As an essential companion to Plato's Apology and Crito, Socrates Against Athens provides valuable historical and cultural context to our understanding of the trial.

As an essential companion to Plato's _Apology_ and _Crito,_ _Socrates Against Athens_ provides valuable historical and cultural context to our understanding of the trial.

Competing perspectives on the nature of emotion are illustrated with latent and emergent variable models. Latent variable models draw from classical test theory, assuming that the measured indicators of emotion covary by virtue of some common executive, organizing neural circuit or network in the brain. By contrast, emergent variable models draw from a theory-driven, operational definition tradition, positing that emotions do not cause, but rather are caused by, the measured indicators of emotion, assuming no executive neural circuit or network, and (...) requiring no covariation among indicators. I suggest that the emergent variable model may be more compatible with the extant literature on the nature of emotion, especially in the age of affective neuroscience. (shrink)

This paper describes how Locke’s Two Treatises of Government was read in Britain from Josiah Tucker to Peter Laslett. It focuses in particular upon how Locke’s readers responded to his detailed and...

This article profiles Modern Language studies in United Kingdom universities in a sometimes polemical way, drawing on the author’s experiences, insights and reflections as well as on published sources. It portrays the unique features of Modern Languages as a university discipline, and how curricula and their delivery have evolved. As national and international higher education contexts change more fundamentally and more rapidly than ever before, it seeks to draw on recent and current data to describe the impact of student choice (...) and to identify trends, particularly with regard to the place of literature. (shrink)

800x600 In our book _Global Insanity_ we argued that the existential predicament faced by humanity is a predictable consequence of Western Enlightenment thinking and the resulting world model, whose ascendance with the Industrial Revolution entrained development of the global consumer Economy that is destroying the biosphere. This situation extends from a dominant mindset based on the philosophy of reductionism. The problem was recognized and characterized by Robert M. Hutchins. In 1985, Hutchins ideas were discussed by Robert Rosen in Chapter 1 (...) of _Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical & Methodological Foundations_._ _Building on Hutchins' ideas, Rosen laid the foundation for an entire new, non-reductionist paradigm, which he called "complexity theory". This new paradigm is what we are further developing here. One has to recognize that a paradigm shift is needed to overcome the entrenched mindset and world model that reductionism has created. Here we explore the myriad interconnected ways-psychological, social, cultural, political, and technological-that the Western world model and consumer economy works as a complex system to thwart, neutralize, or co-opt for its own ends any effort to bring about the kind of radical change that is needed to avert global ecological catastrophe and societal collapse. This resistance to change stems from the need, inherent in the Western model, to continually grow the consumer economy. The media's continued portrayal of consumptive economic growth as a good thing, the widely held belief that the Economy is paramount, and current political and technological trends all manifest the system's active resistance to change. From the perspective of the mature economic system, any work that does not serve to grow the Economy is counterproductive, and viewed as unnecessary, a luxury, or subversive. The potential for real change is thus inversely related to the viability of the Economy, which will eventually decline as the system develops into senescence. To the extent that the fragile metastability of senescence affords opportunity for radical change, economic decline can be viewed as a hopeful sign. But taking maximum advantage of that opportunity will be extraordinarily difficult, as it will require widespread recognition of the problem, major voluntary sacrifice by the relatively large numbers of people who still benefit from the system, and concerted "grassroots" efforts. It can be expected that the system will resist those efforts until the end, becoming increasingly reliant on media-enabled distraction and divisive politics, as well as violent coercion, to maintain itself. Investment in education and science is widely touted as necessary for improving our situation, but this is misguided as long as the educational system and scientific enterprise continue to work in collusion with the larger system, as they currently do. Until the reductionist mindset and world model that drives the system is effectively challenged, there can be little hope for the kind of change needed to avert the catastrophic collapse of civilization. Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical reconstruction of J. B. Erhard's account of recognition that locates it within the context of his revolutionary natural law theory. The first three sections lay out the foundations of Erhard's position. The fourth section outlines Erhard's response to the opponents of revolution and raises a problem for it. The fifth section argues that we can resolve this problem by drawing upon Erhard's account of failures of legal recognition. The sixth and final section considers the relevance (...) of that account for contemporary legal and political theory. (shrink)

Several commentators have argued that Hegel's account of ‘self-consciousness’ in Chapter IV of the Phenomenology of Spirit can be read as an ‘immanent critique’ of Fichte's idealism. If this is correct, it raises the question of whether Hegel's account of ‘recognition’ in Chapter IV can be interpreted as a critique of Fichte's conception of recognition as expounded in the Foundations of Natural Right. A satisfactory answer to this question will have to provide a plausible interpretation of the ‘life and death (...) struggle’ as an immanent critique of Fichte's account of recognition. This paper aims to provide such an interpretation. The first part of the paper provides a discussion of Fichte's account of recognition that emphasizes its ‘epistemic’ concerns. The second part argues that Hegel's account of the ‘life and death struggle’ can be read plausibly as an immanent critique of Fichte's account of recognition. (shrink)

Chance has somewhat different meanings in different contexts, and can be taken to be either ontological or epistemological . Here I argue that, whether or not it stems from physical indeterminacy, chance is a fundamental biological reality that is meaningless outside the context of knowledge. To say that something happened by chance means that it did not happen by design. This of course is a cornerstone of Darwin’s theory of evolution: random undirected variation is the creative wellspring upon which natural (...) selection acts to sculpt the functional form of organisms. In his essay Chance & Necessity, Jacques Monod argued that an intellectually honest commitment to objectivity requires that we accord chance a central role in an otherwise mechanistic biology, and suggested that doing so may well place the origin of life outside the realm of scientific tractability. While that may be true, ongoing research on the origin of life problem suggests that a biogenesis may have been possible, and perhaps even probable, under the conditions that existed on primordial earth. Following others, I argue that the world should be viewed as causally open, i.e. primordially indeterminate or vague. Accordingly, chance ought to be the default scientific explanation for origination, a universal ‘null hypothesis’ to be assumed until disproven. In this framework, creation of anything new manifests freedom , and causation manifests constraint, the developmental emergence of which establishes the space of possibilities that may by chance be realized. (shrink)

Confusing modern poetry with philosophy is a common fault of literary criticism. Yet, the work of some poets can benefit critically from philosophical interpretations. Wallace Stevens is a poet who manifested an abiding interest in philosophy. His poems consistently display, in both their syntax and modulation of thought, philosophical parallels. Stevens’ dominant mode of thought is phenomenological. This can be shown by analyzing parallels between phenomenological methodology and Stevens’ poetry. Particularly three poems---“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (1917), “The (...) Snow Man” (1921), and “The Latest Freed Man” (1938)---embody, respectively, the poem as doing phenomenology, the poem as a description of the phenomenological mind, and the poem as a portrait of the phenomenologist. (shrink)

In this article I respond to commentaries of my review of latent versus emergent variable models of emotion. I note that Ross Buck’s view of emotion as stated in his commentary largely endorses an emergent variable model. Drawing from Dynamical Systems Theory, Camras frames the emergent variable model as softly-assembled attractor states. This implies that emotions are “fuzzy sets” of indicators that vary in the degree to which they indicate an emergent emotional state. Calvo offers affective computing as a method (...) of evaluating indicators according to their incremental contribution to predicting human emotional responses. This innovative perspective holds a great deal of promise. Ultimately, I hope that this discussion has contributed to the field's understanding of emotion and emotional processes. (shrink)

It would appear, judging from the evidence provided by Jonathan Rée in the first chapter of this extraordinary book, that the first work of philosophy in the English language was The Rule of Reason...

Scholarship on Kant's practical philosophy has often overlooked its reception in the early days of post-Kantian philosophy and German Idealism. This volume of new essays illuminates that reception and how it informed the development of practical philosophy between Kant and Hegel. The essays discuss, in addition to Kant, Hegel and Fichte, relatively little-known thinkers such as Pistorius, Ulrich, Maimon, Erhard, E. Reimarus, Reinhold, Jacobi, F. Schlegel, Humboldt, Dalberg, Gentz, Rehberg, and Möser. Issues discussed include the empty formalism objection, the separation (...) between right and morality, freedom and determinism, nihilism, the right to revolution, ideology, and the limits of the liberal state. Taken together, the essays provide an historically informed and philosophically nuanced picture of the development of post-Kantian practical philosophy. (shrink)

The article supplies an overview of UK modern languages education at school and university level. It attends particularly to trends over recent years, with regard both to numbers and to social elitism, and reflects on perceptions of language learning in the wider culture and the importance of gaining wider recognition of the value of languages education.