During World War II, the Institute for Social Research conducted an innovative study of American working-class antisemitism. This article goes beyond existing literature by reconstructing the project’s evolving understanding of labor antisemitism—from ideology to psychopathology. This change, it argues, arose from the project’s methods, findings, and analytical concepts—especially the long-overlooked concept of the stereotype. The article documents this concept’s role in two better-known Institute works from the period: Dialectic of Enlightenment and Authoritarian Personality. Throughout, it traces continuities in the Institute’s (...) research program and reconsiders the balance between its empirical studies and its critical theory in the 1940s. (shrink)

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno famously argued that ‘myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.’ Although much scholarship has analyzed and built upon Horkheimer and Adorno’s insight, it has often conflated myth with another concept: epic. By closely reading Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, this article disentangles the two concepts and elucidates key features of myth. Sacrifice, it argues, stood at the centre of myth, connecting and organizing its other dimensions. Next, the article reconstructs the lineage (...) of Horkheimer and Adorno’s account of myth and sacrifice in the fields of anthropology, ethnology, and sociology. Specifically, Horkheimer and Adorno drew on analyses of sacrificial rites in these disciplines to argue that sacrifices constituted a transaction between worshipers and gods and, therefore, established control, disempowerment, and fraud. Finally, the article takes up Horkheimer and Adorno’s task of tracing the conduits between myth and enlightenment by identifying parallel features of sacrifice and modern wage labor. To conclude, the article indicates the significance of mythical sacrifice by connecting its analysis of wage labour to contemporary theorizing about the ‘theological dimensions of capitalism.’ Together, these arguments show the centrality of Dialectic to theories of myth as conceptual tools and critical resources. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno has a reputation for being adamantly opposed to empirical social science; he denounced it as, at best, a methodological fetish and, at worst, a source of reification. For the most part, scholars have implicitly followed Adorno's view, variously explaining away the impetus for or de‐emphasizing the importance of his participation in a number of varied studies in the social and human sciences between the late 1930s and mid‐1950s. This chapter begins to correct this imbalance by returning attention to (...) three of Adorno's most important empirical studies: “The Essential Value of Radio to All Types of Listeners” (1938–1941), “Anti‐Semitism among American Labor” (1944–1945), and “The Function of Anti‐Semitism in the Personality” (1944–1950). First, the chapter reconstructs Adorno's penetrating critique of existing research methods. Adorno came to see that empirical studies of individuals' preferences and opinions propagated the illusions of choice, preference, experience, and individuality that were necessary to the ideology of contemporary capitalism. But Adorno did not countenance the abandonment of these empirical techniques. Second, the chapter documents Adorno's revision and implementation of empirical techniques in the study of prejudice and authoritarianism. Adorno, it shows, used techniques ranging from social statistics to behavioral psychology. Adorno did not seek to rescue or to synthesize these approaches but instead insisted on the necessity of pursuing each empirical method until it terminated in contradiction. By so doing, he held, empirical social science could be used to illuminate the incongruities of the capitalist economy and social totality itself. (shrink)

Should engineering ethics be taught? Despite the obvious truism that we all want our students to be moral engineers who practice virtuous professional behavior, I argue, in this article that the question itself obscures several ambiguities that prompt preliminary resolution. Upon clarification of these ambiguities, and an attempt to delineate key issues that make the question a philosophically interesting one, I conclude that engineering ethics not only should not, but cannot, be taught if we understand “teaching engineering ethics” to mean (...) training engineers to be moral individuals (as some advocates seem to have proposed). However, I also conclude that there is a justification to teaching engineering ethics, insofar as we are able to clearly identify the most desirable and efficacious pedagogical approach to the subject area, which I propose to be a case study-based format that utilizes the principle of human cognitive pattern recognition. (shrink)

According to the conceptualist view in the philosophy of perception, we must possess concepts for all the objects, properties and relations which feature in our perceptual experiences. In this paper, I investigate the possibility of developing an argument against the conceptualist view by appealing to the notion of attention. In Part One, I begin by setting out an apparently promising version of such an argument, a version which appeals to a link between attention and perceptual demonstrative concept possession. In Part (...) Two, however, I show how the conceptualist can challenge what appears to be the key premise of the argument, and I go on to describe, in Part Three, an important further difficulty which we face if we attempt to overcome this challenge in a particular way. My conclusion will be that the conceptualist's challenge to the argument is convincing and hence that the argument remains inconclusive. (shrink)

David Charles presents a major new study of Aristotle's views on meaning, essence, necessity, and related topics. These interconnected views are central to Aristotle's metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, and are also highly relevant to current philosophical debates. Charles aims to reach a clear understanding of Aristotle's claims and arguments, to assess their truth, and to evaluate their importance to ancient and modern philosophy.

Charles Beitz rejects two highly influential conceptions of international theory as empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. In one, international relations is a Hobbesian state of nature in which moral judgments are entirely inappropriate, and in the other, states are analogous to persons in domestic society in having rights of autonomy that insulate them from external moral assessment and political interference. Beitz postulates that a theory of international politics should include a revised principle of state autonomy based on the justice (...) of a state's domestic institutions, and a principle of international distributive justice to establish a fair division of resources and wealth among persons situated in diverse national societies. (shrink)

In Part 1, I contend (using Coriolanus as my mouthpiece) that Keeley and Clarke have failed to show that there is anything intellectually suspect about conspiracy theories per se. Conspiracy theorists need not commit the ‘fundamental attribution error’ there is no reason to suppose that all or most conspiracy theories constitute the cores of degenerating research programs, nor does situationism - a dubious doctrine in itself - lend any support to a systematic skepticism about conspiracy theories. In Part 2. I (...) argue (in propria persona) that the idea that there is something suspect about conspiracy theories is one of the most dangerous and idiotic superstitions to disgrace our political culture. (shrink)

Human rights have become one of the most important moral concepts in global political life over the last 60 years. Charles Beitz, one of the world's leading philosophers, offers a compelling new examination of the idea of a human right.

Iris Murdoch and moral philosophy -- Understanding the other: a Gadamerian view on conceptual schemes -- Language not mysterious? -- Celan and the recovery of language -- Nationalism and modernity -- Conditions of an unforced consensus on human rights -- Democratic exclusion (and its remedies?) -- Religious mobilizations -- Themes from a secular age -- The immanent counter-enlightenment -- Notes on the sources of violence: perennial and modern -- The future of the religious past -- Disenchantment-re-enchantment -- What does secularism (...) mean? -- Die blosse Vernunft ("reason alone") -- Perils of moralism -- What was the Axial revolution? (shrink)

Of laws in general -- Of laws directly derived from the nature of government -- Of the principles of the three kinds of government -- That the laws of education ought to be relative to the principles of government -- That the laws given by the legislator ought to be relative to the nature of government -- Consquences of the principles of different governments, with respect to the simplicity of civil and criminal laws, the form of judgements, and inflicting of (...) punishments -- Consquences of the different principles of the three governments, with respect to sumptuary laws, luxury, and the condition of women -- Of the corruption of the principles of the three governments -- Of the laws in the relation they bear to defensive force -- Of laws, in the relation they bear to offensive force. (shrink)

In this revised edition of his 1979 classic Political Theory and International Relations, Charles Beitz rejects two highly influential conceptions of international theory as empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. In one, international relations is a Hobbesian state of nature in which moral judgments are entirely inappropriate, and in the other, states are analogous to persons in domestic society in having rights of autonomy that insulate them from external moral assessment and political interference. Beitz postulates that a theory of international (...) politics should include a revised principle of state autonomy based on the justice of a state’s domestic institutions, and a principle of international distributive justice to establish a fair division of resources and wealth among persons situated in diverse national societies. (shrink)

The transcendental aesthetic -- Arithmetic and the categories -- Remarks on pure natural science -- Two studies in the reception of Kant's philosophy of arithmetic: postscript to part I -- Some remarks on Frege's conception of extension -- Postscript to essay 5 -- Frege's correspondence: postscript to essay 6 -- Brentano on judgment and truth -- Husserl and the linguistic turn.

Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is unquestionably one of the chief landmarks in biology. The Origin (as it is widely known) was literally only an abstract of the manuscript Darwin had originally intended to complete and publish as the formal presentation of his views on evolution. Compared with the Origin, his original long manuscript work on Natural Selection, which is presented here and made available for the first time in printed form, has more abundant examples and illustrations (...) of Darwin's argument, plus an extensive citation of sources. (shrink)

Charles Babbage was an English mathematician, philosopher and mechanical engineer who invented the concept of a programmable computer. From 1828 to 1839 he was Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, a position whose holders have included Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking. A proponent of natural religion, he published The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise in 1837 as his personal response to The Bridgewater Treatises, a series of books on theology and science that had recently appeared. Disputing the claim that science disfavours (...) religion, Babbage wrote 'that there exists no such fatal collision between the words of Scripture and the facts of nature'. He argues on the basis of reason and experience alone, drawing a parallel between his work on the calculating engine and God as the divine programmer of the universe. Eloquently written, and underpinned by mathematical arguments, The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise is a landmark work of natural theology. (shrink)

The collapse of historicism was not merely the demise of an academic tradition but signified a shift in the understanding of hermeneutics and metaphysics. Whereas earlier books have explored the rise and dominance of historicism within academic history, this is the first to trace its collapse and to show how it was shaped by larger philosophical and scientific concerns. Charles R. Bambach's lucid account of the demise of historicism within the context of German metaphysics provides a rich new perspective (...) on the development of the young Heidegger's concept of "historicity" and on the origins of postmodern thought. Bambach reconstructs the methodological debates arising from a pervasive sense of crisis among German philosophers in the late nineteenth century. He details the divergent attempts by the Neo-Kantians, Nietzsche, and Dilthey to overcome the limitations of historical relativism. Heidegger's view of "historicity," Bambach shows, radically transforms the problematic of historicism into a discourse concerning the crisis of philosophical modernity. (shrink)

In this article, network science is discussed from a methodological perspective, and two central theses are defended. The first is that network science exploits the very properties that make a system complex. Rather than using idealization techniques to strip those properties away, as is standard practice in other areas of science, network science brings them to the fore, and uses them to furnish new forms of explanation. The second thesis is that network representations are particularly helpful in explaining the properties (...) of non-decomposable systems. Where part-whole decomposition is not possible, network science provides a much-needed alternative method of compressing information about the behavior of complex systems, and does so without succumbing to problems associated with combinatorial explosion. The article concludes with a comparison between the uses of network representation analyzed in the main discussion, and an entirely distinct use of network representation that has recently been discussed in connection with mechanistic modeling. (shrink)

Professor Whitty has endorsed the consensus that research into education is empirical social science, distinguishing ‘educational research’ which seeks directly to influence practice, and ‘education research’ that has substantive value but no necessary practical application.The status of the science here is problematic. The positivist approach is incoherent and so supports neither option. Critical educational science is virtually policy-inert. The interpretive approach is empirically sound but, because of the value component in education, does not support education research either, or account for (...) this component.A solution to the latter problem is sought in the debate between Carr and Hirst on the relationship between philosophy and education. This shows Carr making claims that rely on a conception of philosophy that he rejects, while Hirst insists on this conception, uses it to justify practical claims, but denies that this is possible.To achieve a practically relevant analysis of educational research, both need to include second-order, normative, conceptual enquiry into the philosophies that drive educational policy-making and partly regulate teaching methodology. Deweyan, first-order, ‘reflective practice’ needs, then, to be supplemented with second-order reflection.Educational research is philosophy- not science-driven, and is value-led. Consequently, it has the status not of scientific discovery but of practical recommendation. (shrink)

Subsequent chapters discuss Vives's ideas on the soul, especially his analysis of the emotions, his contribution to rhetoric and dialectic and a posthumous defense of the Christian religion in dialogue form."--BOOK JACKET.

Introduction Comparative psychology can generally be defined as the branch of psychology that studies the similarities and differences in the behavior of organisms. Formal definitions found in textbooks and encyclopedias disagree whether comparative psychologists restrict their work to the study of animals or include the study of human behavior. This paper offers an opinion on the major problem facing comparative psychology today – where we will find the next generation of comparative psychology students. Something must be done before we lose (...) access to an entire generation of psychology undergraduates. It is not enough to say that comparative psychology is being “absorbed” in other academic units such as “integrative biology”, “integrative study of animal behavior”, “evolutionary psychology”, “comparative cognition”, or “animal cognition.” Indeed, many of these topics are not primarily studied in psychology departments, wherein comparative psychology students have traditionally received joint training in the principles of behavior and comparative analysis, as applied to both humans and other animals. Consider, for example, the difference between comparative psychology and comparative cognition. Comparative cognition includes features of comparative psychology, but they are not identical. Comparative cognition represents a very specific theoretical position whose validity is based on certain suppositions such as the belief (by definition) that the internal cogni... (shrink)

La Valeur inductive de la relativité est sans conteste l'ouvrage le plus méconnu de toute l'oeuvre «philosophique» de Gaston Bachelard. Au silence presque total, à l'absence de lectures, ne répondent que des interprétations du« premier genre», appuyées sur un certain ouï-dire discursif, mais qui font l'autorité des pseudo-standards. Les positions bachelardiennes sont ici confrontées à La Déduction relativiste d'Émile Meyerson. Le poids de l'analyse portera essentiellement sur un dépl(o)iement du dispositif bachelardien d'induction et de construction. L'appareillage « inductif » doit (...) être pensé sur le modèle électromagnétique, et la position «constructiviste» est toujours liée au travail de synthèse. Enfin, c'est une véritable métaphysique que semble dès lors devoir engendrer cette « pensée des sciences ». (shrink)

Charles Avison's Essay on Musical Expression, first published in 1752, is a major contribution to the debate on musical aesthetics which developed in the course of the 18th century. Considered by Charles Burney as the first essay devoted to 'musical criticism' proper, it established the primary importance of 'expression' and reconsidered the relative importance of harmony and melody. Immediately after its publication it was followed by William Hayes's Remarks (1753), to which Avison himself retorted in his Reply. Taken (...) together these three texts offer a fascinating insight into the debate that raged in the 18th century between the promoters of the so-called 'ancient music' (such as Hayes) and the more 'modern' musicians. Beyond matters of taste, what was at stake in Avison's theoretical contribution was the assertion that the individual's response to music ultimately mattered more than the dry rules established by professional musicians. Avison also wrote several prefaces to the published editions of his own musical compositions. This volume reprints these prefaces and advertisements together with his Essay to provide an interesting view of eighteenth-century conceptions of composition and performance, and a complete survey of Avison's theory of music. (shrink)

Much current theorizing about literature involves efforts to renew our sense of aesthetic values in reading. Such is the case with new formalism as well as recent appeals to the notion of “surface reading.” While sympathetic to these efforts, Charles Altieri believes they ultimately fall short because too often they fail to account for the values that engage literary texts in the social world. In Reckoning with the Imagination, Altieri argues for a reconsideration of the Kantian tradition of Idealist (...) ethics, which he believes can restore much of the power of the arguments for the role of aesthetics in art. Altieri finds a perspective for that restoration in a reading of Wittgenstein’s later work that stresses Wittgenstein’s parallel criticisms of the spirit of empiricism. Altieri begins by offering a phenomenology of imagination, because we cannot fully honor art if we do not link it to a distinctive, socially productive force. That force emerges in two quite different but equally powerful realizations in his reading of John Ashbery’s “Instruction Manual,” which explicitly establishes a model for a postromantic view of imagination, and William Butler Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” He then turns to Wittgenstein with chapters on the role of display as critique of Enlightenment thinking, the honoring of qualities like sensitivity and the ability to attune to the actions of others, the role of expression in the building of models, and the contrast between ethical and confessional modes of judgment. Finally, Altieri produces his own model of aesthetic experience as participatory valuation and makes an extended argument for the social significance of appreciation as a way to escape the patterns of resentment fundamental to our current mode of politics. A masterful work by one of our foremost literary and philosophical theorists, Reckoning with the Imagination will breathe new life into ongoing debates over the value of aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Complementing the publication of Darwin's notebooks and correspondence, this work provides access to the last remaining unpublished source of Darwin manuscript materials. It is a catalog to and a complete transcription of the marks and annotations he made in the margins of his books. The margin comments throw light on Darwin's immediate reactions to his reading matter; further comments on slips of paper stuck inside the covers of the books reveal more considered evaluation. These comments are also fully transcribed. Annotation (...) copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

This book is an examination of the inattention of business schools to moral education, addressing lessons learned from the most recent business corruption scandals and financial crises, and also questioning what we're teaching now and what should be considering in educating future business leaders to cope with the challenges of leading with integrity in the global environment"--Provided by publisher.

This paper has two purposes: to provide a contextualised account of the Young Hegelian theory of the state, and to argue that Marx began working on the manuscript known as his ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’, not in the Summer of 1843, as most commentators assume, but at least as early as the Spring of 1842. The established narrative describes the Young Hegelians as ‘liberals’, and suggests that Marx ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law’ represents his rejection of their (...) liberalism and turn towards a more radical democratic and revolutionary position. Conversely, I argue that the Young Hegelians (notably Arnold Ruge and Bruno Bauer) were never liberal (at least not by any standard definition of that term) but articulated a radical and revolutionary theory of the state from the outset – one that understood freedom, not as independence, but as political participation, and that characterised the modern state, not as the guarantor of private rights, but as the institutional framework in which all citizens could realise their public freedom. In this sense, Marx’s ‘Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy Law’ does not represent a break with the Young Hegelians theory of state, but a contribution to it. (shrink)

This article reports a study carried out in order to measure how semantic factors affect reductions in the difficulty of the Chinese Ring Puzzle (CRP) that involves removing five objects according to a recursive rule. We hypothesised that semantics would guide inferences about action decision making. The study involved a comparison of problem solving for two semantic isomorphic variants of the CRP ( fish and fleas ) with problem solving for the puzzle's classic variant (the Balls and Boxes problem; Kotovsky (...) learning involves generalising the relations within a coherent, interconnected whole that makes up the puzzle's rules. It seems that semantics make it easier for the puzzle's elements to be grouped together within coherent, meaningful wholes, which reduces relational complexity and facilitates problem solving. (shrink)

Antisemitism is fun. This essay explains why and proposes a new approach to combating it.

An indispensable and comprehensive resource for students and scholars of philosophy of religion.

This paper describes one style of functional analysis commonly used in the neurosciences called task-bound functional analysis. The concept of function invoked by this style of analysis is distinctive in virtue of the dependence relations it bears to transient environmental properties. It is argued that task-bound functional analysis cannot explain the presence of structural properties in nervous systems. An alternative concept of neural function is introduced that draws on the theoretical neuroscience literature, and an argument is given to show that (...) this alternative concept of may help to overcome the explanatory limitations of task-bound functional analysis. (shrink)

Landauer's principle, often regarded as the basic principle of the thermodynamics of information processing, holds that any logically irreversible manipulation of information, such as the erasure of a bit or the merging of two computation paths, must be accompanied by a corresponding entropy increase in non-information-bearing degrees of freedom of the information-processing apparatus or its environment. Conversely, it is generally accepted that any logically reversible transformation of information can in principle be accomplished by an appropriate physical mechanism operating in a (...) thermodynamically reversible fashion. These notions have sometimes been criticized either as being false, or as being trivial and obvious, and therefore unhelpful for purposes such as explaining why Maxwell's Demon cannot violate the second law of thermodynamics. Here I attempt to refute some of the arguments against Landauer's principle, while arguing that although in a sense it is indeed a straightforward consequence or restatement of the Second Law, it still has considerable pedagogic and explanatory power, especially in the context of other influential ideas in nineteenth and twentieth century physics. Similar arguments have been given by Jeffrey Bub. (shrink)

On 27th December 1831, HMS Beagle set out from Plymouth under the command of Captain Robert Fitzroy on a voyage that lasted nearly 5 years. The purpose of the trip was to complete a survey of the southern coasts of South America, and afterwards to circumnavigate the globe. The ship's geologist and naturalist was Charles Darwin. Darwin kept a diary throughout the voyage in which he recorded his daily activities, not only on board the ship but also during the (...) several long journeys that he made on horseback in Patagonia and Chile. His entries tell the story of one of the most important scientific journeys ever made with matchless immediacy and vivid descriptiveness. (shrink)

A fascinating research program in neurophysiology attempts to quantify the amount of information transmitted by single neurons. The claims that emerge from this research raise new philosophical questions about the nature of information. What kind of information is being quantified? Do the resulting quantities describe empirical magnitudes like those found elsewhere in the natural sciences? In this article, it is argued that neural information quantities have a relativisitic character that makes them distinct from the kinds of information typically discussed in (...) the philosophical literature. It is also argued that despite this relativistic character, there are cases in which neural information quantities can be viewed as robustly objective empirical properties. (shrink)