While impressed by much of what Mercier & Sperber (M&S) offer through their argumentative hypothesis, we question whether the specific competencies entailed in each system are adequate. In particular, whether system 2 might not require independent reasoning capabilities. We explore the adequacy of the explanations offered for confirmation bias and the Wason selection task.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd Reviews 179 THE EARLY “IRON CURTAIN” Michael D. Stevenson Schulich School of Business, York U. / Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. Toronto, on m3j 1p3 / Hamilton, on l8s 4l6, Canada [email protected] Patrick Wright. Iron Curtain: from Stage to Cold War. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2007. Pp. xvii, 488. isbn 978-0-19-923150-8. £18.99 (hb); £12.99 (pb). In his famous (...) Westminster College address on 5 March 1946 in Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill Wred one of the opening salvos of the Cold War by proclaiming that from “Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain” had been lowered across Europe. Patrick Wright’s intriguing and provocative book does not examine the phrase “iron curtain” in its popular Cold War context. Instead, he maintains that many characteristics of this metaphor, “including the pronounced sense of theatricality it would bring to international politics, were inherited from the period before the Second World War” (p. 18). Wright divides Iron Curtain into two primary chronological sections, the Wrst covering the period from 1914 to 1920. An iron curtain originally referred to the steel safety screen that descended in English theatres, beginning in the lateeighteenth century, to separate the audience from the often catastrophic Wres that broke out on the stage. The phrase entered the lexicon of international relations in January 1915 when British author and paciWst Violet Page (writing under the pseudonym Vernon Lee) published an article lamenting that “War’s cruelties and recriminations, War’s monstrous iron curtain” (p. 80) had alienated European nations such as England and Germany sharing a common cultural heritage. But the barrier quickly moved east in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and “took the form not just of exaggerated political rhetoric, but of an economic blockade enforced by naval power” (p. 171), as the Allies sought to contain the infection of Bolshevism. Wright devotes most attention in this section to documenting the 1920 visit to Russia by the British delegation jointly sponsored by the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, which sought to penetrate the dense fog of Allied anti-Bolshevik propaganda and validate the delegation members’ own preconceived views about the nascent socialist utopia in Russia. British delegates witnessed images both of progress carefully stagemanaged by their hosts and of terrible economic dislocation and poverty caused by the Allied blockade and the civil war, which allowed the majority of them to return home to lavish praise on the Soviet experiment that would, in their minds, inevitably fulWl its potential once the Bolshevik government became stable. February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd 180 Reviews 1 “The Future of Europe”, European AVairsz 1, no. 1 (April 1949): 3. The second section of Wright’s book examines Western reports of life behind the iron curtain between 1920 and 1939. Here, the author focuses heavily on the theatrical nature of Soviet attempts to create modern-day Potemkin villages that werez—zwith a limited number of exceptionsz—zaccepted as reality by an endless parade of left-wing visitors. A second British Trades Union Congress delegation in 1924, for example, received a dramatically embellished picture of Soviet economic progress that included a train journey past a long-abandoned factory belching smoke created by burning wet straw frantically provided by Russian peasants; the resulting report of the delegation “repeatedly collapsed into the most abject conformity with the Soviet view of reality” (p. 245). The most tragic examples of Western visitors’ blindness to the truth occurred during the 1930s famine deliberately induced by Stalin, and Wright exposes a wide cast of characters who adopted a blinkered view of conditions in the ussr. Among intellectuals, Wright documents the 1931 visit of George Bernard Shaw, who cavalierly dismissed reports of widespread food shortages while dining sumptuously in Moscow’s Hotel Metropole. Among journalists, Wright develops the case of Walter Duranty, the New York Timesz correspondent who knuckled under to demands of Soviet censors to produce sanitized accounts denying or ignoring the famine in order to protect his privileged place in that... (shrink)

Bertrand Russell undertook an extended North American lecture tour in 1931 to raise funds for the Beacon Hill experimental school he operated with Dora Russell. To rectify the existing lack of scholarly analysis of the 1931 tour, this paper provides annotated transcriptions of twenty-eight letters Russell sent during the tour to Dora and to Patricia Spence, Russell’s mistress. These letters provide intriguing insights into the state of Russell’s financial and professional affairs and illuminate personal relationships he cultivated in the United (...) States and Canada. Most importantly, they document his complex marital situation at this tumultuous juncture in his life before he decided to end his relationship with Dora early in 1932 in favour of Spence. (shrink)

An important American lecture tour undertaken by Bertrand Russell in April 1939 has been largely ignored because of the long-standing embargo on tour letters sent by Russell to his third wife, Patricia. Taking advantage of the embargo’s recent expiry, this paper provides annotated transcriptions of twenty-four letters sent by Russell to Patricia and others during the tour and analyzes topics such as his family relationships and interactions with a wide array of individuals. Most importantly, Russell’s tour letters demonstrate his evolving (...) viewpoint on pacifism and his evaluation of the tense international situation as World War II approached. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell’s Scandinavian lecture tour in October 1935 has been largely undocumented because of the longstanding embargo on the tour correspondence Russell exchanged with Marjorie (“Peter”) Spence, his lover and future third wife. These archival restrictions ended in 2009, and this paper presents annotated transcriptions of twenty letters sent by Russell to Peter during his trip to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. The tour allowed Russell to test early versions of two important papers in his return to philosophy in the mid-193s, (...) and his meetings with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in Copenhagen significantly enhanced his understanding of quantum mechanics. Additionally, these letters demonstrate the impact of the tour on Russell’s political thought and his evolving views on fascism and pacifism, and they provide the first intimate picture of Russell’s complex relationship with Peter. (shrink)

Meta-ethical non-cognitivism makes two claims—a negative one and a positive one. The negative claim is that moral utterances do not express beliefs which provide the truth-conditions for those utterances. The positive claim is that the primary function of such utterances is to express certain of the speaker’s desire-like states of mind. Non-cognitivism is officially a theory about the meanings of moral words, but non-cognitivists also maintain that moral states of mind are themselves at least partially constituted by desire-like states to (...) which moral utterances give voice. Non-cognitivists need a plausible account of what distinguishes whims, addictions and cravings from genuinely moral judgments. For while non-cognitivists maintain that in a suitably broad sense moral judgments just are constituted by desire-like states they also insist that not any old desire constitutes a genuinely moral judgment. Since the challenge is to demarcate what is distinctive about moral attitudes we might usefully call this the demarcation challenge. One common strategy for meeting the demarcation challenge is to focus on desires directed at getting others to share one’s own desires and emotions. This strategy has some of its earliest roots in Charles Stevenson’s pioneering work. Stevenson argued that there is a ‘do so as well!’ aspect to moral discourse. On Stevenson’s account, in saying something is morally good a speaker not only expresses her own attitude of approval of the object of evaluation but also urges her interlocutors to share that attitude, thereby expressing a desire that they ‘do so as well.’ More recently, in Ruling Passions, Simon Blackburn emphasizes the importance of what he refers to as a ‘staircase of practical and emotional ascent’. (shrink)

Empathy has become a hot topic in philosophy and more generally, but its many uses haven’t yet been recognized. Empathy has epistemological applications beyond its ability to put us directly in contact with the minds of others, and its role in ethics has been underestimated: it can, for example, help the present-day sentimentalist make sense of Francis Hutcheson’s idea of a moral sense. Most notably, perhaps, empathy also plays an important role in speech acts that speech act theorists have completely (...) ignored: for example, felicitous assertion and questioning both depend on the empathic conveying of emotion. (shrink)

In recent years a number of books have been published that offer short autobiographical essays of academics, focusing on their research and how their life history affected their scholarly development. These could be labeled as "intellectual journey narratives." Some volumes focus on philosophers and their religious faith or lack thereof (e.g., Clark, 1997, Antony, 2007). Psychology has its own version of the intellectual journey narrative, in T. S. Krawiec's (1972, 1974, 1978) multivolume set of autobiographical essays by contemporary psychologists. In (...) 1987, Rosemary Pilkington edited her first volume of essays entitled Men and Women of Parapsychology: Personal Reflections, Esprit Volume 1. It contains autobiographical essays by Jule Eisenbud, Montague Ullman, Jan Ehrenwald, Eileen Coly, Joseph H. Rush, Gertrude R. Schmeidler, Emilio Servadio, Renée Haynes, Hans Bender, Karlis Osis, George Zorab and Bernard Grad. The second (2013) volume contains autobiographical essays by Mary Rose Barrington, Eberhard Bauer, William Braud (now deceased), Stephen Braude, Richard S. Broughton, Larry Dossey, Sally Rhine Feather, Erlendur Haraldsson, Arthur Hastings, Stanley Krippner, Lawrence LeShan, Roger Nelson, John Palmer, Guy Leon Playfair, William G. Roll (now deceased), Serena Roney-Dougal, Stephan A. Schwartz, Rex G. Stanford, Russell Targ, Charles T. Tart, and Walter von Lucadou. Between the two volumes almost every significant contemporary parapsychologist is represented, with the major exceptions being the late John Beloff and the late Ian Stevenson. (shrink)

In 'Sartre on Bad Faith' Leslie Stevenson attempts to formulate the Sartrean notion of bad faith. According to Stevenson, someone is in bad faith, if she reflectively denies some state of affairs, of the truth of which she is pre-reflectively aware. Jeffrey Gordon counters with the criticism that, although Stevenson's analysis of Sartre is correct, it is a position which is philosophically indefensible. I argue that Stevenson's reflective denial account falls to Gordon's criticism, but that it (...) is also inadequate as a description of bad faith. I then offer an analysis of bad faith which provides both a better reading of Sartre and a way of overcoming Gordon's objection. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 171-173 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding, by David Ellis; ix & 195 pp. New York: Routledge, 2000, $35. In his discussion of biography as a form, Ellis points to his study as a response to the scarcity of "monographs on biography... and [that] none of them are (...) particularly satisfactory" (p. 2). He further points out that "the comparative dearth of analytic enquiry into biography is surprising" (p. 3). In short, his first pages get off to a rocky start in their tatty justification of a critical study. Though a critic of D. H. Lawrence, Ellis uses the English writer sparingly, pointing out in his "Preface" what he feels is a need "to keep illustration involving Lawrence to a decent minimum" (p. viii) while concentrating on those problems which face the biographer. That said, he sets about to characterize biography as an integration of "a disinterested enthusiasm for information... [fashioning a]... compelling story in which many details with no direct relevance to the life of his subject can be considered as contributing successfully to a period atmosphere" (p. 35). Ellis is thinking specifically of Norman Sherry's biography of Graham Greene through which he has brought to the discussion his intent of pointing to an approach which concerns itself with chapters on "Ancestors," "Primal Scenes," "Body Matters," "the Sociological [End Page 171] Imagination," "History, Chance and Self-determination," "Compatibility, Sartre and Long Biographies." All are aspects of biography.As well as the approach he suggests by these areas of concentration, Ellis draws broadly from many subjects of biography, always keeping a critical eye on its form. Anne Stevenson's approach "is towards psychological determinism" (p. 135); Ackroyd in his biography of Dickens raises "through a degree of intellectual play" the questions of when "lineage" is appropriate, that is, the extent to which it has any productive consequence. He also uses Hawthorne and Virginia Woolf as examples. Writing of the role of the historian raises difficulties for writers creating biographies from such an early period as that of Chaucer; Ellis points to Derek Pearsall's "excellent Life of Geoffrey Chaucer" (p. 121).Ellis neither can nor should ignore Lawrence and what better chapter to include him in than "Body Matters" in its concentration on illness. Here Ellis draws on Lawrence's concern with the harm of his health on his work (p. 78). He also considers Flaubert, Sartre, and Woolf. Briefly he mentions Stendhal's imagination of his "future audience" after his death (p. 109), sensibly rejects the long ago depleted and so, parenthetically, apparently permanent speculation on what Keats's might have become had he lived a full life "in a time of drugs for treatment of tuberculosis" (p. 123) and the equally mined issue of what prompted Hemingway's suicide (pp. 132-33). Certainly he is aware of the danger that such a use of material may pander to the pleasure of mere name-hunters (what if there were no index!). At the same time, if the effect of his range of examples invites additions of our own, while keeping before us that his study is about biography as form, it is successful.In "Primal Scenes," the fourth chapter of his book, Ellis gives what he feels is necessary space to Freud, the creator of the term. He points to Wordsworth's "spots of time" as only one indication of the difficulty--if not impossibility--of capturing biographically those moments in childhood by which the individual written about might be defined (p. 57). (Such an impossibility should not be surprising to those of us readers who recognize the nearly impossible task for ourselves in our own lives.) Surely both the biographer and autobiographer share this ignorance and frustration. In a very interesting move, Ellis points to Compton Mackenzie's discussion of a critical event in his six-year old life surrounding the interruption of an Easter evening with his parents and siblings, interrupted by the arrival of friends. Ellis writes... (shrink)

Objects of representation: Kant's Copernican revolution re-interpreted -- Synthetic unities of experience -- Three ways in which space and time might be said to be transcendentally ideal -- The given, the unconditioned, the transcendental object, and the reality of the past -- A theory of everything?: Kant speaks to Stephen Hawking -- Opinion, belief or faith, and knowledge -- Freedom of judgment in Descartes, Spinoza, Hume and Kant -- Six levels of mentality -- A Kantian defense of freewill.

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)

Contemporary literature on consciousness, with some exceptions, rarely considers the olfactory system. In this article the characteristics of olfactory consciousness, viewed from the standpoint of the phenomenal /access distinction, are examined relative to the major senses. The review details several qualitative differences in both olfactory P consciousness and A consciousness . The basis for these differences is argued to arise from the functions that the olfactory system performs and from the unique neural architecture needed to instantiate them. These data suggest, (...) at a minimum, that P and A consciousness are uniquely configured in olfaction and an argument can be made that the P and A distinction may not hold for this sensory system. (shrink)

The fact that Gilbert Ryle and J.L. Austin seem to disagree about the ordinary use of words such as ‘voluntary’, ‘involuntary’, ‘voluntarily’, and ‘involuntarily’ has been taken to cast doubt on the methods of ordinary language philosophy. As Benson Mates puts the worry, ‘if agreement about usage cannot be reached within so restricted a sample as the class of Oxford Professors of Philosophy, what are the prospects when the sample is enlarged?’ (Mates, Inquiry 1:161–171, 1958, p. 165). In this chapter, (...) we evaluate Mates’s criticism alongside Ryle’s and Austin’s specific claims about the ordinary use of these words, assessing these claims against actual examples of ordinary use drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC). Our evaluation consists in applying a combination of methods: first aggregating judgments about a large set of samples drawn from the corpus, and then using a clustering algorithm to uncover connections between different types of use. In applying these methods, we show where and to what extent Ryle’s and Austin’s accounts of the use of the target terms are accurate as well as where they miss important aspects of ordinary use, and we demonstrate the usefulness of this new combination of methods. At the heart of our approach is a commitment to the idea that systematically looking at actual uses of expressions is an essential component of any approach to ordinary language philosophy. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to present the distinct ways in which Wolff, Baumgarten, and Kant understand the relationship between necessitation, constraint, and reluctant action in an effort to illustrate the subtle ways in which their conceptions of obligation differ from each another. Whereas Wolff conceives of natural or moral obligation as incompatible with constraint, Baumgarten holds that constraint and reluctant action are, in some instances, compatible with natural obligation. Kant departs from Baumgarten by conceiving of obligation as necessarily (...) involving constraint: as Kant’s reply to Schiller’s famous objection reveals, obligation must take on the character of constraint to reluctant action on account of the fact that human beings possess inclinations that always threaten to impel them in directions that oppose morality. (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)

An Essay on Human Action seeks to provide a comprehensive, detailed, enlightening, and (in its detail) original account of human action. This account presupposes a theory of events as abstract, proposition-like entities, a theory which is given in the first chapter of the book. The core-issues of action-theory are then treated: what acting in general is (a version of the traditional volitional theory is proposed and defended); how actions are to be individuated; how long actions last; what acting intentionally is; (...) what doing one thing by doing another is; what basic action is; and what omitting to do something is. Attention is also given to the concepts of causation, intention, volition, deciding, choosing, and trying. Finally, a libertarian account of free action is tentatively proposed and defended. (shrink)

This article constructs and deploys a set of autoethnographic narratives from the author’s experience as a Baptist minister to critically retrieve the category of ‘women’s experience’ for feminist theological construction. Autoethnography, as a response to the crisis of representation in the Humanities, uses personal narratives of the self to reveal, critique and transform wider cultural trends. It therefore provides helpful tools for analysing, critiquing and transforming theological thought and practice. Following the article’s methodological sections, the constructive sections use the crafted (...) autoethnographies to re-frame Rowan Williams’s vision for how church and world co-constitute each other towards God’s just ends. Whereas Williams argues that this co-constitution occurs through processes of interactive transformative judgment, the feminist theological understanding argued for here founds the process instead on interactive, transformative grace. (shrink)

This a clear and concise introduction to Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.ichael Watts uses Kierkegaard's own writings to introduce his theoriesbout living a truthfu; and spiritual life, while explaining the enormousnfluence of the philosopher's personal life on his work and beliefs. As theounder of 20th century existentialism, and the first philosopher to definehe idea of angst, Kierkegaard's profound influence on modern life is clearlyefined in accessible terms in this guide for students and general readers.

Inspired by Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Sellars, I illustrate and identify certain kinds of unity which are typical (if not universal) features of our conscious experience, and argue that Kant was right to claim that such unities are produced by unconscious processes of synthesis: A perceptual experience of succession is not reducible to a succession of perceptual experiences. The experience of perceiving one object as having several features is not reducible to a conjunction of perceptual experiences of those features. A cross-modal (...) perceptual experience is not reducible to a conjunction of single-modality perceptual experiences. Incoming perceptual information is synthesized into a single scene-a representation of the world as perceived from a spatio-temporal point of view. Any two of the simultaneous features of the experience of a subject S can be thought of together by S. Many of the experiences of a subject S can be thought of by S at a later time as part of his or her history of experience. These can be summarized in the general principle: An experience of a complex is not a complex of experiences. This is consistent with Sellars’ principle that: A sense-impression of a complex is a complex of impressions because the latter applies at the sub-personal, unconceptualized level, and the former at the conscious level of conceptualized experiences. (shrink)

A book on the problems of ethics from the perspective of language and meaning.

Inspired by Kant, Merleau-Ponty and Sellars, I illustrate and identify certain kinds of unity which are typical (if not universal) features of our conscious experience, and argue that Kant was right to claim that such unities are produced by unconscious processes of synthesis:A perceptual experience of succession is not reducible to a succession of perceptual experiences.The experience of perceiving one object as having several features is not reducible to a conjunction of perceptual experiences of those features.A cross-modal perceptual experience is (...) not reducible to a conjunction of single-modality perceptual experiences.Incoming perceptual information is synthesized into a single scene---a representation of the world as perceived from a spatia-temporal point of view.Any two of the simultaneous features of the experience of a subject S can be thought of together by S.Many of the experiences of a subject S can be thought of by S at a later time as part of his or her history of experience.These can be summarized in the general principle:An experience of a complex is not a complex of experiences.This is consistent with Sellars’ principle that:A sense-impression of a complex is a complex of impressionsbecause the latter applies at the sub-personal, unconceptualized level, and the former at the conscious level of conceptualized experiences. (shrink)

Opponents of medically assisted dying have long appealed to ‘slippery slope’ arguments. One such slippery slope concerns palliative care: that the introduction of medically assisted dying will lead to a diminution in the quality or availability or palliative care for patients near the end of their lives. Empirical evidence from jurisdictions where assisted dying has been practiced for decades, such as Oregon and the Netherlands, indicate that such worries are largely unfounded. The failure of the palliation slope argument is nevertheless (...) instructive with respect to how slippery slope arguments can be appraised without having to await post-facto evidence regarding the effects of a proposed change in public policy. Close attention in particular to the norms operative in a given institution and how changes to policy will interact with those norms enable slippery slopes to be credibly appraised. (shrink)