Frank Mathias Oppenheim was born in Coldwater, Ohio, on May 18, 1925, and studied at Xavier, Loyola, and Saint Louis Universities. He joined the Chicago Province of the Jesuit Order in 1942 and was ordained on June 15, 1955. He is the author of four books on Josiah Royce’s philosophy: Royce’s Journey Down Under, Royce’s Mature Philosophy of Religion, Royce’s Mature Ethics, and Reverence for the Relations of Life: Re-Imagining Pragmatism via Josiah Royce’s Interactions with Peirce, James, and Dewey, (...) in addition to scores of journal articles devoted to Royce. Oppenheim is also the editor of Josiah Royce’s Late Writings: A Collection of Unpublished and Scattered Works, and was... (shrink)

Positive Psychology has been instrumental in promoting wellbeing science in the modern era. However, there are still ways in which positive psychology interventions and positive education programmes can be improved to achieve more robust and sustained effects. One suggested method is to make wellbeing more salient and tangible through the use of objective tools that assess the relationship between psychological and physiological wellbeing, and enable wellbeing status and change to be seen. With the addition of an interdisciplinary team, as well (...) as technology-enabled and pedagogically sound learning tools and approaches, the potential for positive outcomes and impact increases exponentially. Monitoring wellbeing progress in this way can provide evidence, motivation and belief in positive psychology and wellbeing interventions. This can lead to engaged learning, sustained benefits and systemic impact. Positive psychology needs to strategically extend on the emerging work in this field to help everyone, including policy makers, notice and value wellbeing. (shrink)

Heated debates over healthcare policy in the United States point to the need for a legal framework that can sustain both moral diversity and peaceful cooperation. It is argued that the classical liberal Rule of Law, with its foundation in the ethical principle of permission, is such a framework. The paper shows to what extent the current healthcare policy landscape in the United States diverges from the rule of law and suggests how the current framework could be modified in order (...) to better approximate that ideal. Two objections are then answered. The first is that the rule of law cannot be realized due to the structure of legislatures. The second objection is that government should guarantee both liberty and all of the necessary conditions of autonomy. (shrink)

Santayana may be read as a conservative in behavior, thought, and feeling, if not in creed. A close reading of Scepticism and Animal Faith (SAF), Santayana’s autobiography, Persons and Places (PP), and Santayana’s ontology as articulated in Realms of Being (RB), supports an interpretation of Santayana’s philosophy as one of human imperfection and limits, which includes a conservative vision of human flourishing.

How (Not) to Be Secular is what Jamie Smith calls "your hitchhiker's guide to the present" -- it is both a reading guide to Charles Taylor's monumental work A Secular Age and philosophical guidance on how we might learn to live in our times. Taylor's landmark book A Secular Age (2007) provides a monumental, incisive analysis of what it means to live in the post-Christian present -- a pluralist world of competing beliefs and growing unbelief. Jamie Smith's book is a (...) compact field guide to Taylor's insightful study of the secular, making that very significant but daunting work accessible to a wide array of readers. Even more, though, Smith's How (Not) to Be Secular is a practical philosophical guidebook, a kind of how-to manual on how to live in our secular age. It ultimately offers us an adventure in self-understanding and maps out a way to get our bearings in today's secular culture, no matter who "we" are -- whether believers or skeptics, devout or doubting, self-assured or puzzled and confused. This is a book for any thinking person to chew on. (shrink)

Noted psychologist and philosopher develops his own brand of pragmatism, based on theories of C. S. Peirce. Emphasis on "radical empiricism," versus the transcendental and rationalist tradition. One of the most important books in American philosophy. Note.

Moral philosophy is the study of what morality is and what it requires of us. As Socrates said, it's about "how we ought to live"-and why. It would be helpful if we could begin with a simple, uncontroversial definition of what morality is. Unfortunately, we cannot. There are many rival theories, each expounding a different conception of what it means to live morally, and any definition that goes beyond Socrates's simple formula-tion is bound to offend at least one of them. (...) This should make us cautious, but it need not paralyze us. In this chapter, I will describe the "minimum conception" of morality. (shrink)

The claim that individuals legitimately differ with respect to their values seems to be uncontroversial among bioethicists, yet many bioethicists nevertheless oppose right-to-try laws. This seems to be due in part to a failure to recognize that such laws are intended primarily to be political, not legal, instruments. The right-to-try movement seeks to build political support for increasing access to newly developed drugs outside of clinical trials. Opponents of right-to-try laws claim that increasing access outside of clinical trials would undermine (...) evidence-based medicine. They seek to maximize overall gains to patients by protecting them from adverse drug reactions and ensuring that drugs are more effective on average. In contrast, right-to-try activists have a point that regulatory judgments of drug safety and effectiveness impose one set of trade-offs on all individuals, regardless of their different values. That might be acceptable if determinations of safety and effectiveness were black and white, but that does not seem to be the case. This article argues that judgments of safety and effectiveness are in an important respect normative and reflect the perceived value of those ends relative to others. Such judgments, when universally imposed, harm patients who would readily make do with less knowledge of drug safety and effectiveness in exchange for more time and self-determination. The relevant moral principle is that of respect for individual autonomy. Just as that principle should lead one to substitute collective decisions for individual ones to regulate a natural monopoly, the same principle should lead one to substitute individual decisions for collective ones to avoid a government monopoly on access to newly developed drugs. It is argued that reforms should increase the number of treatment options available to patients outside of clinical trials. The final section of the article discusses ways in which current regulations might be reformed so as to provide more treatment options outside of clinical trials, without undermining evidence-based medicine. (shrink)

Hubert Dreyfus has argued that cases of absorbed bodily coping show that there is no room for self-awareness in flow experiences of experts. In this paper, I argue against Dreyfus’ maxim of vanishing self-awareness by suggesting that awareness of agency is present in expert bodily action. First, I discuss the phenomenon of absorbed bodily coping by discussing flow experiences involved in expert bodily action: merging into the flow; immersion in the flow; emergence out of flow. I argue against the claim (...) that flow experience does not involve an awareness of agency for each of these features, while conceding that fluent agency does not involve self-awareness in the thetic sense. I challenge the assumption that the awareness of fluent agency must be understood in terms of a thetic awareness of agency. Instead, I develop an Anscombean account of the awareness of fluent agency in terms of the phenomenal character of knowing one’s aims. I respond to the challenge that if an Anscombean account of the awareness of agency is to succeed, then agents must be able to answer Anscombean questions. I consider the objection that awareness of agency is not a form of self-awareness by outlining an account of self-awareness as self-synthesis that is distinct from self-perception and self-ascription, but which makes room for self-awareness in expert bodily action. (shrink)

Do Quine and Carnap distort the social nature of inquiry by privileging individual epistemic subjects? This objection is at the heart of Donald Davidson’s claim that Quine fails to grasp the significance of the concept of truth. In Carnap’s case, the objection may be detected in Charles Morris’s call to ground scientific philosophy in semiotics, the science of signs, rather than syntax, the formal investigation of languages. Drawing out the challenge from Morris’s proposal requires examining a neglected influence on this (...) neglected philosopher: his advisor George Herbert Mead’s social theory of mind. I argue that Morris and Davidson can both be understood as demanding that scientific philosophers socialize their conception of objectivity. (shrink)

This first volume contains discussions of the brain, methods for analyzing behavior, thought, consciousness, attention, association, time, and memory.

For this 1897 publication, the American philosopher William James brought together ten essays, some of which were originally talks given to Ivy League societies. Accessible to a broader audience, these non-technical essays illustrate the author's pragmatic approach to belief and morality, arguing for faith and action in spite of uncertainty. James thought his audiences suffered 'paralysis of their native capacity for faith' while awaiting scientific grounds for belief. His response consisted in an attitude of 'radical empiricism', which deals (...) practically rather than ideologically with real-world phenomena. When facing a 'momentous' decision about belief, he says, we both can and must choose the best hypothesis. The first four essays apply this principle to religious faith, and the rest explore the pragmatic approach to such topics as determinism, ethics and individual achievement. James developed his ideas further in The Varieties of Religious Experience and Pragmatism, both of which are reissued in this series. (shrink)

The identity and diversity of individual objects may be grounded or ungrounded, and intrinsic or contextual. Intrinsic individuation can be grounded in haecceities, or absolute discernibility. Contextual individuation can be grounded in relations, but this is compatible with absolute, relative or weak discernibility. Contextual individuation is compatible with the denial of haecceitism, and this is more harmonious with science. Structuralism implies contextual individuation. In mathematics contextual individuation is in general primitive. In physics contextual individuation may be grounded in relations via (...) weak discernibility. (shrink)

Most of Santayana’s critics view him as an epiphenomenalist. Angus Kerr-Lawson has written several articles that characterize Santayana’s account of consciousness as epiphenomenalist.1 In “Santayana’s Philosophy of Mind”, John Lachs considers the strengths and weaknesses of Santayana’s epiphenomenalism.2 These views are based on solid evidence. Although he seldom uses the word “epiphenomenalism”, Santayana’s most prominent account of mind-body relations has all the features of that theory. In “Apologia Pro Mente Sua”, Santayana praises an article by Eliseo Vivas that presents him (...) as an epiphenomenalist. He goes on to imply that he has never contradicted his “doctrine of the material inefficacy of.. (shrink)

The Gifford Lectures were established in 1885 at the universities of St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh to promote the discussion of 'Natural Theology in the widest sense of the term - in other words, the knowledge of God', and some of the world's most influential thinkers have delivered them. The 1901–2 lectures given in Edinburgh by American philosopher William James are considered by many to be the greatest in the series. The lectures were published in book form in (...) 1902 and have been reprinted many times. James, who was educated in the United States and Europe, and spent much of his career teaching philosophy at Harvard, was very influential in the development of modern psychology, and in these twenty lectures he explores the personal experience of religion. Some of the topics include religion and neurology, 'the sick soul', saintliness, and mysticism. (shrink)

In this unique work, James P. Sterba argues that traditional ethics has yet to confront the three significant challenges posed by environmentalism, feminism, and multiculturalism. He maintains that while traditional ethics has been quite successful at dealing with the problems it faces, it has not addressed the possibility that its solutions to these problems are biased in favor of humans, men, and Western culture. In Three Challenges to Ethics: Environmentalism, Feminism, and Multiculturalism, Sterba examines each of these challenges. In (...) the case of environmentalism, he argues that traditional ethics must incorporate conflict resolution principles that favor nonhumans over humans in a significant range of cases. In terms of feminism, he maintains that traditional ethics should rule out gendered family structures and implement an ideal of androgyny. In regard to multiculturalism, he contends that traditional ethics must endorse an ethics that is secular in character and that can survive an extensive comparative evaluation of both Western and non-Western moral ideals and cultures. The only textbook devoted to this topic, Three Challenges to Ethics is an engaging text for introductory courses in ethics and moral problems and is also interesting and provocative reading for scholars and general readers. (shrink)

Essays and poems explore the contemporary relevance of Emerson’s work and thought.

Scepticism about ought simpliciter is the view that there is no such thing as what one ought simpliciter to do. Instead, practical deliberation is governed by a plurality of normative standpoints, each authoritative from their own perspective but none authoritative simpliciter. This paper aims to resist such scepticism. After setting out the challenge in general terms, I argue that scepticism can be resisted by rejecting a key assumption in the sceptic’s argument. This is the assumption that standpoint-relative ought judgments bring (...) with them a commitment to act in accordance with those judgments. Instead, I propose an alternative account of our normative concepts according to which only ought simpliciter judgments commit one to acting in accordance with those judgments. In addition to answering the sceptical challenge, the proposal offers an independently motivated account of what makes a concept normatively authoritative. (shrink)

Knowing that we are finite, how can we live to the fullest? Spanish/American philosopher George Santayana described a special kind of transcendence or "spirituality" that enables us to fully enjoy the present moment, regardless of our limited existence. This book clarifies and extends Santayana's account of spirituality, while suggesting how the detachment of spirituality can relieve human suffering, enrich our lives, and make us better human beings.

In addition to being one of the world's most influential philosophers, Aristotle can also be credited with the creation of both the science of biology and the philosophy of biology. He was the first thinker to treat the investigations of the living world as a distinct inquiry with its own special concepts and principles. This book focuses on a seminal event in the history of biology - Aristotle's delineation of a special branch of theoretical knowledge devoted to the systematic investigation (...) of animals. Aristotle approached the creation of zoology with the tools of subtle and systematic philosophies of nature and of science that were then carefully tailored to the investigation of animals. The papers collected in this volume, written by a pre-eminent figure in the field of Aristotle's philosophy and biology, examine Aristotle's approach to biological inquiry and explanation, his concepts of matter, form and kind, and his teleology. (shrink)

James I. The Political Works of James I. Reprinted from the Edition of 1616. With an Introduction by Charles Howard McIlwain. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1918. cxi, 354 pp. Reprinted 2002 by The Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

One of the great American pragmatic philosophers alongside Peirce and Dewey, William James (1842–1910) delivered these eight lectures in Boston and New York in the winter of 1906–7. Though he credits Peirce with coining the term 'pragmatism', James highlights in his subtitle that this 'new name' describes a philosophical temperament as old as Socrates. The pragmatic approach, he says, takes a middle way between rationalism's airy principles and empiricism's hard facts. James' pragmatism is both a method of (...) interpreting ideas by their practical consequences and an epistemology which identifies truths according to their useful outcomes. Furnished with many examples, the lectures illustrate pragmatism's response to classic problems such as the question of free will versus determinism. Published in 1907, this work further develops James's approach to religion and morality, introduced in The Will to Believe (1897) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), both reissued in this series. (shrink)

American transcendentalism is essentially a kind of practice by which the world of facts and the categories of common sense are temporarily exchanged for the world of ideas and the categories of imagination. The point of this exchange is to make life better by lifting us above the conflicts and struggles that weigh on our souls. As these chains fall away, our souls rise to heightened experiences of freedom and union with the good. Emerson and Thoreau are the two most (...) significant nineteenth century proponents of American transcendentalism. (shrink)