Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) has been called the German Rousseau. Yet while Rousseau is recognized as a political thinker, Herder is not. This book explores each thinker's ideas--on nature and culture, selfhood and mutuality, paternalism, freedom, and autonomy--and compares their conceptions of legitimate statehood. Arguing that the crux of political legitimacy for both men was the possibility of "extended selfhood," Barnard shows that Herder, like Rousseau, profoundly altered human self-understandings, thus influencing modes of justifying political allegiance.

The core of J.G. Herder's philosophy of nationalism lies in the conviction that human creativity must be embedded in the particular culture of a communal language. While he acknowledged that this cultural particular must be integrated into a more universal humanity, he insisted that each culture should preserve its incommensurable distinctiveness. He also called for a new method of enquiry regarding history, one that demands empathetic sensitivity toward the uniquely individual while realizing that there are few gains without losses. F.M. (...) Barnard demonstrates that Herder, despite his innovative work on the idea of nationality, was fully aware of the dangers of ethnic fanaticism, but also of the hazards of what is now known as globalization, recognizing that these must be tempered by a sense of universal humanity. Barnard shows that Herder anticipated modern theories of the dynamics of cultures and traditions through the problematic interplay of persistence and change and that his speculations on cultural and political pluralism, on language as a democratic bond, and on the possible fusion of communitarian and liberal dimensions of public life remain relevant to contemporary debates. (shrink)

Barnard demonstrates that in a democracy accountability is more than damage control and must be part of considerations in the political forum before decisions are made, not just after the fact when trying to assign blame.".

Barnard argues that Western democracy, if it is to continue to exist as a legitimate political system, must maintain the integrity of its application of performative principles. Consequently, if both social and political democracy are legitimate goals, limitations designed to curb excessive political power may also be applicable in containing excessive economic power. Barnard stresses that whatever steps are taken to augment civic reciprocity, the observance and self-imposition of publicly recognized standards is vital. Democratic Legitimacy will appeal to (...) political scientists and philosophers, as well as specialists in democratic theory. (shrink)

We will here describe a conception of truth that is robust rather than deflationist, and that differs in important ways from the most familiar robust conceptions.' We will argue that this approach to truth is intrinsically and intuitively plausible, and fares very well relative to other conceptions of truth in terms of comparative theoretical benefits and costs.

This paper outlines the background and significance of philosophy of technology as a focus of inquiry emerging within nursing scholarship and research. The thesis of the paper is that philosophy of technology and nursing is fundamental to discipline development and our role in enhancing health care. It is argued that we must further our responsibility and interest in critiquing current and future health care systems through philosophical inquiry into the experience, meaning and implications of technology. This paper locates nurses as (...) important contributors to the use and integration of health care technology and identifies nursing as a discipline that can provide specific insights into the health experience of individuals, cultures and societies. Nurses are encouraged to undertake further examination of epistemological, ontological and ethical challenges to arise from technology as a focus of philosophical inquiry. The advancement of philosophy of technology and nursing will make a profound contribution to inquiry into the experience of technology, the needs of humanity and the development of appropriate health care. (shrink)

A critique of the hypothesis of extended cognition.

That about sums up what is wrong with Clark's view.

Following Wiggins’ seminal article, On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time, this article presents the first comprehensive account of the relation of material constitution, an asymmetrical, transitive relation which totally orders distinct ‘entities’ (individuals, pluralities or masses of stuff) which ‘spatially coincide.’ Their coincidence in space is explained by a recursive definition of ‘complete-composition’, weaker than strict mereological indiscernibility, which also explains the variety of logically independent similarities in such cases. This account is ‘analytical’, dealing with ‘putative’ (...) cases in general. The main strategy is to rationally reconstruct Aristotle’s notion of material cause. It is developed more fully with a theory of how to justify admitting generable and perishable things into the natural world, in The Kinds of Things: A Theory of Personal Identity Based on Transcendental Argument (Open Court, 1996). (shrink)

In Knowledge and Belief, Frederick Schmitt explores the nature and value of knowledge and justified belief through an examination of the dispute between epistemological internalism and externalism. Knowledge and justified belief are naturally viewed as belief of a sort likely to be true--an externalist view. It is also intuitive, however, to view them as an internal matter; justification must be accessible to the subject or constituted by the subject's epistemic perspective. The author argues against the view that internalism is (...) the historically dominant epistemology by examining closely the epistemological principles that underlie the treatment of skepticism in Plato, the Academic and Pyrrhonian skeptics, Descartes and Hume. Schmitt develops a sustained, detailed argument against many forms of internalism in favor of a reliabilist/externalist epistemology. His version of reliabilism, though strictly externalist, accommodates and explains the most durable intuitions alleged to support internalism. Knowledge and Belief assumes no knowledge of epistemology or its history. Readers of philosophy will find this an excellent introduction to ancient and modern epistemology; this systematic study of the internalist and externalist debate is the first of its kind. (shrink)

One of the very few accounts in English of German idealism, this ambitious work advances and revises our understanding of both the history and the thought of the classical period of German philosophy. As he traces the structure and evolution of idealism as a doctrine, Frederick Beiser exposes a strong objective, or realist, strain running from Kant to Hegel and identifies the crucial role of the early romantics—Hölderlin, Schlegel, and Novalis—as the founders of absolute idealism.

In a series of articles specifically commossioned for this volume, some of today's most distinguished business ethicists survey the main areas of interest and ...

Agent computing, and in particular intelligent mobile agent computing, is at present awarded increasing prominence in the literature. This is partly due to the pervasive nature of available Internet technologies such as search engines and booking agents. It is within this context that the importance of investigating various characteristics demonstrated by mobile agent computing is becoming apparent. In order to perform specialized tasks on behalf of their owners, a certain amount of intelligence in mobile agents is often assumed or expected. (...) The attribute intelligent brings with it a concomitant human characteristic that is assigned to an inanimate technological object. In mobile agent systems, communities of agents already inhabit areas of cyberspace and interact with other agents, human users and hosts. Depending on the expected interaction with other entities, it is plausible to think that such a community can exhibit a social life of its own. This raises issues concerning information security as well as the ethical and social behaviour of mobile agents. In this paper we discuss a framework for dealing with the security and ethical design issues of this technology. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 16, Issue 5, Page 653-657, August 2011.

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 566-567, July 2012.

The Fate of Reason is the first general history devoted to the period between Kant and Fichte, one of the most revolutionary and fertile in modern philosophy.

Frederick F. Schmitt offers a new account of Hume's epistemology in A Treatise of Human Nature, which alternately manifests scepticism, empiricism, and naturalism. Critics have emphasised one of these positions over the others, but Schmitt argues that they can be reconciled by tracing them to an underlying epistemology of knowledge and probability.

This book is the first complete intellectual biography of Hermann Cohen and the only work to cover all his major philosophical and Jewish writings. Frederick C. Beiser pays special attention to all phases of Cohen's intellectual development, its breaks and its continuities, throughout seven decades. The guiding goal behind Cohen's intellectual career, he argues, was the development of a radical rationalism, one committed to defending the rights of unending enquiry and unlimited criticism. Cohen's philosophy was therefore an attempt to (...) defend and revive the Enlightenment belief in the authority of reason; his critical idealism an attempt to justify this belief and to establish a purely rational worldview. According to this interpretation, Cohen's thought is resolutely opposed to any form of irrationalism or mysticism because these would impose arbitrary and artificial limits on criticism and enquiry. It is therefore critical of those interpretations which see Cohen's philosophy as a species of proto-existentialism or Jewish mysticism. Hermann Cohen: An Intellectual Biography attempts to unify the two sides of Cohen's thought, his philosophy and his Judaism. Maintaining that Cohen's Judaism was not a limit to his radical rationalism but a consistent development of it, Beiser contends that his religion was one of reason. He concludes that most critical interpretations have failed to appreciate the philosophical depth and sophistication of his Judaism, a religion which committed the believer to the unending search for truth and the striving to achieve the cosmopolitan ideals of reason. (shrink)