A proposal that the basic mental models used to structure social interaction result from self-organization in brain activity.

The excellent quality and depth of the various essays make [the book] an invaluable resource....It is likely to become essential reading in its field.—CHOICE.

OUTLINES OF COSMIC PHILOSOPHY PART II SYNTHESIS ...

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This article details the rapid extension of the video surveillance of downtown `public' spaces. Its main argument is that this surveillance is racially differentiated, and that it zones the city differently for Blacks and whites, eroding the Black freedoms of movement and association, while leaving those of whites intact. It also considers isses of privacy as a political zone of potential social change, and raises concern about its video-electronic erosion. The argument is set within the overall argument that underneath the (...) structures of democracy totalitarian tendencies are rapidly extending their reach. (shrink)

This essay attempts to interpret John Rawls's concept of the state in his "Theory of Justice". His concept is not an analysis of the existing monopoly capitalist state. Such an analysis can be found in, for example, "The Fiscal Crisis of the State" by James O'Connor. Rawls's concept is, by contrast, not one of the actual state but of an idealized state. Ideals, though, touch reality at some point. At what point does Rawls's concept of the state touch reality? (...) The market is the key to a realistic interpretation of Rawls's concept of the state. His view of the market is even at the basis of his renowned principles of justice. The 'efficiency' and 'freedom' of the market are prized by Rawls and other liberal theorists. Income inequality and large capital concentration threaten these prized virtues of the market. Rawls requires a strongly interventionist state to counteract the dangers of monopoly. His idealized state intervenes, not to promote concentration in the manner of the monopoly capitalist state, but to promote greater equality. This equality is needed if the market is to display efficiency and freedom. It is through this intervention that the state promotes justice. Properly interpreted, the assurance problem on which Rawls bases the need for the state arises from market tendencies. The market enables initial advantages to be increased. This is ultimately why people with advantages support the market, whether the context is private ownership or bureaucratic control within so-called market socialism. The inequality resulting from increasing initial advantages interferes with efficiency and freedom. Rawls's state intervenes to preserve the market while restraining it. This can be seen as an attempt to preserve class society from itself. Consequently, Rawls's conception of justice is founded on classes. (shrink)

This essay attempts to interpret John Rawls's concept of the state in hisTheory of Justice. His concept is not an analysis of the existing monopoly capitalist state. Such an analysis can be found in, for example,The Fiscal Crisis of the State by James O'Connor. Rawls's concept is, by contrast, not one of the actual state but of an idealized state. Ideals, though, touch reality at some point. At what point does Rawls's concept of the state touch reality?The market is (...) the key to a realistic interpretation of Rawls's concept of the state. His view of the market is even at the basis of his renowned principles of justice. (shrink)

A Future for Socialism, John E. RoemerAgainst Capitalism, David Schweikart.

But Williams had created a field of historical study, where his white counterparts had not. Single-handedly and without the blessing or approval of the academic community, Williams had called attention to the importance of including Afro-Americans in any acceptable and comprehensive history of the nation long before the historians of various groups of European-Americans or Asian-Americans had begun to advocate a similar treatment for their groups. And if Williams did not impress the white professional historians, he gave heart and encouragement (...) to future Afro-American historians. When the History of the Negro Troops appeared in 1887, nineteen-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois was a college senior at Fisk University and editor-in-chief of the student magazine, The Fisk Herald. In the columns of the Herald Du Bois wrote, "At last we have a historian; not merely a Negro historian, but a man who judged by his merits alone has written a splendid narrative. The Herald congratulates George W. Williams, and the race, which may justly be . . . [proud] of him."1 Many years later, Carter G. Woodson, the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and of the Journal of Negro History, described Williams' History of the Negro Troops as "one of the most valuable accounts of the Civil War."2 With words like these from Du Bois and Woodson, on whose shoulders much of the second stage of Afro-American historiography would rest, it is not too much to say that George Washington Williams was responsible for the beginnings of Afro-American historiography. · 1. The Fisk Herald, January 1888, p. 8.· 2. Woodson's appraisal of Williams was found among his papers and made available to me by Dr. Charles H. Wesley when he was executive director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, which had been founded by Woodson in 1915. John Hope Franklin, president-elect of the American Historical Society, has written a biography of George Washington Williams. He is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of History at the University of Chicago and the author of, among other works, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans and A Southern Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reasons CountJohn Z. Sadler (bio)Keywordscriminality, mental disorder, responsibilityAs a fourth-year psychiatry resident many years ago, I encountered a patient on the psychiatric emergency service whom I have never forgotten, because my experience with him jelled a distinction about the importance of explaining violence. Brought in involuntarily by the police for being “dangerous,” he was a fearsome visage: six feet four, shaven head, angular jaw, the triangular build of an (...) athlete, a history of paranoid schizophrenia and violence. I’ll call him Mr. Big. His court order papers explained that he had threatened to kill his brother-in-law.Mr. Big’s story, in brief, was that he was a veteran on disability, and that he had purchased, some years ago, a small home using his wits and savings from his pension. Although he admitted that he could be, and had been, violent off his medications, he explained that he had been taking his medicines reliably for two years and had never had any trouble over that period—until now. His brother-in-law, according to Mr. Big, had moved in and appropriated his home while the patient was away on a trip to see a friend, and now refused to leave, to the chagrin of both the patient and his sister. Mr. Big had threatened to kill the brother-in-law in indignation with the in-law’s behavior. The brother-in-law never called or appeared. The sister, it turns out, corroborated the story, and after an examination revealed only minimal idiosyncrasies of thought and affect, the patient was referred for legal counseling, released, and the family was warned. We all hoped that justice could be found peacefully.Wilson and Adshead emphasize in their thoughtful discussion of violence and psychiatric symptoms that the explanation for the violent act is crucial to assessing its pertinence to mental disorder. What was elegant in Mr. Big’s case was that the motivation for threats of violence was proximate, morally comprehensible, corroborated by at least one other, insightful, and most of all, clear-cut. Although these features for distinguishing violence due to normative motivation versus violence due to mental disorder are addressed by Wilson and Adshead, they would agree that, unfortunately, these tools of proximity, comprehensibility, ordinariness of motivation, insight, and corroboration are often absent, unobtainable, or inadequate.But these considerations are helpful in ruling out violence as symptom, which is the lesson Mr. Big taught me—reasons count. Wilson and Adshead go on to critically consider the features that may be positive identifications for violence as symptom. With “deplorability,” they identify a feature of the violence that exceeds what I have termed “normative motivation,” which defies our empathic ability to understand the perpetrator’s point of view. However, deplorable events are perpetrated by soldiers and police in their socially approved work, so even deplorability has limits in its utility. Indeed, social psychologists’ research has shown, as Susan Fiske and colleagues put it, “Virtually anyone can be aggressive if sufficiently [End Page 73] provoked, stressed, disgruntled, or hot” (Fiske et al. 2004, 1482). Also, like “normative” motivation, deplorability is culture—and politically—relative, another limit to its utility.Even with complex causality, the INUS approach of Mackie’s offers a way to link symptoms to a more complex causal network while admitting that the social components of the causal network may exhibit particular moral and pragmatic interests. For medicine, the INUS approach is sensible and coherent with biomedicine’s intellectual culture of multifactorial causation of disease. However, criminal culpability in law is usually a dichotomous decision; any taint of choice links the offender to the whole culpability package (Sadler 2002).The conclusion one is left with is that no failsafe tools permit us to distinguish violence provoked by mental disorder versus normatively motivated violence. I tend to agree that, for some cases, we will never be able to broker the distinction between disordered violence versus nondisordered violence. My pessimism is based on the technical limitations of parsing mental life retrospectively in a way that will always allow for the kind of clear-cut distinction described in the case of Mr. Big (Sadler 2002). That is, how, after the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 3.2 (1996) 139-142 Concurrent Contents: Recent and Classic References at the Interface of Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology Articles Abramowitz, S., C. Abramowitz, C. Jackson et al. 1973. The politics of clinical judgment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 41: 385-391.Audi, R. N. 1972. Psychoanalytic explanation and the concept of rational action. The Monist 56: 444- 464.Barondess, J. A. 1979. Disease and illness--a crucial distinction. American (...) Journal of Medicine 66: 375-376.Barrett, R. J. 1988. Interpretations of schizophrenia. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 12: 357-388.Bechtel, W. 1993. The case for connectionism. Philosophical Studies 7: 119-154.Belzen, J. A. 1995. The impact of phenomenology on classical psychiatry: Rümke's position between Jaspers and Kraepelin. History of Psychiatry 6: 349-385.Benda, C. E. 1967. Neuroses of conscience. Journal of Existentialism 7: 425-442.Binns, P. 1995. Commentary on "Contentless consciousness." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2: 61-63.Blankenburg, W. 1980. Phenomenology and psychopathology. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 11: 50-78.Bloomfield, T. M. 1979. Psychoanalysis: A human science? Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 9: 271-287.Blumenfeld, D. 1972. Free action and unconscious motivation. The Monist 56: 426-443.Boudreaux, G. 1977. Freud on the nature of unconscious mental processes. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 7: 1-32.Bracken, P. J. 1995. Beyond liberation: Michael Foucault and the notion of a critical psychiatry. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 1: 1-13.Brazier, M. 1995. Commentary on "Who should be committable?." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 1: 49-50.Bursztajn, J., and A. Brodsky. 1995. Authenticity and autonomy in the managed-care era: Forensic psychiatric perspectives. Journal of Clinical Ethics 5, no. 3: 237-242.Byrnes, J. F. 1979. Suggestions on writing the history of psychological data. History and Theory 16: 297-305.Campbell, E. J., J. G. Scadding, and R. J. Roberts. 1979. The concept of disease. British Medical Journal 2: 757-762.Carveth, D. 1988. In reply to Eagle's reply on "The epistemological foundations of psychoanalysis." Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18: 377-378.Chadwick, R. F. 1995. Commentary on "Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 1: 83-84.Christiansen, B. 1964. The scientific status of psychoanalytic clinical evidence (III). Inquiry 7: 47-79.Davis, M. 1987. Realistic utilitarianism and the social conditions of cognitive psychotherapy. Social Theory & Practice 13: 237-259.Dega, W., et al. 1978. Ethics and mental health: Discussion. Dialectics and Humanism 5: 219-235.Dingle, H. 1949. The logical status of psycho-analysis. Analysis 9: 63-66.Dupeau, J. 1977. Freud and degeneracy. Diogenes Spring: 43-64.Eagle, M. 1988. A reply to Carveth's "The epistemological foundations of psychoanalysis. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 18: 371-375.Elevitch, B. 1974-75. Reasons, motives and psychoanalysis. Philosophical Forum (Boston) 6: 143- 162.Elliot, P. 1995. Policies, identity, and social change: Contested grounds in psychoanalytic feminism. Hypatia 10: 41-55.Fabrega Jr, H. 1980. The position of psychiatric illness in biomedical theory: A cultural analysis. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 5: 145-168.Fisk, G. 1993. Accreditation of psychotherapists. British Journal of Hospital Medicine 50: 437-438.Flynn, B. G. 1985. Reading Habermas reading Freud. Human Studies 8: 57-76.Forrow, L., R. M. Arnold, and J. Frader. 1991. Teaching clinical ethics in the residency years--preparing competent professionals. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 16: 93-112.Friedman, M. 1982. Philosophical anthropology and psychotherapy. Philosophical Context 12: 9-19.Galdston, I. 1969. The ontologic foundations of morality. Existential Psychiatry 7: 69-75.Gardner, S. 1995a. Commentary on "Irrationality and the dynamic unconscious." Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 2: 175-176.Gardner, S. 1995b. Psychoanalysis, science, and commonsense. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 2, no. 2: 93-113.Handelsman, M. M. et al. 1995. Does legally mandated consent to psychotherapy ensure ethical appropriateness? The Colorado experience. Ethics and Behavior 5, no. 2: 119-129.Hanlon, M. D. 1977. Commentary on Dunham's "Psychiatry, Sociology and Civil Liberties." Values and Ethics in Health Care 2: 275-278.Heaton, J. M. 1972. Insight in... (shrink)

This anthology contains selections from the writings of early American thinkers, the pragmatists, and many later twentieth-century philosophers in America. Accordingly, the book is divided into three major parts: the first deals with Edwards, Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, and Thoreau; the second includes Fiske, Wright, Peirce, James, Dewey, and Royce; and the long third section contains selections from the early realists, Thomists, process philosophers, systematic metaphysicians, phenomenologists, new empiricists, language philosophers, and moral philosophers. Each chapter in each of the three (...) parts begins with a brief introduction by the editor, and concludes with “study questions” and a bibliography. Finally, there is a brief epilogue, “Is There an American Philosophy?”, which reviews some of the literature concerning the defining characteristics, if any, of philosophical thought in America. (shrink)

This anthology contains selections from the writings of early American thinkers, the pragmatists, and many later twentieth-century philosophers in America. Accordingly, the book is divided into three major parts: the first deals with Edwards, Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, and Thoreau; the second includes Fiske, Wright, Peirce, James, Dewey, and Royce; and the long third section contains selections from the early realists, Thomists, process philosophers, systematic metaphysicians, phenomenologists, new empiricists, language philosophers, and moral philosophers. Each chapter in each of the three (...) parts begins with a brief introduction by the editor, and concludes with “study questions” and a bibliography. Finally, there is a brief epilogue, “Is There an American Philosophy?”, which reviews some of the literature concerning the defining characteristics, if any, of philosophical thought in America. (shrink)

Este artículo examina las concepciones de justicia y bien desde lasperspectivas de John Rawls y Milton Fisk. Enfatizamos en los principalespostulados y diferencias que suponen esas nociones en el marco delliberalismo político y las realidades sociales contemporáneas. En primerlugar discutimos el concepto de bienes primarios elaborado por Rawls y surelación con la igualdad social. Señalamos como este concepto se ajustamás a condiciones procedimentales que a realidades concretas. En segundolugar discutimos las nociones de bienes públicos y justicia radical de Fisk (...) apartir de una moral política no formalista construida en el marco de proyectossolidarios y de bienes sustantivos y colectivos. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the work of several positivists involved with the "Metaphysical Club" of Cambridge, MA in the early 1870s -- John Fiske, Chauncey Wright, and Francis Ellingwood Abbot. Like the logical positivists of the 1930s, these philosophers were forced to answer a key question: with so many of its traditional domains colonized by science and so many of its traditional questions dismissed as metaphysical or useless, what is left for philosophy to do? One answer they (...) gave was that philosophy could unify the sciences. As Fiske put it, "positive philosophy is science organized.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy by Trevor PearceAlexander KleinTrevor Pearce. Pragmatism's Evolution: Organism and Environment in American Philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. Pp. 384. Paperback, $35.00.Pragmatist pioneers were young lions in the days of Darwin. Evolutionary-biological thinking infused this philosophical movement from the start. And yet the last time a major monograph appeared on classic pragmatism and evolutionary biology—Philip Wiener's Evolution and (...) the Founders of Pragmatism (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1949)—the author could personally thank Ralph Barton Perry, William James's junior colleague and eventual biographer. John Dewey himself wrote the foreword.Almost seventy-five years later, we have Trevor Pearce's painstakingly researched Pragmatism's Evolution. The author has graduate training in both biology and philosophy and is a former student of William Wimsatt and Robert Richards's (343). The book offers an intricate portrait of how debates about evolutionary biology informed the thinking of a loose-knit group of pragmatists between the years 1860 and 1910. While a remarkable variety of figures are discussed, ten pragmatists command the most attention: Chauncey Wright, C. S. Peirce, Francis Ellingwood Abbot, John Fiske, William James, Josiah Royce, John Dewey, Jane Addams, G. H. Mead, and W. E. B. Du Bois (18). Call them "the American Ten."Without downplaying Darwin, an overarching theme is the special significance of Herbert Spencer. Despite many specific disagreements with him (see e.g. 74, 207–8, 253–54, 281), the American Ten all accepted something more fundamental from Spencer: an intellectual framework that explains mind and morality in terms of functional relationships between organism and environment.After an introduction outlining what Pearce identifies as four chronological "cohorts" of pragmatists (more on this concept below), he examines the 1860s and 1870s reception of Darwin (chapter 1) and Spencer (chapter 2), showing how senior pragmatists like Wright, Peirce, and James defended evolution during this period. In chapter 2, we meet the Metaphysical Club's arch Spencerian, John Fiske, and we get a reading of James's critique of Spencer's psychology and sociology. Chapter 3 gives a highly detailed, reference-work-like portrait of the second cohort's training in evolutionary biology during the 1880s—chiefly Royce, Dewey, Addams, Mead, and Du Bois. In chapter 4, we learn that in the 1880s and 1890s, idealists like Edward Caird, Samuel Alexander, David George Ritchie, and Josiah Royce all co-opted ideas from evolutionary biology, which they apparently thought compatible with Hegelian dialectics. Chapter 5 shows that central planks of Peirce's metaphysics and Dewey's ethics are responsive to an 1890s dispute over the causes of the biological variation upon which selection acts (the so-called "factors" debate). The final two chapters show how pragmatist ethics (chapter 6) and epistemology (chapter 7) were infused with substantive ideas about evolution and about scientific experiment more generally.The depth and use of historical scholarship on offer here are both remarkable. On depth, Pearce draws from nineteen special collections and archives housed at institutions from California to Manchester, UK. The reference list (published on Pearce's website) runs [End Page 160] to 118 pages and was apparently too long for inclusion in the book. Archival research and lengthy bibliographies are to be expected in today's history of philosophy. But the sheer range of sources Pearce draws from is, by any measure, impressive.The use to which he puts those sources is provocative. Close reading, and in particular argument reconstruction, is usually the stock in trade for historians of philosophy. Pearce takes a different approach (7), seeking interpretive insight through a kind of philosophical network analysis. The nodes are mainly philosophers, scientists, and social critics. Unlike digital network analyses, Pearce connects his nodes by hand, via a great multiplicity of social, educational, and intellectual relations. We learn who studied evolution where, with whom, and when; what specific texts were assigned in classes taken, in classes taught; who attacked whom, who sided with whom; and so on.The resulting networks are rich, though they can be difficult to track due to their complexity. At its best, the book uses networks to produce genuine insights that... (shrink)

Twelve years after his Origin of Species, Charles Darwin published his Descent of Man. If the first book brought the gases of philosophi cal controversy to fever heat, the second exploded them in fiery roars. The issue was the nature, the condition, and the destiny of genus humanum. According to the prevailing Genteel Tradition mankind was a congregation of embodied immortal souls, each with its fixed identity, rights and duties, living together with its immortal neigh bors under conditions imposed by (...) "the laws of nature and of nature's God." Obedience or disobedience of these laws destined all to eternal bliss or eternal damnation. What had come to be called "evolution" was assimilated to the Tradition in diverse interpretations such as John Fiske's, Henry Drummond's and Charles Pierce's. Their common ten dency was to establish "evolution" as somehow the method whereby divine providence ordains the conditions under which man accom plishes his destiny. The most productive competitor of the Genteel Tradition went by various names, with positivism, materialism and naturalism the most telling. Its success as competitor was not due to its theological or metaphysical import. Its success flowed from its mode of observing how effects or results, those undesired as well as those desired, got produced. Unified and generalized, these observations were taken for notations of causal sequences always and everywhere the same, thus for laws of "nature" to whose workings "the providence of God" added nothing productive and could be and was dispensed with. (shrink)

Between the American Revolution and the Civil War many Americans professed to reject altogether the notion of adhering to tradition, perceiving it as a malign European influence. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Americans had possibly become more tradition-minded than their European contemporaries. So argues Michael D. Clark in this incisive work of social and intellectual history. Challenging reigning assumptions, Clark maintains that in the period 1865 to 1942 Americans became more conscious of tradition as a social force, (...) viewed it more positively, and used it more eclectically and selectively for personal and social enrichment. Clark expands upon the existing body of scholarly work by clearly distinguishing tradition from other ways of relating to the past and by studying particular traditions that shaped American thought and culture. He gives primary attention to five individuals who represent the growing influence of tradition in this period: the popular philosopher and historian John Fiske, representing Anglo-American tradition; the Virginia historians Philip Bruce and Lyon G. Tyler, representing a southern variation on a national tradition; the country's leading neo-Gothic architect, Ralph Adams Cram, representing a surprisingly pervasive medieval tradition; and the sociologist Charles H. Cooley, representing views on immigrant traditions. Clark examines how the idea of tradition, initially associated with family home and local town, was carried outward to the larger sphere and applied to promote American expansionism -- territorially, economically, and demographically. Tradition was also used as a weapon by well-entrenched social groups in struggles over power and values. It offered a sense of stability in a time of unsettling technological and sociological change. Ironically, Clark shows, `traditionalists of this era helped to create a modern sensibility by opposing the Victorian linear sense of history and employing instead historical cycles and typology as ways to bridge past and present. The American Discovery of Tradition, 1865--1942 describes a period of time when the social and intellectual forces of tradition and modernity converged in the United States. America was both a nation looking back, now having a memory of its own past, and a nation looking forward to future progress. Clark's book reveals the shaping of the modern American self and its distinctive attitude -- both positive and negative -- toward tradition. (shrink)

Everyday life as a sociological/philosophical concept is widely considered to be both a familiar and yet taken-for-granted subject matter for analytic investigation. In considering the works of three leading scholars, Michel de Certeau, Harold Garfinkel, and John Fiske, one can look toward possible referents to this term. Starting with Certeau’s critical semiotics of the everyday, with its emphasis on such distinctions as place and space as well as strategies and tactics, the everyday can be theorized in terms of (...) contrasts between discourse and practice. Similarly, with Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological emphasis on the practical actor and Fiske’s ethnographic and cultural studies emphasis on local meaning, the everyday can be conceptualized in terms of distinctions between lived order and a theorized version of the everyday. By examining the approaches of these three scholars as well as drawing upon a visual examination of everyday urban scenes, the article concludes with an affirmation of a multi-conceptual and methodological approach to the everyday and with recognition of the everyday as a signifier loaded with a multitude of possibly overlapping meanings. (shrink)

Source: Author: Marjan Khodamoradpour, Alireza Anushiravani Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has been adapted many times by different directors. However, the two prominent adaptations standing out throughout history are Jay Clayton’s 1974 adaptation as the most sincere rendering of the book, and the recently adapted movie by the Broadway director, Baz Luhrmann. The latter adaptation is important in that it has been accomplished in the age of technology, in 3D format, and at the time of the new readings, i.e. cultural (...) or new historical readings, of the novel. This paper is an endeavor to analyze the movie through John Fiske’s theory on media studies. Also, an effort has been made to see whether in this new adaptation, the idea of the new studies of the novel have been shown by the director, or else the movie is a mere representation of struggle for money discussed by the traditional Marxist scholars, metaphorically playing the old tunes. ]]>. (shrink)

In the early 1980s Perth was probably the most important city in Australia for Cultural Studies. Through that decade many intellectuals who became leaders in Australian Cultural Studies and important players in Cultural Studies outside of Australia worked in Perth. Among them were John Fiske, John Frow, John Hartley, Tom O’Regan, Lesley Stern, Graeme Turner and, a decade later, Ien Ang. This essay discusses the presence of these academics in Perth and advances some reasons why Perth (...) became so important to Cultural Studies in Australia. It also discusses the kind of Cultural Studies that became privileged in Perth and considers some of the reasons for this. Perth Cultural Studies in the 1980s was primarily text-based and focused on screen-related popular culture, especially television programs and popular film. Cultural Studies in Perth developed in a city thought of as marginal to Australia, in institutions that were either not universities or, in the case of Murdoch University, was a very new university, by cosmopolitan academics who mostly came from either elsewhere in Australia or from the United Kingdom. (shrink)

THIS PAPER IS THE CO-WINNER OF THE FRED BERGER PRIZE IN PHILOSOPHY OF LAW FOR THE 1999 AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE BEST PUBLISHED PAPER IN THE PREVIOUS TWO YEARS. -/- The conflict between liberal legal theory and critical legal studies (CLS) is often framed as a matter of whether there is a theory of justice that the law should embody which all rational people could or must accept. In a divided society, the CLS critique of this view is overwhelming: (...) there is no such justice that can command universal assent. But the liberal critique of CLS, that it degenerates into an unpalatable moral relativism on which there is no non-arbitrary basis between a justice that underwrites forms of domination such as slavery and a justice that condemns such forms of domination is equally powerful and compelling. I show that there is a way to harmonize both views that is subject to empirical test. -/- First I show that the most widely accepted and influential formulation of liberal justice, John Rawls' Justice as Fairness, in. e.g, A Theory of Justice, cannot avoid the relativistic challenge because it would not be accepted, as a matter of sociological fact, by real people in a divided society once the "veil of Ignorance" is removed and real people step out from the Original Position. To put it differently, different reflective equilibria are inevitable in a divided society. Given the weight that Rawls properly puts on the realizability of a conception of justice and its stability in practice, this is a fatal objection. There can be no divided society that is "well ordered" in Rawls' sense, governed by a shared conception of justice and known to be so governed. -/- I then turn to the most powerful statement of the CLS view, Milton's Fisk's relativistic account in The State and Justice. For Fisk, justice is a compromise between what the dominant groups can compel and what the the subordinate groups will acquiesce to., There is no one such compromise in any given situation, so the account is in that sense relativistic, but more deeply, it is relativistic in that it offers no non-arbitrary, non-question begging way to choose between the official justice of, e.g., a slaveholding society and and the radical justice of the slaves, which has no place for slaveholders as a group or slavery as an institution.All that Fisk can offer is an arbitrary existential choice: I'm with the slaves. (Or the slaveowners.) Most of us would find this disconcerting or even unacceptable. -/- I show that Fisk's general sort of account can be modified to allow for an non-arbitrary choice. Given general facts about human nature, societies based on domination will produce resistance that over the long run will diminish or eliminate various forms of domination. Through a sort of ratchet effect, rights won will be hard if not impossible to reverse. Societies embodying forms of domination can therefore be compared on dimensions of stability: the more domination, the more resistance, and the less stability. Such societies are inferior on the dimension of justice to more emancipatory society on the terms of both kinds of justice, official and radical. -/- This is not question begging because regimes of domination incorporate stability no less than more emancipatory social orders. The choice between official justice embodying domination and radical justice that does not is not arbitrary because it is based on a shared commitment to long term stability. This offers an empirical test of which social orders are more justice, and a prediction that over time, domination will tend to decrease. (shrink)

Kuklick traces the history of philosophic thought in the United States "as typified and dominated by Harvard" from 1860 to 1930. He provides an analysis both of the thought of this period and of the development of Harvard University and its philosophy department. These two types of analyses are interwoven throughout the book, for Kuklick finds that the second type provides an important key to the interpretation that unfolds within the first type. Among the philosophers included are Francis Bowen, Chauncey (...) Wright, John Fiske, F. E. Abbot, C. S. Peirce, William James, Josiah Royce, Hugo Munsterberg, George Palmer, George Santayana, Ralph B. Perry, E. B. Holt, Ernest Hocking, Alfred N. Whitehead, and C. I. Lewis. Royce and James receive the most lengthy examination, and while there is a surprisingly unappreciative discussion of Whitehead’s position, it is followed by an unusually enthusiastic analysis of the philosophy of C. I. Lewis, whom Kuklick considers to be, "with the exception of Peirce... the most capable philosopher in the school we have studied." Though such a counterbalance to the more common tendency to slight the enduring achievements of Lewis’s philosophical insights is refreshing, even his most avid supporters might well hesitate to affirm such a view. Kuklick’s attitude toward Lewis, as well as his focus of attention on James and Royce, may be guided by a dominant theme of the book in general. One of the major philosophic threads which Kuklick uses to weave a unifying bond among many of the philosophers of this period is idealism, while the realistic strains of the philosophers involved are at best slighted, at worst distorted. James as well, of course, as Royce, is interpreted within the framework of idealism. Lewis, as heir to the debate between neo-realism and idealism as carried on by Perry and Royce, is seen by Kuklick as unsuccessfully attempting to repudiate the idealism bequeathed to him by Royce, thus representing the ultimate triumph of idealism over realism. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was a British philosopher, political economist, civil servant, and Member of Parliament.

We will next speak of Liberality. Now this is thought to be the mean state, having for its object-matter Wealth: I mean, the Liberal man is praised not in the circumstances of war, nor in those which constitute the character of perfected self-mastery, nor again in judicial decisions, but in respect of giving and receiving Wealth, chiefly the former. By the term Wealth I mean all those things whose worth is measured by money.

Loneliness in medicine is a serious problem not just for patients, for whom illness is intrinsically isolating, but also for physicians in the contemporary condition of medicine. We explore this problem by investigating the ideal physician-patient relationship, whose analogy with friendship has held enduring normative appeal. Drawing from Talbot Brewer and Nir Ben-Moshe, we argue that this appeal lies in a dynamic form of companionship incompatible with static models of friendship-like physician-patient relationships: a mutual refinement of embodied virtue that draws (...) both persons together. The ideal physician-patient relationship has a dialectical character that fosters each member's improvement of phenomenologically recognizing and embodying moral virtues. A key component of this dynamic is a commitment to the common goal of the patient's health, realized through joint interactivities and conversations over time. The physician's presence to the patient's suffering—understood best as an alienating phenomenological condition for the patient—orients and discloses possibilities for virtuous caregiving by structuring the meanings of the goals, conversations, and joint narrative constitutive of their relationship. Presence to suffering, paradoxically, is perhaps an important prerequisite for this dynamic partnership. These activities dialectically build an interpretive horizon of understanding through which moral goods and character refinement—in and for the other—may become revealed for both persons in their shared being-in-the-world. This analysis of suffering, mood, and revealing of (possible) moral goods has implications for addressing the modern problem of loneliness for patients and physicians, who are increasingly inhibited from building flourishing relationships with each other. (shrink)