Thrift and Thriving in America is a collection of groundbreaking essays on the significance of thrift throughout American history.

_Why efforts to create a scientific basis of morality are doomed to fail_ In this illuminating book, James Davison Hunter and Paul Nedelisky recount the centuries-long, passionate quest to discover a scientific foundation for morality. The "new moral science" led by such figures as E.O. Wilson, Patricia Churchland and Joshua Greene is only the newest manifestation of an effort that has failed repeatedly. Though claims for its accomplishments are often wildly exaggerated, this new iteration has been no (...) more successful than its predecessors. Hunter and Nedelisky argue that in the end, science cannot tell us how we should live or why we should be good and not evil, and this is for both philosophical and scientific reasons. In the face of this failure, the new moral science has taken a surprising turn. Whereas earlier efforts sought to demonstrate what is right and wrong, the new moral scientists have concluded that right and wrong, because they are not amenable to scientific study, don’t actually exist. Their moral nihilism turns the science of morality into a social engineering project. If there is nothing moral for science to discover, the science of morality becomes, at best, a program to achieve arbitrary societal goals. Concise and rigorously argued, _Science and the Good _is a major critique of a would-be science that has gained too much influence in today’s public discourse, and an exposé of that project’s darker turn. (shrink)

First published in 1984, Cultural Analysis is a systematic examination of the theories of culture contained in the writings of four contemporary social theorists: Peter L. Berger, Mary Douglas, Michel Foucault, and Jürgen Habermas. This study of their work clarifies their contributions to the analysis of culture and shows the converging assumptions that the authors believe are laying the foundation for a new approach to the study of culture. The focus is specifically on culture, a concept that remains subject to (...) ambiguities of treatment, and concentrates on questions concerning the definition and content of culture, its construction, its relations with social conditions, and the manner in which it may be changing. The books demonstrates how these writers have made strides towards defining culture as an objective element of social interaction which can be subjected to critical investigation. (shrink)

Clinical trials of xenotransplantation may begin early in the next decade, with kidneys from genetically modified pigs transplanted into adult humans. If successful, transplanting pig hearts into children with advanced heart failure may be the next step. Typically, clinical trials have a specified end date, and participants are aware of the amount of time they will be in the study. This is not so with XTx. The current ethical consensus is that XTx recipients must consent to lifelong monitoring. While this (...) presents challenges to the right to withdraw in the adult population, additional and unanswered questions also linger in the paediatric population. In paediatric XTx, parents or guardians consent not only to the initial treatment of the child but also to lifelong monitoring, thus making a decision whose consequences will remain present as the child develops the capacity for assent, and finally the capacity for informed consent or refusal. This article presents and evaluates unanswered paediatric ethical questions in regard to the right to withdraw from XTx follow-up in the paediatric population. (shrink)

Research involving human subjects is much more stringently regulated than many other nonresearch activities that appear to be at least as risky. A number of prominent figures now argue that research is overregulated. We argue that the reasons typically offered to justify the present system of research regulation fail to show that research should be subject to more stringent regulation than other equally risky activities. However, there are three often overlooked reasons for thinking that research should be treated as a (...) special case. First, research typically involves the imposition of risk on people who do not benefit from this risk imposition. Second, research depends on public trust. Third, the complexity of the moral decision making required favors ethics committees as a regulative solution for research. (shrink)

About 25 years ago, it came to light that a single combinatorial property determines both an important dividing line in model theory and machine learning. The following years saw a fruitful exchange of ideas between PAC-learning and the model theory of NIP structures. In this article, we point out a new and similar connection between model theory and machine learning, this time developing a correspondence between stability and learnability in various settings of online learning. In particular, this gives many new (...) examples of mathematically interesting classes which are learnable in the online setting. (shrink)

We set up a general context in which one can prove Sauer-Shelah type lemmas. We apply our general results to answer a question of Bhaskar [1] and give a slight improvement to a result of Malliaris and Terry [7]. We also prove a new Sauer-Shelah type lemma in the context of op-rank, a notion of Guingona and Hill [4].

Research involving human subjects is much more stringently regulated than many other nonresearch activities that appear to be at least as risky. A number of prominent figures now argue that research is overregulated. We argue that the reasons typically offered to justify the present system of research regulation fail to show that research should be subject to more stringent regulation than other equally risky activities. However, there are three often overlooked reasons for thinking that research should be treated as a (...) special case. First, research typically involves the imposition of risk on people who do not benefit from this risk imposition. Second, research depends on public trust. Third, the complexity of the moral decision making required favors ethics committees as a regulative solution for research. (shrink)

This article explores the meanings of manhood as articulated by Afro-American men. Conceptualization and Q-sort methods are used to examine men's construction of manhood and men's ratings of the importance of selected attributes to being a man. Manhood emerged as a multidimensional construct with four major domains and 15 distinct clusters of ideas. The cluster of attributes rated as most important to being a man paralleled the conceptualization of manhood derived from the open-ended interviews for both professional and nonprofessional men. (...) Men's ratings of attributes in the areas of ownership, manliness, spiritual and religious, and power varied by occupational status. (shrink)

A century and a half after the Kulturkampf in Germany, and three decades after James Davison Hunter’s account of the “culture warriors,” this book review examines what Nietzsche might have to say to us today about our understanding of the past and our relation to the future. It considers two studies of the four essays of Nietzsche’s Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen taken as a whole, one study of Nietzsche’s second essay on history, one on Nietzsche’s general conception of decadence (...) and culture, and a collection of essays on Nietzsche’s views of history and memory. Taken together, these studies not only complement each other in respect of their readings of the Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen and the question of culture, they also throw light on other aspects of Nietzsche by reminding us of the rootedness of Nietzsche’s thought in the outlook of Weimar classicism and highlighting the vitalist aspects of Nietzsche’s thought. The review concludes that Nietzsche is more timely than ever, not least because of his critique of education, as well as his attention to such key themes as identity politics, Erinnerungskultur, and museumization; it is still possible to agree with Nietzsche’s sentiments as expressed in a motto from an early notebook of July 1862: “I prefer the past to the present; but I believe in a better future.”. (shrink)

Novel technological developments mean that gene editing – making deliberately targeted alterations in specific genes – is now a clinical reality. The inherited metabolic disorders, a group of clinically significant, monogenic disorders, provide a useful paradigm to explore some of the many ethical issues that arise from this technological capability. Fundamental questions about the significance of the genome, and of manipulating it by selection or editing, are reviewed, and a particular focus on the legislative process that has permitted the development (...) of mitochondrial donation techniques is considered. Ultimately, decisions about what we should do with gene editing must be determined by reference to other non-genomic texts that determine what it is to be human – rather than simply to undertake gene editing because it can be done. (shrink)

This guest-edited special section explores the related themes of mystery, humility, and religious practice from both the Western and East Asian philosophical traditions. The contributors are David E. Cooper, John Cottingham, Mark Wynn, Graham Parkes, and Ian James Kidd.

Steven D. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City takes its place alongside James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars as one of the two truly indispensable books on today’s Culture Wars. It advances our understanding of today’s conflict by situating it historically and focusing our attention on its religious dimension. Smith argues that today’s conflict is the latest episode in a longstanding conflict between immanent forms of religiosity which locate the sacred in the world of space and time, (...) and transcendent forms of religiosity which locate the divine beyond space and time. As compelling as it is, the volume’s argument would have been strengthened by a more sustained treatment of the nature of the political community and the essential role played within it by the truths held in common by the members concerning God, man, nature, and history. (shrink)

Hunter Brown shows that Henry James's views of religious experience do not in fact lapse into subjectivismor fideism that critics have accused him of but occasions hardships and self-sacrifice which James describes.

The purpose of this dissertation is to defend William James's will to believe doctrine from the main lines of criticism which have been levelled against it throughout the last century. Principal among such criticisms are accusations that James fideistically advocated an intrusion of the subject into doxastic practice which opens the door to wishful thinking, and that he confused belief and hypothesis-adoption. My defense of James against such charges will be based upon analyses of two important but (...) neglected components of his position--the "liveness" of certain options and propositions, and the "strenuous mood"--and upon a contextualization of the role assigned by James to "passional nature" within the terms of reference of his work on immediate experience. (shrink)

Crime scene investigation is a form of Distributed Cognition. The principal concept we explore in this paper is that of `resource for action'. It is proposed that crime scene investigation employs four primary resources-for-action: the environment, or scene itself, which affords particular forms of search and object retrieval; the retrieved objects, which afford translation into evidence; the procedures that guide investigation, which both constrain the search activity and also provide opportunity for additional activity; the narratives that different agents within the (...) system produce to develop explanatory models and formal accounts of the crime. For each aspect of distributed cognition, we consider developments in technology that could support activity. (shrink)

Crime scene investigation is a form of Distributed Cognition. The principal concept we explore in this paper is that of `resource for action'. It is proposed that crime scene investigation employs four primary resources-for-action: the environment, or scene itself, which affords particular forms of search and object retrieval; the retrieved objects, which afford translation into evidence; the procedures that guide investigation, which both constrain the search activity and also provide opportunity for additional activity; the narratives that different agents within the (...) system produce to develop explanatory models and formal accounts of the crime. For each aspect of distributed cognition, we consider developments in technology that could support activity. (shrink)

On 18–19 May 2018, a symposium was held in the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Ronald W. Hepburn (1927–2008). The speakers at this event discussed Hepburn’s oeuvre from several perspectives. For this book, the collection of the revised versions of their talks has been supplemented by the papers of other scholars who were unable to attend the symposium itself. Thus this volume contains contributions from (...) eighteen notable scholars of different disciplines, ranging from contemporary aesthetics and art theory through to philosophical approaches to religion, education and social anthropology. It also includes a bibliography of Hepburn’s writings. The essays were first published in two special issues of the Journal of Scottish Thought, vols. 10–11 (2018–2019). -/- Ronald William Hepburn was born in Aberdeen on 16 March 1927. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School, then he graduated with an M.A. in Philosophy (1951) and obtained his doctorate from the University of Aberdeen (1955). His tutor at Aberdeen was Donald MacKinnon (1913– 1994), a Scottish philosopher and theologian, the author of A Study in Ethical Theory (1957) and The Problem of Metaphysics (1974). Hepburn taught as Lecturer at the Department of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen (1956–60), and he was also Visiting Associate Professor of Philosophy at New York University (1959–60). He returned from the United States as Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham University. In 1964, he was appointed as a Chair in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and between 1965 and 1968 he was also Stanton Lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge. From 1975 until his retirement in 1996, he held the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh. He died in Edinburgh on 23 December 2008. His philosophical interests ranged from theology and the philosophy of religion through moral philosophy and the philosophy of education to art theory and aesthetics. Notably, Hepburn is widely regarded as the founder of modern environmental and everyday aesthetics as a result of the influence of papers in the 1960s which pioneered a new approach to the aesthetics of the natural world. (shrink)

This article argues against the longstanding view that William James's "Will to Believe" defends the "adoption" of certain beliefs, especially if such beliefs give rise to favourable consequences. I contend, rather, that James is resisting the cultural propensity to call for the "abandonment" of certain beliefs or propensities to believe. A failure to recognize this feature of his position has resulted from a widespread neglect of one of the three distinguishing characteristics of options and propositions which interest him (...) in his essay: their liveness'. My analysis of liveness brings out its centrality and the impact of such centrality on James's position overall. (shrink)

The ways in which Wittgenstein was directly influenced by William James (by his early psychological work as well his later philosophy) have been thoroughly explored and charted by Russell B. Goodman. In particular, Goodman has drawn attention to the pragmatist resonances of the Wittgensteinian notion of hinge propositions as developedand articulated in the posthumously edited and published work, On Certainty. This paper attempts to extend Goodman’s observation, moving beyond his focus on James (specifically, James’s Pragmatism) as his (...) pragmatist reference point. It aims to articulate the affinity between Wittgenstein’s thought on the topic of certainty and that of the neglected pragmatist thinker, George Santayana. -/- The paper draws on Duncan Pritchard’s recent reading of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty in order to articulate the concept of certainty involved in the notion of hinge propositions. It identifies two important and related points of affinity between this Wittgensteinian line of thought on certainty and the line of thought on the same topic articulated in Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith. The paper argues, firstly, that, both lines of thought reflect a pragmatist concept of certainty, according to which our most fundamental certainties are not conceived as purely theoretical objects of belief or knowledge but rather as thearational presuppositions of beliefs and practical action. Secondly, it examines the way inwhich the pragmatist concept of certainty functions, for the two thinkers as a response to scepticism. It argues that although the two thinkers’ responses are very different, they are mutually compatible and, together, point towards the possibility of a distinctively pragmatist response to scepticism, which involves an anti-epistemological model of the intimate relation of the human self to the world. (shrink)

Portraits of patients served many clinical functions in eighteenth-century medic John Hunter's medical practice. As incarnations of medical skills and medical knowledge, they helped Hunter understand his patients’ problems. They could also bridge the physical absence of his patients, and so help him discuss cases at a distance with other members of the medical faculty. Moreover, portraits complemented text in his day-to-day practice; portraits were in no way an ancillary medium for Hunter, but rather a fundamental way (...) of working. Meanwhile, the role of Hunter's assistants as medically trained artists complicates typical historical models of patient–practitioner interactions, and affects how patients were objectified by modes of looking and by art. (shrink)

James Peterson _Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order_ Detroit, Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 1994 ISBN 0-8143-2456-8 212 pp.