Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)

Idealist philosopher Georg Hegel defied the traditional epistemological distinction of objective from subjective and developed his own dialectical alternative. Remarkable for its breadth and profundity, this work combines aspects of psychology, logic, moral philosophy, and history to form a comprehensive view that encompasses all forms of civilization. Its three divisions consist of the subjective mind (dealing with anthropology and psychology), the objective mind (concerning philosophical issues of law and morals), and the absolute mind (covering fine arts, religion, and philosophy). (...) Wide-ranging in its influence, this survey of the evolution of consciousness is essential reading for all students of philosophy and history. (shrink)

TRANSLATORS PREFACE THE PRESENT TRANSLATION OF GEORG SIMMEL'S Schopen- hauer und Nietzsche: Ein Vortragszyklus (1907), ...

Marketing Ethics addresses head-on the ethical questions, misunderstandings and challenges that marketing raises while defining marketing as a moral activity. A substantial introduction to the ethics of marketing, exploring the integral relations of marketing and morality Identifies and discusses a series of ethical tools and the marketing framework they constitute that are required for moral marketing Considers broader meanings and background assumptions of marketing infrequently included in other marketing literature Adds direction and meaning to problems in marketing ethics through reflection (...) on concepts such as individual choice, freedom and responsibility, desire satisfaction, noncoercive exchanges, and instrumental efficiency. (shrink)

The description for this book, Desert, will be forthcoming.

The idea of nature in medical theory and practice -- Diseases -- Health: popular concept and philosophical question -- Is a pedagogy of healing possible? -- The problem of regulation in the organism and in society.

Berkeley's Idealism both advances Berkeley scholarship and serves as a useful guide for teachers and students.

Diese Arbeit stellt sowohl die Leistungskraft wie auch die Grenze des Utilitarismus dar. Sie bedient sich dazu der Methode der exemplarischen Auseinandersetzung mit den systemtheoretischen Elementen des Utilitarismus. Verfolgt wird das Ziel, die Moglichkeit der Integration utilitaristischer Argumentation in die theologische Ethik zu prufen. Dazu werden typisch utilitaristische Argumentationsmuster aus theologischer Sicht bewertet. Die Arbeit ist ein Schritt auf dem Weg, eine neue Verhaltnisbestimmung von Utilitarismus und theologischer Ethik vorzunehmen. Es wird gezeigt, dass sowohl in der Systemtheorie wie auch in (...) der praktischen Anwendung eine Integration utilitaristischer Argumentation in die theologische Ethik moglich ist.". (shrink)

Príspevok je zameraný na problém spravodlivosti Johna Rawlsa v diele Teória spravodlivosti. Obsah práce je koncipovaný ako analýza dvoch princípov spravodlivosti, pričom sa zameriava na ich ťažiskové aspekty. Príspevok sa snaží vyjasniť význam dvoch zásad spravodlivosti prostredníctvom skúmania obsahového zloženia prvého i druhého princípu. V súvislosti s druhým princípom je cieľom nielen objasniť význam férovej rovnosti príležitostí, ale i vzťah druhého princípu s princípom efektívnosti a vzťah demokratického chápania spravodlivosti s princípom rozdielnosti. Zámerom príspevku je tiež poukázať na princíp distribúcie, (...) a to nielen z teoretickej perspektívy. V tejto súvislosti chce text upozorniť aj na prepojenosť distribúcie a zásluh. Pre Rawlsa je dôležité upozorňovať na lexikálnu nadradenosť prvého princípu, preto text neobchádza ani túto skutočnosť. Zároveň s tým verbalizuje rozdiel medzi oboma fundamentálnymi princípmi. (shrink)

El artículo aborda la refutación agustiniana del escepticismo, según se recoge en dos parábolas estudiadas con detalle en Contra Academicos. Señalando sus ideas y el influjo de Virgilio y Cicerón.

What drives much of the current philosophical interest in the idea of group cognition is its appeal to the manifestation of psychological properties—understood broadly to include states, processes, and dispositions—that are in some important yet elusive sense emergent with respect to the minds of individual group members. Our goal in this paper is to address a set of related, conditional questions: If human mentality is real yet emergent in a modest metaphysical sense only, then: (i) What would it mean for (...) a group to have emergent cognitive states? (ii) Is this even a metaphysically coherent view? (iii) Relative to which notion of emergence do we have reason to believe that certain groups in fact have emergent cognitive states? We shall argue that evidence from a wide variety of social science domains makes it plausible that there are group cognitive states and processes no less metaphysically emergent than human cognitive (and other special science) states and processes. (shrink)

Georges Sorel's Study on Vico is a revelatory document of the depths and stakes of French social thought at the end of the 19th century. What brought Sorel to the 18th century Neapolitan theorist of history? Acute awareness of the limitations of Marxist thought in his day, a profound concern with the material underpinnings of language, law, and culture, and the imperative to understand the possibilities of revolutionary change. We find here a different Sorel, one who speaks in surprising ways (...) to the 21st century. The translation is accompanied by an introduction and by a set of notes which situate the text both in Sorel's overall intellectual trajectory and in the fin de siècle debates from which it emerged. (shrink)

In the light of two unpublished letters from Carnap to Kuhn, this essay examines the relationship between Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Carnap's philosophical views. Contrary to the common wisdom that Kuhn's book refuted logical empiricism, it argues that Carnap's views of revolutionary scientific change are rather similar to those detailed by Kuhn. This serves both to explain Carnap's appreciation of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and to suggest that logical empiricism, insofar as that program rested on Carnap's (...) shoulders, was not substantially upstaged by Kuhn's book. (shrink)

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.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Stolen Legacy by George G.M. James refutes the Euro-centric myth that the origin of Western philosophy is Greek. First published in 1954, this book was seminal in leading to a radical reappraisal of a philosophical system long thought to be of European origin. It is an essential work in the syllabus for the study of Western philosophy.

This edited volume draws upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to examine the conscious and unconscious forces underlying race as a social formation, conceptualizing race, racial identity, and racism in ways that go beyond traditional modes of psychoanalytic thought Featuring contributions from Lacanian scholars from diverse geographical and disciplinary contexts, chapters span a wide breadth of topics including white nationalism and contemporary debates over confederate monuments; emergent theories of race rooted in Afropessimism and postcolonialism; Latinx and other racialized groups; apartheid and American (...) slavery; and applications of Lacan's concepts of the lamella, drive and sexuation to processes of racialization. The collection both reorients readers' understandings of race through its deployment of Lacanian theory and redefines the Lacanian subject through its theorizing of subjectivity in relation to race, racism and racial identification. Lacan and Race will be a definitive text for psychoanalytic theorists and contemporary scholars of race and appeal to readers across the fields of psychology, cultural studies, humanities, politics, and sociology. (shrink)

Many epistemologists have been interested in justification because of its presumed close relationship to knowledge. This relationship is intended to be ...

How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been made to articulate falsehoods in certain totalitarian regimes or has been charged with vulgarity and imprecision in a mass-consumer democracy? How will language react to the increasingly urgent claims of more exact speech such as mathematics and symbolic notation? These are some of the questions Steiner addresses in this elegantly written book, first published in 1967 to international acclaim.

This book introduces the reader to the philosophy of early Christianity in the 2nd-4th centuries AD, and contextualizes the philosophical contributions of early Christians in the framework of the ancient philosophical debates. It examines the first attempts of Christian thinkers to engage with issues such as questions of cosmogony and first principles, freedom of choice, concept formation, and the body-soul relation, as well as later questions like the status of the divine persons of the Trinity. It also aims to show (...) that the philosophy of early Christianity is part of ancient philosophy as a distinct school of thought, being in constant dialogue with the ancient philosophical schools, such as Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and even Epicureanism and Scepticism. This book examines in detail the philosophical views of Christian thinkers such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa and sheds light in the distinct ways they conceptualized traditional philosophical issues and made some intriguing contributions. The book's core chapters survey the central philosophical concerns of the early Christian thinkers and examines their contributions. These range across natural philosophy, metaphysics, logic and epistemology, psychology and ethics, and include such questions as how the world came into being, how God relates to the world, what is the status of matter, how we can gain knowledge, in what sense humans have freedom of choice, what the nature of soul is and how it relates to the body, and how we can attain happiness and salvation. The Philosophy of Early Christianity is intended for undergraduate and postgraduate students of ancient philosophy and early Christianity, from across the disciplines of classics, history and theology. (shrink)

Benjamin Franklin famously wrote that “the good [that] men do separately is small compared with what they may do collectively” (Isaacson 2004). The ability to join with others in groups to accomplish goals collectively that would hopelessly overwhelm the time, energy, and resources of individuals is indeed one of the greatest assets of our species. In the history of humankind, groups have been among the greatest workers, builders, producers, protectors, entertainers, explorers, discoverers, planners, problem-solvers, and decision-makers. During the late 19th (...) and early 20th century, many social scientists employed the notorious “group mind” idiom to express the sensible idea that groups can function as the seats of cognition, intelligence, and agency in their own right (Allport 1968; Wilson 2004). In their quest to stress (rightly) that group phenomena are something “over and above” the sum of individual contributions, a fondness for vitalist metaphors led them to believe (wrongly) that genuine group cognition must be the result of tapping into individualistically inaccessible, “holistic” forces. Today, inspired in part by historically unparalleled forms of mass collaboration enabled by the internet, it has once again become popular to speak of collective intelligence, group agency, or even the emergence of a “global brain” (cf. the wiki-edited MIT Handbook of Collective Intelligence). -/- In this chapter, I review some contemporary developments of the idea of group cognition, defined broadly as the collaborative performance of cognitive tasks such as remembering, problem-solving, decision-making, or verbal creativity for the purpose of producing a group-level outcome. My discussion serves a two-fold purpose. First, by discussing how the idea of group cognition can be operationalized, I seek to show that we can retain some central theoretical insights of the “group mind” thesis without succumbing to its eccentric metaphysical overtones. Second, by providing a useful array of generalizable taxonomic resources, I hope to foster greater degrees of mutual awareness among insufficiently integrated areas of research on group performance. (shrink)

Since its publication in 1935, Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change, a text that can serve as an introduction to all of Burke's theories, has become a landmark of rhetorical study. Using new archival sources and by contextualizing the theory in the past and present, Ann George offers the first sustained exploration of Burke's work and seeks to clarify the notoriously difficult book for both amateurs and scholars of rhetoric in Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion.

De récents travaux ont éclairé sans équivoque aucune l'adhésion de Martin Heidegger au totalitarisme hitlérien. Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, traducteur de Kafka et de Nietzsche, reprend la question par un biais plus personnel, dans les pas de Victor Klemeperer, l'auteur de la Lingua Tertii Imperrii (1947). "Gefolgschaft", "Einsatz", "Ereignis" : autant de termes appartenant à la fois au vocabulaire nazi et au système philosophique heideggerien. L'appropriation d'un tel langage n'a rien d'opportuniste ou d'occasionnel, mais marque un engagement profond. Cet ouvrage rare et (...) décisif restitue au lecteur français le champ lexical allemand contemporain d'Heidegger. Il dévoile les implications politiques d'une terminologie qui, en passant dans la traduction d'une langue à l'autre, lui échappent souvent. Une telle contamination constitue symboliquement l'un des événements les plus importants du XXe siècle philosophique, dont on ne finira pas de mesurer la portée et les conséquences. (shrink)

The ‘extended mind’ thesis asserts that cognitive processes are not bound by the skull or even skin of biological individuals, but actively incorporate environmental structures such as symbols, tools, artifacts, media, cultural practices, norms, groups, or institutions. By distributing cognition across space, time, and people in canny ways, we circumvent or overcome the biological limitations of our brains. Human beings are creative, albeit opportunistic experts in cognitive ‘self-transcendence.’ This entry surveys discussions of EM in philosophy of mind and cognitive science (...) which point to this overarching theme. (shrink)

George GrantÑphilosopher, conservative, Canadian nationalist, ChristianÑwas one of Canada’s most significant thinkers, and the author of Lament for a Nation, Technology and Empire, and English-Speaking Justice. Admirers and critics of the author will welcome these compelling essays about society’s traditional values in a technological age.

Reflections by leading Latin American and African American philosophers on their identity within the field of philosophy.

In der Philosophiegeschichte findet sich keine detailliert ausformulierte Philosophie des Abschieds. Die Publikation liefert hierzu die Spur des Abschieds, die als ein abwesend anwesendes Phänomen nachzuzeichnen ist. Neben der Rekonstruktion der relevanten philosophischen Thanatologien von der Antike bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, der Phänomenologie von Leiden und Schmerz, des Trostes und der Trauer werden vorrangig über Nietzsches Philosophie der tragischen Bejahungpraxis philosophische Orientierungen für ein souveränes Verhaltengegenüber dem existentiellen Phänomen des Abschieds präsentiert"--Page 4 of cover.