Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy begins by presenting Plantingas essay, and the chapters that follow address issues in three traditional areas of interest to philosophers: epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics.

These essays exhibit explanation and argument regarding some of the possible answers to these fundamental questions in moral philosophy.

In Cultivating Citizens Dwight Allman and Michael Beaty bring together some of America's leading social and political thinkers to address the question of civic vitality in contemporary American society. The resulting volume is a serious reflection on the history of civil society and a rich and rewarding conversation about the future American civic order.

The problem-oriented approach to teaching first-time philosophy students makes course design simple and makes the course content quickly recognizable to students, yet it fails to challenge them as readers and fails to convey the complex historical and social contexts out of which philosophical inquiry emerges. Presenting philosophical problems without context makes it harder for students to relate course material to their own lives and risks alienating students. In contrast, the authors argue, an interrogative and narrative approach to teaching philosophy facilitates (...) students’ ability to relate personally to philosophical texts and problems. This paper details a course designed by the authors which begins by studying the concept of narrative and subsequently frames the history of philosophy as a story with a setting (the intellectual conversation produced by canonical figures), characters (the philosophers themselves), theme (e.g. the question “How ought I to live?”), and plot (e.g. answers to the question “What is wisdom?”). Simultaneously, in addition to class structures which encourage questions, reading questions are assigned in order to make question-asking central to how students and teachers approach a text. Included are examples of the reading questions, as well as the authors’ method for using these questions and suggestions for how to motivate students to use them. (shrink)

While searching for manuscripts of the writings of Robert Grosseteste, S.H. Thomson examined British Library MS Royal 11 B III and ascribed a short work on poverty to Grosseteste probably since it was found together with the authentic work De decem mandatis and had been copied by the same scribe. Upon closer examination it is concluded that the work is unlikely to have been written by Grosseteste. Nevertheless, the work is of interest as a highly structured anthology of sources regarding (...) poverty, drawn from both Scripture and tradition. The authors examine the message of the text and analyse its structure. Finally, a first edition of the text is presented. (shrink)

In Cultivating Citizens Dwight Allman and Michael Beaty bring together some of America's leading social and political thinkers to address the question of civic vitality in contemporary American society. The resulting volume is a serious reflection on the history of civil society and a rich and rewarding conversation about the future American civic order.

While searching for manuscripts of the writings of Robert Grosseteste, S.H. Thomson examined British Library MS Royal 11 B III and ascribed a short work on poverty to Grosseteste probably since it was found together with the authentic work De decem mandatis and had been copied by the same scribe. Upon closer examination it is concluded that the work is unlikely to have been written by Grosseteste. Nevertheless, the work is of interest as a highly structured anthology of sources regarding (...) poverty, drawn from both Scripture and tradition. The authors examine the message of the text and analyse its structure. Finally, a first edition of the text is presented. (shrink)

responses to Sloep and Van der Steen, Biol. Philos. 1987 (2)33.

In two studies, we explored the frequency and phenomenology of musical imagery. Study 1 used retrospective reports of musical imagery to assess the contribution of individual differences to imagery characteristics. Study 2 used an experience sampling design to assess the phenomenology of musical imagery over the course of one week in a sample of musicians and non-musicians. Both studies found episodes of musical imagery to be common and positive: people rarely wanted such experiences to end and often heard music that (...) was personally meaningful. Several variables predicted musical imagery, including personality, musical preferences, and positive mood. Musicians tended to hear musical imagery more often, but they reported less frequent episodes of deliberately-generated imagery. Taken together, the present research provides new insights into individual differences in musical imagery, and it supports the emerging view that such experiences are common, positive, and more voluntary than previously recognized. (shrink)

In this paper I outline the PAIR account of joint attention as a perceptual-practical, affectively charged intentional relation. I argue that to explain joint attention we need to leave the received understanding of propositions and propositional attitudes and the picture of content connected to it behind and embrace the notions of subject mode and position mode content. I also explore the relation between joint attention and communication.

A basic contradiction in education is that while education and guidance from people with more knowledge is necessary for the development of higher psychological functioning, the constraints imposed on student activity often become a hindrance to development. This contradiction is revealed in how youth participate in video production programs and becomes analyzable because video production brings the conflict to the surface. During video production, students often act with greater agency than they do in other school activities. This shift evokes the (...) agency|structure dialectic as the root of tensions surrounding authority, collaboration, and youth cultures. Based on data from five programs, a comparison of different cases demonstrates how schools damage motivation and initiative, neglect to connect with students and their worlds, and teach passivity while emphasizing an individualistic conception of human activity. New understandings of agency and its connections to the individual|social dialectic are urged. Based on a Vygotskian concept of development as overcoming contradictions, the relationships youth have within school are viewed as an essential part of development, requiring a theoretical shift from individualistic ideas of agency and a clearer connection between youth problems and societal contradictions. (shrink)

Despite its theoretical importance, little is known about how semantic memory structure facilitates and constrains creative idea generation. We examine whether the semantic richness of a concept has both benefits and costs to creative idea generation. Specifically, we tested whether cue set size—an index of semantic richness reflecting the average number of elements associated with a given concept—impacts the quantity (fluency) and quality (originality) of responses generated during the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). Across four studies, we show that low-association, sparse, (...) AUT cues benefit originality at the cost of fluency compared to high-association, rich, AUT cues. Furthermore, we found an interaction with individual differences in fluid intelligence in the low-association AUT cues, suggesting that constraints of sparse semantic knowledge can be overcome with top-down intervention. Our findings indicate that semantic richness differentially impacts the quality and quantity of generated ideas, and that cognitive control processes can facilitate idea production when conceptual knowledge is limited. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 7, Page 27-30, July 2012.

Theories of discourse bring to realism new ideas about how knowledge develops and how representations of reality are influenced. We gain an understanding of the conceptual aspect of social life and the processes by which meaning is produced. This collection reflects the growing interest realist critics have shown towards forms of discourse theory and deconstruction. The diverse range of contributions address such issues as the work of Derrida and deconstruction, discourse theory, Eurocentrism and poststructuralism. What unites all of the contributions (...) is a sense that it is essential to provide a realist alternative to the hitherto dominance of social constructionism, hermeneutics and postmodernism, over many of the issues discussed. By developing a realist perspective the different authors attempt to embed discourse within the structured nature of the reality of the world. Realism can situate language, discourse and ideology within context specific, or 'causally efficacious' circumstances. Realism can help to uncover issues of power, representation, and subjectivity and how discursive and other social practices produce real effects. This can help us understand the manner in which social structures are reproduced through various forms of ideology and discourse. And by knowing this, we can start to address questions concerning human emancipation and how the world is to be transformed. (shrink)

The guiding inspiration of this book is the attraction and distance that mark the relation between anthropology and philosophy. This theme is explored through encounters between individual anthropologists and particular regions of philosophy. Several of the most basic concepts of the discipline—including notions of ethics, politics, temporality, self and other, and the nature of human life—are products of a dialogue, both implicit and explicit, between anthropology and philosophy. These philosophical undercurrents in anthropology also speak to the question of what it (...) is to experience our being in a world marked by radical difference and otherness. In The Ground Between, twelve leading anthropologists offer intimate reflections on the influence of particular philosophers on their way of seeing the world, and on what ethnography has taught them about philosophy. Ethnographies of the mundane and the everyday raise fundamental issues that the contributors grapple with in both their lives and their thinking. With directness and honesty, they relate particular philosophers to matters such as how to respond to the suffering of the other, how concepts arise in the give and take of everyday life, and how to be attuned to the world through the senses. Their essays challenge the idea that philosophy is solely the province of professional philosophers, and suggest that certain modalities of being in the world might be construed as ways of doing philosophy. Contributors. João Biehl, Steven C. Caton, Vincent Crapanzano, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, Michael M. J. Fischer, Ghassan Hage, Clara Han, Michael Jackson, Arthur Kleinman, Michael Puett, Bhrigupati Singh. (shrink)

Eldred offers a remedy to the consequences of ancient Greek misconceptions of time that are also entrenched in today’s mathematized physics. Here time is spatialized as the one-dimensionally linear ‘arrow of time’ for the sake of predicting and controlling movement. But such spatialized time distorts the phenomenon of time itself. An alternative, hermeneutic-phenomenological path begins with a pre-spatial concept of time that is genuinely three-dimensional. This paves the way for recasting who we are as humans in belonging, first of all, (...) to the free openness of 3D-temporality. This belonging enables temporally 3D-vision of the psyche that empowers us to see movement at all and reconcile its inherent contradictoriness. We are then also able to conceive ourselves no longer merely as internally cogitating, self-conscious subjects, but as engaged existentially in temporally 3D-interplay, mutually estimating and esteeming who we are. This unpredictable interplay is constrained, however, by being played out in the sociating medium of thingified value, the accumulative movement of thingified value having gained the upper hand in dictating our life-movements as well as our interplay with the earth. (shrink)

Der private, sehr gefahrdete Bucherbestand Friedrich Nietzsches gilt als ein besonders interessantes Beispiel einer Schriftstellerbibliothek des 19. Jahrhunderts.

We ordinarily suppose that there is a difference between having and failing to exercise a rational capacity on the one hand, and lacking a rational capacity altogether on the other. This is crucial for our allocations of responsibility. Someone who has but fails to exercise a capacity is responsible for their failure to exercise their capacity, whereas someone who lacks a capacity altogether is not. However, as Gary Watson pointed out in his seminal essay ’Skepticism about Weakness of Will’, the (...) idea of an unexercised capacity is much more difficult to make sense of than it initially appears. The aim of ’Rational Capacities’ is to provide the needed explication of this idea. (shrink)

This will be the best way of explaining ‘Paris is the lover of Helen’, that is, ‘Paris loves, and by that very fact [et eo ipso] Helen is loved’. Here, therefore, two propositions have been brought together and abbreviated as one. Or, ‘Paris is a lover, and by that very fact Helen is a loved one’.

Virtually all philosophers agree that for a belief to be epistemically justified, it must satisfy certain conditions. Perhaps it must be supported by evidence. Or perhaps it must be reliably formed. Or perhaps there are some other "good-making" features it must have. But does a belief's justification also require some sort of awareness of its good-making features? The answer to this question has been hotly contested in contemporary epistemology, creating a deep divide among its practitioners. Internalists, who tend to focus (...) on scientific or theoretical beliefs as the ideal, insist that such awareness is required for justification. Externalists, who think children's ordinary beliefs in obvious facts are paradigm cases of justified belief, say it isn't required. Michael Bergmann's book offers a decisive refutation of internalism and a sustained defense of externalism. (shrink)

Bringing together ethnographic exposition with philosophical concepts and arguments and effectively transcending subdisciplinary boundaries between cultural and ...

This article characterizes the varieties of four - dimensionalism and provides a critical overview of the main arguments in support of it.

Naturphilosophie und Metaphysik scheinen zwei unterschiedliche, ja, sich ausschließende philosophische Ansätze zu sein. Bestimmt man aber Naturphilosophie als Metaphysik der Natur im Sinne des Projekts, im Ausgang von den naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen zu einer kohärenten und vollständigen Sicht der Welt zu gelangen, ergibt sich eine neue und überraschende Konstellation. Die Bezugnahme auf die Naturwissenschaften verleiht der Metaphysik einerseits die Berechtigung dazu, revisionär zu sein, das heißt, Erkenntnisansprüche, die aus dem alltäglichen Weltverständnis stammen, zu revidieren. Andererseits ist eine solche Metaphysik ebenso hypothetisch (...) wie die Wissenschaften selbst. Michael Esfeld zeigt zunächst, wie man in diesem Rahmen einen wissenschaftlichen Realismus vertreten kann, und begründet dann so umstrittene Thesen wie die eines vierdimensionalen Blockuniversums mit Ereignissen und Prozessen statt Substanzen oder die eines naturphilosophischen Holismus und Strukturenrealismus statt eines Atomismus und rehabilitiert die Idee notwendiger Verbindungen in der Natur. (shrink)

This is a revision of game theory which takes account of agents' own descriptions of their situations, and which allows people to reason as members of groups.

This new book by Michael Slote argues that Western philosophy on the whole has overemphasized rational control and autonomy at the expense of the important countervailing value and virtue of receptivity. Recently the ideas of caring and empathy have received a great deal of philosophical and public attention, but both these notions rest on the deeper and broader value of receptivity, and in From Enlightenment to Receptivity, Slote seeks to show that we need to focus more on receptivity if (...) we are to attain a more balanced sense and understanding of what is important to us. -/- Beginning with a critique of Enlightenment thinking that calls into question its denial of any central role to considerations of emotion and empathy, he goes on to show how a greater emphasis on these factors and on the receptivity that underlies them can give us a more realistic, balanced, and sensitive understanding of our core ethical and epistemological values. This means rejecting post-modernism's blanket rejection of reason and of compelling real values and recognizing, rather, that receptivity should play a major role in how we lead our lives as individuals, in how we relate to nature, in how we acquire knowledge about the world, and in how we relate morally and politically with others. (shrink)

In this book, Michael Arbib, a researcher in artificial intelligence and brain theory, joins forces with Mary Hesse, a philosopher of science, to present an integrated account of how humans 'construct' reality through interaction with the social and physical world around them. The book is a major expansion of the Gifford Lectures delivered by the authors at the University of Edinburgh in the autumn of 1983. The authors reconcile a theory of the individual's construction of reality as a network (...) of schemas 'in the head' with an account of the social construction of language, science, ideology and religion to provide an integrated schema-theoretic view of human knowledge. The authors still find scope for lively debate, particularly in their discussion of free will and of the reality of God. The book integrates an accessible exposition of background information with a cumulative marshalling of evidence to address fundamental questions concerning human action in the world and the nature of ultimate reality. (shrink)

This book not only sets the historical record straight but also champions the Herderian tradition for its philosophical depth and breadth.