at bay, such policy must be ethical. In turn, the ethics of gene-editing is a culturally determined field of inquiry. This piece presents a proposal (...) for a study whose goal is to arrive at ethical policy recommendations for policymakers. To achieve this goal, this study proposes, what needs to be done is, first, to understand the full history and foundation of gene-editing by conducting a thorough legal, bioethical, and policy review for precedent assisted reproductive technologies and genetic reproductive technologies. Following this effort, an empirical study must be conducted involving careful surveys of key stakeholder groups on their knowledge and opinions of gene-editing. Such stakeholder groups must include bioethicists, medical geneticists, and lay persons, including those in the disability community. (shrink)

The ease and applicability of CRISPR/Cas9––a new and precise gene editing and reproductive technology––have garnered hype and heightened concern about its potential ‘unprecedented and horrific consequences’ and have led many scientific leaders to call for a moratorium on its research and use. CRISPR appears distinctly more controversial than previous technological innovations, with a greater reach and speed of human treatment and enhancement; however, we have seen similarly inflated hopes and fears in response to other medical innovations for well over a (...) century. One intervention that has both historically and recently incited alarm––vaccines––serves as a pertinent example of what could go wrong if a technology's reach is shortened due to inflated fears. By comparing the vaccine controversy and the CRISPR debate, we can help separate the hype from the realistic potential of these technologies. How our society grapples with such innovations will determine the extent to which their impact on our individual and collective health will be beneficial. We must recognise the need for a tempered approach to CRISPR conversation leading to regulation and ethical application. Although CRISPR's reach will continue expanding with ongoing research, thus requiring continuous evaluation, the lessons we have learned from the vaccine controversy demonstrate that our approach must not be to shut down regulation and application now, but to thoughtfully conjoin productive debate and action so that therapeutic gene editing can alleviate suffering as soon as possible without precipitating social outcomes we would belatedly deplore. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 7, July 2019, Page 41-43.

Demystifying the key ideas of the world's greatest philosophers, and exploring all of the most important branches of thought, including philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and feminist philosophy in a uniquely visual way, this resource is the perfect introduction to the subject.

The cosmological-meteorological writings of Paracelsus (1493-1541), presented here for the first time in the most reliable German versions with facing-page translations and thorough text-based and historical commentary, are essential documents of the transition from the medieval to the modern era.

Until the 1970s the history of sexuality was a marginalized practice. Today it is a flourishing field, increasingly integrated into the mainstream and producing innovative insights into the ways in which societies shape and are shaped by sexual values, norms, identities and desires. In this book, Jeffrey Weeks, one of the leading international scholars in the subject, sets out clearly and concisely how sexual history has developed, and its implications for our understanding of the ways we live today. The (...) emergence of a new wave of feminism and lesbian and gay activism in the 1970s transformed the subject, heavily influenced by new trends in social and cultural history, radical sociological insights and the impact of Michel Foucault’s work. The result was an increasing emphasis on the historical shaping of sexuality, and on the existence of many different sexual meanings and cultures on a global scale. With chapters on, amongst others, lesbian, gay and queer history, feminist sexual history, the mainstreaming of sexual history, and the globalization of sexual history, What is Sexual History? is an indispensable guide to these developments. (shrink)

Can you master the ideas of Plato, Kant, Nietzsche and Sartre? What does 'I think, therefore I am' really mean? Do you know the arguments for and against the existence of god? And what do the great philosophers tell us about knowledge and truth, good and evil? Packed with bite-sized briefings, shortcuts and bluffs, Get Smart: Philosophy demystifies 50 key philosophical concepts and provides you with all you need to speak out about the very biggest ideas.

Quick, accessible, compact guide to understanding key political concepts. Contents include: Liberty, Justice, Equality, Human rights, Social contract, Democracy, Monarchy, Anarchism, Capitalism, Socialism, Nationalism and Globalisation.

This book presents a mathematical programming approach to the analysis of production frontiers and efficiency measurement. The authors construct a variety of production frontiers, and by measuring distances to them are able to develop a model of efficient producer behaviour and a taxonomy of possible types of departure from efficiency in various environments. Linear programming is used as an analytical and computational technique in order to accomplish this. The approach developed is then applied to modelling producer behaviour. By focusing on (...) the empirical relevance of production frontiers and distances to them, and applying linear programming techniques to artificial data to illustrate the type of information they can generate, this book provides a unique study in applied production analysis. It will be of interest to scholars and students of economics and operations research, and analysts in business and government. (shrink)

Abstract This essay addresses the role of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in security governance. In this context, it offers a historical overview of some of the main developments in the evolution of private warfare and critically discusses some of the key challenges confronting the quest for holding PMSCs accountable in accordance with international human rights and humanitarian norms.

Demystifies complex philosophical ideas and debates in a comprehensive format that introduces the major theories of such great philosophers as Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Epicurus, and Thomas Aquinas.

This article reports the findings of a survey examining if there are gender and career stage differences between male and female practitioners regarding ethical judgment. The results show that, on average, females adopted a more strict ethical stance than their male counterparts on 7 out of 19 vignettes. Males on the other hand, demonstrated a more ethical stance than their female counterparts on 2 out of 19 vignettes. The results furthermore indicate there is a significant difference in ethical judgment across (...) career stages. Overall, it appears that practitioners in later career stages display higher ethical judgment than practitoners in lower career stages. Implications are provided for both practitioners and academicians. (shrink)

This is the first book to offer a philosophical engagement with microaggressions. It aims to provide an intersectional analysis of microaggressions that cuts across multiple dimensions of oppression and marginalization, and to engage a variety of perspectives that have been sidelined within the discipline of philosophy. The volume gathers a diverse group of contributors: philosophers of color, philosophers with disabilities, philosophers of various nationalities and ethnicities, and philosophers of several gender identities. Their unique frames of analysis articulate both how the (...) concept of microaggressions can be used to clarify and sharpen our understanding of subtler aspects of oppression and how analysis, expansion, and reconceiving the notion of a microaggression can deepen and extend its explanatory power. The essays in the volume seek to defend microaggressions from common critiques and to explain their impact beyond the context of college students. Some of the guiding questions that this volume explores include, but are not limited to, the following: Can microaggressions be established as a viable scientific concept? What roles do microaggressions play in other oppressive phenomena like transphobia, fat phobia, and abelism? How can epistemological challenges around microaggressions be addressed via feminist theory, critical race theory, disability theory, or epistemologies of ignorance? What insights can be gleaned from intersectional analyses of microaggressions? Are there domain-specific analyses of microaggressions that would give insight to features of that domain, i.e. microaggressions related to sexuality, athletics, immigration status, national origin, body type, or ability. Microaggressions and Philosophyfeatures cutting-edge research on an important topic that will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars across disciplines. It includes perspectives from philosophy of psychology, empirically informed philosophy, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, disability theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and social and political philosophy. (shrink)

Whitehead claims there is only one type of individual in the universe—the actual entity—but there are necessarily multiple tokens of this type. This turns out to be paradoxical. Nevertheless, a type of individuality that is necessarily plural because, for each token, relations to other tokens are constitutive is something familiar from ordinary language, everyday politics, and, not least, 19th century German social thought. Whitehead’s actual entity generalizes the notion of species-being we find in Fichte, Feuerbach, and Marx. The rationale for (...) the concept of species-being brings to light important social and political implications of Whitehead’s cosmology. (shrink)

At the time of his death in May of 2012, Ralph Pred was working on a critical social theory inspired by process philosophy. In the book manuscript he left unfinished, Syntax and Solidarity, he develops a “radically empirical” sociology that enables him to identify and critically evaluate the different forms that social solidarity has taken in the history of civilization. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the importance of his unfinished project. The executors of Pred’s literary (...) estate would be happy to see his project, with due acknowledgment, publicized and continued. Keywords: Active Voice Bias, Concrescence, Middle Voice, Sociogeny, Solidarity, Substance. (shrink)

The search for meaningful work has been of interest to researchers from a variety of disciplines for decades and seems to have grown even more recently. Much of the literature assumes that employees share a sense of what is meaningful in work and there isn’t much attention given to how and why meanings might differ. Researchers have not only called for more research studying demographic differences in definitions of meaning :77–90, 2014), but also more research utilizing mixed methods to study (...) psychological concepts like meaningful work Handbook of multimethod measurement in psychology, American Psychological Association, Washington, 2006). This study specifically examines differences across generational cohorts on their prioritization of sources of meaningful work through qualitative, in-depth interviews followed by a more generalizable, quantitative survey. Findings from the qualitative study show that generational cohorts define the meaning in their jobs differently, and they hold negative perceptions about the lack of desire for meaning in each of the other cohorts. Study 2 maps generational cohorts on the comprehensive model of meaningful work designed by Lips-Wiersma and Morris :491–511, 2009) to reveal that although there are some differences in prioritization of sources of meaningful work, all generational cohorts share similar desire to “develop and become themselves” when asked about their definitions of meaningful work. Implications and future research are discussed. (shrink)

What remains as an ongoing project, Weeks contends, is creating a theory of the constitution of subjects to account for the processes of social construction. This book presents one such account.

Childhood cancer incidence is rising, affecting a growing proportion of elementary school students. For most of these children, school attendance can be limited by hospitalisations, treatments and side effects. However, little is yet known about the educational needs and experiences of this population. This phenomenological study explored the school experiences of 10 6- to 12-year-old children with cancer as they underwent chemotherapy. Results revealed perceptions that attending school in the hospital or home during cancer treatment is essentially lonely, confusing and (...) “different”. These perceptions intertwined to illuminate five themes: school should involve fun activities; group educational formats are preferable; old school is the “best school”; being a “good student” is important during treatment; and attending school is complicated during treatment. Therefore, hospital-based and homebound schooling programmes should integrate socially interactive and cognitively engaging curriculum to best support the learning needs of this population. (shrink)

An increasing number of research teams are investigating the efficacy of brain-computer interface (BCI)-mediated interventions for promoting motor recovery following stroke. A growing body of evidence suggests that of the various BCI designs, most effective are those that deliver functional electrical stimulation (FES) of upper extremity (UE) muscles contingent on movement intent. More specifically, BCI-FES interventions utilize algorithms that isolate motor signals—user-generated intent-to-move neural activity recorded from cerebral cortical motor areas—to drive electrical stimulation of individual muscles or muscle synergies. BCI-FES (...) interventions aim to recover sensorimotor function of an impaired extremity by facilitating and/or inducing long-term motor learning-related neuroplastic changes in appropriate control circuitry. We developed a non-invasive, electroencephalogram (EEG)-based BCI-FES system that delivers closed-loop neural activity-triggered electrical stimulation of targeted distal muscles while providing the user with multimodal sensory feedback. This BCI-FES system consists of three components: (1) EEG acquisition and signal processing to extract real-time volitional and task-dependent neural command signals from cerebral cortical motor areas, (2) FES of muscles of the impaired hand contingent on the motor cortical neural command signals, and (3) multimodal sensory feedback associated with performance of the behavioral task, including visual information, linked activation of somatosensory afferents through intact sensorimotor circuits, and electro-tactile stimulation of the tongue. In this report, we describe device parameters and intervention protocols of our BCI-FES system which, combined with standard physical rehabilitation approaches, has proven efficacious in treating UE motor impairment in stroke survivors, regardless of level of impairment and chronicity. (shrink)

The authors argue that the consciousness debate inhabits the same problem space today as it did in the 17th century. They attribute the lack of progress to a mindset still polarized by Descartes’ real distinction between mind and body, resulting in a standoff between humanistic and scientistic approaches. They suggest that consciousness can be adequately studied only by a multiplicity of disciplines so that the paramount problem is how to integrate diverse disciplinary perspectives into a coherent metatheory. Process philosophy is (...) well qualified to attempt such a synthesis. The rationale for the volume is summed up in the book's unifying thesis: normal, focal-attentive consciousness is not the sui generis phenomenon it is usually taken to be, but part of a wider spectrum of experience (including marginal, deviant, and non-human experience) that can only be studied by approaches as diverse as phenomenology, psycho- and neuropathology, biology, and zoology. (shrink)

This paper reports on the results from two studies that were conducted eight years apart with different respondents. The studies examined the role of the Mere Exposure Effect on ethical tolerance or acceptability of particular business decisions. The results from Study 1 show there is a significant difference in ethical judgment for 12 out of 16 vignettes between those who have been exposed to such situations compared to those who have not been exposed to them. In those 12 situations, those (...) who have been exposed to such situations adopted a more tolerant stance toward the ethically questionable behavior. The results from Study 2 show there is a significant difference in ethical judgment for 9 out of 16 vignettes between those who have been exposed to such situations compared to those who have not been exposed to them. Again, in those nine situations, those who have been exposed to such situations adopted a more tolerant stance toward the ethically questionable behavior. Interestingly, the 9 situations in Study 2 were 9 of the 12 situations found to be significant in Study 1, and in the same direction, suggesting that we have found consistency in our findings and support for the Mere Exposure Effect. Implications are provided for both higher education and practitioners. (shrink)

The `sexual citizen' is a new phenomenon in the erotic world, and a new player in the political and cultural arena, a product of the new primacy of sexual subjectivity in contemporary societies. Living at the fateful juncture of private claims to space, self-determination and pleasure, and public claims to rights, justice and recognition, the sexual citizen is a hybrid being, who tells us a great deal about the pace and scale of cultural transformation and new possibilities of the self (...) and identity. Consideration of the sexual citizen also offers a new angle on recent debates about citizenship in all its complex dimensions, bringing to the fore issues that have often been occluded in these debates. The article explores these issues through the prism of three significant social developments: the democratization of relationships; the emergence of new subjectivities; and the proliferation of new `stories' about the body, the erotic and intimate life which both signal and encourage the growth of social and cultural capital, and in turn lead to new demands on the institutions of political life. (shrink)

The doctrine of idols is one of the most famous aspects of Bacon's thought. Yet his claim that the idols lead to madness has gone almost entirely unnoticed. This paper argues that Bacon's theory of idols underlies his diagnosis of the contemporary condition as one of ‘universal madness’. In contrast to interpretations that locate his doctrine of error and recovery within the biblical narrative of the Fall, the present analysis focuses on the material and cultural sources of the mind's tendency (...) towards error. It explains the idols in terms of Bacon's materialist psychology and his exposé of the debilitating effects of language and traditional learning. In so doing, it highlights the truly radical nature of the idols. For Bacon, the first step towards sanity was to alert people to the prevailing madness. The doctrine of idols was intended as a wake-up call, preparing the way for a remedy in the form of his new method of inquiry. The paper concludes by indicating how Bacon's method aimed to treat ‘universal madness’, and it suggests that his diagnosis influenced John Locke. (shrink)

There have been many attempts to retire dualism from active philosophic life, replacing it with something less removed from science, but we are no closer to that goal now than fifty years ago. I propose breaking the stalemate by considering marginal perspectives that may help identify unrecognized assumptions that limit the mainstream debate. Comparison with Whitehead highlights ways that opponents of dualism continue to uphold the Cartesian “real distinction” between mind and body. Whitehead, by contrast, insists on a conceptual distinction: (...) there can no more be body without mind than mind without body (at least at the level of ultimate constituents). Key to this integration is Whitehead’s understanding that mind, at its most rudimentary, is simply the intrinsic temporality of a physical event. Thus, the resulting form of “panpsychism” is more naturalistic than commonly supposed, and it solves both the composition problem (traditionally fatal to panpsychism) and the “hard problem.”. (shrink)

Growth cones are the highly motile structures found at the tips of growing axons and dendrites (neurites), which extend from neurones, during the development of the nervous system. They function both as detectors and transducers of extrinsic guidance cues and as regions where the neurite cytoskeleton is assembled. Without concerted neurite assembly, advance cannot occur. Assembly of the neurite cytoskeleton in growing neurites chiefly involves microtubule assembly at the growth cone. Some of the factors that may influence microtubule assembly in (...) growth cones are becoming apparent and include posttranslational modification of tubulin itself and microtubule associated proteins, particularly tau and MAP1B. (shrink)

This article provides a broad survey of issues facing rural communities and suggests that medicalization of poverty concepts and interventions need to be tailored to those populations. Rural poverty may be both broader and deeper than in urban areas. Those challenges seem to produce a constellation of health conditions, as rural residents struggle with unemployment and lack of opportunities. Relatedly, rural communities struggle to maintain financially viable hospitals and specialty providers. The article closes by offering a snapshot of rural-specific strategies (...) to address these issues. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the manifesto as a utopian genre. Some argue that the manifesto is passé: paradigmatically modernist, unrepentantly masculinist, and thoroughly authoritarian. They see the form as tethered by its foundational text, the Communist Manifesto, to a pre-Fordist political-economic formation and historical subject that are now irrelevant to the conditions of post-Fordist production. According to its critics, the genre is too closely identified with such politically and epistemologically suspect commitments as the vanguard, the party, truth, and the political (...) efficacy of ideology critique. Thus, so the story goes, the Manifesto helped to sow the seeds—in the form of an orthodox Marxism—of its own .. (shrink)

Nicholas Rescher’s way of understanding process philosophy reflects the ambitions of his own philosophical project and commits him to a conceptually ideal interpretation of process. Process becomes a transcendental idea of reflection that can always be predicated of our knowledge of the world and of the world qua known, but not necessarily of reality an sich. Rescher’s own taxonomy of process thinking implies that it has other variants. While Rescher’s approach to process philosophy makes it intelligible and appealing to mainstream (...) analytic philosophy, it leaves behind the more daring ideas of Bergson, James, and Whitehead, all of whom envisioned the primordial reality of process in a radical ontology of becoming. This variant of process thought can be construed as coherent and self-consistent, but not without relinquishing the correspondence theory of truth and embracing challenging ideas that bring us in close proximity to existentialism, apophatic theology, and Buddhism. (shrink)

This paper looks at the history of the problem of individuation from Plato to Whitehead. Part I takes as its point of departure Reiner Wiehl’s interpretation of the different meanings of “abstract” in the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead and arrives at a corresponding taxonomy of different ways things can be called concrete. Part II compares the way philosophers in different periods understand the relation between thought and intuition. The view mostly associated with ancient philosophy is that thought and sense-perception (...) target different kinds of objects. The view mostly associated with modern philosophy (although it was introduced by the Stoics) is that thought and sense-perception are different ways of targeting the same objects. These differences have specific consequences for theories of individuation, which are assessed historically in Part III and then applied to Whitehead’s difficult texts in part IV. (shrink)

A growing public concern regarding ethical business conduct has stimulated marketing research in the ethics area. This study is the first empirical research to investigate the relationship between a code of ethics and sales force behavior. The findings present preliminary evidence that a well communicated code of ethics may be related to ethical sales force behavior. Furthermore, it appears that a sales force that is employed in such an environment can be profiled as being relatively high in job performance and (...) receiving equally high satisfaction from their positions. Suggestions are made for future research and recommendations are offered for marketing practitioners. (shrink)

Karl Marx entitled his first major work on the theory of capitalism an Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, not, it should be stressed, An Introduction to … Political Economy. The inclusion of the crucial ‘the critique of provides the key to Marx's break with classical political economy. As much as he respected the contribution of bourgeois writers, especially Ricardo, he did not consider himself a radical member of the political economy school. That the political economy school's most outstanding (...) members focused upon class relations did not save them from an analysis that, in Marx's judgement, was ‘vulgar', in that it focused upon the appearance of phenomena rather than their underlying causes. Political economy focused on relations of exchange, rather than on class relations among human beings. As he wrote famously in an oftquoted letter, for at least a generation before him bourgeois writers had recognised both class divisions in capitalism and that the basis of profit was exploitation; were these the central elements of his work, his contribution would have been trivial. (shrink)

Demystifies complex philosophical ideas and debates in a comprehensive format that introduces the major theories of such great philosophers as Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Epicurus, and Thomas Aquinas.

Philosophy in Minutes distils 200 of the most important philosophical ideas into easily digestible, bite-sized sections. The core information for every topic - including debates such as the role of philosophy in science and religion, key thinkers from Aristotle to Marx, and introductions to morality and ethics - is explained in straightforward language, using illustrations to make the concepts easy to understand and remember. Whether you are perplexed by existentialism or pondering the notion of free will, this accessible small-format book (...) will help any reader to quickly grasp the basics of this highly nuanced subject. Chapters include: Truth and logic, Marxism, Communism and Socialism, Ontology, Philosophy and literature, Existence of God, Feminist theory, Consciousness, The future of philosophy. (shrink)

The greatest minds of every generation advise on relationships, identity, life events, art and aesthetics, and politics. Everyday questions are answered from a number of philosophical points of view.

Conventional approaches to consciousness assume that our current science tells us within tolerable limits what physical nature is. Because nature so understood cannot explain consciousness as we seem to experience it ourselves, explaining consciousness becomes a problem. One solution is to rethink what consciousness is so that it becomes the sort of thing our current natural science could in principle explain. Whitehead takes the opposite approach, using the existence of consciousness as a clue to what nature must be if it (...) can generate something like consciousness. The justification for this approach can be found in Whitehead’s implicit indictment of descriptive phenomenology. According to Whitehead, the seemingly insoluble problem of explaining consciousness naturalistically is an artifact created by the assumption that consciousness faithfully samples the world, when in fact it obscures the very aspects of nature that are indispensable to understanding how anything, including consciousness itself, could emerge through a physical process. (shrink)

Although Whitehead’s particular style of philosophizing--looking at traditional philosophical problems in light of recent scientific advances--was part of a trend that began with the scientific revolutions in the early 20th century and continues today, he was marginalized in 20th century philosophy because of his outspoken defense of what he was doing as “metaphysics.” Metaphysics, for Whitehead, is a cross-disciplinary hermeneutic responsible for coherently integrating the perspectives of the special sciences with one another and with everyday experience. The program of such (...) a meta-discipline is challenging to philosophical orthodoxy because it enlarges, rather than narrows, the range of empirical evidence that philosophy must acknowledge. This places Whitehead’s philosophy in a perennial tradition that seeks to resolve fundamental antinomies through synthesis and reconciliation rather than reduction or elimination. (shrink)

Terms for consciousness, used with a cognitive meaning, emerged as count nouns in the 17th century. This transformation repeats an evolution that had taken place in late antiquity, when related vocabulary, used in the sense of conscience, went from being mass nouns designating states to count nouns designating faculties possessed by every individual. The reified concept of consciousness resulted from the rejection of the Scholastic-Aristotelian theory of mind according to which the mind is not a countable thing, but a pure (...) potentiality. This rejection was motivated by an acute sense of the mind’s fallible subjectivity. While conditioned by recent historical events, the 17th century’s pervasive sense of subjectivity also reveals a heavy debt to Hellenistic philosophy, which had been recently rediscovered. But whereas Hellenistic thought, mistrustful of theoria, only reifies conscience, early modern thinking, more mistrustful of praxis and seeking its grounding in theoria, goes a step further and reifies consciousness. Partly modeled on theological ideas, the resulting concept of consciousness is plagued by paradoxes that have becomes notorious for their intractability. But essentially the same model of consciousness underwrites contemporary theory, embroiling contemporary debates in the same controversies that dominated the 17th century. Sidestepping these difficulties by returning to the Scholastic-Aristotelian theory of mind would be a tall order, but it is not impossible. Alfred North Whitehead's theory of consciousness offers an example. His novel theory of time enables Whitehead to rehabilitate the Aristotelian concept of passive mind in a wholly naturalistic way. (shrink)

A popular “Reductionist” account of personal identity unifies person stages into persons in virtue of their psychological continuity with one another. One objection to psychological continuity accounts is that there is more to our personal identity than just mere psychological continuity: there is also an active process of self-interpretation and self-creation. This criticism can be used to motivate a rival account of personal identity that appeals to the notion of a narrative. To the extent that they comment upon the issue, (...) proponents of narrative accounts typically reject Reductionist metaphysics that (ontologically) reduce persons to aggregates of person stages. In contrast to this trend, we seek to develop a narrative account of personal identity from within Reductionist metaphysics: we think person stages are unified into persons in virtue of their narrative continuity with one another. We argue that this Reductionist version of the narrative account avoids some serious problems facing non-Reductionist versions of the narrative account. (shrink)