Although research has found that long-term mindfulness meditation practice promotes executive functioning and the ability to sustain attention, the effects of brief mindfulness meditation training have not been fully explored. We examined whether brief meditation training affects cognition and mood when compared to an active control group. After four sessions of either meditation training or listening to a recorded book, participants with no prior meditation experience were assessed with measures of mood, verbal fluency, visual coding, and working memory. Both interventions (...) were effective at improving mood but only brief meditation training reduced fatigue, anxiety, and increased mindfulness. Moreover, brief mindfulness training significantly improved visuo-spatial processing, working memory, and executive functioning. Our findings suggest that 4 days of meditation training can enhance the ability to sustain attention; benefits that have previously been reported with long-term meditators. (shrink)

How Wittgenstein's theories have been bent, transformed, and expanded in the world outside philosophy. The expression of his eyes remained the same, a cold, piercing sadness. Yet his final words were "Tell them I had a happy life." This poetic book examines the way Ludwig Wittgenstein has influenced artists of the word beyond his own field, thereby touching the subject of how philosophy can be relevant at large. By studying the ways Wittgenstein's theories have been bent, transformed, and expanded, (...) class='Hi'>David Rothenberg shows that responses to the reading of philosophy can take many deep, reflective, and different forms. Aphoristically constructed in the style of E. M. Cioran or Edmond Jabès, carefully illustrated with paintings and drawings by Doug Hall, Leif Haglund, and Debra Pughe, The Possibility of Reddish Green situates Wittgenstein in the age of the sound bite and the artistic fragment, promoting the aesthetic of detachment and yet seeking to find a route through the sea of disconnected, jumbled ideas and changes that mark our time. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe article studies a small Hebrew book called “The Wars of God” composed by an Anglo-Jewish jeweler who lived in London at the end of the eighteenth century. The book is interesting in further documenting the Jewish response to Newtonianism, that amalgam of scientific, political, and religious ideas that pervaded the culture of England and the Continent throughout the century. Hart, while presenting Newton in a favorable light, departs from other Jewish Newtonians in voicing certain reservations about Newton's alleged (...) religious orthodoxy, specifically his fear that the force of gravitation might be explained independent of God's divine providence. The key to understanding Hart's unique stance is his reliance on two eighteenth-century Christian theologians: William Whiston and Robert Greene, particularly the latter. In staking out this position, Hart also endorsed the theological position of his more well known Jewish colleague David Levi, the publisher of his Hebrew text. Both men reveal together the capacity of Jewish thinkers to absorb the dominant trends of thinking by the majority culture while defending honestly and defiantly the integrity of their religious faith and community. (shrink)

Tennis smashed onto the worldwide athletic scene soon after its modern rules and equipment were introduced in nineteenth-century England. Exciting, competitive, and uniquely accessible to people of all ages and talent levels, tennis continues to enjoy popularity, both as a recreational activity and a spectator sport. Life imitates sport in Tennis and Philosophy. Editor David Baggett approaches tennis not only as a game but also as a surprisingly rich resource for philosophical analysis. He assembles a team of champion scholars, (...) including David Foster Wallace, Robert R. Clewis, David Detmer, Mark Huston, Tommy Valentini, Neil Delaney, and Kevin Kinghorn, to consider numerous philosophical issues within the sport. Profiles of tennis greats such as John McEnroe, Roger Federer, the Williams sisters, and Arthur Ashe are paired with pertinent topics, from the ethics of rage to the role of rivalry. Whether entertaining metaphysical arguments or examining the nature of beauty, these essays promise insightful discussion of one of the world's most popular sports. (shrink)

The subject of this study is an ambiguity which is deeply rooted in Berkeley's arguments against matter. By a is shift between two meanings of the term ‘sensible’, he is able to construct a simple “refutation” of matter. Berkeley then attempts to show that this argument is irrefutable. The ambiguity of the original argument is, however, contained in the train of supporting arguments. My purpose in bringing attention to this ambiguity is not just to reveal a mistake in Berkeley's arguments (...) against matter. This particular mistake, I believe, deserves scrutiny not only because it is a mistake, but also because it explains the strategy and order of Berkeley's arguments against matter. Furthermore, if this explanation is correct, then some light can be cast on some puzzling features of Berkeley's philosophy. (shrink)

The meaning of the term “analysis” in Leibniz’s work is multifarious and it is doubtful that one could ever succeed in gathering this variety of meanings into a unified whole. However it has long been remarked that a landmass seems to detach itself from these moving waters – an island sometimes called by its inventor “The Most General Analytics of Human Thoughts”. Already sketched in the De Arte Combinatoria (1666) as a reform of the “analytical part” of Logic (pars logices (...) analytica), it rested on a very simple intuition: the possibility of developing, in parallel, three analyses, namely an analysis of thoughts (analysis notionum et veritatum), an analysis of the structure of language by which we express these thoughts (analysis linguarum or analysis grammatica) and an analysis of the symbols by which we represent them (analysis characterum). This “General Analytics” achieved, any human thought could be related to a catalog of simple notions expressed by basic characters (the so called alphabetum cogitationum humanarum) and, as a direct consequence, any truth could be expressed as a combination of these primitive symbols. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ethics in Light of ChildhoodDavid Cloutier (bio)Review of Ethics in Light of Childhood John Wall Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2010. 204 pp. $34.95.John Wall’s ambitious volume contends that “considerations of childhood should not only have greater importance but fundamentally transform how morality is understood” (1). He rightly suggests that “the story of childhood cannot be told in one-dimensional formulas of either innocence and vulnerability or unruliness and (...) undevelopment” (7), but instead require a new paradigm for ethics: “childism.” He questions three historical views of childhood: the “top-down,” the “bottom-up,” and the developmentalist. Wall splendidly moves beyond these views and demonstrates that considering children should instruct us in the limitations of ordinary approaches to ethics—not only for children’s sake but for adults too.How so? Wall’s constructive section considers ontology, teleology, and de-ontology. In them, relying heavily on twentieth-century continental philosophy, supplemented by some social-scientific literature and numerous anecdotal examples, he develops an overall approach to the moral life. First, he argues for an ontology of “restless and endless play” (36) reflective of the human capacity for creativity possessed by both children and adults. Secondly, the moral life has a teleology of “narrative expansion,” with a constant movement toward a “more richly diverse life story” (60). Finally, moral obligation involves a constant “decentering” of the self in which “the world I create for myself should be disrupted and stretched out as far as possible by genuine human difference” (88). Building on the insights of top-down and bottom-up traditions, and going beyond the “flatly unilinear assumptions” of developmental “stageism” (81) ethics involves a constant circularity, exemplified in the final three chapters on specific issues. For example, families who “create increasingly expansive family worlds” engage in top-down transmission of tradition, developmental formation of relationality, and bottom-up nurturing of otherness (149). These qualities apply not only to children but to parents as well, and thus satisfy Wall’s desire for an ethics that is fully “child-inclusive” and that does not privilege adult agents. He succeeds admirably at demonstrating that the real agency children actually possess and exercise, as well as their vulnerability and passivity, are not simply incomplete versions of what adults possess fully.I would raise two concerns. First, the book works so hard to avoid any kind of linearity that criteria enabling judgment seem lacking—for example, surely some [End Page 195] forms of “disruption” are not to be welcomed (especially by children). The telos of “narrative expansion” so strongly refuses to privilege any perspective that it threatens to empty out what one might gingerly call “adult commitments”—to stable love, production, civic life, and fine arts—all of which require virtue (absent here), and which seem necessary for children to flourish. Aspiring “to go on creating oneself endlessly” (58) can be a fruitful depiction of adult life, or it can be an immature escapism. Without a thicker telos, the distinction is difficult to make.Second, his category of “childism” (3) forces him to artificially avoid any telos of maturation. In parallel with other “isms” (e.g., feminism), he argues that children are “full human beings,” live in “fully meaningful moral worlds,” and are “full participants in... human moral experience” (29). “Full” appears throughout, but the inclusion parallel clashes with maturation in human life. True, children and adults have both agency and vulnerability (39), but children, generally speaking, are more vulnerable and are less capable agents, and thus will have particular needs (and also offer particular gifts to adults). “Childism” sometimes obscures the particularities of childhood, and how we are bodily and culturally directed toward some “maturity.” Yet these concerns should not diminish Wall’s achievement in displaying how childhood can teach adults much about ethics.David CloutierMount St. Mary’s UniversityDavid Cloutier David Cloutier is an associate professor of theology at Mount St. Mary’s University. He received his BA from Carleton College and his PhD from Duke University. He is the author of Love, Reason, and God’s Story: An Introduction to Catholic Sexual Ethics (Anselm/St. Mary’s Press, 2008) and editor of Leaving... (shrink)

This book explores how how Hobbes's political philosophy has occupied a pertinent place in different contexts, such as political theory, the theory of international relations, and philosophical idealism.

Teachers White and Thompson allowed students to explore the primary-source readings from several philosophers in a 5th grade course called Apogee. The essay is written with a focus on Patience and other virtues.

‘I can make nothing’, declared Paul Cartledge in this journal some years ago, ‘of the “Lakonian key” first attested in Aristophanes ’. ; Plautus, Mostellaria 404–5, cf. 419–26.).

In his discourse The Glory of Being Human, Kierkegaard dons his spiritual therapist hat not only to help us recognize the futility of worldly ways of distraction but also to appreciate other more stable and edifying kinds of diversions which he calls ‘divine distractions,’ for instance, contemplating the lilies of the field and the birds of the air. Although the discourse The Glory of Being Human was published in 1847, two years before The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard introduces in an (...) edifying fashion some of the main themes developed by Anti-Climacus in the later pseudonymous work published in 1849. So as his angst-ridden reader finally settles down to find edifying distraction in reading this discourse, he will soon discover that the cure for his anxiety cannot be found in escaping from the self in worldly aesthetic distractions, but rather by attending to ‘divine distractions’ in a life of worship and work before God. (shrink)

This is an intellectual autobiography that aims to explain how I am both an analytic philosopher who writes on questions of moral relativism and pluralism and also on classical Confucianism and Daoism. I have written on the subjects of moral psychology and moral epistemology, articulating what I see to be a fruitful consilience between insights of both Confucian and Daoist thinkers and some of the latest findings in psychology and neuroscience. I regard as synergistic and completely logical this combination of (...) interests, but many find it surprising, so I identify the experiences and influences that brought me to where I am now. (shrink)

This lecture presents the text of the speech about Elizabeth I Queen of England delivered by the author at the 2008 Raleigh Lecture on History held at the British Academy. It explores the religious movement called the Family of Love and discusses Sir Walter Raleigh's knowledge about the discourse on Dover Harbour, which was later spuriously attributed to him. The lecture provides an excerpt and interpretation of Queen Elizabeth's poem titled On Monsieur's Departure.

Andrew Janiak has recently claimed that Mme Du Châtelet was “the Enlightenment's most dangerous woman.” There is no evidence that contemporaries regarded her as dangerous. There is no evidence that contemporaries (publishing in French, in France, during her lifetime) took exception to a woman philosopher, or regarded her epistemology as innovative and/or subversive. The claim that she was dangerous is thus a peculiar one, as it is unsupported by any empirical evidence. A consideration of the various meanings of the word (...) “dangerous” leads to the conclusion that Du Châtelet was not a threat to the culture of the French Enlightenment. (shrink)