In Philosophy as Frustration: Happiness Found and Feigned from Greek Antiquity to Present Bruce Silver argues that traditional philosophical views of happiness, as well as recent psychological theories of happiness, are at odds with themselves and with important accounts of a truly happy life.

This book argues that a basic grasp of philosophy and logic can produce written and spoken material that is both grammatically correct and powerful. The author analyses errors in grammar, word choice, phrasing and sentences that even the finest writers can fail to notice; concentrating on subtle missteps and errors that can make the difference between good and excellent prose. Each chapter addresses how common words and long-established grammatical rules are often misused or ignored altogether – including such common words (...) as ‘interesting’, ‘possible’, and ‘apparent’. By tackling language in this way, the author provides an illuminating and practical stylistic guide that will interest students and scholars of grammar and philosophy, as well as readers looking to improve their technical writing skills. (shrink)

“But when you meet her again,” he observed, “in Heaven, you, too, will be changed. You will see her spiritualized, with spiritual eyes.”1Dante is not a philosopher, although George Santayana sees him as one among a very few philosophical poets.2 The Divine Comedy deals in terza rima with issues that are philosophically urgent, including the relation between reasoning well and happiness.3And as one of the few great epics in Western literature, the Comedy offers its readers the pleasures of world-class poetry, (...) fabulous beasts from classical literature, good people and sinners from Dante’s Italy, and the prolongation in verse of Thomas Aquinas’s summa Theologiae and Summa contra Gentiles. In some ways, Dante’s epic .. (shrink)

I maintain that George Ripley (1802-1880) is among the most philosophically searching New England transcendentalists. In this essay I argue that Ripley’s denial that God’s miracles are the sole evidence of Christian truth clarifies the issues and debate that divide empiricists who seek evidence for truth through external verification and intuitionists who maintain that religious truth is manifest only within the minds, hearts, and special senses of true believers.

Professor l a mirarchi argues, In his "force and absolute motion in berkeley's philosophy of physics" (_journal of the history of ideas<d>, Volume 38, Pages 705-713), That I have misunderstood berkeley's treatment of inertial motion. I contend, Despite professor mirarchi's criticism, That while berkeley accepts the newtonian principle of inertia, He cannot accommodate it into his own radically contingent picture of the universe.

Philosophers writing on the subject of human action have found it tempting to introduce their subject by raising Wittgenstein's question, 'What is left over if you subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?' The presumption is that something of particular interest is involved in an action of raising an arm that is not present in a mere bodily movement, and the philosopher's task is to specify just what this is. Unfortunately, such (...) an approach does not take us very far, since a person could properly be said to raise his (or her) arm while asleep or hypnotized even though he (or she) would not be performing an action in the sense of 'action' with which philosophers are particularly concerned. To avoid this kind of difficulty I shall approach the subject of human action is a more academic way: I shall expound some important rival theories of human action, and introduce the relevant issues by commenting critically on those theories. One of the issues I eventually introduce is a metaphysical one. A theory of action makes sense, I contend, only on the assumption that there are such 'things' as actions (or events). After considering some key arguments bearing on the issue I conclude that, as matters currently stand in philosophy, a metaphysically noncommittal attitude toward actions and events seems justified. (shrink)

Since the introduction of mathematical population genetics, its machinery has shaped our fundamental understanding of natural selection. Selection is taken to occur when differential fitnesses produce differential rates of reproductive success, where fitnesses are understood as parameters in a population genetics model. To understand selection is to understand what these parameter values measure and how differences in them lead to frequency changes. I argue that this traditional view is mistaken. The descriptions of natural selection rendered by population genetics models are (...) in general neither predictive nor explanatory and introduce avoidable conceptual confusions. I conclude that a correct understanding of natural selection requires explicitly causal models of reproductive success. *Received May 2006; revised December 2006. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Kansas State University, 201 Dickens Hall, Manhattan, KS 66506; e‐mail: [email protected] . (shrink)

In this book the author examines the stubborn philosophical belief in moral responsibility, surveying the philosophical arguments for it, but focusing on the system that supports these arguments: powerful social and psychological factors that hold the belief in moral responsibility firmly in place.--Publisher's description.

In their target article, “Proposed Principles for International Bioethics Conferencing: Anti-Discriminatory, Global, and Inclusive,” Jecker et al. (2024) highlight the growing international scope o...

Was ist Bedeutung? Eine dem Internalismus zuzurechnende Antwort besagt, die Bedeutung einer Repräsentation sei deren funktionale Rolle. Wenn die Bedeutungen von Repräsentationen ihre Extensionen bestimmen, vermag ich unter Rückgriff auf Arbeiten von Putnam, Kripke und Devitt zu zeigen, dass diese Antwort falsch ist. Gibt man die Extensionsbestimmung hingegen auf, sind funktionale Rollen laut einem Argument von Fodor und Lepore holistischer Natur. Bedeutungen sind aber nicht holistisch. Die einzige erfolgversprechende Erwiderung auf das holistische Argument würde jedoch gerade darauf beruhen, dass Bedeutungen (...) extensionsbestimmend sind. Die Funktionale-Rollen-Semantik, so die These dieser Arbeit, ist mithin keine befriedigende Antwort auf unsere Ausgangsfrage. (shrink)

Gathering thoughts -- Teachers who inspired me -- What am I? : Montessori? Steiner? eclectic? : Is it important? -- Which comes first? : a philosophical framework, theory and research evidence : what do teachers and other practitioners need to bring out their best work -- Working with principles which are interpreted and embedded in articulated practice -- The importance of parent partnership and the development of moral values and self-discipline -- Play : a very complex thing -- Finding how (...) to position myself in relation to play -- Inclusion : commonalities, differences"fragmentation or wholeness?"-- Cultivating creativity -- Remaining a generalist rather than becoming a specialist within one area of early childhood education -- Changing political climates -- How best to train teachers of young children -- Remaining a Froebelian but still exploring why and wondering "will I always be one?". (shrink)

Why is it commonplace for us to contemplate distorted depictions of faces with eagerness and enjoyment, but to be repelled by real people whose physiognomies resemble the depicted ones? More generally, what makes perceiving pictured physically anomalous individuals so different from perceiving physically anomalous people themselves? . . . I will suggest how we can theorize human beauty, as we do beauty in art, so as to savor, rather than rebuff, novelty, disproportionateness, and even crookedness in the human shape. For (...) anomaly to present as originality rather than deviance requires a context in which we theorize the connectedness of successors with their heritage. (shrink)

The version uploaded to this site is a late draft. The paper arises both from William L. Rowe's classic 1979 discussion of the problem of evil, argues that there exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse, and also from Steven Wykstra's response, in the course of which he argues for the following Condition of Reasonable Epistemic Access (CORNEA): "On the basis (...) of cognized situation s, human H is entitled to claim 'It appears that p' only if it is reasonable for H to believe that, given her cognitive faculties and the use she has made of them, if p were not the case, s would likely be different in some way discernible by her." My paper discusses CORNEA, and proposes a replacement principle. (shrink)

Locates in Schelling a new understanding of our relation to nature in philosophy.

Upon doing something generous for someone with whom you are close, some kind of reciprocity may be appropriate. But it often seems wrong to actually request reciprocity. This chapter explores the wrongness in making these requests, and why they can nevertheless appear appropriate. After considering several explanations for the wrongness at issue (involving, e.g. distinguishing oughts from obligation, the suberogatory, imperfect duties, and gift-giving norms), a novel proposal is advanced. The requests are disrespectful; they express that their agent insufficiently trusts (...) the hearer to recognize their own reasons to reciprocate, and the close relationship between them morally requires this kind of trust. This proposal is articulated and situated in the recent discussion of the normativity of requests. The chapter concludes by explaining how these requests may appear appropriate. Agents in these relationships often have standing to make requests, though the standing is lacking in these particular cases. (shrink)

Over the course of his work, Graham Oppy developed numerous important criticisms of versions of the cosmological argument. Here I am not concerned with his specific criticisms of cosmological arguments but rather with his claim that cosmological arguments per se are not good arguments, for they provide no persuasive reason for believing the conclusion that God exists and are embedded in theories that already affirm the conclusion. I explore what he believes makes an argument good, contend that cosmological arguments can (...) have functions within worldviews other than persuasion, and consider his recent modifications of the discussion that address competing worldviews. (shrink)

One of America's foremost philosophers reflects on the discipline and its relation to everyday life.

Offers a compelling vision of how to achieve and conduct a liberal but democratic society through the ideal of Neutrality--between people and ideas of the good--and using the tool of Neutral dialogue.

Why do states who are committed to the principle of civilian immunity and the protection of non-combatants end up killing and injuring large numbers of civilians during their military operations? Bugsplat explains this paradox through an in-depth examination of five conflicts fought by Western powers since 1989.

« Ce guide offre aux étudiants en formation initiale à l'enseignement, au personnel enseignant en poste, à leurs formateurs et aux directions d'établissement scolaire les ressources nécessaires pour se frayer un chemin à travers les cadres éthiques et légaux complexes qui réglementent le quotidien de la pratique enseignante. ».

The second edition of The Great Psychotherapy Debate has been updated and revised to include a history of healing practices, medicine, and psychotherapy, an expanded theoretical presentation of the contextual model, an examination of therapist effects, and a thorough review of the research on common factors such as the alliance, expectations, and empathy.

Foreword -- 1. The War Within -- 2. The Cult of Experience -- 3. The Long March -- 4. America's Transformers -- 5. American Restoration -- 6. Twenty-twenty Vision -- Acknowledgments.

A survey of moral theology from its biblical origins to the eve of the Reformation, demonstrating that Reformed moral sensibilities were received and developed from the greater church tradition.

"This volume provides a long-needed anthology of major writings related to the subject of violence.

Volume 1: A-B -- Volume 2: C-E -- Volume 3: F-I -- Volume 4: J-O -- Volume 5: P-R -- Volume 6: S-X.