Political liberalism has increasingly come under fire from both the right and the left, in politics as well as in philosophy. In this new study, G.B. Madison offers a systematic rebuttal to these contemporary critics, attempting to demonstrate that the basic principles of classical liberal philosophy are not only internally valid and coherent but also directly relevant to the problems faced by society in the post-industrial age. Building on the theory of Frank H. Knight and other liberal tinkers, (...) class='Hi'>Madison outlines the postmodern theory of reason that is presupposed within classical liberal theory and makes the case that as a political philosophy liberalism can be justified entirely within its own terms, without reference to arbitrary or absolute values. (shrink)

Madison, G. B. Avant-propos.--Gadamer, H.-G. La mort comme question.--Lévinas, E. L'être et l'autre.--Dufrenne, M. L'esthétique de Paul Valéry.--Eliade, M. Orphée et l'orphisme.--Décarie, V. Vertu totale, vertu parfaite et kalokagathie dans l'Éthique à Eudème.--Strasser, S. Réflexions sur la proposition phénoménologique.--Peursen, C. van. L'existence fait-elle sens?--Edie, J. E. La pertinence actuelle de la conception husserlienne de l'idéalité du langage.--Taylor, C. Force et sens, les deux dimensions irréductibles d'une science de l'homme.--Henry, M. Phénoménologie de la conscience, phénoménologie de la vie.--Philibert, M. Marx, (...) la machine et la manufacture.--Dumas, A. Savoir objectif, croyance projective, foi interpellée.--Maqdici, A. L'ontologie kérygmatique de Paul Ricœur, approche arabe.--Kemp, P. Le rôle du mythe et de la poésie dans l'orientation sociale. (shrink)

S. Geniusas: Although Gadamer’s hermeneutics has suffered attacks from a number of philosophical perspectives, the profusion of criticisms seldom constitutes new challenges and for the most part is a reiteration of two seemingly opposite claims. On the one hand, we often hear that Gadamer’s hermeneutics is merely a disguised brand of the “philosophy of the subject” which under the pretext of openness reduces the Other to the self. On the other hand, it is just as often claimed that Gadamer’s writings (...) fall into the category of the “hermeneutics of the fundamental questions” and therefore they cannot account for the selfhood of the self. Taking as its focus the theme of the oneness of the hermeneutical horizon(s), this paper argues that this theme carries no hegemonic or essentialist connotations. Rather, a careful analysis, which accentuates the negative and the dialectical elements of the oneness of horizons and the fact that this theme is for Gadamer both a presupposition and an achievement, reveals the shortcomings of both critiques. In the final analysis, the oneness of the horizon(s) is the dialogue that we ourselves are. Special attention is granted to Richard Kearney’s critique of Gadamer, to Gadamer’s critique of the incommensurabilist stance, and to the relevance of Gadamer’s hermeneutics in the context of today’s socio-political concerns. G. B. Madison: This essay is a companion piece to S. Geniusas’ “On the Oneness of the Hermeneutical Horizon(s)” and seeks to correct some of the serious misunderstandings of the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer that one often encounters in the literature. It seeks above all to show how Gadamer’s commitment to philosophical universalism is ideally suited to enabling philosophy to confront the ethical challenges posed by the phenomenon of globalization. (shrink)

Rutherford and Lindell (2011) review an extensive literature on lateralization of emotion. As they note, an important issue surrounding this question is the nature of emotion, which bears on what, precisely, is lateralized. The present comments are intended to broaden the context of the review, by considering lateralization from the standpoint of a bivariate model of evaluative processes and a neuroevolutionary perspective.

1. Introduction : humanity's urge to understand -- 2. Elements of scientific thinking : skepticism, careful reasoning, and exhaustive evaluation are all vital. Science Is universal -- Maintaining a critical attitude. Reasonable skepticism -- Respect for the truth -- Reasoning. Deduction -- Induction -- Paradigm shifts -- Evaluating scientific hypotheses. Ockham's razor -- Quantitative evaluation -- Verification by others -- Statistics : correlation and causation -- Statistics : the indeterminacy of the small -- Careful definition -- Science at the frontier. (...) When good theories become ugly -- Stuff that just does not fit -- 3. Christopher Columbus and the discovery of the "Indies" : it can be disastrous to stubbornly refuse to recognize that you have falsified your own hypothesis -- 4. Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestley both test the befuddling phlogiston theory : junking a confusing hypothesis may be necessary to clear the way for new and productive science -- 5. Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction but fails to unify electromagnetism and gravitation : it is usually productive to simplify and consolidate your hypotheses -- 6. Wilhelm Röntgen intended to study cathode rays but ended up discovering X-rays : listen carefully when Mother Nature whispers in your ear : she may be leading you to a Nobel Prize -- 7. Max Planck, the first superhero of quantum theory, saves the universe from the ultraviolet catastrophe : assemble two flawed hypotheses about a key phenomenon into a model that fits experiment exactly and people will listen to you even if you must revolutionize physics -- 8. Albert Einstein attacks the problem "Are atoms real?" from every angle : solving a centuries-old riddle in seven different ways can finally resolve it -- 9. Niels Bohr models the hydrogen atom as a quantized system with compelling exactness, but his later career proves that collaboration and developing new talent can become more significant than the groundbreaking research of any individual -- 10. Conclusions, status of science, and lessons for our time. Conclusions from our biographies -- What thought processes lead to innovation? -- Is the scientist an outsider? -- The status of the modern scientific enterprise -- Lessons for our time -- Can the scientific method be applied to public policy? -- Why so little interest in science? -- Knowledge is never complete. (shrink)

Some have argued that because factually meaningful assertions must be falsifiable, putative theistic assertions such as “God loves us” are not meaningful because they are not falsifiable. It is further suggested that every attempt to make a factually significant theistic assertion founders on the same shoal of falsifiability.

Phosphoinositides are inositol‐containing phospholipids whose hydrolysis is a key step in the rapid responses of animal cells to extracellular signals. Whether they play similar roles in plant cells has not been established, and some have suggested alternative roles as direct modulators of specific proteins. Nonetheless, evidence is accumulating that phosphoinositide hydrolysis mediates transduction of some signal in plants. The evidence is strongest for a role in triggering the shedding of flagella by the unicellular alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii under acid stress. Rapid (...) kinetic analysis indicates that phosphoinositide hydrolysis occures within half a second and could trigger the rapid loss of flagella. Plant responses to pathogens and osmotic stress, as well as the regulation of turgor changes which underlie stomatal opening and closing and the movement of leaves and flower parts, may also be mediated by phosphoinositide hydrolysis. The evidence thus indicates that at least one reason plants have phosphoinositides is to mediate transduction of environmental signals. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that personalization technologies used by Google for the purpose of tailoring search results for individual users create filter bubbles, which reinforce users’ political views. Surprisingly, empirical evidence for a personalization-induced filter bubble has not been forthcoming. Here, we investigate whether filter bubbles may result instead from a searcher’s choice of search queries. In the first experiment, participants rated the left-right leaning of 48 queries (search strings), 6 for each of 8 topics (abortion, benefits, climate change, sex (...) equality, immigration, nuclear family, Islam, and taxation). An independent sample of participants were then asked to select one of these queries for each of the 8 topics. With the exception of the topic of Islam, participants were significantly more likely to select a query corresponding to their own political leaning, compared to other queries, explaining between 12% and 39% of the variance. A second experiment investigated the effect of the political leaning of the same queries on the overall political leaning of Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) in Google Search. The top six results of each SERP were rated collectively by a third group of participants, explaining 36.3% of the variance across all 48 search terms (p < .00001). That is, (1) participants in our experiments tended to select own-side search queries, and (2) using those queries tended to yield own-side search results when using the Google search engine. Our results are consistent with the notion of a self-imposed filter bubble in which query selection plays a salient role. (shrink)

The precise relationship between the autonomic nervous system and emotion has been a topic of intense debate and research throughout the history of modern psychology. The present article considers some of the more influential theoretical frameworks that continue to drive contemporary research on the relationship between emotion and physiological processes. In particular, we highlight the multiple routes through which somatovisceral afference influences emotion and how this relates to the topic of emotion-specific patterns of autonomic nervous system activity.

Max Weber famously wrote that world images determine the tracks along which societies move. This article examines the relation between world images and the so-called tracks of society, which in this metaphor resemble the current concept of institution. This concept is now associated with the ‘new institutionalisms’ in social science and has no connection to the civilizational level of analysis that Weber used. This article reexamines Weber’s usage of the terms and employs the terms to analyze differences in the principles (...) of legitimacy between those emerging in the West and those in China, differences that Weber himself did not recognize. (shrink)

Behrendt & Young's (B&Y's) theory offers a potentially important perspective on the neurobiology of schizophrenia, but it remains incomplete. In addition to bottom-up contributions, such as those associated with disturbances in sensory constraints on cognitive processes, a comprehensive model requires the integration of the consequences of abnormal top-down modulation of input processing for the evolution of “underconstrained” perceptions. Dysfunctional cholinergic modulation of input functions represents a necessary mechanism for the generation of false perceptions.

Microtubules are organized into diverse cellular structures in multicellular organisms. How is such diversity generated? Although highly conserved overall, variable regions within α‐ and β‐tubulins show divergence from other α‐ and β‐tubulins in the same species, but show conservation among different species. Such conservation raises the question of whether diversity in tubulin structure mediates diversity in microtubule organization. Recent studies probing the function of β‐tubulin isotypes in axonemes of insects(1) suggest that tubulin structure, through interactions with extrinsic proteins, can direct (...) the architecture and supramolecular organization of microtubules. (shrink)

In the mid-nineteenth century, Karl Marx issued several critiques of political economy writings stressing the exclusive duality of states and the national economies. He argued that capitalism had characteristic features quite apart from those shaped by the idiosyncrasies of national economies. In the first part of this article, we critique the contemporary state-centered explanations for the industrialization of East Asia on same grounds. We claim that most political economists misinterpret or entirely ignore the significance of export-led industrialization, which is a (...) characteristic feature of East Asian capitalism. In the second part of the article, we demonstrate the importance of the retail revolution in the US and Europe on Asian industrialization. In particular, we show that the development of the sequential ordering system that is an inherent feature of Western-based contract manufacturing differentially shaped the industrial organization of East Asian economies. The resulting path-dependent trajectories of development, in turn, encouraged government policy-makers to ‘buy into’ trends of global capitalism in different ways. The trajectories also led business people to privilege and adapt some social institutions and cultural patterns over other ones. (shrink)

To read Working through Derrida is to plunge into the midst of a lively debate on the place of Jacques Derrida and the thought associated with him in today's literary and philosophical consciousness. With essays by major philosophers such as Richard Rorty, John R. Searle, and John D. Caputo, the volume focuses on the ethical, legal, and political dimensions of Derrida's production and on his more recent concerns. It addresses the key themes of law and justice, the law of exemplarity, (...) phenomenological critique, semiology, ethics and the other, Rorty on Derrida, and Habermas vs. Derrida. Gary B. Madison's critical introduction caps this major appraisal of Derrida and deconstruction. (shrink)

Evaluative processes have their roots in early evolutionary history, as survival is dependent on an organism’s ability to identify and respond appropriately to positive, rewarding or otherwise salubrious stimuli as well as to negative, noxious, or injurious stimuli. Consequently, evaluative processes are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom and are represented at multiple levels of the nervous system, including the lowest levels of the neuraxis. While evolution has sculpted higher level evaluative systems into complex and sophisticated information-processing networks, they do not (...) come to replace, but rather to interact with more primitive lower level representations. Indeed, there are basic features of the underlying neuroarchitectural plan for evaluative processes that are common across levels of organization—including that of evaluative bivalence. (shrink)

In The Ethics of Postmodernity, Gary B. Madison and Marty Fairbairn have collected instructive and illuminating essays that address the dilemmas left in the wake of the postmodern attack on foundationalism. This collection is a powerful statement on the many directions a postmetaphysical ethics might take. Contributors include Barry Allen, Caroline Bayard, Robert Bernasconi, Thomas W. Busch, M.C. Dillon, Marty Fairbairn, Paul Fairfield, Morny Joy, Richard Kearney, Gary B. Madison, Joseph Margolis, Tom Rockmore, Charles E. Scott, (...) Evan Simpson, and Mark Williams. (shrink)

This collection is a powerful statement about the many directions a post-metaphysical ethics might take.

This paper examines various views—religious, scientific, philosophical—on the meaning and significance of world history. The view it defends is a phenomenological, non-metaphysical one, i.e., it is one that does not seek to understand history in the light of end-states lying beyond time and history but which seeks, rather, to lay bare the logic at work within the contingency of events. Taking as its focus the phenomenon of globalization, the paper seeks to make explicit the global ontology that is implicit in (...) philosophical hermeneutics. The thesis it defends in this regard is that, to the degree that it prevails and by reason of a kind of “functional necessity,” globalization is capable of bringing into being a global ethic of mutuality and reciprocity. (shrink)

We submit this brief in support of the Nonhuman Rights Project’s efforts to secure habeas corpus relief for the elephant named Happy. We reject arbitrary distinctions that deny adequate protections to other animals who share with protected humans relevantly similar vulnerabilities to harms and relevantly similar interests in avoiding such harms. We strongly urge this Court, in keeping with the best philosophical standards of rational judgment and ethical standards of justice, to recognize that, as a nonhuman person, Happy should be (...) released from her current confinement and transferred to an appropriate elephant sanctuary, pursuant to habeas corpus. (shrink)