The purpose of this article is to examine the applicability of the theory of projection for Anthropological hypotheses. The claim is made that Goodman's classic statement of the problem does not apply in its entirety to actual Anthropological hypotheses. The recent Freeman-Mead debate is employed as a framework for the discussion, illustrating that the issue of projectibility, while central for the social sciences, is best used as a backdrop to illustrate several important methodological problems. For Anthropology, and other related social (...) sciences, the central methodological problem, which is directly related to the projectibility one, is the development and justification of evidence-rules that can be used for a theory of confirmation. A preliminary attempt is then made to articulate the nature of these rules within the general Hempelian framework of qualitative confirmation. (shrink)

This article argues that the emerging field of Mixed Methods faces a series of challenges which must be addressed before the area can fulfill its potential. Foremost among these is the lack of attention given to ontological concerns. Specifically, Mixed Methods must examine what ontological commitments are made as the result of employing the range of typologies now discovered. It is argued that Mixed Methods presently lacks a clear conception of how its paradigm is significantly different from non-mixed methodological approaches. (...) It is suggested that Mixed Methods adopt a “weak” minimal realist ontological stance that is rooted in a position called “measured realism.” It is also argued that such a position is required since the present reliance on pragmatism does not sufficiently address ontological concerns. Suggestions are made, by way of an empirical research example, as to plausible ways to handle the issue of ontological commitment. (shrink)

The article is an attempt to better understand the objections to the doctrine of 'reliabilism' made by prominent epistemologists. The view argued for here is that while one extreme case of anti-reliabilism seems to be the paradigm case against the entire concept, this very case points out some additional, and implicit, problems with the standard account of epistemic justification. The most notable is that the standard view attacks reliabilism on the grounds that it lacks a means of giving adequate reasons (...) or evidence for its claims. We argue that the standard view, while correct on its paradigm case against reliabilism, is itself weakened by its lack of recognition of the central role theories of evidence must play in its basic account. Since theories of evidence are themselves divergent and problematic in terms of explaining how claims are justified, the standard account needs to address the issues of which account of evidence is 'adequate' and why it is. It is finally suggested that traditional epistemology might be more accurately described as a branch of confirmation theory. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to extend the meaning of the concept of indeterminacy for the human sciences. The authors do this by coining the term methodological indeterminacy and arguing that indeterminacy is better understood when linked to specific methodological techniques. Paradoxically, while specific research techniques demonstrate that the issue of indeterminacy is complex, yielding the possibility of types and degrees, it does not eliminate the problem of translation first raised by Quine. However, the authors go on to argue that, (...) from a research perspective, indeterminacy can and must be approached in such a way that it is possible to reduce cases of it, even though never completely eliminating it in the human sciences. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to explore some of the non-obvious characteristics of the social science research-social policy (SSRSP) paradigm. We examine some of the underlying assumptions of the readily accepted claim that social science research can lead to the creation of rational social policy. We begin by using the framework of meta-analysis as one of the most powerful means of informing policy by way of empirical research findings. This approach is critiqued and found wanting in several ways. Several (...) conceptual and definitional issues connected to the term “policy” are explored as well. A central argument is that even the best social science research is no guarantee of enlightened policymaking because the very (inductive) basis of empirical research militates against the possibility of going from research findings to policy. This claim is explored within the context of a central paradox. This paradox is explored in some depth. Finally, within the SSRSP claim, we analyze related issues such as the possibility of utilizing Mixed Methods and the politics of policymaking. We conclude that the SSRSP framework is, at best, a subjective one which ironically is needed, but one which is constrained by the very methods that is uses to formulate policy. (shrink)

This paper attempts to clarify the meaning and significance of "qualitative confirmation". The need to do so is related to the fact that, without such a conceptualization, a large portion of the human sciences are relegated to a less than scientific status. Accordingly, "qualitative confirmation" is viewed as a proper subset of traditional confirmation theory. To establish such a case, a general Hempelian framework is utilized, but it is supplemented with two additional levels of confirmation. It is concluded that the (...) final test for adequacy of such confirmation must rest on a subjective probability notion. (shrink)

The article argues for the possibility of translation manuals having an implicit internal structure. This structure is composed of specific methodological assumptions and techniques. Using the (N)-type and (G)-type distinction developed by Fuller for the study of scientific behavior, it is shown that these are incomplete characterizations of translation manuals. A more complete characterization must involve an analysis of how the presence or absence of methodological rules influences the interpretation of specific research questions. It is further argued that while Quine's (...) original indeterminacy thesis cannot be completely rejected, in some cases it can be modified to reflect the importance of the methodological constraints. Finally, it is suggested that the more critical analysis of translation manuals will benefit the on-going debates in the study of scientific behavior. (shrink)

This reissue of his collection of early essays, Logico-Linguistic Papers, is published with a brand new introduction by Professor Strawson but, apart from minor ...

A critique of the hypothesis of extended cognition.

v. 1. Reflection & mystery -- v. 2. Faith & reality.

Comment expliquer que tant d'humains, en ce début de XXIe siècle, accordent encore foi aux discours des religions, que ce soit une religion chrétienne, musulmane ou juive? Possèdent-elles des vérités plus assurées que celles des sciences humaines ou maintiennent-elles leurs fidèles dans l'ignorance, de peur que ceux-ci ne quittent le bateau amiral des églises, des mosquées ou des synagogues? Que proposent-elles de si séduisant pour que l'on sente le besoin de suivre aveuglément leurs enseignements et que des croyants soient prêts (...) à mourir ou à occire pour elles? « Au moment où le créationnisme devient de plus en plus présent dans le cursus académique et où le programme Ethique et culture religieuse, enseigné à nos jeunes dans nos écoles, fait l'apologie du religieux et banalise la superstition, ce livre de Marcel Sylvestre a de quoi nous faire réfléchir sur l'importance à accorder à la raison. » Extrait de la préface de Louise Mailloux. (shrink)

The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece traces the odyssey of "truth," Aletheia, from mythoreligious to philosophical thought in archaic Greece. Marcel Detienne's starting point is a simple observation: In archaic Greece, three figures - the diviner, the bard, and the king - all share the privilege of dispensing truth by virtue of the religious power of divine memory which provides them with knowledge, both oracular and inspired, of the present, past, and future. Beginning with this definition of the (...) prerational meaning of truth, Detienne proceeds to elaborate the complex conceptual and historical contexts from which emerges the philosophical notion of truth still influencing Western philosophy today. (shrink)

This important collection of lectures and essays was regarded by Gabriel Marcel as the best introduction to his thought.

This edition of Marcel's inspiring Homo Viator has been updated to includle fifty-seven pages of new material available for the first time in English, making this the first English-language edition to conform to the standard French edition. Here, Christianity's foremost existentialist of the twentieth century gives us a prodigious personal insight on 'man on the way' that will reinforce and commend our own pilgrimages in hope. Book jacket.

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 ...

A new approach to understanding the nature of ethics and ethical decision making, not only in the context of business, but also in other life contexts.

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.

Due to its emphasis on experiential interests, animal ethics tends to focus on individuals as the sole unit of moral concern. Many issues in animal ethics can be fruitfully analysed in terms of obligations towards individual animals, but some problems require reflection about collective dimensions of animal life in ways that individualist approaches can’t offer. Criticism of the individualist focus in animal ethics is not new; it has been put forward in particular by environmental ethics approaches. However, the latter tend (...) to be so far removed from the concerns of animal ethicists that both groups talk at cross purposes. We think the gap between environmental and animal ethics could be bridged by on the one hand focusing more on the collective dimensions of our concerns with animals - after all, individuals are constituted by the collective of which they are a part - and on the other hand, by showing that moral status can also be attributed to groups in an indirect way, related to the moral status of their individual members. In our paper we explore various ways of conceptualising the moral relevance of collectiveness in animal life. We draw on insights from public health ethics, as this field of inquiry has also developed - at least partly—in response to individualist approaches in human bioethics, creating more room for recognizing the value of population health, interpersonal relations, solidarity, and ways in which a collective is constituted. (shrink)

For over four decades, "Introduction to Operations Research" by Frederick Hillier has been the classic text on operations research. While building on the classic strengths of the text, the author continues to find new ways to make the text current and relevant to students. One way is by incorporating a wealth of state-of-the-art, user-friendly software and more coverage of business applications than ever before. The hallmark features of this edition include clear and comprehensive coverage of fundamentals, an extensive set of (...) interesting problems and cases, and state-of-the-practice operations research software used in conjunction with examples from the text. The ninth edition introduces a new partnership with the Institute for Operations Research and Management (INFORMS). These two pillars of the OR world have come together to showcase some of the award-winning applications of operations research and integrate them with this text. (shrink)

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.

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

Hegel is one of the major philosophers of the nineteenth century. Many of the major philosophical movements of the twentieth century - from existentialism to analytic philosophy - grew out of reactions against Hegel. He is also one of the hardest philosophers to understand and his complex ideas, though rewarding, are often misunderstood. In this magisterial and lucid introduction, Frederick Beiser covers every major aspect of Hegel's thought. He places Hegel in the historical context of nineteenth-century Germany whilst clarifying the (...) deep insights and originality of Hegel's philosophy. A masterpiece of clarity and scholarship, _Hegel_ is both the ideal starting point for those coming to Hegel for the first time and essential reading for any student or scholar of nineteenth century philosophy. Additional features: glossary chapter summaries chronology annotated further reading. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt disavowed the title of “philosopher,” and is known above all as a political theorist. But the relationship between philosophy and politics animates her entire oeuvre. We find her addressing the topic in The Human Condition (1958), in Between Past and Future (a collection of essays written in the early 1960s), and in Men in Dark Times (another collection of essays, this one from the late sixties). It is treated in her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, composed during the (...) seventies, and also in the posthumous Life of the Mind, two of three projected volumes of which were complete when she died in 1975. Certainly, Arendt’s thought cannot be understood without taking into account her deep suspicion of and equally deep commitment to philosophy in the context of political reflection. For all that, her writings on this abiding preoccupation do not gel into a systematically articulated theory or programmatic statement. Instead, they reflect Arendt’s appreciation of what remained for her a “vital tension” – an enigma. (shrink)

Histories of German philosophy in the nineteenth century typically focus on its first half--when Hegel, idealism, and Romanticism dominated. By contrast, the remainder of the century, after Hegel's death, has been relatively neglected because it has been seen as a period of stagnation and decline. But Frederick Beiser argues that the second half of the century was in fact one of the most revolutionary periods in modern philosophy because the nature of philosophy itself was up for grabs and the very (...) absence of certainty led to creativity and the start of a new era. In this innovative concise history of German philosophy from 1840 to 1900, Beiser focuses not on themes or individual thinkers but rather on the period's five great debates: the identity crisis of philosophy, the materialism controversy, the methods and limits of history, the pessimism controversy, and the Ignorabimusstreit. Schopenhauer and Wilhelm Dilthey play important roles in these controversies but so do many neglected figures, including Ludwig Büchner, Eugen Dühring, Eduard von Hartmann, Julius Fraunstaedt, Hermann Lotze, Adolf Trendelenburg, and two women, Agnes Taubert and Olga Pluemacher, who have been completely forgotten in histories of philosophy. The result is a wide-ranging, original, and surprising new account of German philosophy in the critical period between Hegel and the twentieth century. (shrink)

This paper takes as a starting point a recent development in privacy-debates: the emphasis on social and institutional environments in the definition and the defence of privacy. Recognizing the merits of this approach I supplement it in two respects. First, an analysis of the relation between privacy and autonomy teaches that in the digital age more than ever individual autonomy is threatened. The striking contrast between on the one hand offline vocabulary, where autonomy and individual decision making prevail, and on (...) the other online practices is a challenge that cannot be met in a social approach. Secondly, I elucidate the background of the social approach. Its importance is not exclusively related to the digital age. In public life we regularly face privacy-moments, when in a small distinguished social domain few people are commonly involved in common experiences. In the digital age the contextual integrity model of Helen Nissenbaum has become very influential. However this model has some problems. Nissenbaum refers to a variety of sources and uses several terms to explain the normativity in her model. The notion ‘context’ is not specific and faces the reproach of conservatism. We elaborate on the most promising suggestion: an elaboration on the notion ‘goods’ as it can be found in the works of Michael Walzer and Alisdair Macintyre. Developing criteria for defining a normative framework requires making explicit the substantive goods that are at stake in a context, and take them as the starting point for decisions about the flow of information. Doing so delivers stronger and more specific orientations that are indispensible in discussions about digital privacy. (shrink)

Neo-Kantianism was an important movement in German philosophy of the late 19th century: Frederick Beiser traces its development back to the late 18th century, and explains its rise as a response to three major developments in German culture: the collapse of speculative idealism; the materialism controversy; and the identity crisis of philosophy.

This is the first full study in English of the German historicist tradition. Frederick C. Beiser surveys the major German thinkers on history from the middle of the eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, providing an introduction to each thinker and the main issues in interpreting and appraising his thought. The volume offers new interpretations of well-known philosophers such as Johann Gottfried Herder and Max Weber, and introduces others who are scarcely known at all, including J. A. Chladenius, Justus (...) Möser, Heinrich Rickert, and Emil Lask. Beyond an exploration of the historical and intellectual context of each thinker, Beiser illuminates the sources and reasons for the movement of German historicism—one of the great revolutions in modern Western thought, and the source of our historical understanding of the human world. (shrink)

This book is the first comprehensive study of Rousseau's rich and complex theory of the type of self-love (amour proper) that, for him, marks the central difference between humans and the beasts. Amour proper is the passion that drives human individuals to seek the esteem, approval, admiration, or love--the recognition--of their fellow beings. Neuhouser reconstructs Rousseau's understanding of what the drive for recognition is, why it is so problematic, and how its presence opens up far-reaching developmental possibilities for creatures that (...) possess it. One of Rousseau's central theses is that amour proper in its corrupted, manifestations--pride or vanity--is the principal source of an array of evils so widespread that they can easily appear to be necessary features of the human condition: enslavement, conflict, vice, misery, and self-estrangement. Yet Rousseau also argues that solving these problems depends not on suppressing or overcoming the drive for recognition but on cultivating it so that it contributes positively to the achievement of freedom, peace, virtue, happiness, and unalienated selfhood. Indeed, Rousseau goes so far as to claim that, despite its many dangers, the need for recognition is a condition of nearly everything that makes human life valuable and that elevates it above mere animal existence: rationality, morality, freedom--subjectivity itself--would be impossible for humans if it were not for amour proper and the relations to others it impels us to establish. (shrink)

Weltschmerz is a study of the pessimism that dominated German philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century. Pessimism was essentially the theory that life is not worth living, and was introduced into German philosophy by Schopenhauer. Frederick C. Beiser examines the intense and long controversy that arose from Schopenhauer's pessimism, which changed the agenda of philosophy in Germany away from the logic of the sciences and toward an examination of the value of life. He examines the major defenders (...) of pessimism and its chief critics, especially Eugen Dühring and the neo-Kantians. The pessimism dispute of the second half of the century has been largely ignored in secondary literature and this book is a first attempt since the 1880s to re-examine it and to analyze the important philosophical issues raised by it. The dispute concerned the most fundamental philosophical issue of them all: whether life is worth living. (shrink)

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. The philosophers of this time broke with the two central tenets of the modem Cartesian tradition: the authority of reason and the primacy of epistemology. They also witnessed the decline of the Aufkldrung, the completion of Kant's philosophy, and the beginnings of post-Kantian idealism. Thanks to Beiser we can newly appreciate the influence of (...) Kant's critics on the development of his philosophy. Beiser brings the controversies, and the personalities who engaged in them, to life and tells a story that has uncanny parallels with the debates of the present. (shrink)

Diotima's Children is a re-examination of the rationalist tradition of aesthetics which prevailed in Germany in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century.

Neil Levy defends no-platforming people who espouse dangerous or unacceptable views. I reject his notion of higher-order evidence as authoritarian and dogmatic. I argue that no-platforming frustrates the growth of knowledge.

Grand specialiste de Ficin, Raymond Marcel expose ainsi les principes de son ambitieux programme: 1) resoudre un probleme dans l'evolution de la pensee europeenne, a savoir les relations entre les theologiens medievaux et les philosophes du XVIIe siecle. Ficin l'interesse en sa qualite de " point de repere " entre la philosophie medievale et moderne. Cette biographie est ainsi le travail d'un historien de la philosophie, historien au point de vue religieux, plus precisement thomiste. 2) livrer une introduction essentielle (...) a une serie de textes. Nous pouvons distinguer 2 grandes parties: 1) une introduction d'une centaine de pages " Renaissance et Platonisme " qui rappelle le probleme complexe et meconnu du platonisme dans la pensee occidentale de la Renaissance carolingienne a la moitie du XVe siecle. 2) La seconde partie, qui constitue le cur de l'ouvrage et s'appuie essentiellement sur la correspondance de Ficin, etudie plus specifiquement l'evolution intellectuelle de Ficin et la reception de ses ouvrages dans le contexte du platonisme du XVe siecle: les consequences du concile de Florence sur la pensee florentine, les rapports de Ficin avec Come de Medicis. (shrink)