What did Leibniz have to contribute to the philosophy of mind? To judge from textbooks in the philosophy of mind, and even Leibniz commentaries, the answer is: not much. That may be because Leibniz’s philosophy of mind looks roughly like a Cartesian philosophy of mind. Like Descartes and his followers, Leibniz claims that the mind is immaterial and immortal; that it is a thinking thing ; that it is a different kind of thing from body and obeys its own laws; (...) and that it comes stocked with innate truth-tracking intellectual ideas and an epistemically troubling habit of forming confused sensory ideas on the occasion of external corporeal events. Nothing is new. Of course, Leibniz adds unconscious perceptions to the mind in the form of his famous petites perceptions, and he offers a unique solution to the problem of mind-body interaction in the form of his infamous pre-established harmony. In the overall scheme of things, however, these look like minor alterations in a philosophy of mind that the Cartesians had been advocating for some fifty years. Or so it appears. (shrink)

Descartes revolutionized our conception of the mind by identifying consciousness as the mark of the mental: all and only thoughts are conscious. Today the idea that all thoughts are conscious seems obviously wrong. Worse, however, Descartes himself seems to posit a whole host of unconscious thoughts. Something is not as it seems. Either Descartes is remarkably inconsistent, or his claim that all thought is conscious is more nuanced than it appears. In this paper I argue that while Descartes was indeed (...) unwavering in his commitment to the conscious mark, he had the resources to distinguish different types and degrees of consciousness that make for a richer cognitive psychology than he is typically credited with. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.1 (2001) 49-75 [Access article in PDF] Sensible Ends:Latent Teleology in Descartes' Account of Sensation Alison Simmons One of Descartes' hallmark contributions to natural philosophy is his denunciation of teleology. It is puzzling, then, to find him arguing in Meditation VI that human beings have sensations in order to preserve the union of mind and body (AT VII 83). 1 This (...) appears to be just the sort of teleological explanation that he proscribes. Descartes' Anglo-American commentators have had little to say about the teleological overtones of his claims about sensation. His French commentators acknowledge these overtones, but seem largely untroubled by them. 2 It is worth pausing to be troubled, for a closer analysis reveals that Descartes' famous proscription against teleology is not as simple as it is generally thought to be. In the first half of this essay, I argue that Descartes advocates a genuinely teleological conception of the senses. My aim is not to charge Descartes with employing illicit teleology, but to argue that there is a place for teleology even in his revisionist natural philosophy. Accordingly, in the second half of this essay, I argue that Descartes' assault on teleological explanation is [End Page 49] not a sweeping assault on finality, but a more directed attack on particular uses of ends in natural philosophy. Descartes' assault leaves standing a form of teleological explanation that proves crucial to his own treatment of sensation. 1. Descartes' Rejection of Teleological Explanation at a Glance A teleological explanation is one that purports to account for something in terms of its ends or its function relative to the ends of the system of which it is a part. Aristotle's physics provides many classic examples: plants produce leaves for the protection of their fruit; spiders spin webs in order to catch food; animals grow sharp front teeth and dull back teeth in order to facilitate biting and chewing respectively; eyes are for seeing. According to Aristotle, all natural phenomena are directed toward ends and no explanation is complete without a teleological component that specifies the end for the sake of which the phenomenon occurs. Indeed ends take explanatory priorityover other causes: "Both causes [the end and the matter] must be stated by the student of nature, but especially the end; for that is the cause of the matter, not vice versa." 3 And: [T]he causes concerned in natural generation are, as we see, more than one. There is the cause for the sake of which [the end], and the cause whence the beginning of motion comes [the efficient cause]. Now we must decide which of these two causes comes first, which second. Plainly, however, that cause is the first which we call that for the sake of which. For this is the account of the thing, and the account forms the starting-point.4In other words, Aristotle argues that natural substances have the matter they do, have the parts or organs they do, are organized as they are and act as they do for the sake of their ends. To explain why things are as they are, the natural philosopher must therefore explain the ways in which they contribute to ends.Among the late scholastic Aristotelians familiar to Descartes there is considerable debate concerning the causal efficacy of ends. Genuine final causation, in which something is said to be acted on by an end, is limited to the intentional behavior of rational agents who consciously recognize their ends: only something that recognizes an end can be "moved" by one. Even here the sort of causation involved is peculiar: a rational agent is "moved" by an end insofar as the end induces a "metaphorical motion" toward (or desire for) the end in the agent's will. 5 While these scholastic Aristotelians resist attributing final causation [End Page 50] to non-rational creatures, they nevertheless persist in attributing ends to them. When Toletus, Rubio, the Coimbrans and Suarez take up the question whether nature acts propter finem, each answers it affirmatively: natural... (shrink)

Human beings pose a problem for Descartes’ metaphysics. They seem to be more than a mere sum of their mental and bodily parts; human beings, Descartes insists, are unions of mind and body. But what does that union amount to? In the first, negative, part of this paper I argue that, by Descartes’ own lights, there is no way for us to answer this question if we are looking for a proper metaphysics of the union. Metaphysics is the job of (...) the intellect; it involves understanding. On Descartes’ considered view, we don’t understand the union; we feel it through the internal senses. In the second, positive, part of the paper I argue that, while Descartes does not give a properly metaphysical account of the union, he does provide a rich phenomenology of it that is of both theoretical and practical interest. Along the way, I suggest a phenomenological reading of a number of important passages that scholars have interpreted as Descartes’ attempt to provide a metaphysics of the union. (shrink)

Descartes is often thought to bifurcate sensory experience into two distinct cognitive components: the sensing of secondary qualities and the more or less intellectual perceiving of primary qualities. A closer examination of his analysis of sensory perception in the Sixth Replies and his treatment of sensory processing in the Dioptrics and Treatise on Man teIls a different story. I argue that Descartes offers a unified cognitive account of sensory experience according to which the senses and intellect operate together to produce (...) a fundamentally imagistic representation of the world in both its primary and secondary quality aspects. At stake here is not only our understanding of the cognitive structure of sensory experience but the relation of sense and intellect more generally in the Cartesian mind. The deep bifurcation in the Cartesian mind is not between the sensory perception of primary and secondary qualities but between sensory perception and purely intellectual perception. (shrink)

Descartes’ mind-body dualism and his quest for objective knowledge can appear de-humanizing. My aim in this paper is to re-humanize Descartes. When we take a closer look at what Descartes actually says about human beings, it casts his entire thought in a much different light.

It is no surprise that the phenomenal qualities of our sensory experience pose recalcitrant philosophical problems for a physical materialist metaphysics. The colors of flowers as we experience them by sight, the taste of a ripe peach, and the smell of fresh-cut grass are undeniably part of the experienced world; yet in their phenomenal mode, they do not seem well-placed in the physicist's world of particles and energy fields. It seems, prima facie, that the metaphysical programs found in earlier science (...) and philosophy were better suited to accommodate these qualities: in the hylomorphic world of the Aristotelians, colors were "real qualities" existing as such in flowers; in the dualistic world of Descartes, colors were displaced from things like flowers to the immaterial mind of the perceiver. The dissertation argues that this intuition about our philosophical heritage is both philosophically confused and historically inaccurate. It betrays a misconception about phenomenal qualities and the problems they pose which results from a failure to distinguish phenomenal qualities from a special subset of sensible qualities that we have come to call "secondary" qualities. Disentangled from the primary-secondary quality distinction, phenomenal qualities include all sensible qualities insofar as they form the experiential contents of our sensory perceptions. So considered, phenomenal qualities invite difficult questions about the representational nature and ontological status of our sensory experience even within the Aristotelian and Cartesian metaphysics. By examining Descartes' and the Aristotelians' theories of sense perception with a focus on these questions we achieve a better understanding of "the problem" of phenomenal qualities, better interpretations of these historical theories of sense perception, and suggestions for reshaping the problem space within which we think philosophically about phenomenal qualities today. (shrink)

This volume of fourteen essays commemorating the 350th anniversary of the publication of Descartes’s Meditations represents several current trends in Descartes scholarship. Among the essays there are close textual analyses, discussions of the scholastic Aristotelian influence on Descartes, and an emphasis on metaphysical topics rather than the epistemological ones that dominated the Anglo-American literature twenty years ago. The volume bears the mark of being a collection of conference papers in its breadth of topics and methodological styles, but it serves well (...) as a measure of the times for the history of philosophy, as I will explain below. (shrink)

The particular design of any technology may have profound social implications. Computing technologies are deeply intermeshed with the activities of daily life, playing an ever more central role in how we work, learn, communicate, socialize, and participate in government. Despite the many ways they have improved life, they cannot be regarded as unambiguously beneficial or even value-neutral. Recent experience shows they can lead to unintended but harmful consequences. Some technologies are thought to threaten democracy through the spread of propaganda on (...) online social networks, or to threaten privacy through the aggregation of datasets that include increasingly personal information, or to threaten justice when machine learning is used in such high-stakes, decision-making contexts as loan application reviews, employment procedures, or parole hearings. It is insufficient to ethically assess technology after it has produced negative social impacts, as has happened, for example, with facial recognition software that discriminates against people of color and with self-driving cars that are unable to cope with pedestrians who jay-walk. Developers of new technologies should aim to identify potential harmful consequences early in the design process and take steps to eliminate or mitigate them. This task is not easy. Designers will often have to negotiate among competing values—for instance, between efficiency and accessibility for a diverse user population, or between maximizing benefits and avoiding harm. There is no simple recipe for identifying and solving ethical problems. -/- Computer science education can help meet these challenges by making ethical reasoning about computing technologies a central element in the curriculum. Students can learn to think not only about what technology they could create, but also whether they should create that technology. Learning to reason this way requires courses unlike those currently standard in computer science curricula. A range of university courses on topics in areas of computing, ethics, society and public policy are emerging to meet this need. Some cover computer science broadly, while others focus on specific problems like privacy and security; typically, these classes exist as stand-alone courses in the computer science curriculum. Others have integrated ethics into the teaching of introductory courses on programming, artificial intelligence, and human-computer interaction. (shrink)

Optimism and pessimism are two diametrically opposed views about the value of existence. Optimists maintain that existence is better than non-existence, while pessimists hold that it is worse. Arthur Schopenhauer put forward a variety of arguments against optimism and for pessimism. I will offer a synoptic reading of these arguments, which aims to show that while Schopenhauer’s case against optimism primarily focuses on the value or disvalue of life’s contents, his case for pessimism focuses on the ways in which life (...) as a whole is structurally defective. (shrink)

John Fischer and Mark Ravizza defend in this book a painstakingly constructed analysis of what they take to be a core condition of moral responsibility: the notion of guidance control. The volume usefully collects in one place ideas and arguments the authors have previously published in singly or jointly authored works on this and related topics, as well as various refinements to those views and some suggestive discussions that aim to show how their account of guidance control might fit into (...) a more comprehensive account of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Joyful Human Rights espouses a joy-centered approach that provides new insights into foundational human rights issues. William Paul Simmons offers a framework -- surveying a more comprehensive understanding of human experiences -- for theorizing and practicing a more affirmative and robust notion of human rights.

The Beloved Self is about the holy grail of moral philosophy, an argument against egoism that proves that we all have reasons to be moral. Part One introduces three different versions of egoism. Part Two looks at attempts to prove that egoism is false, and shows that even the more modest arguments that do not try to answer the egoist in her own terms seem to fail. But in part Three, Hills defends morality and develops a new problem for egoism, (...) an epistemological problem. She shows that it is not epistemically rational to believe the most plausible versions of egoism. The first part of the book will be most relevant to those interested in moral theory, as it contains detailed discussions of recent interpretations of virtue ethics and especially of Kant's moral theory. The second and third part of the book turn to epistemology, particularly moral epistemology, and include an account of the relationship between knowledge and action, a new theory of moral understanding, and a discussion of the epistemically rational response to various kinds of disagreement. Hills also defends a new account of virtue and of morally worthy action. (shrink)

This paper problematises the ways women’s leadership has been understood in relation to male leadership rather than on its own terms. Focusing specifically on ethical leadership, we challenge and politicise the symbolic status of women in leadership by considering the practice of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. In so doing, we demonstrate how leadership ethics based on feminised ideals such as care and empathy are problematic in their typecasting of women as being simply the other to men. We apply (...) different strategies of mimesis for developing feminist leadership ethics that does not derive from the masculine. This offers a radical vision for leadership that liberates the feminine and women’s subjectivities from the masculine order. It also offers a practical project for changing women’s working lives through relationality, intercorporeality, collective agency and ethical openness with the desire for fundamental political transformation in the ways in which women can lead. (shrink)

This short article argues that an adequate response to the implications for governance raised by ‘Big Data’ requires much more attention to agency and reflexivity than theories of ‘algorithmic power’ have so far allowed. It develops this through two contrasting examples: the sociological study of social actors used of analytics to meet their own social ends and the study of actors’ attempts to build an economy of information more open to civic intervention than the existing one. The article concludes with (...) a consideration of the broader norms that might contextualise these empirical studies, and proposes that they can be understood in terms of the notion of voice, although the practical implementation of voice as a norm means that voice must sometimes be considered via the notion of transparency. (shrink)

Causes always seem to come prior to their effects. What might explain this asymmetry? Causation's temporal asymmetry isn't straightforwardly due to a temporal asymmetry in the laws of nature—the laws are, by and large, temporally symmetric. Nor does the asymmetry appear due to an asymmetry in time itself. This Element examines recent empirical attempts to explain the temporal asymmetry of causation: statistical mechanical accounts, agency accounts and fork asymmetry accounts. None of these accounts are complete yet and a full explanation (...) of the temporal asymmetry of causation will likely require contributions from all three programs. (shrink)

Welcome to the family -- The sources of new phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger -- How to be a phenomenological heretic: the origins and development of new phenomenology -- Phenomenology and onto-theology -- Phenomenology and theology reconsidered -- New phenomenology on the existence and nature of God -- The call, prayer, and Christian philosophy -- Proposals for new phenomenology and analytic philosophy of religion -- Normativity: ethics, politics, and society -- Possible futures for new phenomenology.

In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan defends the view that all animals who are “subjects of a life” have an equal moral right to life. In this chapter, I consider whether it makes sense to think that animals have an equal right to life in light of the challenge that life has less value for animals than humans. This challenge raises two central questions: (1) does life have less value for animals than humans and (2) if it does, (...) does this fact justify the view that animals do not have an equal right to life. I argue, first, that life has greater value for most humans than animals because most humans are capable of experiencing higher qualities of enjoyment in life, in the form of creative, intellectual pleasures. However, this does not justify denying that animals have an equal right to life. Whether beings’ lives deserve strong respect depends on whether the value of life for those beings meets a certain threshold. I argue that the value of life for many animals meets this threshold because it is compatible with the virtue of compassion. (shrink)

This book explores the meaning and practice of corporeal ethics in organized life. Corporeal ethics originates from an emergent, embodied and affective experience with others that precedes and exceeds those rational schemes that seek to regulate it. Pullen and Rhodes show how corporeal ethics is fundamentally based in embodied affect, yet practically materialized in ethico-political acts of positive resistance and networked solidarity. Considering ethics in this way turns our attention to how people's conduct and interactions might be ethically informed in (...) the context of, and in resistance to, the masculine rationality of dominating organizational power relations in which they find themselves. Pullen and Rhodes outline the ways in which ethically grounded resistance and critique can and do challenge self-interested organizational power and privilege. They account for how corporeal ethics serves to destabilize the ways that organizations reproduce practices that negate difference and result in oppression, discrimination, and inequality. The book is suitable for students, scholars and citizens who want to learn more about the radical possibilities of how political actions arising from corporeal ethics can strive for equality and justice. (shrink)

Vladimir Putin's image functions as a political talisman far outside of the borders of his own country. By studying material objects, fan fiction and digital media, this book traces the satirical uses of Putin's public persona, notably how he stands as a foil for other world leaders. It argues that the internet is crucial to the creation of contemporary Putin memorabilia and that these items show a continued political engagement by young people, even as some political scientists and media experts (...) decry what they see as the opposite. The book further addresses the ways in which explicit sexual references about government officials are being used as everyday political commentary in the United States. Turning a critical eye to Putin kitsch shows how the number of such references skyrocketed during the 2016 US Presidential election campaign, and suggests that the phenomenon is likely to still be important when Americans next return to the polls. Finally, the internet makes possible a totally new kind of kitsch--the virtual kind. An examination of how the Russian president's image circulates via memes and parodies, as well as through apps and games, suggests that political culture has become increasingly participatory in the last decade. (shrink)

Collected critical essays analyzing Kierkegaard’s work in regards to theology and social-moral thought. Kierkegaard’s God and the Good Life focuses on faith and love, two central topics in Kierkegaard’s writings, to grapple with complex questions at the intersection of religion and ethics. Here, leading scholars reflect on Kierkegaard’s understanding of God, the religious life, and what it means to exist ethically. The contributors then shift to psychology, hope, knowledge, and the emotions as they offer critical and constructive readings for contemporary (...) philosophical debates in the philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and epistemology. Together, they show how Kierkegaard continues to be an important resource for understandings of religious existence, public discourse, social life, and how to live virtuously. “All in all, the editors of this volume have put together a thoughtful and sometimes provocative collection of essays by a number of Kierkegaard scholars and philosophers for the reader’s consideration.... The volume undoubtedly makes a contribution to contemporary philosophical debates in the philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, and epistemology, especially with regard to the importance of faith and love for leading a good and meaningful human life.” —International Journal for Philosophy of Religion “Invites the reader to think anew about what Kierkegaard was saying and what we can learn from him in the context of our time, particularly what it means to become a Christian in terms of the moral task of love and living a life worthy of a human being.” —Sylvia Walsh, translator of Kierkegaard’s Discourses at the Communion on Fridays. (shrink)

Restless Ideas is a lively new textbook of contemporary social theory that speaks directly to the anxious age in which we live today. In addition to providing a highly readable guided tour of major social theories from the mid-20th to the early 21st century, this book is full of dynamic examples that show how these theories may be used to deepen our understanding of current events and of our own life experiences. The emergence of demagogic political leaders like Donald Trump (...) in the USA, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey; the rise of religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and political populism; the digital echo-chamber of social media; and the underlying causes of Brexit are only some of the many current social issues that can be framed through contemporary social theories. Similarly, the politics of sexual, racial and ethnic minorities can be analyzed through the prism of theoretical perspectives such as queer theory, standpoint and intersectional theory, postcolonial theory and critical race theory, while the ongoing struggles for gender equality and gender justice can usefully be examined through the generational perspectives of feminist theories. This book sets the stage with a critical discussion of the loaded history of the social theory canon and makes the argument that there has never been a better time than the present to broaden our understanding of our shared global heritage of social theory, to include some of the formerly excluded classics of past social thinkers, and to open the doors to current social thinkers theorizing from the margins. The book traces the modern roots of contemporary social theory back to the works of the early structural functionalists, systems theorists, conflict theorists, symbolic interactionists, ethnomethodologists and sociobiologists, building on and at times inverting the canon with the critical advancements to social theory. Later chapters focus on the current influence of structuration theory, third wave critical theory, postmodernism and poststructuralism, critical race theory, postcolonialism, liquid and late modernity theories, and globalization theories. These perspectives include the works of contemporary social theorists such as Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, Juliet Mitchell, Dorothy Smith, Judith Butler, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, Zygmunt Bauman, Slavoj Zizek, Alain Badiou, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Manuel Castells and Ulrich Beck. The underlying premise - and the promise - of this book is that social theory has the power to provide us with the skills for more informed observation, analysis, and empathic understanding of social behavior and social interaction. In a word: the value of social theory may be seen in how it can enhance social literacy - by deepening our understanding of the world around us, and by empowering us to become practical theorists in our own lives. (shrink)

The massive disparity between the relative wealth of most citizens in affluent countries and the profound poverty of billions of people struggling elsewhere for survival is morally jolting. But why exactly is this disparity so outrageous and how should the citizens of affluent countries respond? Political philosopher, Thomas Pogge, has emerged as one of the world’s most ardent critics of global injustice which, he argues, is caused directly by the operation of a global institutional order that not only systematically disadvantages (...) poor countries but is imposed on them by precisely those wealthy, powerful countries that benefit the most from the order’s injustice. In allowing their governments to perpetrate this injustice, Pogge contends that citizens of the wealthy countries collude in a monumental crime against humanity. In this book Pogge’s challenging and controversial ideas are debated by leading political philosophers from a range of philosophical viewpoints. With a clear and informative introduction by Alison Jaggar, and original contributions from Neera Chandhoke, Jiwei Ci, Joshua Cohen, Erin Kelly, Lionel McPherson, Charles W. Mills, Kok-Chor Tan, and Leif Wenar, this volume deepens and expands the debate over global justice and moral responsibility in the world today. (shrink)

Archaeological facts have a perplexing character; they are often seen as less likely to “lie,” capable of bearing tangible, material witness to actual conditions of life, actions and events, but at the same time they are notoriously fragmentary and enigmatic, and disturbingly vulnerable to dispersal and attrition. As Trouillot (1995) argues for historical inquiry, the identification, selection, interpretation and narration of archaeological facts is a radically constructive process. Rather than conclude on this basis that archaeological facts and fictions are indistinguishable, (...) I identify a number of strategies that archaeologists rely on to make discerning use of “legacy” data – archaeological data recovered and curated over for decades, even centuries, often for very different purposes than those that animate contemporary archaeological inquiry. These include source criticism, secondary retrieval, repositioning and recontextualizing these data in ways that can, sometimes radically shift the “facts” associated with them. The construction of critical genealogies of these facts – the travels and transformations of the material, interpretive and narrative facts of archaeology – is a crucial condition for the successful exploitation of these epistemic possibilities. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine a solution to the Liar paradox found in the work of Ockham, Burley, and Pseudo-Sherwood. I reject the accounts of this solution offered by modern commentators. I argue that this medieval line suggests a non-hierarchical solution to the Liar, according to which ?true? is analysed as an indexical term, and paradox is avoided by minimal restrictions on tokens of ?true?. In certain respects, this solution resembles the recent approaches of Charles Parsons and Tyler Burge; in (...) other respects, it is related to a suggestion of Gödel. But, as a whole, it suggests an original solution to the Liar paradox, quite unlike any current proposals. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

ABSTRACT This article suggests that Asian American rhetorics of sound destabilize representational politics by complicating the racialization of sonic difference. The author investigates the relationship between notions of Asian American citizenship and not-Blackness in vocal performance. By attending to sonic rhetorics through Awkwafina’s blaccent controversy, the article explores the condition of epistemic violence that position Asian American voices as “unhearable.”.

In 1905, Richard discovered his paradox of definability, and in a letter written that year he presented both the paradox and a solution to it.Soon afterwards, Poincaré endorsed a variant of Richard?s solution.In this paper, I critically examine Richard?s and Poincaré?s ways out.I draw on an objection of Peano?s, and argue that their stated solutions do not work.But I also claim that their writings suggest another way out, different from their stated solutions, and different from the orthodox Tarskian approach.I argue (...) that this second solution does not prevent the return of the paradox. (shrink)

According to ‘orthodox’ representationalism, perceptual states possess constitutive veridicality (truth, accuracy, or satisfaction) conditions. Typically, philosophers who deny orthodox representationalism endorse some variety of anti-representationalism. But we argue that these haven’t always been, and needn’t continue to be, the only options. Philosophers including Descartes, Malebranche and Helmholtz appear to have rejected orthodox representationalism while nonetheless endorsing perceptual representations of a fundamentally practical kind not captured by orthodox representationalism. Moreover, we argue that the perceptual science called on by contemporary philosophers to (...) defend orthodox representationalism instead motivates a return to this older view, and we suggest that contemporary philosophers may conceptualize fundamentally practical perceptual representations as _‘de agendo’_ representations, a species of representation that has constitutive appropriateness rather than veridicality conditions. (shrink)

The early Epicurean revival in Florence and Italy -- Medicean Florence : Ficino and Bartolomeo Scala -- Republican Florence : the university lectures of Marcello Adriani -- Niccol Machiavelli and the influence of Lucretius -- Lucretian networks in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries -- Appendix : notes on Machiavelli's transcription of MS Vat. Rossi 884.

This is a long-overdue biography of the Huxleys: the Victorian natural historian T.H. Huxley ("Darwin's Bulldog") and his grandson, the scientist, conservationist, and zoologist Julian Huxley. Both T.H. and Julian suffered from depression, thinking and writing about the condition and genetic inheritance in highly curious ways. And between them, they communicated to the world the great modern story of the theory of evolution by natural selection. Because the grandson modeled himself so self-consciously on the grandfather, celebrated historian Alison Bashford (...) writes seamlessly about these omnivorous intellects together, almost as if they were one very long-lived man whose vital dates bookended the colossal shifts in world history from the age of sail to the Space Age, and from colonial wars to world wars to the cold war. The myriad questions that the Huxleys grappled with make them the perfect dynasty-companions for time travel over the age of evolution: What is the nature of time and how old is the Earth itself? What is the connection between human history and natural history? How are humans animals and how are we not? What is the deep past and the distant future of humankind? Can and should we actively seek to improve future generations? What might the planet look like 10,000 years hence? This momentous biography traces the problems and wonders of the modern world that the Huxleys themselves raised, postured, and pondered over lives that spanned the age of evolution. (shrink)

Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of this book is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besant, Vernon Lee, and (...) Constance Naden. Alison Stone looks at their views on naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history. She shows how these women interacted and developed their philosophical views in conversation with one another, not only with their male contemporaries. The rich print and periodical culture of the period enabled these women to publish philosophy in forms accessible to a general readership, despite the restrictions women faced, such as having limited or no access to university education. Stone explains how these women became excluded from the history of philosophy because there was a cultural shift at the end of the nineteenth century towards specialised forms of philosophical writing, which depended on academic credentials that were still largely unavailable to women. (shrink)

As Spinoza's near‐total omission from the history of physics reflects, Spinoza never produced a physics in this narrow sense: a careful and systematic investigation of bodies, forces, and their motions of the kind found in Descartes, Regius, or Huygens. Spinoza did have things to say about extension, motion, and the causal interactions of bodies. Understanding Spinoza's physics requires reckoning with his responses to Descartes. Like Descartes, Spinoza thinks that all and only bodies share an attribute, the attribute of Extension. Spinoza's (...) commitment to the “attribute‐neutrality” of some causal facts is reflected in his physics. Attribute‐neutrality can also make sense of some changes in the DPP. Physics investigates the nature and properties of bodies, so for Spinoza as for Descartes, it will involve an analysis of the attribute of Extension. Spinoza never drew out the detailed physical implications of his metaphysics of bodies. (shrink)

Even without Alzheimer's or dementia, most of us are prone to “ordinary forgetting”. The Good Place and careful philosophical reflection can help us think through memory loss, relationships, and making a place for each other as we live through the human condition. Throughout The Good Place, Chidi and Eleanor help each other develop and sustain their moral selves as well as their relationship. Stories are fundamental to our sense of self, right and wrong, and the kind of people we are. (...) To understand memory as a construction, we must understand the three stages of individual memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval. How we scaffold each other's identities and how we hold space for each other in the real world are ethical issues that have everything to do with memory and the stories we tell ourselves and each other. The Good Place can help us grapple with this. (shrink)

This unique collection of essays focuses on various aspects of Plato's Philosophy of Art, not only in The Republic , but in the Phaedrus, Symposium, Laws and related dialogues. The range of issues addressed includes the contest between philosophy and poetry, the moral status of music, the love of beauty, censorship, motivated emotions.