The Phenomenology of Spirit is both one of Hegel's most widely read books and one of his most obscure. The book is the most detailed commentary on Hegel's work available. It develops an independent philosophical account of the general theory of knowledge, culture, and history presented in the Phenomenology. In a clear and straightforward style, Terry Pinkard reconstructs Hegel's theoretical philosophy and shows its connection to ethical and political theory. He sets the work in a historical context and shows (...) the contemporary relevance of Hegel's thought for European and Anglo-American philosophers. The principal audience for the book is teachers and students of philosophy, but the great interest in Hegel's work and the clarity of Pinkard's exposition ensure that historians of ideas, political scientists, and literary theorists will also read it. (shrink)

This study is divided into three parts: the classical tradition; Althusser and after; and modern debates. It includes chapters on class consciousness, ideology and utopia, and the epistemology of sociology, looking at the work of Georg Lukas, Karl Mannheim and Lucien Goldman respectively.

He sets out not just to expose the illusions of postmodernism but to show the students he has in mind that they never believed what they thought they believed ...

A comprehensive exploration of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. This work is a comprehensive study of the philosophical issues raised by mysticism. Mystics claim to experience reality in a way not available in normal life, a claim which makes this phenomenon interesting from a philosophical perspective. Richard H. Jones’s inquiry focuses on the skeleton of beliefs and values of mysticism: knowledge claims made about the nature of reality and of human beings; value claims about what is significant and (...) what is ethical; and mystical goals and ways of life. Jones engages language, epistemology, metaphysics, science, and the philosophy of mind. Methodological issues in the study of mysticism are also addressed. Examples of mystical experience are drawn chiefly from Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, but also from Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Daoism. “This is a significant extension of the seminal work by Walter Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy. That work has stimulated much literature, all of which Jones manages to review here. He critically extends Stace’s universal core and embeds it in a sophisticated discussion of the extent, range, and metaphysical implications of mysticism.” — Ralph W. Hood, Jr., coauthor of The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach. (shrink)

Scientists have used models for hundreds of years as a means of describing phenomena and as a basis for further analogy. In Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science, Daniela Bailer-Jones assembles an original and comprehensive philosophical analysis of how models have been used and interpreted in both historical and contemporary contexts. Bailer-Jones delineates the many forms models can take (ranging from equations to animals; from physical objects to theoretical constructs), and how they are put to use. She examines (...) early mechanical models employed by nineteenth-century physicists such as Kelvin and Maxwell, describes their roots in the mathematical principles of Newton and others, and compares them to contemporary mechanistic approaches. Bailer-Jones then views the use of analogy in the late nineteenth century as a means of understanding models and to link different branches of science. She reveals how analogies can also be models themselves, or can help to create them. The first half of the twentieth century saw little mention of models in the literature of logical empiricism. Focusing primarily on theory, logical empiricists believed that models were of temporary importance, flawed, and awaiting correction. The later contesting of logical empiricism, particularly the hypothetico-deductive account of theories, by philosophers such as Mary Hesse, sparked a renewed interest in the importance of models during the 1950s that continues to this day. Bailer-Jones analyzes subsequent propositions of: models as metaphors; Kuhn's concept of a paradigm; the Semantic View of theories; and the case study approaches of Cartwright and Morrison, among others. She then engages current debates on topics such as phenomena versus data, the distinctions between models and theories, the concepts of representation and realism, and the discerning of falsities in models. (shrink)

The phrase "the meaning of life" for many seems a quaint notion fit for satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams. But in this spirited, stimulating, and quirky enquiry, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising answer. Eagleton first examines how centuries of thinkers and writers--from Marx and Schopenhauer to Shakespeare, Sartre, and Beckett--have responded to the ultimate question of meaning. He suggests, however, that it is (...) only in modern times that the question has become problematic. But instead of tackling it head-on, many of us cope with the feelings of meaninglessness in our lives by filling them with everything from football to sex, Kabbala, Scientology, "New Age softheadedness," or fundamentalism. On the other hand, Eagleton notes, many educated people believe that life is an evolutionary accident that has no intrinsic meaning. If our lives have meaning, it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready made. Eagleton probes this view of meaning as a kind of private enterprise, and concludes that it fails to holds up. He argues instead that the meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way. It is not metaphysical but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth living--that is, a certain quality, depth, abundance and intensity of life. Here then is a brilliant discussion of the problem of meaning by a leading thinker, who writes with a light and often irreverent touch, but with a very serious end in mind. "If you were to ask what provides some meaning in life nowadays for a great many people, especially men, you could do worse than reply 'football.' Not many of them perhaps would be willing to admit as much; but sport stands in for all those noble causes--religious faith, national sovereignty, personal honor, ethnic identity--for which, over the centuries, people have been prepared to go to their deaths. It is sport, not religion, which is now the opium of the people.". (shrink)

In the second half of the eighteenth century, German philosophy came for a while to dominate European philosophy. It changed the way in which not only Europeans, but people all over the world, conceived of themselves and thought about nature, religion, human history, politics, and the structure of the human mind. In this rich and wide-ranging book, Terry Pinkard interweaves the story of 'Germany' - changing during this period from a loose collection of principalities into a newly-emerged nation with (...) a distinctive culture - with an examination of the currents and complexities of its developing philosophical thought. He examines the dominant influence of Kant, with his revolutionary emphasis on 'self-determination', and traces this influence through the development of romanticism and idealism to the critiques of post-Kantian thinkers such as Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard. His book will interest a range of readers in the history of philosophy, cultural history and the history of ideas. (shrink)

There are two main ways in which an interest in the sociology of literature can be justified. The first form of justification is realist: literature is in fact deeply conditioned by its social context, and any critical account of it which omits this fact is therefore automatically deficient. The second way is pragmatist: literature is in fact shaped by all kinds of factors and readable in all sorts of contexts, but highlighting its social determinants is useful and desirable from a (...) particular political standpoint.Both of these cases would seem to have something going for them. Hardly anybody would want to deny that literature is in an important sense a social product; but this claim is so general that a specifically “sociological” treatment of literary works does not necessarily follow from it. Metaphors and line endings, after all, are also in some sense social products, so that to attend to these elements of a literary text is not necessarily to deny the work’s sociality. “Social product” would seem too comfortably broad a category, just as “economic product” would seem too crippingly narrow. A problem with the realist case about the sociology of literature, then, is that it is not very clear what exactly is being claimed. The pragmatist case would seem a persuasive rationale for, say, a feminist reading of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism, since few people would want to claim that the poem was in some central way about patriarchal relations in the sense that The Rape of the Lock is. A Marxist critic who attended to questions of social class in Treasure Island, perhaps placing Long John Silver in the context of the British shop stewards’ movement and celebrating his antagonism to the gentry, would not necessarily be committed to holding that these issues were “in fact” crucial to the text; he or she would insist instead that they should be brought to light because they were crucial to history and society in general. Terry Eagleton’s recent works include collected essays—Against the Grain and William Shakespeare—as well as a novel, Saints and Scholars. His work in progress is on the ideology of the aesthetic. (shrink)

One of the founders of modern philosophical thought Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has gained the reputation of being one of the most abstruse and impenetrable of thinkers. This major biography of Hegel offers not only a complete account of the life, but also a perspicuous overview of the key philosophical concepts in Hegel's work in a style that will be accessible to professionals and non-professionals alike. Terry Pinkard situates Hegel firmly in the historical context of his times. The story (...) of that life is of an ambitious, powerful thinker living in a period of great tumult dominated by the figure of Napoleon. The Hegel who emerges from this account is a complex, fascinating figure of European modernity, who offers us a still compelling examination of that new world born out of the political, industrial, social, and scientific revolutions of his period. (shrink)

In Chapters 4 and 5 of his 1998 book From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis, Frank Jackson propounds and defends a form of moral realism that he calls both ‘moral functionalism’ and ‘analytical descriptivism’. Here we argue that this metaethical position, which we will henceforth call ‘analytical moral functionalism’, is untenable. We do so by applying a generic thought-experimental deconstructive recipe that we have used before against other views that posit moral properties and identify them with certain (...) natural properties, a recipe that we believe is applicable to virtually any metaphysically naturalist version of moral realism. The recipe deploys a scenario we call Moral Twin Earth. (shrink)

It has often been thought that our knowledge of ourselves is _different_ from, perhaps in some sense _better_ than, our knowledge of things other than ourselves. Indeed, there is a thriving research area in epistemology dedicated to seeking an account of self-knowledge that would articulate and explain its difference from, and superiority over, other knowledge. Such an account would thus illuminate the descriptive and normative difference between self-knowledge and other knowledge.¹ At the same time, self- knowledge has also encountered its (...) share of skeptics – philosophers who refuse to accord it any descriptive, let alone normative, distinction. In this paper, we argue that there is at least one _species_ of self-knowledge that is different from, and better than, other knowledge. It is a specific kind of knowledge of one’s concurrent phenomenal experiences. Call knowledge of one’s own phenomenal experiences _phenomenal knowledge_. Our claim is that some (though not all) phenomenal knowledge is different from, and better than, non-phenomenal knowledge. In other. (shrink)

I reply to each of the contributions in this issue. I agree with much that Hillel Steiner argues, especially his insistence that the associated ideas of impartiality and discontinuity are crucial to dealing satisfactorily with a diversity of competing claims. I am, however, less willing to conceive provision for that diversity as the role, rather than a role, that we should ascribe to rights. I question the success of David Miller’s endeavour to provide a unified justification of human rights grounded (...) in the concept of need. It is the notion of a minimally decent human life, rather than need itself, that does most of the justificatory work in Miller’s argument and, arguably, that notion does not deliver a genuinely unitary account of human rights. I concede the case for state funding of opera and the arts more generally to John Horton’s argument, but defend neutralism, and its associated distinction between the right and the good, as a strategy for dealing with diversity, including cultural diversity. I resist Richard Bellamy’s attempt to ground all basic rights in democracy and suggest that his argument relies upon idealized assumptions about the functioning of democracy. I share much of his objection to substituting judicial for political decision-making but argue that a strong moral commitment to rights need not imply a shift in power from democratic processes to courts. I endorse Albert Weale’s argument for favouring a beneficial design approach over a rights approach to healthcare and to many other social goods. Rights should not monopolize our moral and political thinking. (shrink)

Scientific models represent aspects of the empirical world. I explore to what extent this representational relationship, given the specific properties of models, can be analysed in terms of propositions to which truth or falsity can be attributed. For example, models frequently entail false propositions despite the fact that they are intended to say something "truthful" about phenomena. I argue that the representational relationship is constituted by model users "agreeing" on the function of a model, on the fit with data and (...) on the aspects of a phenomenon that are modelled. Model users weigh the propositions entailed by a model and from this decide which of these propositions are crucial to the acceptance and continued use of the model. Thus, models represent phenomena when certain propositions they entail are true, but this alone does not exhaust the representational relationship. Therefore, the constraints that produce the choice of the relevant propositions in a model must also be examined and their analysis contributes to understanding the relationship between models and phenomena. (shrink)

Introduction -- The beginnings of human judgment -- The chemistry, economics, and psychology of praise -- Blame: the necessity and devastation of guilt and shame -- Family judgments, family systems -- Just friends: praise and blame between peers -- Intimate judgments: praise and blame within couples -- Professional dues: praise and blame in the workplace -- Social media and the new challenges to our judgment meter -- Lifelong judgments.

This is a fascinating study of the a-temporal nature of evil in the West. The international authors who have contributed to this text not only concentrate on political, social and legally sanctioned cruelty from the past and present, but also explore the nature of moral transgression in contemporary art, media and literature. Although many forms and practices of what might be called evil' are analysed, all are bound by violence and/or the sexually perverse.

The phrase "the meaning of life" for many seems a quaint notion fit for satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams. But in this spirited Very Short Introduction, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising answer. Eagleton first examines how centuries of thinkers and writers--from Marx and Schopenhauer to Shakespeare, Sartre, and Beckett--have responded to the ultimate question of meaning. He suggests, however, that it is only (...) in modern times that the question has become problematic. But instead of tackling it head-on, many of us cope with the feelings of meaninglessness in our lives by filling them with everything from football to sex, Kabbala, Scientology, "New Age softheadedness," or fundamentalism. On the other hand, Eagleton notes, many educated people believe that life is an evolutionary accident that has no intrinsic meaning. If our lives have meaning, it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready made. Eagleton probes this view of meaning as a kind of private enterprise, and concludes that it fails to holds up. He argues instead that the meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way. It is not metaphysical but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth living--that is, a certain quality, depth, abundance and intensity of life. Here then is a brilliant discussion of the problem of meaning by a leading thinker, who writes with a light and often irreverent touch, but with a very serious end in mind. (shrink)

Problem gambling is a growing public health issue in the UK. In this paper, we argue that football plays a problematic role in the promotion and normalisation of gambling. Given that sport broadcas...

Little is known about how and why corporate social responsibility (CSR) emerged in lesser developed countries. In order to address this knowledge gap, we used Chile as a test case and conducted a series of in-depth interviews with leaders of CSR initiatives. We also did an Internet and literature search to help provide support for the findings that emerged from our data. We discovered that while there are similarities in the drivers of CSR in developed countries, there are distinct differences (...) as well. In particular, we found that different sectors drive CSR in Chile. In contrast to other geographies where consumer demand and government regulation provided the impetus for CSR efforts, multinational companies (MNCs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are key actors in Chile. MNCs imported their CSR beliefs, skills, and processes into Chile. Their efforts resulted in a virtuous cycle. Once large domestic firms felt pressured by their MNC rivals, they too adopted CSR initiatives. The ability to manage relationships with multiple stakeholders and perceptions of authenticity were also critical to the success of CSR in Chile. Using network theory as a lens, we suggest that network density and centrality largely determine whether CSR efforts will be authentic. Based on these contentions, we suggest avenues for future research. (shrink)

In this new and original book, Claire Armon-Jones examines the concept of affect and various philosophical positions which attempt to define and characterize it: the standard view, the neo-cognitivist view, and the objectual thesis. She contends that these views radically distort our understanding of affect by disregarding modes of affect which fail to conform to the accounts they each employ. Against the standard and neo-cognitivist views she argues that the notions they use to characterize affect are neither necessary nor (...) sufficient; and against the objectual thesis she further argues that affective states exhibit degrees of independence from the concept of an object. She develops a new theory of the varieties of affect that explains their cognitive nature, their felt aspect, their special logic and the relationship between their objectless and object-directed forms. Armon-Jones concludes by suggesting that her arguments call into question certain assumptions about the rationality and moral status of affect and require a revision of the conception of the good in affect. (shrink)

Kausales Denken spielt sowohl im Alltag wie auch im wissenschaftlichen Forschungsprozess eine zentrale Rolle. Es erlaubt uns, Phänomene vorherzusagen, zu kontrollieren und zu verstehen. Kausales Denken geht über die Angabe der Ursachen eines Phänomens hinaus: Wollen wir verstehen, warum ein Fahrrad fährt, so versuchen wir, Schritt für Schritt nachzuvollziehen, wie die einzelnen Bestandteile des Fahrrads zusammenwirken, um miteinander die Bewegung zu produzieren. Wir sind an dem Mechanismus interessiert, durch den das Phänomen zustande kommt. Dieses Vorgehen wird in der Wissenschaftsphilosophie wie (...) auch in der Kognitionspsychologie mit Hilfe mechanistischer Theorien kausalen Denkens beschrieben. Der Sammelband bringt erstmals Vertreter beider Disziplinen in sechs aufeinander abgestimmten Beiträgen zusammen. Neben einer Diskussion der Kernmerkmale mechanistischen Denkens stehen insbesondere Fragen nach dem Erwerb mechanistischer Denkstrukturen und nach der Rolle von Handlungen und Handlungserfahrungen im Fokus. (shrink)

What is real? Less than you might think. We advocate austere metaphysical realism---a form of metaphysical realism claiming that a correct ontological theory will repudiate numerous putative entities and properties that are posited in everyday thought and discourse, and also will even repudiate numerous putative objects and properties that are posited by well confirmed scientific theories. We have lately defended a specific version of austere metaphysical realism which asserts that there is really only one concrete particular, viz., the entire cosmos (...) (see Horgan and Potr (2000, 2002), Potr (2003)). But there are various potential versions of the generic position we are here calling austere metaphysical realism; and it is the generic view that constitutes the ontological part of the overall approach to realism and truth that we will describe here. What is true? More than you might think, given our austere metaphysical realism. We maintain that truth is semantically correct affirmability, under contextually operative semantic standards. We also maintain that most of the time, the contextually operative semantic standards work in such a way that semantic correctness (i.e., truth) is a matter of indirect correspondence rather than direct correspondence between thought or language on the one hand, and the world on the other.1 When correspondence is indirect rather than direct, a given statement (or thought) can be true even if the correct ontology does not include items answering to all the referential commitments (as we will here call them) of the statement. 2 This means that even if a putative object is repudiated by a correct ontological theory, ordinary statements that are putatively about that object may still be true. For instance, the statement “The University of St. Andrews is in Scotland” can be semantically correct (i.e., true) even if the right ontology does not include any entity answering to the referring term ‘The University of St. Andrews’, or any entity... (shrink)

In this book , Lorraine Besser-Jones develops a eudaimonistic virtue ethics based on a psychological account of human nature. While her project maintains the fundamental features of the eudaimonistic virtue ethical framework—virtue, character, and well-being—she constructs these concepts from an empirical basis, drawing support from the psychological fields of self-determination and self-regulation theory. Besser-Jones’s resulting account of "eudaimonic ethics" presents a compelling normative theory and offers insight into what is involved in being a virtuous person and "acting well." (...) This original contribution to contemporary ethics and moral psychology puts forward a provocative hypothesis of what an empirically-based moral theory would look like. (shrink)

This paper focuses on three under-researched subjects in the corporate social responsibility literature: small businesses, small towns, and consequences of social responsibility for the business owner personally. Small businesses are the vast majority of businesses and make a significant contribution to national economic vitality. Their value to the survival of small towns, where they are often the only businesses, is even more important. Research indicates that the social performance of big and small businesses alike is dependent upon the values and (...) disposition of the top decision maker. Therefore, insight into the owner's motivations for contributing to community betterment and the consequences of that behavior for the business and the owner will add to this literature. Equally important, this knowledge can inform policies aimed at increasing good citizenship for all sizes of businesses regardless of location. (shrink)

This article takes as its starting point the observation that neoliberalism is a concept that is ‘oft-invoked but ill-defined’. It provides a taxonomy of uses of the term neoliberalism to include: an all-purpose denunciatory category; ‘the way things are’; an institutional framework characterizing particular forms of national capitalism, most notably the Anglo-American ones; a dominant ideology of global capitalism; a form of governmentality and hegemony; and a variant within the broad framework of liberalism as both theory and policy discourse. It (...) is argued that this sprawling set of definitions are not mutually compatible, and that uses of the term need to be dramatically narrowed from its current association with anything and everything that a particular author may find objectionable. In particular, it is argued that the uses of the term by Michel Foucault in his 1978–9 lectures, found in The Birth of Biopolitics, are not particularly compatible with its more recent status as a variant of dominant ideology or hegemony theories. It instead proposes understanding neoliberalism in terms of historical institutionalism, with Foucault’s account of historical change complementing Max Weber’s work identifying the distinctive economic sociology of national capitalisms. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the _élan vital_, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as "mechanical," and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist (...) discourse. Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making. (shrink)

In the early twentieth century, the life philosophy of Henri Bergson summoned the _élan vital_, or vital force, as the source of creative evolution. Bergson also appealed to intuition, which focused on experience rather than discursive thought and scientific cognition. Particularly influential for the literary and political Négritude movement of the 1930s, which opposed French colonialism, Bergson's life philosophy formed an appealing alternative to Western modernity, decried as "mechanical," and set the stage for later developments in postcolonial theory and vitalist (...) discourse. Revisiting narratives on life that were produced in this age of machinery and war, Donna V. Jones shows how Bergson, Nietzsche, and the poets Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire fashioned the concept of life into a central aesthetic and metaphysical category while also implicating it in discourses on race and nation. Jones argues that twentieth-century vitalism cannot be understood separately from these racial and anti-Semitic discussions. She also shows that some dominant models of emancipation within black thought become intelligible only when in dialogue with the vitalist tradition. Jones's study strikes at the core of contemporary critical theory, which integrates these older discourses into larger critical frameworks, and she traces the ways in which vitalism continues to draw from and contribute to its making. (shrink)

Creativity is one of the least understood aspects of intelligence and is often seen as intuitive' and not susceptible to rational enquiry. Recently, however, there has been a resurgence of interest in the area, principally in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, but also in psychology, philosophy, computer science, logic, mathematics, sociology, and architecture and design. This volume brings this work together and provides an overview of this rapidly developing field. It addresses a range of issues. Can computers be creative? Can (...) they help us to understand human creativity? How can artificial intelligence (AI) enhance human creativity? How, in particular, can it contribute to the sciences of the artificial', such as design? Does the new wave of AI (connectionism, geneticism and artificial life) offer more promise in these areas than classical, symbol-handling AI? What would the implications be for AI and cognitive science if computers could not be creative? These issues are explored in five interrelated parts, each of which is introducted and explained by a leading figure in the field. - Prologue (Margaret Boden) - Part I: Foundational Issues (Terry Dartnall) - Part II: Creativity and Cognition (Graeme S. Halford and Robert Levinson) - Part III: Creativity and Connectionism (Chris Thornton) - Part IV: Creativity and Design (John Gero) - Part V: Human Creativity Enhancement (Ernest Edmonds) - Epilogue (Douglas Hofstadter) For researchers in AI, cognitive science, computer science, philosophy, psychology, mathematics, logic, sociology, and architecture and design; and anyone interested in the rapidly growing field of artificial intelligence and creativity. (shrink)

Few scholars have investigated the considerations of over-empowered teams from a non-consequential ethics approach. Leveraging a virtue-based ethics lens of team empowerment, we provide a framework of team ethical orientation and over-empowerment using highly influential market research teams as a basis for our analysis. The purpose of this research is to contrast how teams founded on virtue-based ethics can attenuate ethical dilemmas and negative organizational outcomes from team over-empowerment. We provide a framework of four conditions that include Sophisticated, Suppressed, Contagion, (...) and Impeded to discuss alignment between team ethical orientation and team empowerment. Through this framework, we aim to further our understanding of empowered team behavior between action that is virtuous, moral, and ethical and activity that threatens organizational values and goals. (shrink)