Michael Kochin’s radical exploration of rhetoric is built around five fundamental concepts that illuminate how rhetoric functions in the public sphere. To speak persuasively is to bring new things into existence—to create a political movement out of a crowd, or an army out of a mob. _Five Chapters on Rhetoric _explores our path to things through our judgments of character and action. It shows how speech and writing are used to defend the fabric of social life from things (...) or facts. Finally, Kochin shows how the art of rhetoric aids us in clarifying things when we speak to communicate, and helps protect us from their terrible clarity when we speak to maintain our connections to others. Kochin weaves together rhetorical criticism, classical rhetoric, science studies, public relations, and political communication into a compelling overview both of persuasive strategies in contemporary politics and of the nature and scope of rhetorical studies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.1 (2002) 77-89 [Access article in PDF] Time and Judgment in Demosthenes' De Corona 1 - [PDF] Michael S. Kochin Hannah Arendt concludes the first volume of The Life of the Mind thus: If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may (...) reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it were, from that pseudo-divinity named History of the modern age, without denying history's importance but denying its right to being the ultimate judge. Old Cato... has left us a curious phrase which aptly sums up the political principle implied in the enterprise of reclamation. He said: "Victrix causa deis placit, sed victa Catoni" ("The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato"). (1978, 1: 216) 2This article is an exercise in reclamation of the kind that Hannah Arendt describes. I wish to reclaim the cause for which Demosthenes struggled, the cause of democratic freedom, from the judgment of history expressed in the defeat of Athens and her allies at the hands of Philip of Macedon. Though politics is attenuated in the contemporary world, we can understand the peculiar characteristics of political action by reconstructing in our imagination those moments in the past when political life was richest. Here I am going to take up an aspect of political action that is particularly well-illuminated in Demosthenes' speech On the Crown: the role of time in the judgment of political action. 3We can approach Demosthenes' political career for a variety of purposes: The easiest to understand, because it is in many ways the most superficial, is with the motives of the humanist. We study the political speeches of Demosthenes in order to be inspired to value political freedom [End Page 77] and to learn how it can be defended. The trouble with this view is that it assumes that the conditions for political action are present for us, as they were for Demosthenes in the Athens of his time, and that political action is itself something serious men (and now women) ought to undertake. That these two assumptions are edifying and patriotic does not make them true.We can also approach Demosthenes as an exercise in historical science (that is, historische Wissenschaft). The scientific historian wants to learn the facts about the rise of Philip's hegemony over Greece. The scientific historian therefore prefers objectivity to edification. As George Cawkwell, a leading participant in the Demosthenesstreit in the '60s and '70s, wrote, "Moral edification and history can be kept separate" (1969, 166).I find this the most difficult purpose to understand, because it is unclear how this scientific-historical perspective can be connected with the human-all-too-human perspectives of the participants. When, for example, Cawkwell writes of the age of Demosthenes that "The central fact of the age is military, not moral—viz. the huge preponderance in military potential of the Macedonian state over the power of any Greek state," he cites a fact whose truth he himself perceives in part from Philip's victory over the Thebans and Athenians at Chaeroneia in 338 B.C.E. and Alexander's campaign against Thebes in 335. 4 Cawkwell does not trouble himself to explain how Demosthenes or anybody else could possibly have learned the fact of Philip's greater military strength and resources prior to these events. Nor does Cawkwell refute the claim that given Philip's failures before Perinthos and Byzantium in 340, at the very time that Demosthenes led the Athenians to war it was reasonable to suppose Philip much weaker than he had seemed, or seems to us (Pickard-Cambridge 1979, 491). 5 He does not even show how Philip could have known his own capabilities prior to his success. It is thus unclear what use historical-scientific judgment could be, since it is not clear how to relate historical-scientific judgment to the judgment of participants in human affairs.I should stop here, not least because I... (shrink)

CONSIDER THE PROBLEM OF INTEGRITY: we all aspire to be true to ourselves, to be today what we were yesterday, to fulfill our promises. One way of addressing the need for integrity, the need to be a whole person, is to think about what it would take to make an intelligible narrative out of one’s experiences. As Charles Taylor writes, “It has often been remarked that making sense of one’s life as a story is... not an optional extra; that our (...) lives exist also in this space of questions, which only a coherent narrative can answer.” What is intelligible about a human life, on this view, is its life story. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.1 (2002) 77-89 [Access article in PDF] Time and Judgment in Demosthenes' De Corona 1 - [PDF] Michael S. Kochin Hannah Arendt concludes the first volume of The Life of the Mind thus: If judgment is our faculty for dealing with the past, the historian is the inquiring man who by relating it sits in judgment over it. If that is so, we may (...) reclaim our human dignity, win it back, as it were, from that pseudo-divinity named History of the modern age, without denying history's importance but denying its right to being the ultimate judge. Old Cato... has left us a curious phrase which aptly sums up the political principle implied in the enterprise of reclamation. He said: "Victrix causa deis placit, sed victa Catoni" ("The victorious cause pleased the gods, but the defeated one pleases Cato"). (1978, 1: 216) 2This article is an exercise in reclamation of the kind that Hannah Arendt describes. I wish to reclaim the cause for which Demosthenes struggled, the cause of democratic freedom, from the judgment of history expressed in the defeat of Athens and her allies at the hands of Philip of Macedon. Though politics is attenuated in the contemporary world, we can understand the peculiar characteristics of political action by reconstructing in our imagination those moments in the past when political life was richest. Here I am going to take up an aspect of political action that is particularly well-illuminated in Demosthenes' speech On the Crown: the role of time in the judgment of political action. 3We can approach Demosthenes' political career for a variety of purposes: The easiest to understand, because it is in many ways the most superficial, is with the motives of the humanist. We study the political speeches of Demosthenes in order to be inspired to value political freedom [End Page 77] and to learn how it can be defended. The trouble with this view is that it assumes that the conditions for political action are present for us, as they were for Demosthenes in the Athens of his time, and that political action is itself something serious men (and now women) ought to undertake. That these two assumptions are edifying and patriotic does not make them true.We can also approach Demosthenes as an exercise in historical science (that is, historische Wissenschaft). The scientific historian wants to learn the facts about the rise of Philip's hegemony over Greece. The scientific historian therefore prefers objectivity to edification. As George Cawkwell, a leading participant in the Demosthenesstreit in the '60s and '70s, wrote, "Moral edification and history can be kept separate" (1969, 166).I find this the most difficult purpose to understand, because it is unclear how this scientific-historical perspective can be connected with the human-all-too-human perspectives of the participants. When, for example, Cawkwell writes of the age of Demosthenes that "The central fact of the age is military, not moral—viz. the huge preponderance in military potential of the Macedonian state over the power of any Greek state," he cites a fact whose truth he himself perceives in part from Philip's victory over the Thebans and Athenians at Chaeroneia in 338 B.C.E. and Alexander's campaign against Thebes in 335. 4 Cawkwell does not trouble himself to explain how Demosthenes or anybody else could possibly have learned the fact of Philip's greater military strength and resources prior to these events. Nor does Cawkwell refute the claim that given Philip's failures before Perinthos and Byzantium in 340, at the very time that Demosthenes led the Athenians to war it was reasonable to suppose Philip much weaker than he had seemed, or seems to us (Pickard-Cambridge 1979, 491). 5 He does not even show how Philip could have known his own capabilities prior to his success. It is thus unclear what use historical-scientific judgment could be, since it is not clear how to relate historical-scientific judgment to the judgment of participants in human affairs.I should stop here, not least because I... (shrink)

"Examines concepts for persuasive communication.

Acceptance or rejection of factual assertions is a far more important process than logical validation of arguments. Not only are assertions more persuasive than arguments; this is desirable, since we want our beliefs and actions to be reasonable and not just rational. When do we resort to argument? Real speeches heavy on arguments aim to present the speaker as calm, serious, and knowledgeable. In public life, one argues not in order to demonstrate the claim for which one is arguing, but (...) to show that one shares the common prejudices or values that appear in the presuppositions and conclusions of one’s argument, and to demonstrate mastery of the subject matter by displaying relevant knowledge in coherently organized detail. Arguing is thus a way of presenting facts and principles so as to show one’s character as worthy of trust. (shrink)

The ancient philosophers aimed to turn us away from thinking about particularizing affection to thinking about justifiable human relations. The aim of their protreptic discourses was to get their readers, who were citizens, sons, and fathers, to think about their lives by putting these relations into question. I show how this conversion works and explore its political consequences by reading the accounts of friendship in Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and then comparing those accounts with the views on the causes and (...) justifications of human relations of Rousseau, of Christians and post-Christian Kantians, and of the Hebrew Bible and its Rabbinic commentators. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Weeds: Cultivating the Imagination in Medieval Arabic Political PhilosophyMichael S. KochinAny reader of Plato’s dialogues in their entirety feels the constant tug of two very different solar motions. In the Laws the young field-legates (agronomoi) of the city move in a twelve-month cycle through each of the divisions of the city’s territory (Laws 760) in obedience to the law and the gods of the city. Socrates, too, moves through (...) the city, questioning each citizen about the beliefs concerning the virtues implanted by the city’s laws and myths. Socrates, like the field-legates, moves in “obedience” to the command of the sun-god Apollo, a command that Socrates claims to have received through the god’s oracle at Delphi.1 To live in the light of the sun of reason is only possible within a city totally ordered in imitation of heavenly order—so speaks the Laws.2 To follow the sun is to move in opposition to the shadows of artificial light that dominate all actual and even possible cities—so speaks the Apology and, more explicitly, the Republic.Our learned prejudices about these two solar motions lead us to divide Plato’s thought into periods of composition. Socratic heliotropy belongs to the dialogues of Plato’s earlier period, especially the earliest, the Apology, scholars believe; the city itself in seasonal motion belongs to the dialogues of Plato’s later period, and especially the latest, his Laws. The Republic, which describes the best city as an artificially lighted cave, whose inhabitants ought nonetheless to be ruled by the philosopher-king who has, at least momentarily, seen the sun, belongs to Plato’s middle period. [End Page 399]Whatever the merits of this family of readings as interpretations of Plato, 3 they use a scholar’s device to avoid coming to terms with a genuine tension. The two modes of solar motion represent two different modes of relating philosophy to politics, even under their modern guises of theory and practice. Either the philosopher is to bring the political into rational order, or he is to bring his own life into rational order against the disorders and deliberate confusions of the political. Either the philosopher is to weed the fields of the city of disorderly weeds, or he himself is a weed or, more politely, a wildflower, pushing up toward the sun through the broken asphalt of politics.Plato himself seems to resolve this tension by distinguishing between the philosopher’s duties in the best city and in other cities. As Socrates says in the Republic:Observe, then, Glaucon, that we won’t be doing injustice to the philosophers who grow up among us, but we will say just things to them, when we compel them to care and guard for the others. For we will say that those who are of their sort who grow up in the other cities fittingly do not share in the labors therein. For they grew in them spontaneously though the regime in each did not intend it, and the spontaneously grown has a just claim not to be eager to repay the cost of its nurture to anybody, since it owes [its] nurture to nobody. But you we reared up, just as in hives, as leaders and kings for yourselves and the rest of the city, and you have been educated better and more perfectly than those and are more able to have a share of both [philosophy and rule]. Each of you must then go down in turn to the common dwelling of the others and accustom yourself to the shadows there. For when you are accustomed, you will see in a myriad ways better than those there, and you will know the images, that they are images and of what they are images, on account of your having seen the true things that concern the beautiful, the just and the good. 4Yet Plato’s Socrates availed himself only partially of the just claim of the philosopher in an actual city that contributed nothing to his nurture. While Socrates took only a minimal part in the official business of the city, he never hesitated to [End... (shrink)

WE SCHOLARS WHO WRITE ABOUT THE Republic have found much to say about the education of Plato’s warriors. We carefully and thoughtfully relate their virtues to those of the Republic ’s philosopher-kings, and even to those of Plato’s Socrates. We have found much less to say about Plato’s peculiar account of that for which they are educated— war. I agree with Leon Craig that war and spiritedness are central to the argument of the Republic. Indeed, I will contend, Socrates’ three (...) different accounts of war reflect and, in a way, complete the central argument of the Republic. Yet Craig and other modern scholars of the cultivation of Plato’s warriors have very little to say on Socrates’ three accounts of the city at war. (shrink)

Gender and Rhetoric in Plato's Thought explores the relation between Plato's Republic and Laws on the set of issues that the Laws itself marks out as fundamental to the comparison: the unity of the virtues, the role of women, and the place of the family. Plato aims to persuade men to abandon the view of the good life that Greek cities and their laws inculcate as the only life worth living for those who would be real men and not effeminate (...) weaklings. What we can learn about Plato is the importance for him of understanding the nature of persuasion in order to come to terms with gender justice and the apparent plurality of human goods. What we learn from Plato is that to tackle the issues that arise in our new political community of men and women we must comprehend the proper bases and limits of persuasion. (shrink)

Maistre’s Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg is modeled on Plato’s Laws. Plato and Maistre both demand the political control of natural inquiry, and implement these controls through theodictic conversation. Maistre, following the lead of Plato’s legislator, publishes an exemplary conversation about providence between a young man tempted by an atheistic Enlightenment and two older, wiser, and more learned men of affairs. Maistre defends providentialism from materialist interpretations of natural science even as Plato defended it from ancient materialism.

The language and ideals of Greek political life identified citizenship with manliness. Plato saw this engendering of politics as a threat to the unity, stability, and excellence of a city, for the unmoderated manliness of actual cities, he claimed, fosters bigoted patriotism, female dissipation, and unnatural vice. Moreover, these cities' civic pieties could not match the egoistic appeal of tyranny, for the Greek ideal of masculinity itself points to tyranny as the most manly life. ;Plato's project, as I will argue (...) through a study of the Republic and the Laws, is to harness spirit and desire to reason in order to rescue cities from these tragedies of engendered politics. Such a rationalization requires a proper understanding of the "male" passions and their subjugation to a disgendered reason. Plato argues not only that the engendered politics of Greek cities treats women unjustly, but also that by excluding females and the feminine these cities make their male citizens vicious and unhappy. ;Since Plato apparently contradicts the egalitarian views of the Republic in his later dialogue, the Laws, I aim to recover the single intention behind two political proposals differing widely in detail. Plato's teaching on gender and politics has been subject to a wide variety of criticism in recent years, but both his feminist and anti-feminist interpreters have generally failed to appreciate the thick and profound political psychology which stands behind his radical views on gender and politics. Plato describes both soul and city as complexes of frequently contradictory desires for whom unity of purpose must be achieved. The lives of men and women in actual cities display distinct and apparently incompatible virtues, but the rationalization of politics requires that these virtues be reconciled in a single regime for both soul and city. ;In conclusion, I will argue that arguments for gender justice, that, like Plato's, are founded in a critique of the pretensions of masculinity, provide more powerful arguments for sexual egalitarianism than more "feminist" arguments that attack patriarchy simply as unjust toward women. (shrink)

Blattberg is my former Tel Aviv colleague, a bilingual Canadian patriot, and a student of Charles Taylor and Isaiah Berlin. His work attacks the neutralist and pluralist responses to the political problem posed by the plurality of values. The neutralists elaborate procedures for realizing the shared political things that do not depend on our varied value-conceptions. The neutralists understand the fundamental political act as the juridical adjudication of individuals’ rights-claims. The neutralists’ view is thus only ambiguously related to democracy understood (...) as the procedure by which the people, through their representatives, govern themselves. Moreover, the neutralists falsely believe that the most basic concerns of individuals are those that can be evaluated atomistically rather than holistically: for them, distributing money equally is a greater concern than fostering the proper conditions for friendship. (shrink)

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This collection of essays, offered in honor of the distinguished career of prominent political philosophy professor Clifford Orwin, brings together internationally renowned scholars to provide a wide context and discuss various aspects of the virtue of “humanity” through the history of political philosophy.

This book explores Dostoevsky as a political thinker from his religious and philosophical foundation to nineteenth-century European politics and how themes that he had examined are still relevant for us today.

The overarching theme of Michael Kochin's Five Chapters on Rhetoric seems to be that classical rhetoric is still important. With the help of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Gorgias, Callicles, Protagoras, Isocrates, Cicero, Quintilian, and others, Kochin makes the case that when thinking about rhetoric, we ought to listen to the ancients—at least most of the time. While the overarching theme deals with the classical tradition, the book's central argument is focused squarely on current rhetorical practices. The proper role (...) of rhetoric, Kochin argues, is to allow "the facts" to "speak for themselves" (164). He attempts to establish this claim by exploring five concepts that are, or ought to be, central to our .. (shrink)

According to the received account of guilt in the philosophical literature, one cannot feel guilt unless one takes oneself to have done something morally wrong. But ordinary people feel guilt in many cases in which they do not take themselves to have done anything morally wrong. In this paper, I focus on one kind of guilt without perceived wrongdoing, guilt about being merely causally responsible for a bad state-of-affairs. I go on to present a novel account of guilt that explains (...) guilt about mere causal responsibility, according to which guilt represents part of the self as bound up with what is bad. (shrink)

Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics is an introduction to contemporary ethical issues in health care, designed especially for Canadian audiences. The book is organized around six key concepts: beneficence, autonomy, truth-telling, confidentiality, justice, and integrity. Each of these concepts is explained and discussed with reference to professional and legal norms. The discussion is then supplemented by case studies that exemplify the relevant concepts and show how each applies in health care and nursing practice. This new fourth edition includes an (...) added chapter on end-of-life issues, and it is revised throughout to reflect the latest developments on topics such as global health ethics, cultural competence, social media, and palliative sedation. (shrink)

What is the relation between small-scale collaborative plans and the execution of those plans within interactive contexts? I argue here that joint attention has a key role in explaining how shared plans and shared intentions are executed in interactive contexts. Within singular action, attention plays the functional role of enabling intentional action to be guided by a prior intention. Within interactive joint action, it is joint attention, I argue, that plays a similar functional role of enabling the agents to act (...) in a collaborative way such that their actions are rationally guided by a prior shared intention. This understanding of joint attention – as having a key functional role of enabling the rational guidance of joint intentional action by a prior shared intention – allows for an alternative understanding of the kind of minimal cooperation that infants can engage in. On this understanding, infants’ capacity to engage in joint actions is already an incipient capacity to engage in rational and intentional joint actions, albeit a capacity that is necessarily scaffolded by an adult rational co-partner. (shrink)

Excerpt from Die Ethik des Aristoteles: In Ihrer Systematischen Einheit und in Ihrer Geschichtlichen Stellung Untersucht 1. Die Tapferkeit. Keine systematische Anordnung der Tugenden Die sittliche Gesinnung als Motiv der Tapferkeit - die Tapferkeit als richtiges Masshalten. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing (...) imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.". (shrink)

Using William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the play-within-the play, The Murder of Gonzago, as a case study, this essay argues that theatrical utterances constitute a special case of language usage not previously elucidated: the utterance of a statement with propositional content in theatre functions as an event. In short, the propositional content of a particular p (e.g. p1, p2, p3 …), whether or not it is true, is only understood—and understood to be true—if p1 is uttered in a particular time, place, (...) and situation (i.e. during a theatrical event); otherwise, the propositional content in those theatrical utterances can either be false or contingently true. (shrink)

Als Philosoph, Literat, Prediger und Pädagoge gehört Herder zu den bedeutendsten Vertretern der Weimarer Klassik. Diese aktuelle und kenntnisreiche Biografie bringt Leben und Werk Herders einem breiteren Publikum nahe.

Michael Dummett's three John Dewey Lectures--"The Concept of Truth," "Statements About the Past," and "The Metaphysics of Time"--were delivered at Columbia University in the spring of 2002. Revised and expanded, the lectures are presented here along with two new essays by Dummett, "Truth: Deniers and Defenders" and "The Indispensability of the Concept of Truth." In _Truth and the Past,_ Dummett clarifies his current positions on the metaphysical issue of realism and the philosophy of language. He is best known as (...) a proponent of antirealism, which loosely characterizes truth as what we are capable of knowing. The events of the past and statements about them are critical tests of an antirealist position. These essays continue and significantly contribute to Dummett's work. (shrink)

What is the relation between joint attention and common knowledge? On the one hand, the relation seems tight: the easiest and most reliable way of knowing something in common with another is for you and that other to be attentively aware of what you are together experiencing. On the other hand, they couldn’t seem further apart: joint attention is a mere perceptual phenomena that infants are capable of engaging in from nine months of age, whereas common knowledge is a cognitive (...) phenomenon involving (so it seems) complex, overlapping metarepresentational states that require the kind of sophisticated mindreading skills that developmental psychology has shown to be beyond the capabilities of young children. In 'The Shared World: Perceptual Common Knowledge, Demonstrative Communication, and Shared Social Space', Axel Seemann attempts, inter alia, to makensense of this conundrum. (shrink)

_A portion of the revenue from this book’s sales will be donated to Doctors Without Borders to assist the humanitarian work of nurses, doctors, and other health care providers in the fight against COVID-19 and beyond._ _Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics_ is an introduction to contemporary ethical issues in health care, designed especially for Canadian audiences. The book is organized around six key concepts: beneficence, autonomy, truth-telling, confidentiality, justice, and integrity. Each of these concepts is explained and discussed with (...) reference to professional and legal norms. The discussion is then supplemented by case studies that exemplify the relevant concepts and show how each applies in health care and nursing practice. This new fourth edition includes an added chapter on end-of-life issues, and it is revised throughout to reflect the latest developments on topics such as global health ethics, cultural competence, social media, and palliative sedation, as well as ethical issues relating to COVID-19. (shrink)

In this paper, we explore how a conversational theory of moral responsibility can provide illuminating resources for building a theory about the nature and norms of moral forgiveness.

A paradigm-shifting work that revolutionizes our understanding of the origins and structure of science. Captivatingly written, interwoven with tantalizing illustrations and historical vignettes ranging from Newton's alchemy to quantum mechanics to the storm surge of Hurricane Sandy, Michael Strevens's wholly original investigation of science asks two fundamental questions: Why is science so powerful? And why did it take so long, two thousand years after the invention of philosophy and mathematics, for the human race to start using science to learn (...) the secrets of nature? The Knowledge Machine's radical answer is that science calls on its practitioners to do something irrational: by willfully ignoring religion, theoretical beauty, and, especially, philosophy-essentially stripping away all previous knowledge-scientists embrace an unnaturally narrow method of inquiry, channeling unprecedented energy into observation and experimentation. Like Yuval Harari's Sapiens or Thomas Kuhn's 1962 classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The Knowledge Machine overturns much of what we thought we knew about the origins of the modern world. (shrink)

Aphorismen-Bücher sind nicht systematisch und widersprechen eigentlich der Konsequenz des Denkens. Nietzsche indes fordert das «rück- und vorsichtige» Lesen der seinen, und in der Tat: In der Morgenröthe erschließen sich mehrere Gewebe von Verweisen. Hervor tritt eine Technik: mögliche Strukturen anzubieten, wie zum Beispiel Bildfolgen und Zahlenkomposition. Kontexte finden sich, die erstens alles Reden, selbst das philosophische, von den lästigen Verpflichtungen auf logische und empirische Sachverhalte und zu anderen, etwa ästhetischen Möglichkeiten des Denkens befreien, und die zweitens anbieten, den Kalkül (...) durch Zahlen- oder Bilderspiel zu ersetzen. Die kaleidoskopisch wechselnden Sinn-Angebote lassen die Wahrheitsfrage überflüssig und poetische Ideen sichtbar werden. (shrink)

It is time to transcend the arid debate between rationality and ir-, a-, or non-rationality as our basic assumption about human agency.1 There are powerful arguments and extensive evidence both for and against the rationality assumption, with heavily defended entrenchments on both sides. Managers and management scholars continually make at least tacit assumptions about how they expect others to behave. If only we could have in both theory and practice the coherence and precision of rational models as well as the (...) descriptive richness of ‘behavioural’ approaches. The message of this paper is that perhaps we can. The advent of consciousness studies and, more recently, neuroeconomics would seem to indicate the way forward to transcend the opposition in some kind of synthesis. This paper investigates rationality in the light of Daniel Dennett’s thesis that it is at the core of all intentionality that is the defining characteristic of mental phenomena. Neuroeconomics seeks to enhance understanding of agency by investigating new insights on the materialist basis of mental phenomenology in the neurophysiology of the brain and nervous system. Experimental evidence mapping intentional states onto neurophysiological states is emerging, some researchers even claiming to have found a ‘neurophysiological utility function’. Dennett closes the circuit by locating the existence of brain-hardware supporting satisficing intentional choice and action as the output of evolutionary ‘design’. The dichotomy is transcended: satisficing models (of which normative optimising rational choice models are a reasonable abstraction) are a good basis both for statistical prediction of the behaviour of large numbers, and as the first base on which to construct and refine a model of expectation-formation about particular types of agent and then of individual agents. Using both the old (‘external’) and the new (sub-individual) behaviourism as well as work on unpacking the abstract notion of rationality, we can concretise optimising rational choice both generally, for epistemic theory-building purposes, and specifically for understanding and deploying models of managerial agency. Such models will need to incorporate emotion with cognition in an integrated approach. (shrink)

The original edition of this book describes it as an attempt to develop a comprehensive understanding of traditional Judaism in conversation with contemporary ...

Die Frage nach der Verhaltnisbestimmung von Spiritualitat und Intellektualitat beruhrt eine sehr alte theologische Fragestellung, namlich die Bestimmung des Verhaltnisses von Glauben und Denken beziehungsweise von Glauben und Vernunft. Das jeweilige Zueinander von Spiritualitat und Intellektualitat kann nur dann als gelungen beurteilt werden, wenn es so geschieht, dass die Einheit beider gewahrt wird. Das Werk des katholischen Philosophen Richard Schaeffler kann als ein konsequenter Versuch interpretiert werden, die Einheit von Spiritualitat und Intellektualitat zu wahren. Die Arbeit geht diesem Versuch Richard (...) Schaefflers nach und gibt so eine erste Einfuhrung in das Werk des Philosophen.". (shrink)

Drawing on work of the past decade, this volume brings together articles from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science, and many other branches of the biological sciences. The volume delves into the latest theoretical controversies as well as burning questions of contemporary social importance. The issues considered include the nature of evolutionary theory, biology and ethics, the challenge from religion, and the social implications of biology today (in particular the Human Genome Project).

Editorial NoteThis paper was read by Michael Dummett at Leiden University on September 26, 1992 at the invitation by Göran Sundholm to address the topic mentioned in the title. Dummett’s lecture was part of a workshop, Meaning Theory and Intuitionism, with 12 invited speakers over three days. After the workshop, Dummett gave a copy of the manuscript to Sundholm together with permission to publish it. At the time, nothing came of the publication plans, nor did Dummett publish it in (...) any other form. The text has remained virtually unknown, and apart from a lecture of Per Martin-Löf, also at Leiden, on the same topic, it has received no scholarly attention. We are indebted to Dummett’s literary executor, Professor Ian Rumfitt, of All Souls College, Oxford, who after nearly three decades confirmed the earlier permission to publish.Göran SundholmAnsten Klev. (shrink)

Normative realists tend to consider evolutionary debunking arguments as posing epistemological challenges to their view. By understanding Sharon Street’s ‘Darwinian dilemma’ argument in this way, they have overlooked and left unanswered her unique scientific challenge to normative realism. This paper counters Street’s scientific challenge and shows that normative realism is compatible with an evolutionary view of human evaluative judgment. After presenting several problems that her adaptive link account of evaluative judgments faces, I outline and defend an evolutionary byproduct perspective on (...) evaluative judgment. I then argue that a consideration of levels of analysis in biological–behavioral explanation suggests that the realist who adopts the byproduct perspective I outline is not at a prima facie disadvantage to the normative anti-realist on grounds of parsimony. This perspective, I suggest, can enable normative realists to answer evolutionary challenges to their view. (shrink)

Hume famously warned us that the ‘[The] ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry’. Or, again, Newton: ‘Hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity … and I frame no hypotheses.’ Aristotelian science was concerned with just such questions, the specification of occult qualities, the real essences that answer the question What is matter, etc?, the preoccupation with circular definitions such as dormative virtues, and so on. The (...) rise of modern science is usually seen as a break with the sterility of Aristotelianism, so what exactly is it that modern science does discover, if it is not the essential nature of matter, of force, of energy, of space and time? A famous answer was provided by Poincaré: ‘The true relations between these real objects are the only reality we can attain.’ This is often regarded as the manifesto of so-called structural realism, as espoused in recent years by John Worrall, for example ). In response to the arguments of Larry Laudan against convergent realism, Worrall points to the continuity in the formal relations between elements of reality expressed by mathematical equations, while the intrinsic nature of these elements of reality gets constantly revised. (shrink)

Should the recreational use of drugs such as marijuana, cocaine, heroin, and LSD, be prohibited by law? Prohibitionists answer yes. They usually argue that drug use is extremely harmful both to drug users and to society in general, and possibly even immoral, and they believe that these facts provide sufficient reasons for prohibition. Legalizers answer no. They usually give one or more of three arguments: First, some argue that drug use is not as harmful as prohibitionists believe, and even that (...) it is sometimes beneficial. Second, some argue that drug prohibition “does not work”, i.e., is not very successful in preventing drug use and/or has a number of very bad consequences. Lastly, some argue that drug prohibition is unjust or violates rights. I won’t attempt to discuss all these arguments here. Instead, I will focus on what seem to me the three most prominent arguments in the drug legalization debate: first, the argument that drugs should be outlawed because of the harm they cause to drug users; second, the argument that they should be outlawed because they harm people other than the user; and third, the argument that drugs should be legalized because drug prohibition violates rights. I shall focus on the moral/philosophical issues that these [134] arguments raise, rather than medical or sociological issues. I shall show that the two arguments for prohibition fail, while the third argument, for legalization, succeeds. (shrink)