"This reviewer had to be restrained from stopping people in the street to urge them to read it: They would learn something of the way science is done,...

A Place for Beauty in the Therapeutic Encounter is written for all psychotherapists, counsellors, and psychologists who practise under the broad banner of psychoanalytic thinking. It is also for anyone who loves beauty and wants to think more about its place in the mind.

Introducing the building project -- Building law on a solid foundation : the eternal law -- Discovering the framework : the natural law -- Examining the framework : the content of the natural law -- Consulting the architect when problems arise : the divine law -- Decorating the structure : the art of making human law -- Appointing a foreman : the basis of authority and obligation -- Falling OV the frame : the limits of legal authority -- The point (...) of the structure : justice and the causes of law -- The reality of the art (not the science) of law. (shrink)

This book traces the career development and influence on American intellectual life of the first twenty women to earn a PhD in philosophy in the United States. Rogers explores the factors that led these women to pursue careers in academic philosophy, examines the ideas they developed, and evaluates the impact they had on the academic and social worlds they inhabited. This volume investigates not only the success stories of such women as Eliza Ritchie, Julia Gulliver, and Christine Ladd-Franklin, to name (...) a few, but also the policies and practices that made it difficult or impossible for others to succeed. (shrink)

There has been a long debate on whether demonstratives are directly referential as Kaplan originally argued, or indirectly referential like a definite description. I propose a new analysis of demonstratives that combines intuitions from both direct and indirect approaches. The demonstrative is analyzed as an indirectly referential expression with a binary maximality operator that takes two arguments, where the second argument can be a deictic pointing, an anaphoric index, or a relative clause. Direct reference is encoded not in the meaning (...) of the demonstrative but in the meaning contributed by the pointing gesture, thus capturing both direct and indirect uses. I further propose that some pronouns in English function as demonstratives, realizing the binary structure and competing with the demonstrative. The main advantages of this proposal include (a) deriving the distribution of pronominal and adnominal demonstratives systematically; (b) capturing the unique interaction that demonstratives have with a pointing gesture; and (c) locating English demonstratives against a larger, cross-linguistic picture. (shrink)

The fundamental problem of Christology is the apparent contradiction of Christ as recorded at Chalcedon. Christ is human and Christ is divine. Being divine entails being immutable. Being human entails being mutable. Were Christ two different persons there’d be no apparent contradiction. But Chalcedon rules as much out. Were Christ only partly human or only partly divine there’d be no apparent contradiction. But Chalcedon rules as much out. Were the very meaning of ‘mutable’ and/or ‘immutable’ other than what they are, (...) there’d be no apparent contradiction. But the meaning is what it is, and changing the meaning of our terms to avoid the apparent contradiction of Christ is an apparent flight from reality. What, in the end, is the explanation of the apparent contradiction of Christ? Theologians and philosophers have long advanced many consistency-seeking answers, all of which increase the metaphysical or semantical complexity of the otherwise strikingly simple but radical core of Christianity’s GodMan. In this paper, I put the simplest explanation on the theological table: namely, Christ appears to be contradictory because Christ is contradictory. This explanation may sound complicated to the many who are steeped in the mainstream account of logic according to which logic precludes the possibility of true contradictions. But the mainstream account of logic can and should be rejected. Ridding theology of the dogma of mainstream logic illuminates the simple though striking explanation of the apparent contradiction of Christ — namely, that Christ is a contradictory being. Just as the simplest explanation to the apparent roundness of the earth has earned due acceptance, so too should the simplest explanation of the apparent contradiction of Christ. (shrink)

In a number of influential articles published since 1972, Dorothy Grover has developed the prosentential theory of truth. Brought together and published with a new introduction, these essays are even more impressive as a group than they were as single contributions to philosophy and linguistics. Denying that truth has an explanatory role, the prosentential theory does not address traditional truth issues like belief, meaning, and justification. Instead, it focuses on the grammatical role of the truth predicate and asserts that (...) “it is true” is a prosentence, functioning much as a pronoun does. Grover defends the theory by indicating how it can handle notorious paradoxes like the Liar, as well as by analyzing some English truth-usages. The introduction to the volume surveys traditional theories of truth, including correspondence, pragmatic, and coherence theories. It discusses the essays to come and, finally, considers the implications of the prosentential theory for other theories. Despite the fact that the prosentential theory dismisses the “nature of truth” as a red herring, Grover shows that there are important aspects of traditional truth theories that prosentential theorists have the option of endorsing. (shrink)

The title alone of McCall’s book reveals its ambitious enterprise. The book’s structure is a long inference to the best explanation: chapters present problems that are solved by a single, ontological model. Problems as diverse as time flow, quantum measurement, counterfactual semantics, and free will are discussed. McCall’s style of writing is lucid and pointed—in general, very pleasant to read.

This article argues the following points. The Hobbesian hypothesis, which we define as the claim that all people are better off under state authority than they would be outside of it, is an empirical claim about all stateless societies. It is an essential premise in most contractarian justifications of government sovereignty. Many small-scale societies are stateless. Anthropological evidence from them provides sufficient reason to doubt the truth of the hypothesis, if not to reject it entirely. Therefore, contractarian theory has not (...) done what it claims to do: it has not justified state sovereignty to each person subject to it by demonstrating that they benefit from that authority. To be justified in contractarian terms, states have to do something to improve the living standards of disadvantaged people under their rule. (shrink)

Benedict Spinoza is feted as the philosopher par excellence of the popular democratic multitude by Antonio Negri and others. But Spinoza himself expresses a marked ambivalence about the multitude in brief asides, and as for his thoughts on what he calls “the rule of multitude,” that is, democracy, these exist only as meager fragments in his unfinished Tractatus Politicus or Political Treatise. This essay addresses the problem of Spinoza’s multitude. First, I reconstruct a vision of power that is found in (...) the Ethics but that tends to be overlooked in the scholarly literature: power is not just sheer efficacy or imposition of will, but rather involves a capacity for being-affected; I call this the conception of power as sensitivity. The second part of my argument shows how, given Spinoza’s emphatic political naturalism, the conception of power as sensitivity can be extended to his political philosophy to shed light on what Spinoza calls potentia multitudinis, or “the power of the multitude”—a term found solely in the Political Treatise and nowhere else in his oeuvre. This juxtaposition reveals significant qualifications to the liberatory potential of the multitude currently claimed in the scholarly literature. (shrink)

The host actin nucleation machinery is subverted by many bacterial pathogens to facilitate their entry, motility, replication, and survival. The majority of research conducted in the past primarily focused on exploitation of a host actin nucleator, the Arp2/3 complex, by bacterial pathogens. Recently, new studies have begun to explore the role of formins, another family of host actin nucleators, in bacterial pathogenesis. This review provides an overview of recent advances in the study of the exploitation of the Arp2/3 complex and (...) formins by bacterial pathogens. Secreted bacterial effector proteins seem to manipulate the regulation of these actin nucleators or functionally mimic them to drive bacterial entry, motility and survival within host cells. An enhanced understanding of how formins are exploited will provide us with greater insight into how a fundamental eurkaryotic cellular process is utilized by bacteria and will also advance our knowledge of host‐pathogen interactions. (shrink)

The developmental importance to humans of the human-constructed physical environment, including myriad modified natural objects or manufactured objects, is well recognized. The importance of the physical dimension of the constructed niche has also been recognized in nonhuman animals with respect to dwellings (e.g., beavers’ dams, birds’ nests, and bees’ hives), but has not previously been applied to technical traditions, despite the fact that enduring alterations of the physical environment left by social partners are part of the constructed niche that supports (...) the learning of technical skills through the phenomenon of delayed social facilitation. These alterations aid learning over a longer time scale than the actions themselves. Thus, technical skills that result in enduring physical artifacts, which themselves aid learning the skills, should be both more persistent in a population and more widespread than technical skills that do not share this feature. This perspective gives us a new lens through which to understand the origins of technical traditions in nonhuman animals, and by extension, in human ancestors. Understanding the process by which traditional technical skills are acquired in nonhuman species gives us insight into the ways that the combination of social and physical niche construction can support the evolution of technical aspects of culture from modest beginnings. (shrink)

Recent trends in business ethics along with growing attacks upon unions, suggest that employee rights will be a major social concern for business managers during the next decade. However, in most of the discussions of employee rights to date, the very meaning and legitimacy of such rights are often uncritically taken for granted. In this paper, we develop an account of employee rights and defend this conception against what we take to be the strongest in-principle objections to it.

Classical Christian orthodoxy insists that God is Triune: there is only one God, but there are three divine Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — who are somehow of one substance with one another. But what does this doctrine mean? How can we coherently believe that there is only one God if we also believe that there are three divine Persons? This problem, sometimes called the ‘threeness-oneness problem’ or the ‘logical problem of the Trinity’, is the focus of this (...) interdisciplinary volume. It includes a selection of recent philosophical work on this topic, accompanied by a variety of essays by philosophers and theologians to further the discussion. The book is divided into four parts, the first three dealing in turn with the three most prominent models for understanding the relations between the Persons of the Trinity: Social Trinitarianism, Latin Trinitarianism, and Relative Trinitarianism. Each section includes essays by both proponents and critics of the relevant model. The volume concludes with a section containing essays by theologians reflecting on the current state of the debate. (shrink)