In her review of my book Assisted Death: A Study in Ethics and Law, Glenys Williams raises a number of substantive objections to its argument. In this note I reply to those objections.

William James’s reputation in the field of emotion research is based on his early psychological writings where he defines emotions as ‘feelings of bodily changes’. In his later work, particularly in his study of mystic emotion, James comes up with what looks like a completely different approach. Here his focus is on positive feelings of inspiration and joy, but also on downbeat moods like melancholy and depression. He examines how these feeling states give meaning to an individual’s life. Theorists (...) often speculate about a gap between James’s early writings and his later work, and assume that the later James turned from an evolutionary-minded natural scientist into a metaphysical philosopher. In my paper, I follow Ratcliffe in his view that a sharply drawn line between the early and the late work is implausible and that James’s later study of mysticism fits nicely with his early psychology. Drawing on James, I show how in his later work, James develops a theory of embodied emotions that anticipates the role ascribed by twentieth century phenomenology to anxiety and other ‘bad moods’, as possibilities for philosophical reflection and self-understanding. (shrink)

In recent years a number of books have been published that offer short autobiographical essays of academics, focusing on their research and how their life history affected their scholarly development. These could be labeled as "intellectual journey narratives." Some volumes focus on philosophers and their religious faith or lack thereof (e.g., Clark, 1997, Antony, 2007). Psychology has its own version of the intellectual journey narrative, in T. S. Krawiec's (1972, 1974, 1978) multivolume set of autobiographical essays by contemporary psychologists. In (...) 1987, Rosemary Pilkington edited her first volume of essays entitled Men and Women of Parapsychology: Personal Reflections, Esprit Volume 1. It contains autobiographical essays by Jule Eisenbud, Montague Ullman, Jan Ehrenwald, Eileen Coly, Joseph H. Rush, Gertrude R. Schmeidler, Emilio Servadio, Renée Haynes, Hans Bender, Karlis Osis, George Zorab and Bernard Grad. The second (2013) volume contains autobiographical essays by Mary Rose Barrington, Eberhard Bauer, William Braud (now deceased), Stephen Braude, Richard S. Broughton, Larry Dossey, Sally Rhine Feather, Erlendur Haraldsson, Arthur Hastings, Stanley Krippner, Lawrence LeShan, Roger Nelson, John Palmer, Guy Leon Playfair, William G. Roll (now deceased), Serena Roney-Dougal, Stephan A. Schwartz, Rex G. Stanford, Russell Targ, Charles T. Tart, and Walter von Lucadou. Between the two volumes almost every significant contemporary parapsychologist is represented, with the major exceptions being the late John Beloff and the late Ian Stevenson. (shrink)

Emotions are ”feelings of bodily changes’, according to William James. This definition was the starting point of a debate that has been going on for more than a century now. James’ approach soon seemed empirically falsified by experimental psychologists and it was seriously undermined by philosophers who called his views untenable, because he seemed to reduce emotions to non-cognitive sensations. But time and again James rose from his grave. Today we witness his revival in the work of ”neo-Jamesians’ like (...) Jesse Prinz and ”neo-phenomenologists’ like Matthew Ratcliffe. In this article the main reactions to James’ ”feelings of bodily changes’ are examined. My conclusion is that both his critics and his supporters have started from an incomplete interpretation of the theory. James’ pragmatically embedded psychology of emotion as the experience of a dynamic, bodily self has until today received insufficient philosophical attention. (shrink)

In the 1950s, Chomsky and his colleagues began attempts to reduce the complexity of natural language phonology and syntax to a few general principles. It wasn’t long before philosophers, notably John Searle and H. Paul Grice, started looking for ways to do the same for rational communication (Chapman 2005). In his 1967 William James Lectures, Grice presented a loose optimization system based on his maxims of conversation. The resulting papers (especially Grice 1975) strike a fruitful balance between intuitive exploration (...) and formal development. Though the work is not particularly formal, it marks the birth of modern formal pragmatics. Pragmatics is central to the theory of linguistic meaning because, to paraphrase Levinson (2000), the encoded content of the sentences we utter is only the barest sketch of what we actually communicate with those utterances. Utterance interpretation involves complex interactions among (i) semantic content, (ii) the context of utterance, and (iii) general pragmatic pressures (of which Grice’s maxims are one conception). The starting point for a formal pragmatics is the observation that speakers agree to a remarkable extent on the interpretations of the utterances they hear, suggesting that there are deep regularities across speakers, utterance contexts, and sentence types in how (i)–(iii) interact. An overarching challenge for pragmatic theory is that semantic content and the context of utterance influence each other. It is common, for instance, to find that the meaning of a sentence is crucially incomplete without contextual information. Indexicals and demonstratives are paradigm cases: ‘I am here now’ doesn’t have a fully specified denotation without information about who the speaker is, when he is speaking, and where he is speaking. Similarly, modal auxiliaries like must admit of a wide range of interpretations.. (shrink)

Many philosophers with hedonistic sympathies (e.g., Mill, Sidgwick, Sumner, Feldman, Crisp, Heathwood, and Bradley) have claimed that well-being is necessarily experiential. Kagan once claimed something slightly different, saying that, although unexperienced bodily events can directly impact a person’s well-being, it is nonetheless true that any change in a person’s well-being must involve a change in her (i.e., either in her mind or in her body). Kagan elaborated by saying that a person’s well-being cannot float freely of her such that (...) it is affected by events that do not affect her (Kagan 1992, 169–189). These two claims—that well-being is necessarily experiential and that changes in well-being must involve changes in the person—are two different ways of specifying the general intuition that a person’s well-being must be strongly tied to her. This general intuition imposes an adequacy constraint on welfare theorizing: To be adequate, a welfare theory cannot allow that someone can be directly benefited by events that are not strongly tied to her. Call this the strong-tie requirement. The strong-tie requirement is easily satisfied by welfare hedonism, but it poses problems for desire-fulfillment welfare theories and objective-list welfare theories. Though a great deal has been written about desire-fulfillment welfare theories in relation to the strong-tie requirement, not as much has been written about objective-list welfare theories in relation to the strong-tie requirement. This paper argues that objective-list welfare theories can satisfy the strong-tie requirement, though probably only if they take a perfectionist form, as opposed to a brute-list form. (shrink)

The similarities and differences in dream content at the cross-cultural, gender, and individual levels provide one starting point for carrying out studies that attempt to discover correspondences between dream content and various types of waking cognition. Hobson and Kahn’s . Dream content: Individual and generic aspects. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 850–858.) conclusion that dream content may be more generic than most researchers realize, and that individual differences are less salient than usually thought, provides the occasion for a review of findings (...) based on the Hall and Van de Castle . The content analysis of dreams. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.) coding system for the study of dream content. Then new findings based on a computationally intensive randomization strategy are presented to show the minimum sample sizes needed to detect gender and individual differences in dream content. Generally speaking, sample sizes of 100–125 dream reports are needed because most dream elements appear in less than 50% of dream reports and the magnitude of the differences usually is not large. (shrink)

Pioneering sociologist William Graham Sumner (1840Ð1910) was a prolific and astute historian of the early American republic. His work is informed by both his classical liberalism and his understanding of economics. He authored eight major works including major biographies and thematic studies concentrating on the vital subjects of currency, banking, business cycles, foreign trade, protectionism, and democratic politics.

The pioneering sociologist William Graham Sumner was a prolific and astute historian of the early American republic, whose work was informed by his classical liberalism and his understanding of economics. He authored seven major works including biographies and thematic studies concentrating on the vital subjects of currency, banking, business cycles, foreign trade, protectionism, and politics. Although his works are out of print, and hardly mentioned or referred to by historians or economists, they are quite valuable for understanding the (...) politics and major economic issues of the first century of the republic.1 They are: History of American Currency, Lectures on the History of Protection, Andrew Jackson, Alexander Hamilton, The Financier and Finances of the American Revolution, 2 vols., Robert Morris, History of Banking in the United States. As one can see, Sumner was most interested in the history of money and banking in America. He was a resolute opponent of inflation, inconvertible currencies, legal tender laws, bimetallic standards, and the American practice of fractional-reserve banking. His theory of the business cycle was built on the work of antebellum political economists such as Condy Raguet. Sumner’s understanding of it is sophisticated and proto- Austrian. (shrink)

A person's welfare or well-being concerns what is good for him, what makes his life worth living. It therefore depends crucially on facts about the person and his life. As William James once remarked, whether a life is worth living depends on the liver. How this dependency should be spelled out is a controversial question. Desire theorists, or as I shall call them well-being preferentialists, claim that a person's well-being depends on his desires and preferences.

From the $700 billion bailout of the banking industry to president Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package to the highly controversial passage of federal health-care reform, conservatives and concerned citizens alike have grown increasingly fearful of big government. Enter Nobel Prize–winning economist and political theorist F. A. Hayek, whose passionate warning against empowering states with greater economic control, The Road to Serfdom, became an overnight sensation last summer when it was endorsed by Glenn Beck. The book has since sold over (...) 150,000 copies. The latest entry in the University of Chicago Press’s series of newly edited editions of Hayek’s works, The Constitution of Liberty is, like Serfdom, just as relevant to our present moment. The book is considered Hayek’s classic statement on the ideals of freedom and liberty, ideals that he believes have guided—and must continue to guide—the growth of Western civilization. Here Hayek defends the principles of a free society, casting a skeptical eye on the growth of the welfare state and examining the challenges to freedom posed by an ever expanding government—as well as its corrosive effect on the creation, preservation, and utilization of knowledge. In opposition to those who call for the state to play a greater role in society, Hayek puts forward a nuanced argument for prudence. Guided by this quality, he elegantly demonstrates that a free market system in a democratic polity—under the rule of law and with strong constitutional protections of individual rights—represents the best chance for the continuing existence of liberty. Striking a balance between skepticism and hope, Hayek’s profound insights are timelier and more welcome than ever before. This definitive edition of The Constitution of Liberty will give a new generation the opportunity to learn from his enduring wisdom. (shrink)

Based on a qualitative study, this paper explores how United States public health professionals view and think about the existing U.S. healthcare system, while also allowing these study participants to imagine new ways of structuring and practicing public health. Using semi-structured qualitative interviews, I show how public health professionals engage with the concept of “the social” and their personal experiences with public health to question the status quo. By giving public health professionals space in which to imagine changes and different (...) ways of practicing public health, I demonstrate the effectiveness of imagination as a capacity that public health professionals possess to take the lead in creating the changes they hope for. (shrink)

Many everyday actions have major but unforeseeable long-term consequences. Some argue that this fact poses a serious problem for consequentialist moral theories. We argue that the problem for non-consequentialists is greater still. Standard non-consequentialist constraints on doing harm combined with the long-run impacts of everyday actions entail, absurdly, that we should try to do as little as possible. We call this the Paralysis Argument. After laying out the argument, we consider and respond to a number of objections. We then suggest (...) what we believe is the most promising response: to accept, in practice, a highly demanding morality of beneficence with a long-term focus. (shrink)

Edited by Marthe Chandler and Ronnie Littlejohn, this work is a collection of expository and critical essays on the work of Henry Rosemont, Jr., a prominent and influential contemporary philosopher, activist, translator, and educator in the field of Asian and Comparative Philosophy. The essays in this collection take up three major themes in Rosemont's work: his work in Chinese linguistics, his contribution to the theory of human rights, and his interest in East Asian religion. Contributions include works by the leading (...) scholars in Chinese philosophy in the Western world and Rosemont's close associates: Roger T. Ames, Bao Zhiming, Mary Bockover, Marthe Chandler, Ewing Y. Chinn, Erin M. Cline, Fred Dallmayr, Jeffrey Dippmann, Herbert Fingarette, Harrison Huang, Eric Hutton, Philip J. Ivanhoe, David Jones, William La Fleur, Ronnie Littlejohn, Ni Peimin, Michael Nylan, Harold Roth, Sumner Twiss, Tu Weiming, David Wong, with responses from Henry Rosemont, Jr. and a brief Reminiscence by Noam Chomsky. (shrink)

Récurrente sous différentes formes dans le domaine de la lexicométrie, l’analyse cooccurrentielle vise à dévoiler les attractions lexicales qui opèrent dans un texte en restituant un état intermédiaire entre la séquence textuelle et l’inventaire lexical, état qui doit combiner l’explicitation syntagmatique de l’une avec la hiérarchisation statistique de l’autre. Pour dépasser les résultats des méthodes de cooccurrence classiques et identifier des systèmes cooccurrentiels plus complexes à l’oeuvre dans le texte, il s’avère nécessaire de substituer à l’approche analytique des associations lexicales (...) une vue synthétique de ces attractions prééminentes en contexte. (shrink)

Discourse ethics represents an exciting new development in neo-Kantian moral theory. William Rehg offers an insightful introduction to its complex theorization by its major proponent, Jürgen Habermas, and demonstrates how discourse ethics allows one to overcome the principal criticisms that have been leveled against neo-Kantianism. Addressing both "commun-itarian" critics who argue that universalist conceptions of justice sever moral deliberation from community traditions, and feminist advocates of the "ethics of care" who stress the moral significance of caring for other individuals, (...) Rehg shows that discourse ethics combines impartiality with solidarity. He provides the first systematic reconstruction of Habermas's theory and explores its relationship to the work of such contemporary philosophers as Charles Taylor. His book articulates a bold alternative to the split between the "right" and the "good" in moral theory and will greatly interest philosophers, social and legal scholars, and political theorists. (shrink)

Two controversial cases in Confucian literature present the demands of filial piety as conflicting with those of impartial justice. Let us call them the Case of Concealment (Analects 18.13) and the Case of Evasion (Mencius 7A53). A dogmatic reading of the texts indicates that both Confucius and Mencius give more weight to filial piety than to justice. This essay, however, provides an alternative reading of the cases: the liberal reading. I argue that the Confucian teachers used the cases as moral (...) dilemmas that force Confucian students to learn how to use a cluster of Confucian virtues, including practical wisdom, discretion, and straight determination, under difficult circumstances. The liberal reading views these moral dilemmas as rhetorical tools; they guide Confucian students in meditative exercises and ultimately transform students’ mode of seeing and being. (shrink)

Volume 31 contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2014-15. Works: _Symposium_, _Republic_, _Euthyphro_, Proclus’s _De malorum_, _Sophist_, _Statesman_; topics: eros, tripartite soul, what the gods love, evil, Homeric motifs.

The volume contains papers and commentaries presented to the _Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy_ during the academic year 2015-16. Works: Phaedrus, Republic, Apology, Laws, Seventh Letter, Stoic texts. Topics: Stoic blending, reciprocal eros, perception in tripartite soul, Stoic identity, Plato’s politics and events.

Although declarations of the death of God seem to be provocations announcing the end of the era of theology, this announcement is actually central to the Christian revelation in its most classic forms, as well as to its reworkings in contemporary religious thought. Indeed provocative new possibilities for thinking theologically open up precisely in the wake of the death of God. Already Hegel envisaged a revolutionary new realization of divinity emerging in and with the secular world through its establishment of (...) a total order of immanence. However, in postmodern times this comprehensive order aspired to by modern secularism implodes or cracks open towards the wholly Other. A hitherto repressed demand for the absolute difference of the religious, or for “transcendence”, returns with a vengeance. This difference is what could not be stated in terms of the Hegelian System, for reasons that poststructuralist writers particularly have insisted on: all representations of God are indeed dead. Yet this does not mean that they cannot still be powerful, but only that they cannot assign God any stable identity. Nietzsche’s sense of foreboding concerning the death of God is coupled with his intimations of the demise of representation and “grammar” as epistemologically bankrupt, but also with his vision of a positive potential for creating value in the wake of this collapse of all linguistically articulated culture. He points the way towards the emergence of a post-secular religious thinking of what exceeds thought and representation. (shrink)

[This download contains the Table of Contents and Chapter 1.] This first book-length study of confabulation breaks ground in both philosophy and cognitive science.