When Stanford M. Lyman authored The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil in 1978 it was hailed by Alasdair MacIntyre as 'a book of absorbing interest and importance_[that] places us all in his debt.' By Nelson Hart as 'a masterful and thought-provoking book_[that] is the only scholarly treatment of sin that is so well-informed by the best of ancient through modern perspectives.' By James A. Aho as a work whose 'abstract hardly does justice to the scholarly and detailed (...) analysis of sin.' And by Harry Cohen as a 'book_[that] stands as a beautiful illustration of what holistic, idiosyncratic, interdisciplinary, and creative thinking and writing can bring to bear on the age-old problem of society and evil.' The American Sociological Association's section on the Sociology of the Emotions selected this book as one of the works that laid the foundations for the study of pride, lust, envy, and anger—basic sentiments embedded in the social process. For this revised and expanded edition Lyman has written a new chapter, 'Sentiments, Sin, and Social Conflict: Toward a Sociology of the Emotions.' The new edition will be a valuable work for courses in social psychology, ethics, deviance, and the sociology of morals and of religion. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Seven Deadly Sins: Society and Evil. By Stanford M. Lyman. The Seven Deadly Sins Today. By Henry Fairlie.

All of our information about the world is derived from the function of our senses, and thus they are the principal source of all our knowledge. This was recognized explicitly by early Greek philosophers, remained an important point of discussion for nineteenth‐century philosophers, and continues to be a key issue for present‐day philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. It is a key issue in cognitive science because, by initiating the processes that store and evaluate information, sensory information transmission can be considered a (...) cognitive initiator. In a very real sense, who we are and how we see the world are the result of the experiences that are mediated by our sensory systems. These are some of the reasons why the study of sensory systems has occupied such a prominent place in modern cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Cell cycle dynamics has emerged as a key regulator of stem cell fate decisions. In particular, differentiation decisions are associated with the G1 phase, and recent evidence suggests that self‐renewal is actively regulated outside of G1. The mechanisms underlying these phenomena are largely unknown, but direct control of gene regulatory programs by the cell cycle machinery is heavily implicated. A recent study sheds important mechanistic insight by demonstrating that in human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) the Cyclin‐dependent kinase CDK2 controls a (...) wide‐spread epigenetic program that drives transcription at differentiation‐related gene promoters specifically in G1. Here, we discuss this finding and explore whether similar mechanisms are likely to function in multipotent stem cells. The implications of this discovery toward our understanding of stem cell‐related disease are discussed, and we postulate novel mechanisms that position the cell cycle as a regulator of cell fate gene networks at epigenetic, transcriptional and post‐transcriptional levels. (shrink)

Fish, S. Georgics of the mind: Bacon's philosophy and the experience of his Essays.--Brett, R. L. Thomas Hobbes.--Watt, I. Realism and the novel.--Tuveson, E. Locke and Sterne.--Kampf, L. Gibbon and Hume.--Frye, N. Blake's case against Locke.--Abrams, M. H. Mechanical and organic psychologies of literary invention.--Ryle, G. Jane Austen and the moralists.--Schneewind, J. B. Moral problems and moral philosophy in the Victorian period.--Donagan, A. Victorian philosophical prose: J. S. Mill and F. H. Bradley.--Pitcher, G. Wittgenstein, nonsense, and Lewis Carroll.--Bolgan, A. C. (...) The philosophy of F. H. Bradley and the mind and art of T. S. Eliot: an introduction.--Davie, D. Yeats, Berkeley, and Romanticism.--Ross, M. L. The mythology of friendship: D. H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell, and "The Blind man".--Rosenbaum, S. P. The philosophical realism of Virginia Woolf.--Bibliography (p. 357-360). (shrink)

This book is for those searching for an ethics engine with enough philosophical power to drive healthcare reform toward a balance between medical technology and human compassion. Jos Welie's project is to This is an important goal that has eluded others. Jos Welie has more nearly succeeded in this book than any other author who has come to my attention.

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive anthology of works concerning the nature of economics as a science, including classic texts and essays exploring specific branches and schools of economics. Apart from the classics, most of the selections in the third edition are new, as are the introduction and bibliography. No other anthology spans the whole field and offers a comprehensive introduction to questions about economic methodology.

Mindreading (or folk psychology, Theory of Mind, mentalizing) is the capacity to represent and reason about others’ mental states. The Simulation Theory (ST) is one of the main approaches to mindreading. ST draws on the common-sense idea that we represent and reason about others’ mental states by putting ourselves in their shoes. More precisely, we typically arrive at representing others’ mental states by simulating their mental states in our own mind. This entry offers a detailed analysis of ST, considers theoretical (...) arguments and empirical data in favour of and against it, discusses its philosophical implications, and illustrates some alternatives to it. (shrink)

One might well wonder—is there a category under which every thing falls? Offering an informative account of such a category is no easy task. For nothing would distinguish things that fall under it from those that don’t—there being, after all, none of the latter. It seems hard, then, to say much about any fully general category; and it would appear to do no carving or categorizing or dividing at all. Nonetheless there are candidates for such a fully general office, including (...) thing, being, entity, item, existent, and—especially—object.[ It is not obvious that there is any fully general category (whether object or otherwise). Accordingly, not all accounts of object assign it to a fully general category, instead allowing that there are non-objects. On those views, object does indeed divide. Accounts of object, then, differ with respect to whether there are non-objects. And this is not the only fault line. Other dimensions of difference include what objects there are and what objects are. Accordingly, this entry will survey three broad questions about the category object: What, if any, is its contrast or complement? What is its extension? What is its nature? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume's Natural History: Religion and "Explanation" M. JAMIE FERREIRA HUME'S BOLDLYSIMPLESTATEMENTof the genesis of religion--that "the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst for revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries" led humankind to see "the first obscure traces of divinity"--is supported by appeals to what he considers plain common sense.' For example, given that at "the first origin of (...) society" (e4) our ancestors were obviously "ignorant and barbarous" (23), anxiously helpless in the face of threatening natural events--hence, obviously with neither the leisure nor the impulse nor the aptitude for serious reflection--it was obviously passionate fears and hopes, not reason, which motivated their beliefs. Given that the mind obviously "rises from inferior to superior," and that humankind obviouslyhasn't "inhabited palaces before huts and cottages or studied geometry before agriculture" (~4), polytheism obviously antedated monotheism. In the course of detailing his commonsensical account of the origin and development of religion, Hume highlights a wide variety of natural tendencies, principles, and propensities which are operative. Keith Yandell offers a recent reading of one such propensity at work in the origin of religion--namely, what Hume calls the "propensity of human nature, which leads into a system, that gives them some satisfaction" (29)--and Yandell explicitly takes it to be a propensity to an "explanatory" system.2 I want to argue in what follows that any reading of Hume's account of religion which highlights an explanatory motivation can be significantly misleading insofar as it obscures the way in which Hume's account differs markedly from other classical genetic accounts which emphasize explanation. ' The Natural History ofReligion, ed. H. E. Root (Stanford, CA, 1956), 28. Further parenthetical page references in the text will be to this work. His later formulation--"The primary religion of mankind arises chiefly from an anxious fear of future events" (65)--recalls Philo's pithy version, namely, "terror is the primary principle of religion" (Dialoguesconcerning Natural Religion, XII). ~Hume's "Inexplicable Mystery": His Views on Religion (Philadelphia, 199o), 9. Hereafter HIM. [5931 594 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER 1995 In his account of the "propensity of human nature, which leads into a system, that gives them some satisfaction," Yandell admits that "no explanation is given of exactly what sort of satisfaction is in question," yet he goes on without a pause to speak of how "people accept different and various explanatory systems"; referring to a natural "propensity to understand," he concludes that "for Hume, we need not accept a religious system of explanation, but most of us in fact do so."s I suggest that Yandell's shift from "system" to "explanatory system," which is unheralded, is of crucial significance because the emphasis on explanation tends to call to a reader's mind just the sort of appeal which Hume decisively rejects. I shall argue that Hume draws our attention to and decisively excludes from his account a concept of explanation which actually does play an important role in other parallel accounts--namely, a concept which focuses on the integrity of a broad picture and an ultimate accounting; Hume points to such a concept in his references to the "frame of the universe," "final causes," and the "first rise of the visible system." Such a role might seem to elaborate Hume's appeal to common sense--after all, isn't the natural response to "unknown causes" to try to understand them, and isn't the attempt to understand them the same as looking for an "ultimate" explanation, however crude it might be at the outset? Although this might seem commonsensical to others (as we shall see), I want to argue that what Hume sees at work in the origin of religion is not a search for such an explanation, even a crude one. Rather, on Hume's view the only curiosity at work is a curiosity about how to cope: the propensity to a system is the propensity to the kind of determinacy which is expedient for control, and the only satisfaction the system provides is one in terms of a coping which is independent of truth-seeking... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume's Natural History: Religion and "Explanation" M. JAMIE FERREIRA HUME'S BOLDLYSIMPLESTATEMENTof the genesis of religion--that "the anxious concern for happiness, the dread of future misery, the terror of death, the thirst for revenge, the appetite for food and other necessaries" led humankind to see "the first obscure traces of divinity"--is supported by appeals to what he considers plain common sense.' For example, given that at "the first origin of (...) society" (e4) our ancestors were obviously "ignorant and barbarous" (23), anxiously helpless in the face of threatening natural events--hence, obviously with neither the leisure nor the impulse nor the aptitude for serious reflection--it was obviously passionate fears and hopes, not reason, which motivated their beliefs. Given that the mind obviously "rises from inferior to superior," and that humankind obviouslyhasn't "inhabited palaces before huts and cottages or studied geometry before agriculture" (~4), polytheism obviously antedated monotheism. In the course of detailing his commonsensical account of the origin and development of religion, Hume highlights a wide variety of natural tendencies, principles, and propensities which are operative. Keith Yandell offers a recent reading of one such propensity at work in the origin of religion--namely, what Hume calls the "propensity of human nature, which leads into a system, that gives them some satisfaction" (29)--and Yandell explicitly takes it to be a propensity to an "explanatory" system.2 I want to argue in what follows that any reading of Hume's account of religion which highlights an explanatory motivation can be significantly misleading insofar as it obscures the way in which Hume's account differs markedly from other classical genetic accounts which emphasize explanation. ' The Natural History ofReligion, ed. H. E. Root (Stanford, CA, 1956), 28. Further parenthetical page references in the text will be to this work. His later formulation--"The primary religion of mankind arises chiefly from an anxious fear of future events" (65)--recalls Philo's pithy version, namely, "terror is the primary principle of religion" (Dialoguesconcerning Natural Religion, XII). ~Hume's "Inexplicable Mystery": His Views on Religion (Philadelphia, 199o), 9. Hereafter HIM. [5931 594 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:4 OCTOBER 1995 In his account of the "propensity of human nature, which leads into a system, that gives them some satisfaction," Yandell admits that "no explanation is given of exactly what sort of satisfaction is in question," yet he goes on without a pause to speak of how "people accept different and various explanatory systems"; referring to a natural "propensity to understand," he concludes that "for Hume, we need not accept a religious system of explanation, but most of us in fact do so."s I suggest that Yandell's shift from "system" to "explanatory system," which is unheralded, is of crucial significance because the emphasis on explanation tends to call to a reader's mind just the sort of appeal which Hume decisively rejects. I shall argue that Hume draws our attention to and decisively excludes from his account a concept of explanation which actually does play an important role in other parallel accounts--namely, a concept which focuses on the integrity of a broad picture and an ultimate accounting; Hume points to such a concept in his references to the "frame of the universe," "final causes," and the "first rise of the visible system." Such a role might seem to elaborate Hume's appeal to common sense--after all, isn't the natural response to "unknown causes" to try to understand them, and isn't the attempt to understand them the same as looking for an "ultimate" explanation, however crude it might be at the outset? Although this might seem commonsensical to others (as we shall see), I want to argue that what Hume sees at work in the origin of religion is not a search for such an explanation, even a crude one. Rather, on Hume's view the only curiosity at work is a curiosity about how to cope: the propensity to a system is the propensity to the kind of determinacy which is expedient for control, and the only satisfaction the system provides is one in terms of a coping which is independent of truth-seeking... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Book Reviews,Shapes oS Philosophical History. By Frank E. Manuel. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965.Pp. 166.$1.95.) Based upon his seven Camp Lectures of 1962 at Stanford, Professor Manuel has issued this taut and recondite volume describing the forms philosophical history has taken in the West. He has performed a difficult task well, giving much scholarly substance to his theme that two archetypal shapes of speculative history-writing have (...) dominated Western thought, one an Augustinian teleological.unitary-procursus view, the other a Polybian, cyclical, Ixionlike, Stoic model. The first is broadly defined as "movement either to a fixed end, or to an indefinite end that defines itself in the course of the progression, history as novelty-creating and always variant"; the second as "circularity, eternal recurrence, return to the beginning of things, sheer reiteration or similar recapitulation." Comte and modem progressists are at the end of the first line, Nietzsehe and Spengler and other cylicists at the end of the second. However, broadly again, amalgamations of the two types are possible, syncretistic variants have often taken shape, and, Protean-hke, both lend themselves to almost infinite interpretive patterns. These typologies are psychological more than logical polarities, both emotional and intellectual alternatives, so they often stand for and serve contradictory purposes. Yet historians tend to betray their preference for one of these opposed conceptions, according to Manuel, as they "select an identity for historic man." Deliberately refraining from taking sides on the issue (thus implicitly casting some doubt on his contention that historians and others "inevitably betray their preference for one of these opposing conceptions"), Manuel addresses himself to the task of illuminating the polarity, exhibiting the multiplicity of its forms through time and focusing upon crucial moments of the debate in the West. Of these exhibits--early Christians vs. pagans, Augustine vs. Joachim, the virtual triumph of cyclicism in the Renaissance (albeit with a split developed between negative and positive, pessimist and optimist cyclicists), the ambivalence of the eighteenth-century Germans on the issue (particularly Kant and Herder), the triumphant optimism of the French perfectibilists, the vacillation of the German academists--Manuel's examination of the French and German writers stands out, although the range of his knowledge and first-hand inspection of archival sources from Augustine's time to Toynbee's demonstrates an admirable scholarship. Of the eighteenth-century Germans, Manuel well illustrates their ambivalent and paradoxical side. Herder, for example, nominally an opponent, debating against "abderite" cyclical theory and apparently concluding in favor of it; Goethe wondering whether the world "will become one great hospital in which we behave toward one another like benign male nurses" if Herder's more optimistic notions triumph; old Kant in his special language rejecting all then current models of world history (moral terrorism, abderitism and eudaemonism ) and opting for what Manuel calls a "mechanism... akin to the cunning of reason" to institute a just civil constitution and estabhsh perpetual peace, yet not really persuaded that his sanguine view of moral progress would prevail. As for the later Germans in and out of the Academy (particularly Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, HSlderlin and Hamann) while youthful enthusiasts of progress (everyone knows the story of the young Hegel and his friends planting the tree of liberty saluting the French revolution), their conceptions of history became more and more Platonic, more and more nostalgic and parochial. On the other hand Manuel's account of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century French relates their boundless energy and dedication to progressist conceptions, a development he holds as quite isolated and isolable from the German movement. Without doubt the French had the most imagination and the most confidence in developing philosophical history to an almost dizzying optimistic pitch. Manuel demonstrates a line from Voltaire through Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, Fourier and the Saint-Simonians to Auguste Comte, each building on the others in time, each theorizing "man's steady conquest of the external world, beginning in a period when he was still the member of a feeble and isolated band, and culminating in his present high estate." "The Golden Age of the human species is not behind us, it is before [171] 172 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY us," Saint-Simon... (shrink)

The prevailing pedagogical approach in business ethics generally underestimates or even ignores the powerful influences of situational factors on ethical analysis and decision-making. This is due largely to the predominance of philosophy-oriented teaching materials. Social psychology offers relevant concepts and experiments that can broaden pedagogy to help students understand more fully the influence of situational contexts and role expectations in ethical analysis. Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment is used to illustrate the relevance of social psychology experiments for business ethics instruction.

Lucas Matthews and I substantially revised my SEP entry on Heritability. This version includes discussion of the missing heritability problem and other issues that arise from the use of Genome Wide Association Studies by Behavioral Geneticists.