In July 2003, Prime Minister Koizumi successfully passed the legislation to dispatch ground SDF units to Iraq in the Diet. His top-down policy process was completely different from Japan's traditional bottom-up system, which Aurelia George Mulgan calls the in which the bureaucrats in the ministries play a central role with the LDP being the only political power to negotiate with them. Mulgan also argues that the system has not changed despite recent institutional changes. On the contrary, (...) this paper illustrates how Koizumi and his Cabinet took advantage of the strengthened authority of the Cabinet Secretariat to initiate policies, and successfully pushed the controversial national security legislation through LDP decision-making organs and the Diet by gaining support first from the coalition partners, presenting a new style of Westminster system. (shrink)

More than one reader of George Santayana will approach the pages of this book with the same anxiety that led me to go through them: Could it be even possible to give account of a current burning problem, terrorism, with elements of the philosophy of that “detached” thinker? A problem, the one of terrorism, that as the editors of the book note, presents itself with an uncommon visceral intensity whose media coverage surpasses by far the one of other urgent (...) topics (global warming, immigration,... (shrink)

Is the history of philosophy primarily a contribution to PHILOSOPHY or primarily a contribution to HISTORY? This paper is primarily contribution to history (specifically the history of New Zealand) but although the history of philosophy has been big in New Zealand, most NZ philosophers with a historical bent are primarily interested in the history of philosophy as a contribution to philosophy. My essay focuses on two questions: 1) How did New Zealand philosophy get to be so good? And why, given (...) that is so good (a point I am at pains to establish), has it apparently had so slight a cultural impact within New Zealand itself? Did we get the wrong Anderson – the uninspiring William, who was Professor at Auckland, rather than his talented younger brother John, who had such a huge cultural influence as Professor of Philosophy at Sydney? Perhaps but that can only be part of the story since we managed to attract even bigger stars, (notably Karl Popper) as well as breeding bigger talents of our own (Prior, Baier, Bennett, Mulgan, Hursthouse, Waldron and many more). Do we export our best talent? Sometimes – but the stars that stay and the stars who arrive don’t seem to have much impact in New Zealand itself however brightly they shine in the international philosophical firmament. Is it too esoteric? Perhaps, but esoteric philosophy can still have a cultural impact, witness, Moore, Popper and the younger Anderson. Is it, like many of New Zealand’s cultural products (from romance novels to movies), primarily intended for an international audience? That’s a large part of the answer but only a part. Another part of the answer is that philosophy HAS had a cultural impact but that impact is not readily apparent. For NZ philosophers have been less keen to push their ideological barrows and more keen to produce critical thinkers, and critical thinkers don’t all think alike. The logician George Hughes was apparently a life-changing teacher not because he had a nostrum but because he taught people to think. As one of his students said ‘the only ism you believe in is the syllogism’. On the whole the history of New Zealand Philosphy is a ‘From Log Cabin to White House’ tale, ‘From colonial obscurity through struggle and adversity to philosophical excellence’. But there are shadows in the picture. Some departments have nearly come to grief through bureaucratic and political misadventures, and it is hard to resist the suspicion that there is often an element of hostility to philosophers on the part of both university bureaucrats and fellow-academics. I speculate as to why this is the case (we are too argumentative and don’t confine our argumentative tendencies to the cloister) but conclude with some upbeat reflections. on the future of New Zealand Philosophy. (shrink)

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In (...) this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language. (shrink)

Isolation in the back-country: George Chamier, G.B. Lancaster, Katherine Mansfield, John Mulgan, and Graham Billing -- Outsiders and misfits in fragmented social milieux: William Satchell, Vincent Pyke, John A. Lee, Robin Hyde, Frank Sargeson, and others -- The lonely and the alone in the fiction of Janet Frame -- Maurice Gee and postmodern isolation -- Women, isolation, and history: Fiona Kidman, Noel Hilliard, and Patricia Grace -- Cultural deracination and isolation : Witi Ihimaera, Keri Hulme, and Alan Duff.

Reexamines the Western philosophical tradition, looking at the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self.

"Its publication should be a major event for cognitive linguistics and should pose a major challenge for cognitive science. In addition, it should have repercussions in a variety of disciplines, ranging from anthropology and psychology to epistemology and the philosophy of science.... Lakoff asks: What do categories of language and thought reveal about the human mind? Offering both general theory and minute details, Lakoff shows that categories reveal a great deal."—David E. Leary, American Scientist.

Reproduction of the original: Mental Evolution in Man by George John Romanes.

Modern Jewish Theology is the first comprehensive collection of Jewish theological ideas from the pathbreaking nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, featuring selections from more than thirty of the most influential modern Jewish thinkers of the era.

Best known for his influential History of Greece, the historian and politician George Grote wrote this account of Plato's dialogues as a philosophical supplement to the History. First published in 1865 and written in dialogic form, Grote's account of Plato's works includes substantial footnotes and marginalia. This first volume focuses on Plato's early and transitional dialogues, all of which feature Socrates. It also includes a preface to the whole project which discusses the meaning and importance of philosophy itself, and (...) extensive introductory material on pre-Socratic philosophy, the life of Plato and history of the Platonic canon. With three volumes each running to over six hundred pages, Grote's scholarship is formidably comprehensive. The publication of Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates confirmed him as one of the greatest authorities on Plato in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

Evidence is presented to show that the role of a generative grammar of a natural language is not merely to generate the grammatical sentences of that language, but also to relate them to their logical forms. The notion of logical form is to be made sense of in terms a natural logic, a logical for natural language, whose goals are to express all concepts capable of being expressed in natural language, to characterize all the valid inferences that can be made (...) in natural language, and to mesh with adequate linguistic descriptions of all natural languages. The latter requirement imposes empirical linguistic constraints on natural logic. A number of examples are discussed. (shrink)

From the late 1950s until 1975, cognition was understood mainly as disembodied symbol manipulation in cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and the nascent field of Cognitive Science. The idea of embodied cognition entered the field of Cognitive Linguistics at its beginning in 1975. Since then, cognitive linguists, working with neuroscientists, computer scientists, and experimental psychologists, have been developing a neural theory of thought and language (NTTL). Central to NTTL are the following ideas: (a) we think with our brains, that is, (...) thought is physical and is carried out by functional neural circuitry; (b) what makes thought meaningful are the ways those neural circuits are connected to the body and characterize embodied experience; (c) so-called abstract ideas are embodied in this way as well, as is language. Experimental results in embodied cognition are seen not only as confirming NTTL but also explained via NTTL, mostly via the neural theory of conceptual metaphor. Left behind more than three decades ago is the old idea that cognition uses the abstract manipulation of disembodied symbols that are meaningless in themselves but that somehow constitute internal “representations of external reality” without serious mediation by the body and brain. This article uniquely explains the connections between embodied cognition results since that time and results from cognitive linguistics, experimental psychology, computational modeling, and neuroscience. (shrink)

Originally a keynote address at the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE) 2013 convention, this article surveys many nonobvious ways that emotion phenomena show up in natural language. One conclusion is that no classical Aristotelian definition of “emotion” in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions is possible. The brain naturally creates radial, not classical categories. As a result, “emotion” is a contested concept. There is no one correct, classical definition of “emotion.” There are real emotion phenomena that can be (...) precisely studied, and language is an important area to look at for such phenomena. (shrink)

The Sweep of Probability broadly surveys this burgeoning field of philosophical inquiry. The book is unique because it engages the reader in contemporary debates about a variety of issues in probability theory without requiring a background in probability and mathematics. It also illustrates how the concerns of probability relate not only to philosophical inquiry but to aspects of everyday life. The primary aim of this book, claims George N.Schlesinger in the introduction, is to illustrate, by discussing a wide variety (...) of topics, that elementary probability belongs to one of those rare intellectual ventures where the returns are disproportionately high to the initial investment of effort. (shrink)

Remarkably accessible, Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment urges social scientists to move beyond the idealistic notion of the purely rational citizen to form a more complete, realistic model that includes the emotional side of ...

In 1972, George Seddon wrote Sense of Place, documenting his experience and research into the Swan Coastal Plain, which has since become a landmark Australian environmental publication. Among its claims to influence is having given modern currency to the term sense of place. Although Seddon did not coin the phrase, it was this book that introduced the phrase into the fields of landscape and environmental design. The book includes information on landforms, climate, geology, soils, flora, the Swan River, the (...) coast, offshore islands, wetlands, and urban areas. Mr. Warner in his Adirondack story, shot a bear by aiming, not at his eye or heart, but at him 'generally'. But we cannot aim 'generally' at the universe, or if we do, we will miss our game. So said William James, the philosopher, and it is good advice on how to take aim at environmental problems. Sense of Place is a topographic essay, not on the universe, but the environs of Perth, Western Australia. It is in three parts: The Land - The Plants - Man. The landforms, climate, drainage geology and plant-cover are discussed in detail, to construct a picture of the region before European settlement. The last third deals with the land use by Aboriginal and European, and the major environmental resources of the region. (shrink)

By delving into the history and development of logic from its beginnings to the modern era, George Englebretsen rehabilitates term logic and demonstrates that an enhanced traditional logic remains a viable possibility. Taking inspiration from Fred Sommers' work, he creates an updated and fascinating version of term logic; one he believes to be just as legitimate as, and in ways superior to, the currently predominant mathematical logic.

Darwin the writer -- Learning to see : Darwin's prophetic apprenticeship on the Beagle voyage -- The prose of On the origin of species -- Surprise and paradox : Darwin's artful legacy -- Darwinian mind and Wildean paradox -- Hardy's Woodlanders and the Darwinian grotesque -- Coda : the comic Darwin.

The Consequentialist Scale (Robinson, 2012) [89] assesses the endorsement of consequentialist and deontological moral beliefs. This study empirically investigated the application of the Greek translation of the Consequentialist Scale in a sample of native Greek speakers. Specifically, 415 native Greek speakers completed the questionnaire. To uncover the underlying structure of the 10 items in the Consequentialist Scale, an Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was conducted. The results revealed a three-factor solution, where the deontology factor exhibited the same structure as the original (...) work by Robinson (2012) [89], while the original consequentialism factor split into two separate factors. Significant Pearson's r correlations were observed between age and responses to the Consequentialist Scale. Separate EFAs were conducted for two age groups based on a medial split: younger (36 years old or less) and older (more than 36 years old). Interestingly, the younger group exhibited a two-factor solution with the same structure as the original work, while the older group showed a three-factor solution. A hierarchical k-means cluster analysis revealed that the cluster of participants who scored higher in deontology compared to consequentialism primarily consisted of older participants, whereas the two other clusters comprised of younger participants exhibited the reverse pattern. Neither gender nor previous experience with philosophy significantly affected scores on the Consequentialist Scale. Overall, our study provides evidence that the Consequentialist Scale is suitable for use in the Greek population. (shrink)

Kant was engaged with the subject of theodicy throughout his career and not merely in his 1791 treatise explicitly devoted to the subject. George Huxford traces Kant’s thought on theodicy throughout his career to show not only the continuity of Kant's consideration but also his philosophical development on the subject.

A category theoretic generalization of the theory of algebraizable deductive systems of Blok and Pigozzi is developed. The theory of institutions of Goguen and Burstall is used to provide the underlying framework which replaces and generalizes the universal algebraic framework based on the notion of a deductive system. The notion of a term -institution is introduced first. Then the notions of quasi-equivalence, strong quasi-equivalence and deductive equivalence are defined for -institutions. Necessary and sufficient conditions are given for the quasi-equivalence and (...) the deductive equivalence of two term -institutions, based on the relationship between their categories of theories. The results carry over without any complications to institutions, via their associated -institutions. The -institution associated with a deductive system and the institution of equational logic are examined in some detail and serve to illustrate the general theory. (shrink)

T. H. Huxley's essay and prolegomena of 1894 argued that the process and products of evolution are morally unacceptable and act in opposition to the ethical progress of humanity. Modern sociobiological insights and studies of organisms in natural settings support Huxley and justify an even more extreme condemnation of nature and an antithesis of the naturalistic fallacy: what is, in the biological world, normally ought not. Modern biology also provides suggestions on the origin of the human moral impulse and on (...) tactics likely to be effective in the combat against nature urged by Huxley. (shrink)

In this article I examine language used to define, express, and exploit “National Socialism”. These different uses vary in time and purpose, and need to be understood in context. The Nazis did not create much of the language most closely associated with National Socialism, but their use of certain language, symbols, and images has been so firmly established that we immediately recognize them even when partially spoken or indirectly referenced. This easy recognition, combined with the emotional charge of anger and (...) horror, lends itself to commercial and political exploitation. I discuss this with examples from scholarly publishing and current events, and also discuss possibilities for crowd manipulation made possible by political use of interactive social networks. (shrink)

This study examines the personal values and value types of Chinese accounting practitioners and students, using the values survey questionnaire developed and validated by Schwartz (1992, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 25, 1–65). A total of 454 accounting practitioners and 126 graduate accounting students participated in the study. The results show that Healthy, Family Security, Self-Respect, and Honoring of Parents and Elders are the top four values for both accounting practitioners and accounting students, although these values are not ranked in (...) the same order. Social Power, An Exciting Life, Devout, and Accepting My Portion in Life are the lowest rated four values for the accounting practitioners whereas Devout, An Exciting Life, Detachment, and Accepting My Portion in Life form the bottom four values for the accounting students. Both accounting practitioners and students ranked Security as the highest value type and Tradition as the lowest one, and the students rated Self-Direction as significantly more important than the practitioners. With respect to gender differences, both the male accounting practitioners and students rated the value type Achievement significantly higher than their female counterparts and there were several significant gender differences in personal values for both accounting practitioners and students. In addition, the perceived values are linked to social and cultural factors as well as to the influence of Western values. (shrink)