Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) was a cultural philosopher, sociologist, literary critic, and historian of music who, along with Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Erich Fromm, founded the Frankfurt School. Against Epistemology is one of his most important works.

This article deals with Jacques Derrida's relationship with the variations of phenomenology represented by Tran Duc Thao and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In his public thesis defense of 1980, Derrida aligns himself with Thao, a Vietnamese philosopher who used phenomenology in a critique of colonialist politics, and explicitly opposes himself to the institutionally-valorized Merleau-Ponty. While direct overlaps and typological similarities exist between Thao and Derrida, the latter is shown overall to be closer to Merleau-Ponty, suggesting Derrida deploys the image of Thao as (...) part of a strategy of autobiographical self-representation which emphasizes his critical relationship to philosophical institutions. (shrink)

A comparative method of studying the biological bases of personality compares human trait dimensions with likely animal models in terms of genetic determination and common biological correlates. The approach is applied to the trait of sensation seeking, which is defined on the human level by a questionnaire, reports of experience, and observations of behavior, and on the animal level by general activity, behavior in novel situations, and certain types of naturalistic behavior in animal colonies. Moderately high genetic determination has been (...) found for human sensation seeking, and marked strain differences in rodents have been found in open-field behavior that may be related to basic differences in brain neurochemistry. Agonistic and sociable behaviors in both animals and humans and the trait measure of sensation seeking in humans have been related to certain common biological correlates such as gonadal hormones, monoamine oxidase (MAO), and augmenting of the cortical evoked potential.The monoamine systems in the rodent brain are involved in general activity, exploratory behavior, emotionality, socialization, dominance, sexual and consummately behaviors, and intracranial self-stimulation. Preliminary studies have related norepinephrine and enzymes involved in its production and degradation to human sensation seeking. A model is suggested that relates mood, behavioral activity, sociability, and clinical states to activity of the central catecholamine neurotransmitters and to neuroregulators and other transmitters that act in opposite ways on behavior or stabilize activity in the arousal systems. Stimulation and behavioral activity act on the catecholamine systems in a brain–behavior feedback loop. At optimal levels of catecholamine systems activity (CSA) mood is positive and activity and sociability are adaptive. At very low or very high levels of CSA mood is dysphoric, activity is restricted or stereotyped, and the organism is unsocial or aggressively antisocial. Novelty, in the absence of threat, may be rewarding through activation of noradrenergic neurons. (shrink)

Computing Methodologies -- Artificial Intelligence.

The primary aim of this paper is to defend the Lockean View—the view that a belief is epistemically justified iff it is highly probable—against a new family of objections. According to these objections, broadly speaking, the Lockean View ought to be abandoned because it is incompatible with, or difficult to square with, our judgments surrounding certain legal cases. I distinguish and explore three different versions of these objections—The Conviction Argument, the Argument from Assertion and Practical Reasoning, and the Comparative Probabilities (...) Argument—but argue that none of them are successful. I also present some very general reasons for being pessimistic about the overall strategy of using legal considerations to evaluate epistemic theories; as we will see, there are good reasons to think that many of the considerations relevant to legal theorizing are ultimately irrelevant to epistemic theorizing. (shrink)

The practice of philanthropy, which releases private property for public purposes, represents in many ways the best angels of our nature. But this practice's noteworthy virtues often obscure the fact that philanthropy also represents the exercise of private power. In The Tyranny of Generosity, Theodore Lechterman shows how this private power can threaten the foundations of a democratic society. The deployment of private wealth for public ends may rival the authority of communities to determine their own affairs. And, in (...) societies characterized by wide disparities in wealth, philanthropy often combines with background inequalities to make public decisions overwhelmingly sensitive to the preferences of the rich. Allowing private wealth to dictate social outcomes collides with core commitments of a democratic society, a society in which people are supposed to determine their common affairs together, on equal terms. But why exactly is democracy valuable? How should these values be weighed against the liberty of donors and the many social benefits that philanthropy promises? Lechterman explores these questions by examining various topics in the practice of philanthropy: the respective roles of philanthropy and government, public subsidies for private giving, the use of donations for political speech, instruments of perpetual giving, the rise in giving by commercial corporations, and effective altruism as a guide for individual giving. These studies build to a surprising conclusion: realizing the democratic ideal may be impossible without philanthropy--but making philanthropy safe for democracy also requires fundamental changes to policy and practice. (shrink)

It seems to me that the ingredients of most theories both in Artificial Intelligence and in Psychology have been on the whole too minute, local, and unstructured to account–either practically or phenomenologically–for the effectiveness of common-sense thought. The "chunks" of reasoning, language, memory, and "perception" ought to be larger and more structured; their factual and procedural contents must be more intimately connected in order to explain the apparent power and speed of mental activities.

The primary objective of this paper is to introduce a new epistemic paradox that puts pressure on the claim that justification is closed under multi premise deduction. The first part of the paper will consider two well-known paradoxes—the lottery and the preface paradox—and outline two popular strategies for solving the paradoxes without denying closure. The second part will introduce a new, structurally related, paradox that is immune to these closure-preserving solutions. I will call this paradox, The Paradox of the Pill. (...) Seeing that the prominent closure-preserving solutions do not apply to the new paradox, I will argue that it presents a much stronger case against the claim that justification is closed under deduction than its two predecessors. Besides presenting a more robust counterexample to closure, the new paradox also reveals that the strategies that were previously thought to get closure out of trouble are not sufficiently general to achieve this task as they fail to apply to similar closure-threatening paradoxes in the same vicinity. (shrink)

This study was undertaken to investigate whether work variables identified in theory and research as being related to employee experiences/behaviours add to the understanding and explain employees' experiences of workplace harassment. The extent to which social cognitive theory (SCT), specifically moral disengagement, explains the processes by which work characteristics are related to harassment was also examined. The purpose of the study was to identify the presence of relationships among work characteristics, satisfaction, moral disengagement and workplace harassment. According to the results, (...) employees with negative opinions of their work tended to experience negative affect and to believe that it is acceptable to harm others. The results of this study provide evidence of (1) relationships between harassment and several workplace characteristics and (2) the applicability of SCT to the explanation of how work characteristics relate to harassment. (shrink)

Brackets and tables, circles and maps, 1554-1872 -- Early botanical networks and trees, 1766-1815 -- The first evolutionary tree, 1786-1820 -- Diverse and unusual trees of the early nineteenth century, 1817-1834 -- The rule of five, 1819-1854 -- Pre-Darwinian branching diagrams, 1828-1858 -- Evolution and the trees of Charles Darwin, 1837-1868 -- The trees of Ernst Haeckel, 1866-1905 -- Post-Darwinian nonconformists, 1868-1896 -- More late-nineteenth-century trees, 1874-1897 -- Trees of the early twentieth century, 1901-1930 -- The trees of Alfred Sherwood (...) Romer, 1933-1966 -- Additional trees of the mid-twentieth century, 1931-1943 -- The trees of William King Gregory, 1938-1951 -- Hints of new approaches, 1954-1969 -- Phenograms and cladograms, 1958-1966 -- Early molecular trees, 1962-1987 -- Notable trees of the past four decades, 1970-2010 -- Primeval branches and universal trees of life, 1997-2010. (shrink)

Recent years have seen the rise of a new family of non-probabilistic accounts of epistemic justification. According to these views—we may call them Normalcy Views—a belief in P is justified only if, given the evidence, there exists no normal world in which S falsely beliefs that P. This paper aims to raise some trouble for this new approach to justification by arguing that Normalcy Views, while initially attractive, give rise to problematic accounts of epistemic defeat. As we will see, on (...) Normalcy Views seemingly insignificant pieces of evidence turn out to have considerable defeating powers. This problem—I will call it the Easy-Defeat Problem—gives rise to a two-pronged challenge. First, it shows that the Normalcy View has counterintuitive implications and, second, it opens the door to an uncomfortable skeptical threat. (shrink)

Doctoral programs at U.S. universities play a critical role in the development of human resources both in the United States and abroad. This volume reports the results of an extensive study of U.S. research-doctorate programs in five broad fields: physical sciences and mathematics, engineering, social and behavioral sciences, biological sciences, and the humanities. Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States documents changes that have taken place in the size, structure, and quality of doctoral education since the widely used 1982 editions. This (...) update provides selected information on nearly 4,000 doctoral programs in 41 subdisciplines at 274 doctorate-granting institutions. This volume also reports the results of the National Survey of Graduate Faculty, which polled a sample of faculty for their views on the scholarly quality of program faculty and the effectiveness of doctoral programs in preparing research scholars/scientists. This much-anticipated update of such an essential reference will be useful to education administrators, university faculty, and students seeking authoritative information on doctoral programs. (shrink)

This celebrated work is the keystone of the thought of the Frankfurt School. It is a wide-ranging philosophical and psychological critique of the Western categories of reason and nature, from Homer to Nietzsche.

An intense and lively debate on literature and art between thinkers who became some of the great figures of twentieth-century philosophy and literature.

What do corporations look like when they have integrity, and how can we move more companies in that direction? Corporate Integrity offers a timely, comprehensive framework- and practical business lessons - bringing together questions of organizational design, communication practices, working relationships, and leadership styles to answer this question. Marvin T. Brown explores the five key challenges facing modern businesses as they try to respond ethically to cultural, interpersonal, organizational, civic and environmental challenges. He demonstrates that if corporations are to (...) meet the needs of civil society, they must facilitate inclusive communication patterns based on mutual recognition and civic cooperation. Corporate Integrity is essential reading for professionals in organizational ethics, business leaders, and graduate students looking for practical and reflective insights into doing business with integrity and purpose. (shrink)

In einem Brief nennt Adorno die "Negative Dialektik" kurz nach ihrem Erscheinen unter seinen Schriften "das philosophische Hauptwerk, wenn ich so sagen darf“. Dieser herausgehobenen Bedeutung, die das Werk für Adorno hatte, entspricht nicht nur die lange Zeit, die er mit der Abfassung des Buchs beschäftigt war, sondern auch die lange Geschichte, die ihre zentralen Motive in seinem Denken haben. Philosophische Begriffsklärung, die Arbeit an "Begriff und Kategorien“ einer negativen Dialektik, versteht Adorno dabei als dialektischen Übergang in inhaltliches Denken – (...) und so betreibt er sie auch hier. Das hat Konsequenzen für die Form des kooperativen Kommentars, der in diesem Band versucht wird. Adornos "Negative Dialektik" zu kommentieren, kann nur in dem Bewußtsein der unüberbrückbaren Kluft gelingen, die den Kommentar von diesem Text trennt. (shrink)

Received by the IRE, October 24, 1960. The author's work summarized here—which was done at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, a center for research operated by MIT at Lexington, Mass., with the joint Support of the U. S. Army, Navy, and Air Force under Air Force Contract AF 19-5200; and at the Res. Lab. of Electronics, MIT, Cambridge, Mass., which is supported in part by the U. S. Army Signal Corps, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the ONR—is based (...) on earlier work done by the author as a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. (shrink)

'Democracy: Justice and Inevitability I. NEUTRALITY AND THE USE OF HISTORY IT is not uncommon for a major writer to be seen by his critics in widely ...

Over the past decades humor studies has formed an unprecedented interdisciplinary consolidation, connected with a consolidation in philosophy of humor scholarship. In this essay, I focus specifically on feminist philosophy of humor as an area of study that highlights relationships between humor, language, subjectivity, power, embodiment, instability, affect, and resistance, introducing several of its key themes while mapping out tensions that can be productive for further research. I first cover feminist theories of humor as instability and then move to feminist (...) theories of humor as generative of social relationships. Though I diagnose several tensions between these approaches that require further elaboration and discussion, I conclude that feminist philosophy of humor is a crucial area of humor research that focuses on systematic oppression, political engagement, embodiment, and affective ties. (shrink)

Unreasonable expectations about the nature and character of scientific knowledge support the widespread political assumption that predictive scientific assessments are a necessary precursor to environmental decision making. All too often, the practical outcome of this assumption is that scientific uncertainty becomes a ready-made dodge for what is in reality just a difficult political decision. Interdisciplinary assessments necessary to address complex environmental policy issues invariably result in findings that are inherently contestable, especially when applied in the unrestrained realm of partisan politics. (...) In this article, the authors argue that predictive scientific assessments are inherently limited in the extent to which they can guide policy development and that rigorous scientific assessments can be much more valuable in the role of ex post policy evaluation than they can in the context of ex ante policy formulation. (shrink)

"This is an extremely intelligent, interesting, and well written book." --Murder Is Academic "... compelling analysis of the comedy thriller... " --Theatre Studies "... almost as much fun to read as is seeing the actual plays discussed... " --Journal of Popular Culture The phenomenal success of such plays as Deathtrap and Sleuth heralded the advent of a new form of detective play--the comedy thriller. Carlson takes the wraps off the comedy thriller and reveals its postmodern effects. He looks at all (...) the elements of the thriller--openings, settings, characters, plot lines, the role of the audience, and endings--and shows how they work to overturn the conventions of realism in detective drama. (shrink)