In this highly original book, Donald Levy considers the most important and persuasive of these philosophical criticisms, as articulated by four figures: Ludwig Wittgenstein, William James, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Adolf Grunbaum.

Both libertarian and compatibilist approaches have been unsuccessful in providing an acceptable account of free will. Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, including the connectionist theory of mind and empirical findings regarding modularity and integration of brain functions, provide the basis for a new approach: neural holism. This approach locates free will in fully integrated behavior in which all of a person's beliefs and desires, implicitly represented in the brain, automatically contribute to an act. Deliberation, the experience of volition, and cognitive (...) and behavioral shortcomings are easily understood under this model. Assigning moral praise and blame, often seen as grounded in the notion that a person has the ability to have done otherwise, will be shown to reflect instead important aspects of signaling in social interactions. Thus, important aspects of the traditional notion of free will can be accounted for within the proposed model, which has interesting implications for lifelong cognitive development. (shrink)

Grünbaum characterizes the foundations of psychoanalysis as consisting primarily of two assertions ? (1) only psychoanalysis can give correct insight into the unconscious causes of neurosis, and (2) only such correct insight can cure neurosis. Grünbaum infers from these that therapeutic success is the only evidence of the correctness of psychoanalytic theories. It is obvious that the two passages in Freud on which Grünbaum relies do not justify his interpretation. Furthermore, Freud thought of therapeutic success as by no means the (...) only kind of relevant and available evidence for psychoanalytic theory. In a discussion of Grünbaum's critique of Freud's theory concerning the causation of slips of the tongue, it is argued that Grünbaum is committed to mistaken views on the nature of causation in psychology and wholly neglects the important role of analogical thinking not only in psychology but in science generally. (shrink)

Chapter three shows that MacIntyre's misunderstanding of what psychoanalysis means by the unconscious leads him to treat it as unobservable. In any intelligible sense, the unconscious is not absolutely unobservable, or else being unobservable is no stigma unique to it; conscious ideas, wishes, e.g., will have to be classed as unobservable, too. MacIntyre's central error is his failing to see that free-association makes the unconscious observable. The chapter concludes with an examination of the concepts of absolute unobservability and observability in (...) contemporary philosophy of science. The idea of an entity or property whose essence it is to be unobservable --that is, of an entity or property that is unobservable in all possible worlds--is absurd. ;Chapter two exposes the fallaciousness of James's claim that on a priori grounds alone the very idea of unconscious mental activity is incoherent. Then, against his claim that brain-processes and/or conscious mental processes that are "quickly gone, unattended to, or forgotten" can explain any phenomenon supposed to need unconsicous mental processes to explain, I argue that the case of resistance to one's own ideas and wishes cannot be accounted for in any of the ten ways James considers; indeed, there are reasons why no explanation of the sorts he considers can be adequate to explain resistance. ;This difference in logical form is missed by Wittgenstein when he confuses the logcial form of an interpretation with the logical form of that of which it is an interpretation--e.g., a dream or symptom. Freud does treat dreams, symptoms, as having meaning, saying things; the condensations and displacements in dreams say "This is really this," "This is all a repetition of that." For Freud, the form of the interpretation is "This dream says 'This is really this,'" Wittgenstein is able to make it plausible to treat interpretations as mythological only by assuming that interpretations are of the same logical form as the dreams they are about. ;They fail, I argue, because each distorts or fails to take account of the same crucial features of unconscious mental processes as psychoanalysis attributes them; these critics assume that the phenomenon the unconscious is needed in order to explain is that of inadvertent, unwitting behavior. Even Freud sometimes slipped in this way--the argument from post-hypnotic suggestion examined in Chapter two also assumes that unwitting behavior of a certain sort requires unconscious mental activity for its explanation. In reality, it is resistance and transference phenomena which justify introduction of the concept of the unconscious. Besides, Freud's method of attributing unconscious mental activity is based on free-association, a wholly novel technique, which produces statements--interpretations--of a different logical form from non-psychoanalytic formulations attributing unconscious mental activity in order to explain inadvertent action. ;Chapter one deals with Wittgenstein's view of psychoanalytic interpretations as a mythology imposted upon subjects. Chapter two examines one of Freud's main proofs for the existence of unconsious mental activity, the argument from post-hypnotic suggestion, and then considers William James's arguments to show that the concept of unconscious mental activity is incoherent, i.e., self-contradictory, and that the concept is unnecessary in that any phenomenon supposed to require the concept to be explained can be explained instead by reference merely to conscious mental processes and/or brain-processes. Chapter three deals with A. MacIntyre's argument to show that the unconscious is unobservable in a way that distinguishes it from legitimate unobservables in science; unlike them, the unconsicous is dispensable in principle. These three criticisms exhaust the main attacks that have been made on the scientific status of the unconscious. (shrink)

While tourism's positive contributions to societies have long been debated, commerce based tourism activities can strengthen peaceful societies by adhering to sustainable tourism principles. This study utilizes content analysis to examine 136 tourism practices from four major awards programs for their contributions to sustainability and peace. Specific practices which illuminate each of these contributions are highlighted. The findings reveal the most common initiatives focus on environmental quality, economic development, and community nourishment efforts, with substantially less focus on initiatives to engage (...) citizen diplomacy and increase transparency. The use of awards programs to further sustainable tourism is discussed, and suggestions for future research in this important area of study are shared. (shrink)

According to a common philosophical distinction, the `original' intentionality, or `aboutness' possessed by our thoughts, beliefs and desires, is categorically different from the `derived' intentionality manifested in some of our artifacts –- our words, books and pictures, for example. Those making the distinction claim that the intentionality of our artifacts is `parasitic' on the `genuine' intentionality to be found in members of the former class of things. In Kinds of Minds: Toward an Understanding of Consciousness, Daniel Dennett criticizes that claim (...) and the distinction it rests on, and seeks to show that ``metaphysically original intentionality'' is illusory by working out the implications he sees in the practical possibility of a certain type of robot, i.e., one that generates `utterances' which are `inscrutable to the robot's designers' so that we, and they, must consult the robot to discover the meaning of its utterances. I argue that the implications Dennett finds are erroneous, regardless of whether such a robot is possible, and therefore that the real existence of metaphysically original intentionality has not been undermined by the possibility of the robot Dennett describes. (shrink)

Using data from a randomized field experiment within a Deliberative Poll, this paper examines deliberation’s effects on both policy attitudes and the extent to which ordinal rankings of policy options approach single-peakedness (a help in avoiding cyclical majorities). The setting was New Haven, Connecticut, and its surrounding towns; the issues were airport expansion and revenue sharing – the former highly salient, the latter not at all. Half the participants deliberated revenue sharing, then the airport; the other half the reverse. This (...) split-half design helps distinguish the effects of the formal on-site deliberations from those of other aspects of the treatment. As expected, the highly salient airport issue saw only a slight effect, while much less salient revenue-sharing issue saw a much larger one. (shrink)

Introduction -- The pre-socratic philosophers -- Sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E. -- Thales -- Anaximander -- Anaximenes -- Pythagoras -- Heraclitus -- Parmenides -- Zeno -- Empedocles -- Anaxagoras -- Leucippus and Democritus -- The Athenian period -- Fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E. -- The Sophists -- Protagoras -- Gorgias -- Thrasymachus -- Callicles and Critias -- Socrates -- Plato -- Aristotle -- The Hellenistic and Roman periods -- Fourth century B.C.E. through fourth century C.E. -- Epicureanism -- Stoicism -- (...) Neoplatonism -- Medieval and Renaissance philosophy -- Fifth through fifteenth centuries -- Saint Augustine -- The encyclopediasts -- John Scotus Eriugena -- Saint Anselm -- Muslim and Jewish philosophies -- Averroës -- Maimonides -- The problem of faith and reason -- The problem of the universals -- Saint Thomas Aquinas -- William of Ockham -- Renaissance philosophers -- Continental rationalism and British empiricism -- The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -- Descartes -- Hobbes -- Spinoza -- Leibniz -- Locke -- Berkeley -- Hume -- Kant -- Post-kantian British and continental philosophy -- The nineteenth century -- Hegel -- Schopenhauer -- Kierkegaard -- Marx -- Nietzsche -- Utilitarianism -- Bentham -- Frege -- Pragmatism, the analytic tradition, and the phenomenological tradition and its aftermath -- The twentieth century -- Pragmatism -- James -- Dewey -- The analytic tradition -- Moore -- Russell -- Logical positivism -- Wittgenstein -- Quine -- The phenomenological tradition and its aftermath -- Husserl -- Heidegger -- Sartre -- Structuralism and poststructuralism -- Saussure -- Lévi-Strauss -- Lacan -- Derrida -- Irigaray. (shrink)

“In its less dramatic versions,” writes author Dan Palmer, “structuralism is just a method of studying language, society, and the works of artists and novelists. But in its most exuberant form, it is a philosophy, an overall worldview that provides an account of reality and knowledge.” Poststructuralism is a loosely knit intellectual movement, comprised mainly of ex-structuralists who either became dissatisfied with the theory or felt they could improve it. Structuralism and Poststructuralism For Beginners is an illustrated tour through the (...) mysterious landscape of these two theories. The book’s starting point is the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. The book moves on to the anthropologist and literary critic Claude Levi-Strauss; the semiologist and literary critic Roland Barthes; the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser; the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan; the deconstructionist Jacques Derrida. The book concludes by examining the postmodern obsession with language and with the radical claim of the disappearance of the individual–obsessions that unite the work of all of these theorists. (shrink)

In a careful re-evaluation of the works of Lévy-Bruhl, Wiebe establishes the coherence of Lévy-Bruhl's classic distinction between primitive, or mythopoeic, and scientific thought, maintaining that religious thinking is mythopoeic in nature while theology -- which thinks about religion -- is related to modern Western scientific thinking. The pre-Socratic philosophers, Wiebe shows, developed a form of rational thought radically different from the religious-mythopoeic thought that preceded it. Although Plato was concerned with recovery of the pre-philosophic wisdom of ancient Greece, he (...) attempted this within a rational, philosophic structure. Wiebe argues that Christian thought, originally mythopoeic, changed rapidly under the influence of Hellenistic culture, and that the Platonization of Christianity introduced an element of philosophic thinking which would eventually undermine its mythopoeic essence. In clarifying the nature of religious thought and its relation to religion, Wiebe provides a sound basis for the development of a general theory of religion. While of particular interest to philosophers, theologians, and students and scholars of the study of religion, Wiebe's study draws upon sources as diverse as philosophy, history, anthropology, and sociology and will therefore interest anyone involved in these disciplines as well. (shrink)

In 1966 Michel Foucault pointed out that the generation of thinkers who had taken as their model Sartre or Merleau-Ponty had suddenly become part of the intellectual museum. A new generation of thinkers had appeared whose passion was not for “meaning”, “man” and “commitment”, but for the “concept and the system”.One could say that the break with the past generation began the day that Levi-Strauss with regard to societies and Lacan with regard to the unconscious showed us that “meaning” was (...) probably nothing but a sort of surface effect, a scum, and that that which affected us most profoundly, that which preceded us, that which maintains us.in space and time was the system.“Our task, Foucault went on, is to free ourselves from humanism and in that sense our work is political.” For some time Foucault and those who thought like him were classed as ‘academics”, that is as people whose thinking had little or no implications for the ongoing state of the society. Then came the May movement of 1968 and in February of 1969 a major gathering was held and the main speakers were Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault. (shrink)

The paper proposes a novel solution to the problem of the time of a killing (ToK), which persistently besets theories of act-individuation. The solution proposed claims to expose a crucial wrong-headed assumption in the debate, according to which ToK is essentially a problem of locating some event that corresponds to the killing. The alternative proposal put forward here turns on recognizing a separate category of dynamic occurents, viz. processes. The paper does not aim to mount a comprehensive defense of process (...) ontology, relying instead on extant defenses. The primary aim is rather to put process ontology to work in diagnosing the current state of play over ToK, and indeed in solving it. (shrink)

An argument for using Donald Davidson's metaphysics for briding the growing divide between scientiific and humanistic understanding of religion.

Social revolutions--that is critical periods of decisive, qualitative change--are a commonly acknowledged historical fact. But can the idea of revolutionary upheaval be extended to the world of ideas and theoretical debate? The publication of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 led to an exciting discussion of revolutions in the natural sciences. A fascinating, but little known, off-shoot of this was a debate which began in the United States in the mid-1970's as to whether the concept of revolution could (...) be applied to mathematics as well as science. Michael Grove declared that revolutions never occur in mathematics, while Joseph Dauben argued that there have been mathematical revolutions and gave some examples. This book is the first comprehensive examination of the question. It reprints the original papers of Grove, Dauben, and Mehrtens, together with additional chapters giving their current views. To this are added new contributions from nine further experts in the history of mathematics, who each discuss an important episode and consider whether it was a revolution. The whole question of mathematical revolutions is thus examined comprehensively and from a variety of perspectives. This thought-provoking volume will interest mathematicians, philosophers, and historians alike. (shrink)

This book challenges the view that bad beliefs - beliefs that blatantly conflict with easily available evidence - can largely be explained by widespread irrationality, instead arguing that ordinary people are rational agents whose beliefs are the result of their rational response to the evidence they're presented with.

The Holocaust marks a decisive moment in modern suffering in which it becomes almost impossible to find meaning or redemption in the experience. In this study, C. Fred Alford offers a new and thoughtful examination of the experience of suffering. Moving from the Book of Job, an account of meaningful suffering in a God-drenched world, to the work of Primo Levi, who attempted to find meaning in the Holocaust through absolute clarity of insight, he concludes that neither strategy works well (...) in today's world. More effective are the day-to-day coping practices of some survivors. Drawing on testimonies of survivors from the Fortunoff Video Archives, Alford also applies the work of Julia Kristeva and the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot to his examination of a topic that has been and continues to be central to human experience. (shrink)

McKenna’s critique (rather than criticisms) of idealized approaches to epistemology is an important contribution to the literature. In this brief discussion, I set out his main concerns about more idealized approaches, within and beyond social epistemology, before turning to some issues I think he neglects. I suggest that it’s important to pay attention to the prestige hierarchy in philosophy, and to how that hierarchy can serve ideological purposes. The greater prestige of more abstract approaches plays a role in determining what (...) issues and what voices we attend to. (shrink)

In the Treatise of Human Nature , Hume argues that, because we have adequate ideas of the smallest parts of space, we can infer that space itself must conform to our representations of it. The paper examines two challenges to this argument based on Descartes's and Locke's treatments of adequate ideas, ideas that fully capture the objects they represent. The first challenge, posed by Arnauld in his Objections to the Meditations , asks how we can know that an idea is (...) adequate. The second challenge, implicit in Locke's Essay , asks how an empiricist can characterize an idea as inadequate, as both picking out an object and yet failing to capture it fully. In showing how Hume responds to these challenges, his theory of perceptual representation is explained and his treatment of space is related to his scepticism. His conclusion is shown not to be a characterization of space as it exists wholly apart from our powers of conception. Instead, in an adumbration of Kant, his claim is restricted to space as it appears to us. (shrink)

Defends and transforms naturalism and materialism to show how culture itself is formed by nature. Bryant endorses a pan-ecological theory of being, arguing that societies are ecosystems that can only be understood by considering nonhuman material agencies such as rivers and mountain ranges alongside signifying agencies such as discourses, narratives and ideologies.