Studies in the neurobiological underpinnings of social information processing bypsychologists, neurobiologists, psychiatrists, radiologists, and neurologists, using methods thatrange from brain imaging techniques to comparative analyses.

United States of America demographic profiles illustrate a nation rich in cultural and racial diversity. Approximately 29% of the population are minorities and demographic projections indicate an increase to 50% by the year 2050. This creates a highly mobile and constantly changing environment, revealing the need for new levels of cultural awareness and sensitivity. These issues are particularly critical in the medical community where medical professionals must understand the impact cultural differences and barriers can have on evaluation, treatment, and rehabilitation. (...) During times of stress, such as when injury strikes, problems associated with lack of cultural sensitivity are intensified. Cultural diversity is of particular concern when standard measures for diagnosis and prognosis are derived from established norms for responding, because culture defines norms. This paper details a ten point checklist designed to facilitate cultural awareness and sensitivity in medical settings to ensure maximum successful recovery and outcomes for all patients. (shrink)

Charles S. Peirce frequently mentioned reading Richard Whately's Elements of Logic when he was 12 years old. Throughout his life, Peirce emphasized the importance of that experience. This valorization of Whately is puzzling at first. Early in his career Peirce rejected Whately's central logical doctrines. What valuable insight concerning logic was robust enough to survive these specific rejections? Peirce recommended a biographical approach to understanding his philosophy. This essay follows that suggestion by considering Peirce's reading of Whately in a larger (...) life context. Surprisingly many factors in Charles Peirce's personal and intellectual development were at play when he read Whately. His father, Benjamin Peirce, oversaw rigorous home schooling intended to train young Charley for a brilliant intellectual career. Laboratory experience with qualitative chemical analysis exposed the boy to the logic of scientific investigation, specifically to the hypothetico-deductive method of inquiry. However, tensions between father and son developed over Charles' wish to devote his life to studying the logic of science. The two also disagreed upon the value of formal science. Against this background we will review relevant logical doctrines of Whately's book, as well as his innovative formalizing practice of logical inquiry. Then we will see that it was Whately's lessons about formal science that were of such importance to Peirce. (shrink)

Some concerns raised by gender violence have been taken up by churches and individuals within them over the last ten years or so, but now the World Council of Churches has set up a project to work specifically on Overcoming Violence Against Women. The project has a three-fold task aimed at enabling constructive engagement with the issue of gender violence: to support and encourage the churches' to develop a network of concerned theologians; to establish an accessible resource base. The prevalence (...) of violence against women in all parts of society, including churches and Christian communities, raises theological questions. Some areas of language, doctrine and the interpretation of Scripture need to be examined and perhaps reconsidered, to provide theologies consistent with churches as communities of safety, respect and justice for women. (shrink)

Miller (1956) identified his famous limit of 7 ± 2 items based in part on absolute identification—the ability to identify stimuli that differ on a single physical dimension, such as lines of different length. An important aspect of this limit is its independence from perceptual effects and its application across all stimulus types. Recent research, however, has identified several exceptions. We investigate an explanation for these results that reconciles them with Miller’s work. We find support for the hypothesis that the (...) exceptional stimulus types have more complex psychological representations, which can therefore support better identification. Our investigation uses data sets with thousands of observations for each participant, which allows the application of a new technique for identifying psychological representations: the structural forms algorithm of Kemp and Tenenbaum (2008). This algorithm supports inferences not possible with previous techniques, such as multidimensional scaling. (shrink)

Renewed Accountability for Access and Excellence provides a forum for contributing scholars and practitioners to advance the discussion of Tenuto’s democratic professional practice in education by sharing additional insights, perspectives, and implications for both policy and practice. Consistent with the model itself, this collective work is intended to encourage meaningful conversations and critical thinking about inclusionary practices, equitable access, excellence, and renewed accountability for teaching and leading.

We argue that Rousseau 's defense of the sex-roled family is not based on biological determinism or simple misogyny. Rather, his advocacy of sexual differentiation is based on his understanding of its ability to bring individuals outside of themselves into interdependent communities, and thus to counter natural independence, self-absorption and asociality, as well as social competitiveness and egoism. This political defense of the sex-roled family needs more critique by feminists.

Birth cohort studies can be used not only to generate population-level quantitative data, but also to recompose persons. The crux is how we understand data and persons. Recomposition entails scavenging for various (including unrecognised) data. It foregrounds the perspective and subjectivity of survey participants, but without forgetting the partiality and incompleteness of the accounts that it may generate. Although interested in the singularity of individuals, it attends to the historical and relational embeddedness of personhood. It examines the multiple and complex (...) temporalities that suffuse people’s lives, hence departing from linear notions of the life course. It implies involvement, as well as reflexivity, on the part of researchers. It embraces the heterogeneity and transformations over time of scientific archives and the interpretive possibilities, as well as incompleteness, of birth cohort studies data. Interested in the unfolding of lives over time, it also shines light on meaningful biographical moments. (shrink)

Citizenship has traditionally been equated with borders and boundaries and, in particular, membership of a nation-state. Motivated by recent interest in the crossing of boundaries and processes of inclusion which operate across a common basis such as the nation-state, this article explores the ways in which international relations were implicitly and explicitly embedded in constructions of British citizenship in the 1940s. Focusing on representations of English girls in literature relating to the education and leisure of girls, this article identifies and (...) explores four international aspects of citizenship. First, it addresses the ways in which British citizenship was defined through an implicit or explicit juxtaposition with the citizenship associated with other nation-states. This international dimension worked to delineate boundaries. Second, the article examines how British citizens were defined as members of a community which transcended the nation. Following this, it explores the expectation that girls required international knowledge in order to effectively fulfil their duties as British citizens. Finally, the article investigates some of the ways in which British citizenship involved international responsibilities. Although some aspects of girls’ citizenship challenged national parochialism, the duties and characteristics of apprentice female citizens were articulated in ways that restated hierarchies which assumed the distinctiveness and authority of Britain and the British. (shrink)

Exploring Shamanism: Using Ancient Rites to Discover the Unlimited Healing Powers of Cosmos and Consciousness . Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books. Soft Cover (222 pages). $19.95 (ISBN: 978 1 56414 663 4) Travelling between the Worlds: Conversations with Contemporary Shamans . Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc. Soft Cover (320 pages). $19.95 (ISBN: 978 1 57174 403 7) Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 6, Edition 2 August 2006.

Softlifting (software piracy by individuals) is an unethical behavior that pervades today''s computer dependent society. Since a better understanding of underlying considerations of the behavior may provide a basis for remedy, a model of potential determinants of softlifting behavior is developed and tested. The analysis provides some support for the hypothesized model, specifically situational variables, such as delayed acquisition times, and personal gain variables, such as the challenge of copying, affect softlifting behavior. Most importantly, the analysis indicated that ethical perception (...) of softlifting has no significant affect on softlifting behavior. These findings suggest major implications for both software manufacturers and academicians attempting to reduce piracy behavior through ethics instruction. (shrink)

As a youngster of perhaps 8 years, Charles S. Peirce was given a chemistry laboratory in which he probably did experiments in qualitative analysis. These experiments were modeled on the hypothetico-deductive method of inquiry. I argue that this laboratory experience initiated Peirce’s life-long interest in logic and the logic of science, and flowered in his “pragmaticism.”.

This collection opens with an inquiry into the assumptions and methods of the historical study of culture, comparing the new cultural history with the old. Thirteen essays follow, each defining a problem within a particular culture. In the first section, Biography and Autobiography, three scholars explore historically changing types of self-conception, each reflecting larger cultural meanings; essays included examine Italian Renaissance biographers and the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Mohandas Gandhi. A second group of contributors explore problems raised by the (...) writing of history itself, especially as it relates to a notion of culture. Here examples are drawn from the writings of Thucydides, Jacob Burckhardt, and the art historians Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski. In the third section, Politics, Nationalism, and Culture, the essays explore relationships between cultural creativity and national identity, with case studies focusing on the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, the place of Castile within the national history of Spain, and the impact of World War I on work of Thomas Mann. The final section, Cultural Translation, raises the complex questions of cultural influence and the transmission of traditions over time through studies of Philo of Alexandria's interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, Erasmus' use of Socrates, Jean Bodin's conception of Roman law, and adaptations of the Hebrew Bible for American children. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a conception of individual religiousness in terms of religious experience. Using ideas of the early Friedrich Schleiermacher, I will claim that religious experiences are contemplative experiences of the totality of being. This understanding of religious experiences presents an alternative to how religious experience is often epistemologically thought about in the more contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Furthermore, it has systematic advantages: It can construe religious plurality in terms of different ways to experience the totality of (...) being, it stays neutral to metaphysical and moral debates such as whether there is a God whose laws we should obey, and it allows for an explanation of how religious intuitions and religious emotions relate to one another as well as of why religiousness and art often go hand in hand. Even though understanding religiousness in terms of contemplative experience also bears revisionary potential, I will discuss how more doxastic elements of religious people’s lives can be reintegrated into this picture. (shrink)

Rawls argues that ‘Parties in the original position would wish to avoid at almost any cost the social conditions that undermine self-respect’. But what are these social conditions that we should so urgently avoid? One evident candidate might be conditions of material inequality. Yet Rawls seems confident that his account of justice can endorse such inequalities without jeopardising citizens’ self-respect. In this article I argue that this confidence is misplaced. Unequalising incentives, I claim, jeopardise the self-respect of those least advantaged—at (...) least under a Rawlsian schema—by undermining the very processes by which Rawls hopes to make distributional inequalities and self-respect compatible. I begin by setting out Rawls’s distinct account of self-respect before moving to describe how Rawls expects the difference principle to support citizens’ in this regard. I then draw upon GA Cohen’s distinction between ‘strict’ and ‘lax’ interpretations of the difference principle to argue that the presence of unequalising incentives undermines both the direct and indirect support that the difference principle can offer to citizens’ self-respect. As such, I claim that Rawls must either weaken his endorsement of unequalising incentives, or risk violating his ‘prior commitment’ to avoiding social conditions harmful to citizens’ self-respect. (shrink)

Language plays a role in the genocide of the Rohingya people in Myanmar and continues to shape their experiences in displacement, yet their linguistic rights are rarely discussed in relation to their human rights and humanitarian concerns. International human rights standards offer important foundations for conceptualizing the “right to language” and identifying how linguistic rights can be violated both in situ and in displacement. The Rohingya case highlights how language policies are weaponized to oppress unwanted minorities; their outsider status is (...) reinforced by the country’s language education policy and they face additional rights challenges in displacement—including obstacles to effectively accessing humanitarian aid. Moving forward, norms associated with self-determination and language rights offer a conceptual foundation for shifting attitudes and altering negative perceptions of Rohingya identity. (shrink)

For philosophers of education who hold on to the optimistic hope that democracy education can play a part in halting the decline of democracy, Davids and Waghid point the way towards its potential contribution when approached by making inclusion foundational to democratic education. Taking a poststructuralist approach as the best way to articulate an expanded conception of inclusion, this book makes the case that there is an urgent need for a reconsidered conception of democratic education that appropriately addresses race, ethnicity (...) and gender. This review's critical appreciation of Davids and Waghids book explores their analysis of inclusion, noting its illuminating use of examples of exclusion in South African education which are also relevant to wider contexts beyond the specificities of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa. In raising some questions about their arguments, I express reservations about the book's predominant focus on race, ethnicity and gender as markers of identity. This is at the expense of class and material exclusion—and hence of distributive justice as a dimension of democratic inclusion. The review concludes with a discussion of how philosophy of education itself might be democratically inclusive, in response to the authors' account of whiteness and their experiences of exclusion. (shrink)

Research suggests that typically developing children begin to understand verbal irony around 5 or 6 years of age. Children's production of verbal irony, however, has not previously been examined. This study was a preliminary investigation of children's irony production, including both verbal and gestural (nonverbal) forms. We coded instances of irony in interactions within 118 family triads, each consisting of 1 parent and 2 children, aged 3 to 15 years. Triads performed an 8-min cooperative task with dominos. In this context, (...) gestural irony was used more frequently than verbal irony: 80% of the families used gestural irony at least once and 32% used verbal irony at least once. Children produced gestural irony as early as 4 years of age, and verbal irony as early as 5 years of age. Children's use of irony was not related to their general cognitive ability or vocabulary, but was related to use of irony by other members of the triad. Results suggest that social context is important to the emergence of irony production. (shrink)

Applying the idea of conversation broadly, Penny A. Weiss offers a collection of essays that are either constructed dialogues, letters, or discussions about voice and silencing. Conversation emerges as both a theory and a method of feminist political inquiry and practice. The most vocal participants in Weiss' conversations are historical political thinkers both within the Western canon (Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau) and beyond its confines (Astell, Coopers, Wollstonecraft, de Pizan). Other figures appear as well, from Anita Hill and U.S. Supreme (...) Court justices to the author's own students and children. Conflicts between feminists and anti-feminists frame some essays, while others represent debates within feminism. This unique collection is unified by a commitment to dialogue as a part of feminist ethics, strategy, and pedagogy, and builds upon the belief that a conversational approach does not preclude disagreement or contrasting stories, but requires them. Conversations With Feminism is an important book for students and scholars of political theory, philosophy, and women's studies. (shrink)

This paper explores conceptual and practical linkages between women and food, and argues that food security cannot be realized until women are centrally included in policy discussions about food. Women's special relationship with food is culturally constructed and not a natural division of labor. Women's identity and sense of self is often based on their ability to feed their families and others; food insecurity denies them this right. Thus the interpretation of food as a human right requires that food issues (...) be analyzed from a gender perspective. For example, the paper asks how the rights to food intersect with the rights of women and other human rights; what the policy implications of these intersecting rights are; and how their integration will contribute to the effort to view all human rights as mutually reinforcing, universal, and indivisible. The second half of the paper speculates on the significance of distinctions between the right to be fed, the right to food, and the right to feed for understanding the relation between gender and food. (shrink)

For Kant, poetry is the freest, finest art of all. Music and painting depend on sensuous charms. Poetry offers the most direct presentation of "aesthetic ideas". As Kant's critique subjects reason to reason, so too does the poet try to best language via language. However, the poet's license is not absolute. The poet must create a new sense, not nonsense, lest he slide into the intractable privacy of delirium or evil. Using Hannah Arendt's reading of the Third Critique, and excerpts (...) from one of Kant's favorite poets, Milton, I examine the extent of the free play poetry allows. (shrink)

Recognising the relevance of Iris Marion Young's work to education, this article poses the question: given Iris Young's commitment to both social justice and to recognition of the political and ethical significance of difference, to what extent does her position allow for transnational interventions in education to foster democracy? First, it explores some of Iris Young's arguments on the relationship between democracy and social justice, with particular reference to their implications for education. Second, I argue that if her ideas are (...) extended to the issue of global justice, the strategies which she offers should be extended, at least when it comes to educational intervention, to allow for a wider range of actions in support of global justice through education for democracy than Iris Young's work so far seems to allow. The wider range of strategies which I propose call on western feminists and their governments to do more to promote democracy and social justice globally. This can be done in ways that are consistent with Iris Young's stipulation that transnational interference is permissible if undertaken against dominative harm. (shrink)

Within the popular consciousness, Emma Goldman has become something of an icon, a symbol for rebellion and women’s rights. But there has been surprisingly little substantive analysis of her influence on social, political, and feminist theory. In _Feminist Interpretations of Emma Goldman,_ Weiss and Kensinger present essays that resist a simplistic understanding of Goldman and instead attempt to examine her thinking in its proper social, historical, and philosophical context. Only by considering the sources, influences, and specific significance of Goldman’s ideas (...) can her proper place in feminist theory be truly understood. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Martha A. Ackelsberg, Kathryn Pyne Addelson, Lynne M. Adrian, Berenice A. Carroll, Voltairine de Cleyre, Janet E. Day, Candace Falk, Kathy E. Ferguson, Marsha Aileen Hewitt, Lori Jo Marso, Jonathan McKenzie, Alix Kates Shulman, Craig Stalbaum, Jason Wehling, and Alice Wexler. (shrink)

Many of the concrete examples found in older philosophical texts that aim at showing how a philosophical idea is relevant tend, for many students, to be mysterious. While instructors can substitute examples from their own lives to show an idea’s relevance, such examples can fail to be effective since college students are not a homogenous group and faculty often do not know their students well. This paper describes a writing assignment where students are asked to choose an event from their (...) lives and write, in the first person, from the perspective of the theorist they are analyzing. Such an assignment not only challenges students to use their own lives to explain a philosophical idea but also allows charges them to use philosophical ideas to examine their own lives. (shrink)

A central feature of John Tomasi’s ‘Free Market Fairness’ is the emphasis it places upon the good of self-respect. Like Rawls, Tomasi believes that accounts of justice ought to offer support for the self-respect of citizens. Indeed, this is a key way in which Tomasi aspires to engage with the ‘high-liberal’ tradition. Unlike Rawls however, Tomasi argues that this support is best provided by our treating a broader set of economic liberties as basic liberties. In this paper I raise two (...) concerns about this latter claim. Firstly, I trace a number of significant ways in which Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect differs from that of Rawls. Whilst such divergences are not necessarily problematic, I argue that they serve to limit the purchase his account has on left-liberals. Further, I argue that the ideal of self-respect is more deeply ‘hard-wired’ into Rawls’s account of justice than Tomasi recognises. As such, Tomasi fails to address the full range of additional ways in which Rawls expects his principles of justice to support citizens’ self-respect. I argue that this also limits the force of Tomasi’s claims. Secondly, and more seriously, I argue that there are significant tensions between Tomasi’s discussion of self-respect and his most forceful argument in favour of the market democratic model he proposes. I argue firstly that Tomasi’s account of when citizens’ self-respect is jeopardised does not allow us to readily distinguish between economic security born of systems of welfare and redistribution, and economic security born of market forces and historical contingency. And more troubling still, is Tomasi’s belief that self-respecting citizens must view themselves as a ‘central cause’ of their situation. Such self-conceptions, I argue, can only coexist alongside the greater wealth thesis if citizens engage in quite naked self-delusions about their causal power. I argue that theorists of justice have good reason to be suspicious of promulgating such delusions and, as such, that this poses a serious problem for a justification of market democracy which aspires to rest upon an appeal to self-respect. (shrink)

Campaigns to decolonize higher education have focused mainly on decolonizing the curriculum. Although the cultural features of colonialism and its material imperatives and damage were both modes of colonial domination and exploitation, more attention has been paid to the former in recent debates about education, and it tends to dominate arguments about and characterizations of decolonization in higher education, by making knowledge and the curriculum the central focus. We argue the need to attend not only to the cultural consequences of (...) imperialism and the damage to the self so thoroughly emphasized in postcolonial and decolonial theory, but also to the material implications of colonialism and the evolution of Empire, which has persisted in new forms since formal decolonization. Decolonizing higher education and its institutions must also address new forms of Empire which have colonized the university. We argue that unless the material aspects of colonization and decolonization are adequately addressed, the university will not be substantively decolonized. Indeed, so strong is the influence of late capitalism in the form of neoliberalism on the contemporary university that its modes of practice are likely to foster superficial strategies to ‘decolonize’ the curriculum instead of addressing how capitalist structures and practices sustain current forms of coloniality. We discuss how neoliberalism, exemplified in the use of global rankings, shapes the contemporary university in today’s new age of Empire and we defend an approach to decolonizing that widens the focus of current debates beyond decolonization of the curriculum, to which we give qualified support. (shrink)

Posing the question ‘How diverse is philosophy of education in the West?’ this paper responds to two recent defences of African philosophy of education which endorse its communitarianism and oppose individualism in Western philosophy of education. After outlining Thaddeus Metz's argument that Western philosophy of education should become more African by being more communitarian, and Yusef Waghid's defence of communitarianism in African philosophy of education, we develop a qualified defence of aspects of individualism in education. Our reservations about some aspects (...) of communitarianism lead us to argue for a role for some forms of individualism in African as well as Western education. Finally, reflecting on what is at stake in this kind of comparative philosophy of education, we argue that an over-emphasis on cultural differences can distract philosophers of education from the attention they should pay to the common dangers posed across continents by the influence of global capitalism on education. (shrink)

Kant thinks poetry is the greatest of all the arts, and that Milton is one of the greatest poets. Sanford Budick, a professor of English from Hebrew University, investigates the Miltonic echoes in Kant’s work in this very thorough, dense, and deliberate study. Budick argues that Milton’s poetic form, especially his use of successive images, informs some of the most crucial and complex passages in Kant’s ethical and aesthetic theory. Budick concedes that it may seem strange to blur the line (...) between poetry and philosophy, but he also underlines the fact that “in Kant’s world poetry and philosophy had not yet experienced the virtual divorce that characterizes our own age” (119). Budick contends that the .. (shrink)

: The Cuddeback Letter Book contains approximately two-hundred letters sent to Charles Peirce between 1859 and 1861. In the front of the book Peirce compiled a list of sixty-one correspondents. Many of them are key figures in Peirce's life, and the Cuddeback has long been recognized as an important source for biographical research. However, some years ago the owner of the Cuddeback blocked scholarly access because of its fragile condition, among other reasons. Fortunately, the Cuddeback has recently been conserved and (...) a digital image of each sheet has been made. This recent development is described below. Scholarly research on this area of Peirce's biography may now resume. (shrink)

The Cuddeback Letter Book contains approximately two-hundred letters sent to Charles Peirce between 1859 and 1861. In the front of the book Peirce compiled a list of sixty-one correspondents. Many of them are key figures in Peirce's life, and the Cuddeback has long been recognized as an important source for biographical research. However, some years ago the owner of the Cuddeback blocked scholarly access because of its fragile condition, among other reasons. Fortunately, the Cuddeback has recently been conserved and a (...) digital image of each sheet has been made. This recent development is described below. Scholarly research on this area of Peirce's biography may now resume. (shrink)

ZUSAMMENFASSUNGWenn vom Glauben als einer Voraussetzung des Wissens gesprochen wird, so heißt das, dass er kein schlechthin Anderes des Wissens sein kann. Denn eine Voraussetzung steht in einem positiven Bezug zu dem Sachverhalt, dessen Voraussetzung sie bildet. Es ist dieser positive Bezug des Glaubens zum Wissen, der im Artikel näher untersucht werden soll. Das geschieht, indem der Glaube im Anschluss an David Hume zunächst als elementares, nicht durch Verstandesleistungen begründetes Regelvertrauen bestimmt wird. In einem zweiten Schritt wird in Aufnahme zentraler (...) Einsichten Michael Polanyis gezeigt, dass einem solchen Vertrauen Aspekte impliziten Verstehens eignen, die ihrerseits als unerlässliche Faktoren im Aufbau öffentlichen Wissens fungieren. Daran anknüpfend wird in einem letzten Gedankengang schließlich nach den realistischen Anlässen des Regelvertrauens gefragt, mit der Pointe, dass in einer Polanyischen Perspektive gesehen die Theorie des Glaubens auf eine Theorie der Offenbarung verweist.SUMMARYThis article explores the thesis that our knowledge about reality depends on elementary acts of faith. The argument proceeds in three steps: In a first step David Hume's concept of belief is interpreted in terms of a basic reliance on evolving regularities which cannot be accounted for by acts of reason. Following central insights of Michael Polanyi's epistemology this pre-reflective reliance is reconstructed as a form of tacit knowledge in a second step of the argument. It will be shown that processes of tacit knowing are constitutive for the development of public accessible knowledge. In the third part, the central question about the real causes of our basic reliance is raised. This question is answered with reference to the function that a theory of revelation has for our understanding of faith. This touches the realistic dimensions of the developed Polanyian perspective. (shrink)

In 1966-67 Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink conducted an extraordinary seminar on the fragments of Heraclitus. _Heraclitus Seminar_ records those conversations, documenting the imaginative and experimental character of the multiplicity of interpretations offered and providing an invaluable portrait of Heidegger involved in active discussion and explication. Heidegger's remarks in this seminar illuminate his interpretations not only of pre-Socratic philosophy, but also of figures such as Hegel and Holderllin. At the same time, Heidegger clarifies many late developments in his own understanding (...) of truth, Being, and understanding. Heidegger and Fink, both deeply rooted in the Freiburg phenomenological tradition, offer two competing approaches to the phenomenological reading of the ancient text-a kind of reading that, as Fink says, is "not so much concerned with the philological problematic... as with advancing into the matter itself, that is, toward the matter that must have stood before Heraclitus's spiritual view.". (shrink)

Josiah Royce was undoubtedly one of the most interesting thinkers of classical American philosophy in the transition from the 19th to the 20th century. His works cover a wide range of subjects from psychology and issues of social philosophy to metaphysics. Surrounded by philosophers such as William James or Charles Sanders Peirce, Royce developed a concept of pragmatism which he himself called "absolute pragmatism" and which was centred around a theory of community. The essays in this edited volume deal with (...) this pragmatistic approach in his work and discuss it from various points of view. Among other things, they explore Royce's relationship to German idealism, the foundation of his ethics as well as his philosophical doctrine of God and his philosophy of religion. This results in rather divergent assessments of his philosophy, each of which is evidence of the enduring relevance of his thinking for the world of today. (shrink)