Argues that Americans have found that economic abundance is not fulfilling in itself, and suggests ways to change how we think about money and the simple life.

Despite the United States' economic abundance, "the good life" has proved elusive. Millions long for more time for friends and family, for reading or walking or relaxing. Instead our lives are frantic, hectic, and harried. In Graceful Simplicity, Jerome M. Segal, philosopher, political activist, and former staff member of the House Budget Committee, expands and deepens the contemporary discourse on simple living. He articulates his conception of a politics of simplicity--one rooted in beauty, peace of mind, appreciativeness, and generosity of (...) spirit. (shrink)

1 Action Theory q What is it to be an agent? • What is it to be passive rather than active? q What is an action? • On what basis do we make the distinction ...

Human agency -- Alienness : experiencing one's own incoherence -- Alienness, understanding, and self-deception -- God's project of self-deception -- Alienation and political agency -- How we fooled ourselves into believing in progress -- The monetary illusion -- The good life and economic activity -- Human activity : a molecular approach to action theory.

La théorie générale du contrôle et de la communication, mieux connue sous le nom de ‘cybernétique’, est habituellement considérée comme le fruit des recherches liées à la deuxième guerre mondiale aux Etats-Unis, menées principalement par le mathématicien américain Norbert Wiener . Dans le cadre de son travail pour l'armée, Wiener a développé une théorie générale des régulations. Nous nous intéressons aux origines de la théorie générale des régulations en Allemagne , montrant qu'elle prend naissance dans un contexte bien différent.Hermann Schmidt (...) , le principal acteur dans ce domaine en Allemagne, bien que physicien de formation, formula sa version de la théorie du contrôle à la fin des années 30, grâce aux différents systèmes de régulation qu'il était amené à étudier au bureau des brevets du Reich . A partir de l'analyse d'une combinaison de facteurs contextuels, nationaux, politiques et contingents, nous proposons une explication de la moindre influence de la théorie de Schmidt.The general theory of control and communication, better known as ‘cybernetics’, is usually considered to be the result of research done during the Second World War in the United States, principally by the American mathematician, Norbert Wiener . Based on his military work, Wiener developed a general mathematical theory of control and feedback system. We discuss the origins of control and feedback theory in Germany , showing that it arose in a very different context.Hermann Schmidt , the principal actor in Germany, though trained as a physicist, formulated his version of control theory based on his extensive hands-on experience with control mechanisms gained during his work as a patent officer in the late 1930s at the German State Patent Office. We also offer an explanation for why Schmidt's general theory of control did not have a great influence based on a combination of national, political, and contingent contextual factors. (shrink)

Résumé La théorie générale du contrôle et de la communication, mieux connue sous le nom de ‘cybernétique’, est habituellement considérée comme le fruit des recherches liées à la deuxième guerre mondiale aux Etats-Unis, menées principalement par le mathématicien américain Norbert Wiener (1894–1964). Dans le cadre de son travail pour l'armée, Wiener a développé une théorie générale des régulations. Nous nous intéressons aux origines de la théorie générale des régulations en Allemagne (Allgemeine Regelungskunde), montrant qu'elle prend naissance dans un contexte bien (...) différent. Hermann Schmidt (1894–1968), le principal acteur dans ce domaine en Allemagne, bien que physicien de formation, formula sa version de la théorie du contrôle à la fin des années 30, grâce aux différents systèmes de régulation qu'il était amené à étudier au bureau des brevets du Reich (Reichspatentamt). A partir de l'analyse d'une combinaison de facteurs contextuels, nationaux, politiques et contingents, nous proposons une explication de la moindre influence de la théorie de Schmidt. (shrink)

In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

First published in 1977, Emotion, Thought and Therapy is a study of Hume and Spinoza and the relationship of philosophical theories of the emotions to psychological theories of therapy. Jerome Neu argues that the Spinozists are closer to the truth; that is, that thoughts are of greater importance than feelings in the classification and discrimination of emotional states. He then contends that if the Spinozists are closer to the truth, we have the beginning of an argument to show that Freudian (...) or analytic therapies make philosophic sense. Throughout the book, careful attention is paid to modern discussions in philosophy of mind and psychology, and materials from anthropology and other relevant disciplines are considered. At the centre of the discussion is the notion of ‘thought-dependence’. Therapies for psychological disorders are placed along a spectrum in accordance with the role they assign to thoughts. The Spinozist view of the emotions can be seen as at the extreme thought end of a corresponding spectrum of theories of the emotions. The book suggests that this stream may help explain the spectrum of therapeutic theories and the possibilities that exist for psychological development and change. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy, psychology and counselling. (shrink)

Abstract:The paper seeks to defend Telic Egalitarianism (TE) by distinguishing two distinct categories into which typical objections to it fall. According to one category of objections (for example, levelling down) TE isgroundless. That is, there is simply no good reason to think that inequality as such is bad. The other type of objections to TE focuses on itscounterintuitiveimplications: it is forced to condemn inequalities between ourselves and long-dead Inca peasants, or between us and worse-off aliens from other planets. The paper (...) shows that once we unpack these two types of objections to TE they become much less persuasive. (shrink)

This title was first published in 2002. This collection of essays aims to present a wide range of interpretations of central themes in Spinoza's philosophy. Philosophical interpretations of Spinoza divide into three general categories. The first sets Spinoza within what is taken to be his historical context. Special emphasis is laid here on aspects of his teaching that seem to bear the influence of Spinoza's own education (and self-education), either through concepts assimilated into his own thinking, or those he undertook (...) to refute and displace. A second interpretative approach uses analytical tools in an attempt to reconstruct Spinozistic issues and theories critically. Finally, there are philosophers who explore Spinoza's texts in their own terms, attempting to present a coherent picture of one or more aspects of Spinoza's teaching. Given the broad span of issues with which Spinoza deals, the latter is often the most difficult track to follow. The 25 articles in this collection exemplify these three attitudes to Spinoza interpretation, though most avail themselves of more than one. In making the selection the editors preferred studies that treat their subject as a viable, endurable philosophical issue, whether the writer accepts Spinoza's presentation or highlights his difficulties. On each issue the articles critically analyze the texts, rather than simply portraying the Spinozistic ideas they express. (shrink)

Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...

This book offers a radical reappraisal of the nature and significance of Wittgenstein’s thought about ethics from a variety of different perspectives. The book includes essays on Wittgenstein’s early remarks on ethics in the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,_ on his 1929 "Lecture on Ethics", and on various aspects of Wittgenstein’s later views on ethics in the _Philosophical Investigations_ and elsewhere. Together, the essays in this volume provide a comprehensive assessment of Wittgenstein’s moral thought throughout his work, its continuity and development between his (...) early and later work, and its connections with other aspects of his thought. Featuring fourteen original contributions written by internationally renowned Wittgenstein scholars, _Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought _opens up a new understanding of ethics that diverges from prevailing views prominent in contemporary discussions of the subject. (shrink)

Current textbooks in formal semantics are all versions of, or introductions to, the same paradigm in semantic theory: Montague Grammar. Knowledge of Meaning is based on different assumptions and a different history. It provides the only introduction to truth- theoretic semantics for natural languages, fully integrating semantic theory into the modern Chomskyan program in linguistic theory and connecting linguistic semantics to research elsewhere in cognitive psychology and philosophy. As such, it better fits into a modern graduate or undergraduate program in (...) linguistics, cognitive science, or philosophy. Furthermore, since the technical tools it employs are much simpler to teach and to master, Knowledge of Meaning can be taught by someone who is not primarily a semanticist. Linguistic semantics cannot be studied as a stand-alone subject but only as part of cognitive psychology, the authors assert. It is the study of a particular human cognitive competence governing the meanings of words and phrases. Larson and Segal argue that speakers have unconscious knowledge of the semantic rules of their language, and they present concrete, empirically motivated proposals about a formal theory of this competence based on the work of Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson. The theory is extended to a wide range of constructions occurring in natural language, including predicates, proper nouns, pronouns and demonstratives, quantifiers, definite descriptions, anaphoric expressions, clausal complements, and adverbs. Knowledge of Meaning gives equal weight to philosophical, empirical, and formal discussions. It addresses not only the empirical issues of linguistic semantics but also its fundamental conceptual questions, including the relation of truth to meaning and the methodology of semantic theorizing. Numerous exercises are included in the book. (shrink)

The topic of this paper is the semantic structure of belief reports of the form 'a believes that p'. it is argued that no existing theory of these sentences satisfactorily accounts for anaphoric relations linking expressions within the embedded complement sentence to expressions outside. a new account of belief reports is proposed which assigns to embedded expressions their normal semantic values but which also exploits frege's idea of using senses to explain the apparent failures of extensionality in the reports.

In ethics, Wittgenstein, early and late, emphasized changes of attitude over questions about how to act. He once told his friend Rhees: “One of my sister’s characteristics is that whenever she hears of something awful that has happened, her impulse is to ask what one can do about it, what she can do to help or remedy. This is a tendency in her of which I disapprove.” Instead, he says elsewhere: “If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. (...) But the most important & effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us […].” Such attitudinal changes involve a kind of clarity of thought for Wittgenstein, and his understanding of them can be explained in part by reference to his later discussion about aspect-perception. Moral problems can disappear in a way that resembles the disappearance of the rabbit-aspect of when the duck-aspect dawns. I compare moral clarification to logical-philosophical clarification. Both cases involve propositions that say nothing, but rather shed light on what other propositions say—tautologies, grammatical remarks, and philosophical elucidations on the one hand, clarificatory moral remarks like ‘think of her as someone’s daughter’ on the other. I argue that this gives a practical edge to Wittgenstein’s moral thought, a tool with which to think through moral difficulties. (shrink)

In a recent article, Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve argue that prioritarianism fails to account for the shift in moral significance in gains to individuals in interpersonal as compared to intrapersonal cases. In this article, I show that the priority view escapes this objection but in a way that deprives it of (some of) its anti-egalitarian stance. Despite Otsuka and Voorhoeve, prioritarianism, rightly understood, provides consistent and attractive recommendations in both single- and multi-person cases. Yet prioritarians, the article goes on (...) to show, cannot do so while availing themselves of the leveling down objection (LDO) to egalitarianism. They may not do so because similarly to egalitarianism, prioritarianism also must reject the principle of personal good. That is, egalitarians and prioritarians may sometime recommend certain actions and outcomes even when these are better for no one. Prioritarians may survive the Otsuka–Voorhoeve critique, but to do so they must abandon their anti-egalitarian stance (or at the very least, the LDO). (shrink)

Bruner sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of the mind. He examines the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful; he calls this side of mental activity the “narrative mode,” and his book makes important advances in the effort to unravel its nature.

" In the generations since, its influence has grown-today it is accepted as a classic of general jurisprudence.The work is a bold and persuasive attack on the ...

Christopher Boorse’s biostatistical theory of medical disorder claims that biological part-dysfunction (i.e., failure of an internal mechanism to perform its biological function), a factual criterion, is both necessary and sufficient for disorder. Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of medical disorder agrees that part-dysfunction is necessary but rejects the sufficiency claim, maintaining that disorder also requires that the part-dysfunction causes harm to the individual, a value criterion. In this paper, I present two considerations against the sufficiency claim. First, I analyze Boorse’s (...) central argument for the sufficiency claim, the “pathologist argument,” which takes pathologists’ intuitions about pathology as determinative of medical disorder and conclude that it begs the question and fails to support the sufficiency claim. Second, I present four counterexamples from the medical literature in which salient part-dysfunctions are considered nondisorders, including healthy disease carriers, HIV-positive status, benign mutations, and situs inversus totalis, thus falsifying the sufficiency claim and supporting the harm criterion. (shrink)

This translation of four of Plato's dialogues brings these classic texts alive for modern readers. Allen introduces and comments on the dialogues in an accessible way, inviting the reader to re-examine the issues Plato continually raises.

Following Meinong, many philosophers have been attracted by the view that emotions have intrinsically evaluative correctness conditions. On one version of this view, emotions have evaluative contents. On another version, emotions are evaluative attitudes; they are evaluative at the level of intentional mode rather than content. We raise objections against the latter version, showing that the only two ways of implementing it are hopeless. Either emotions are manifestly evaluative or they are not. In the former case, the Attitudinal View threatens (...) to collapse into the Perception View or any other view according to which emotions are evaluative at the level of content. In the latter case, the Attitudinal View does not stand up to an obvious alternative, namely that emotions can only be assessed with respect to extrinsic norms or conditions of correctness. (shrink)

This article characterizes aspect-perception as a distinct form of judgment in Kant's sense: a distinct way in which the mind contacts world and applies concepts. First, aspect-perception involves a mode of thinking about things apart from any established routine of conceptualizing them. It is thus a form of concept application that is essentially reflection about language. Second, this mode of reflection has an experiential, sometimes perceptual, element: in aspect-perception, that is, we experience meanings—bodies of norms. Third, aspect-perception can be “preparatory”: (...) it may help us to decide what linguistic norms to develop and how to conceptualize—make the world thinkable. Fourth, the article discusses the forms of justification for which aspect-perception allows—the necessity and normativity involved in employing this form of judgment. (shrink)

Much of our understanding of human thinking is based on probabilistic models. This innovative book by Jerome R. Busemeyer and Peter D. Bruza argues that, actually, the underlying mathematical structures from quantum theory provide a much better account of human thinking than traditional models. They introduce the foundations for modelling probabilistic-dynamic systems using two aspects of quantum theory. The first, 'contextuality', is a way to understand interference effects found with inferences and decisions under conditions of uncertainty. The second, 'quantum entanglement', (...) allows cognitive phenomena to be modeled in non-reductionist ways. Employing these principles drawn from quantum theory allows us to view human cognition and decision in a totally new light. Introducing the basic principles in an easy-to-follow way, this book does not assume a physics background or a quantum brain and comes complete with a tutorial and fully worked-out applications in important areas of cognition and decision. (shrink)

Aspect-seeing, I claim, involves reflection on concepts. It involves letting oneself feel how it would be like to conceptualize something with a certain concept, without committing oneself to this conceptualization. I distinguish between two kinds of aspect-perception: -/- 1. Preparatory: allows us to develop, criticize, and shape concepts. It involves bringing a concept to an object for the purpose of examining what would be the best way to conceptualize it. -/- 2. Non-Preparatory: allows us to express the ingraspability of certain (...) experiences. It involves bringing a concept to an object for the purpose of showing—per impossible—what it would take to properly capture one’s experience. -/- I demonstrate the usefulness of the two kinds of aspect perception in making conceptual judgments, and in making moral and aesthetic judgments. (shrink)

This paper presents a general computational treatment of how mammals are able to deal with visual objects and environments. The model tries to cover the entire range from behavior and phenomenological experience to detailed neural encodings in crude but computationally plausible reductive steps. The problems addressed include perceptual constancies, eye movements and the stable visual world, object descriptions, perceptual generalizations, and the representation of extrapersonal space.The entire development is based on an action-oriented notion of perception. The observer is assumed to (...) be continuously sampling the ambient light for information of current value. The central problem of vision is taken to be categorizing and locating objects in the environment. The critical step in this process is the linking of visual information to symbolic object descriptions; this is calledindexing, from the analogy of identifying a book from index terms. The system must also identifysituationsand use this knowledge to guide movement and other actions in the environment. The treatment focuses on the different representations of information used in the visual system.The four representational frames capture information in the following forms: retinotopic, head-based, symbolic, and allocentric. The functional roles of the four frames, the communication among them, and their suggested neurophysiological realization constitute the core of the paper. The model is perforce crude, but appears to be consistent with all relevant findings. (shrink)

I defend the view that aspect-perception – seeing as a duck, or a face as courageous – typically involves concept-application. Seemingly obvious, this is contested by Avner Baz: ‘aspects may not aptly be identified with, or in terms of, empirical concepts […]’ – In opposition, I claim that they may. Indeed, in many cases there is no other way to identify aspects.I review the development in Baz’s view, from his early criticism of Stephen Mulhall, to his recent recruitment of the (...) discussion about aspects to criticize John McDowell’s conceptualism, and his claim: ‘the dawning of Wittgensteinian aspects reveals our power to perceive unity and sense that are not aptly thought of as conceptual’.I accept many of Baz’s claims against Mulhall and McDowell. However, his arguments go too far. Aspect-perception, I argue, typically involves a special kind of application of concepts. Denying that is denying much of what is important and of interest in the phenomena of aspect. The world revealed in aspect-perception is not the conceptualized world of science; but it is also not the pre-conceptualized ‘phenomenal’ world which, according to Baz, we normally have in perception, and which he wants to bring into view. (shrink)

Closely related to this is Mr. Bruner's "evolutionary instrumentalism," his conception of instruction as the means of transmitting the tools and skills of a ...

Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis asserts that the concept of medical disorder includes a naturalistic component of dysfunction and a value component, both of which are required for disorder attributions. Muckler and Taylor, defending a purely naturalist, value-free understanding of disorder, argue that harm is not necessary for disorder. They provide three examples of dysfunctions that, they claim, are considered disorders but are entirely harmless: mild mononucleosis, cowpox that prevents smallpox, and minor perceptual deficits. They also reject the proposal that dysfunctions (...) need only be typically harmful to qualify as disorders. We argue that the proposed counterexamples are, in fact, considered harmful; thus, they fail to disconfirm the harm requirement: incapacity for exertion is inherently harmful, whether or not exertion occurs, cowpox is directly harmful irrespective of indirect benefits, and colorblindness and anosmia are considered harmful by those who consider them disorders. We also defend the typicality qualifier as viably addressing some apparently harmless disorders and argue that a dysfunction’s harmfulness is best understood in dispositional terms. (shrink)

This book, the product of a lifetime of research by one of the founders of developmental psychology, takes on the powerful assumptions behind these questions- ...

In ‘Rethinking Disease’, Powell and Scarffe1 propose what in effect is a modification of Jerome Wakefield’s2 3 harmful dysfunction analysis of medical disorder. The HDA maintains that ‘disorder’ is a hybrid factual and value concept requiring that a biological dysfunction, understood as a failure of some feature to perform a naturally selected function, causes harm to the individual as evaluated by social values. Powell and Scarffe accept both the HDA’s evolutionary biological function component and its incorporation of a value component. (...) Their proposed ‘new twist’ is to revise the value component: ‘Our proposed definition of disease is as follows: a biomedical state is a disease only if it implicates a biological dysfunction that is, or would be, properly disvalued’. So, they propose that a disorder is a ‘properly disvalued dysfunction’ rather than a ‘harmful dysfunction’, an approach they term ‘thickly normative’ in contrast to the thin normative approach of the HDA. There has been a surge of interest recently in better understanding the ‘harm’ component of the HDA. Powell and Scarffe’s analysis is a helpful contribution to this discussion. We focus here exclusively on their proposal regarding the analysis of the concept of disorder and ignore many important related issues that the authors address, ranging from prioritising resource allocation between disorders and non-disorders to whether the concept of disorder should be replaced by a generic welfarist concept. The resolution of these additional issues depends on first understanding ‘disorder’. The authors’ proposed changes to the HDA also deserve evaluation because the HDA, which has been endorsed by leading nosologists,4 plays an influential role in nosological debate across categories of disorder ranging, for example, from sexual paraphilias5 to psychopathy.6 A basic problem is that Powell and Scarffe misinterpret …. (shrink)