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Is socialism desirable? Is it even possible? In this concise book, one of the world's leading political philosophers presents with clarity and wit a compelling moral case for socialism and argues that the obstacles in its way are exaggerated. There are times, G. A. Cohen notes, when we all behave like socialists. On a camping trip, for example, campers wouldn't dream of charging each other to use a soccer ball or for fish that they happened to catch. Campers do not (...) give merely to get, but relate to each other in a spirit of equality and community. Would such socialist norms be desirable across society as a whole? Why not? Whole societies may differ from camping trips, but it is still attractive when people treat each other with the equal regard that such trips exhibit. But, however desirable it may be, many claim that socialism is impossible. Cohen writes that the biggest obstacle to socialism isn't, as often argued, intractable human selfishness--it's rather the lack of obvious means to harness the human generosity that is there. Lacking those means, we rely on the market. But there are many ways of confining the sway of the market: there are desirable changes that can move us toward a socialist society in which, to quote Albert Einstein, humanity has "overcome and advanced beyond the predatory stage of human development.". (shrink)

In this book Professor Holton continues his analysis of how modem science works and what its influences are on our world, with particular emphasis on the role of the thematic elements - those often unconscious presuppositions that guide scientific work to success or failure. The foundation of the book is provided by the author's research on the work of Albert Einstein, which is then contrasted with other styles of research in the advancement of science. The author deals directly with (...) the often unforeseen consequences of the progress of contemporary science, detailing its fruits as well as its burdens. The many questions examined in this work range over a broad spectrum of areas that command the attention of all readers with an interest in understanding the development of modem science. (shrink)

The physicist–philosopher Philipp Frank’s work and influence, especially during his last three decades, when he found a refuge and a position in America, deserve more discussion than has been the case so far. In what follows, I hope I may call him Philipp – having been first a graduate student in one of his courses at Harvard University, then his teaching assistant sharing his offices, then for many years his colleague and friend in the same Physics Department, and finally, doing (...) research on his archival holdings kept at Harvard. I also should not hide my large personal debt to him, for without his recommendation in the 1950s to the Albert Einstein Estate, I would not have received its warm welcome and its permission, as the first one to do historical research in the treasure trove of unpublished letters and manuscripts, thus starting me on a major part of my career in the history of science. (shrink)

This essay is a study of Polanyi’s career as scientist and philosopher from the point of view of the history of science, starting with the first step in his academic career helped by an intervention of Albert Einstein. Polanyi’s ideas are better understood if placed against the background of then-fashionable philosophical movements, including logical positivism, and his disagreement with Bukharin in 1935. The essay studies the sources and ambitions of Polanyi’s notion of the tacit dimension, his attitude to evolution (...) and “emergence,” and his contribution to the search for the origins of Einstein’s Relativity Theory. His success in the last of these is shown to be an exemplar of Polanyi’s own philosophy. (shrink)

In den letzten Jahren ist eine neue Betrachtungsweise in der Wissen­ schaftsgeschichte entstanden - eine Betrachtungsweise, die ihre fruchtbaren Ideen aus weit auseinanderliegenden Gebieten sucht, die von Wissenschafts­ philosophie und -_Jziologie bis hin zur Psychologie und Ästhetik reichen. Viel­ leicht wird bald ein neuer Name für dieses erweiterte Forschungsgebiet erfor­ derlich sein; noch wesentlicher sind jedoch seine neuen Fragestellungen, Be­ griffe und Modelle. Anhand spezifischer Fallstudien aus der Physik soll in diesem Buch ge­ zeigt werden, in welcher Beziehung die traditionellen (...) Ansichten über die Denkweise von Wissenschaftlern revisionsbedürftig sind.! Dazu mußte ich einige neue Begriffe einführen, wie beispielsweise den Begriff "thematischer Inhalt" der Wissenschaft. Der thematische Inhalt steht gewissermaßen ortho­ gonal zu den empirischen oder analytischen Inhalten der Wissenschaft. Ich werde zeigen, daß Themata eine dominante Rolle in der Entstehung, Durch­ setzung oder Ablehnung wissenschaftlicher Ergebnisse spielen. Zahlreiche unpublizierte Dokumente aus dem wissenschaftlichen Nachlaß Albert Ein­ steins erlauben es, dies besonders am Beispiel der Entstehung der speziellen Relativitätstheorie im Detail nachzuweisen. (shrink)

Environmental ethicists will often say that in dealing with natural entities we need the guidance of an ethic rooted in 'the intrinsic value of nature'. They will add that subjectivist value theories are unable to account for the normativity of intrinsic value discourse. This preoccupation with normativity explains why many environmental ethicists favour value objectivism. As I see it, value theories must address not only the problem of normativity but also the problem of motivation. In fact, my approach to the (...) question as to which type of value theory does most justice to our intuition regarding the value of nature is primarily in terms of the motivational perspective. I argue that neither the usual objectivist theories nor their subjectivist counterparts can accommodate and explain the fact that those who agree that nature has intrinsic value may well differ in motivation to support its preservation. I suggest that such difference in kinds of motivation is related to distinct kinds of value judgement in which belief in the intrinsic value of nature is expressed. To clarify my view I discuss the subjectivist value theory of Gerald Gaus [1]. Gaus regards the distinction between personal and impersonal value judgements to be deeply embedded in his theory. His internalism about the relation between reason and motivation however, leads him to the mistaken conclusion that independent impersonal value judgements do not provide reasons for action. Next, I introduce the distinction between identity-neutral and identity-constitutive reasons. This distinction allows me to formulate more clearly the differences between the kinds of reasons provided by personal and impersonal value judgements. The resulting theory explains how it is that people who do not (personally) value nature may still be motivated to support nature preservation. It also explains why not everyone who endorses natural values will join movements for the preservation of nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:GenetGerald PrinceGenet, by Edmund White (with a chronology by Albert Dichy); xliii & 820 pp. London: Picador, 1994, $29.95 paper.Abandoned to a foundling home in 1910 at the age of seven months, he started to steal before puberty, spent over two years as a teenager in the penal colony of Mettray, signed up with the French army for several tours of duty, and deserted. He traveled through (...) Europe and was arrested in Albania, Yugoslavia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland. He was also repeatedly arrested and sent to jail in France—for embezzlement, for petty theft, for vagrancy—and his record of convictions made him liable for a life sentence until he was pardoned by the President of the Republic. He looked like a dandified tramp or a retired boxer. He frequented thugs and artists or philosophers, criminals and police chiefs, prostitutes as well as cabinet ministers. A book lover, he owned no books. A homosexual, he was rarely attracted to other homosexuals. A great champion of singularity, he came to feel that all human beings were equally valuable. Though he showed himself capable of impassioned friendship, he extolled and often practiced betrayal. He once boasted of being “strong from never having passed through a woman except at the moment of [his] birth” (p. 594). Yet he was a feminist. For a long time he could barely compose a standard letter in French but, when he died from throat cancer in 1985, he had written several masterpieces. He was Jean Genet.If, in his monumental Saint Genet, Sartre pays more attention to the configuration of the writer’s life than to the moments making up that life, Edmund White, in his admirable biography, patiently aligns the moments and waits for patterns to emerge. Genet is, first of all, a meticulous chronicle and can be savored for the details it provides about the protagonist’s daily life or its context, from gay bars in Pigalle to the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago which Genet covered for Esquire. We learn many things. For example, that the FBI spelled his name as “John Genet” and Sartre’s as “Jean Paul Sat”; or that Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock) started his career by playing in movie versions of two Genet plays: The Balcony and Deathwatch.Through the accumulation of facts and anecdotes, great themes—homosexuality, death, abjection, gesture, power—slowly crystallize and White writes splendid pages on the quality of Genet’s texts (beyond their shock value: Genet said that “poetry is the art of using shit and making you eat it”). Written from 1942 to 1947, his five novels (Our Lady of the Flowers, The Miracle of the Rose, Funeral Rites, A Thief’s Journal, Querelle) treat homosexuality with unsurpassed candor, glorify evil, transvalue all values, and blend sociology and myth, slang and highly formal language, in a sumptuously lyrical prose. With The Balcony, The Blacks, and The Screens—composed between 1955 and 1957—Genet invents a stylized and ritualistic theater to explore the dynamics of power. Finally, in the striking mixture of memoir, pamphlet, and epic called The Prisoner of Love [End Page 146] (1985) Genet exalts two disinherited groups—the Black Panthers, the Palestinians—and suggests that love is the site where uniqueness and universality merge.More generally, certain constants in Genet’s life become evident: the loyalty to the abandoned child he was and the hatred for the bourgeois society that dispossessed him; the need to reject before being rejected; the fascination with power and the affirmation of otherness; the ability to mythify himself as an angel of rebellion. Genet was a sociopath of genius.Above all, by its scrupulous scholarship, its successful determination to remain impartial, and its capacity for authoritative prosaism, White’s biography encourages readers to take a (new) look at Genet’s flamboyantly unorthodox writing. It is a remarkable achievement.Gerald PrinceUniversity of PennsylvaniaCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

A Nobel Prize-winning scientist and a leading brain researcher show how the brain creates conscious experience.

Having laid the groundwork in his critically acclaimed books Neural Darwinism (Basic Books, 1987) and Topobiology (Basic Books, 1988), Nobel laureate Gerald M. Edelman now proposes a comprehensive theory of consciousness in The Remembered ...

Many people, including many egalitarian political philosophers, professa belief in equality while enjoying high incomes of which they devotevery little to egalitarian purposes. The article critically examinesways of resolving the putative inconsistency in the stance of thesepeople, in particular, that favouring an egalitarian society has noimplications for behaviour in an unequal one; that what''s bad aboutinequality is a social division that philanthropy cannot reduce; thatprivate action cannot ensure that others have good lives; that privateaction can only achieve a ``drop in (...) the ocean''''; that private effortis not called for, since justice is a matter for the state to enforce;that private effort cannot remove the fundamental injustice, whichis inequality of power; and that private effort involves an unreasonablylarge psychological burden. (shrink)

Concise and understandable, the book explains pertinent findings of modern neuroscience and describes how consciousness arises in complex brains.

_Time_'s 'Man of the Century', Albert Einstein is the unquestioned founder of modern physics. His theory of relativity is the most important scientific idea of the modern era. In this short book Einstein explains, using the minimum of mathematical terms, the basic ideas and principles of the theory which has shaped the world we live in today. Unsurpassed by any subsequent books on relativity, this remains the most popular and useful exposition of Einstein's immense contribution to human knowledge.

This paper develops a stronger version of ‘inference-to-the-best explanation’ scientific realism. I argue against three standard assumptions of current realists: realism is confirmed if it provides the best explanation of theories’ predictive success ; the realist claim that successful theories are always approximately true provides the best explanation of their success ; and realists are committed to giving the same sort of truth-based explanation of superseded theories’ success that they give to explain our best current theories’ success. On the positive (...) side, I argue that the confirmation of realism requires explaining theories’ explanatory success, not just their predictive success ; in turn this task requires a richer realist model of explanation that brings into the explanans both successful theories’ epistemic virtues and the standards governing these virtues, as well as truth; this richer realist model is further confirmed because it can better explain the success of theories in gaining wide acceptance among scientists; and the model is further supported because it is superior to ‘preservative realism ’ in providing a plausible rebuttal of the pessimistic meta-induction from the many past successful-but-false theories to the like- lihood that our best current theories are likewise false. (shrink)

Business people often consider spirituality a means of increasing integrity, motivation and job satisfaction. Yet certain spiritualities are superficial and unstable. Religion gives depth and duration to a spirituality, but may also sew divisiveness. A spirituality's ability to develop good moral habits provides a positive test of the "appropriateness" of that spirituality for business. Many successful business executives demonstrate a spirituality that does develop good moral habits.

In this essay, I criticize Laudan's view that methodological rules in science are best understood as hypothetical imperatives, for example, to realize cognitive aim A, follow method B. I criticize his idea that such rules are best evaluated by a naturalized philosophy of science which collects the empirical evidence bearing on the soundness of these rules. My claim is that this view yields a poor explanation of (1) the role of methodological rules in establishing the rationality of scientific practices, (2) (...) the debates scientists have over rival methodological rules, and (3) the reasons on the basis of which scientists actually embrace, challenge, or transform methodological rules. A better explanation is provided by treating at least some methodological rules as foundational standards of theory-appraisal which define the criteria of scientific truth, knowledge, evidence, proof, explanations, etc., for a certain tradition or community of scientific practice. Such standards are in turn grounded or challenged on the basis of their coherence or incoherence with a wider body of scientific judgments. This view leads away from a naturalized philosophy of science back to its more classical epistemological conception. (shrink)

In this book Gerald Holton takes an opposing view, illuminating the ways in which the imagination of the scientist functions early in the formation of a new ...

Under free institutions the exercise of human reason leads to a plurality of reasonable, yet irreconcilable doctrines. Rawls's political liberalism is intended as a response to this fundamental feature of modern democratic life. Justifying coercive political power by appeal to any one (or sample) of these doctrines is, Rawls believes, oppressive and illiberal. If we are to achieve unity without oppression, he tells us, we must all affirm a public political conception that is supported by these diverse reasonable doctrines. The (...) first part of this essay argues that the free use of human reason leads to reasonable pluralism over most of what we call the political. Rawls's notion of the political does not avoid the problem of state oppression under conditions of reasonable pluralism. The second part tries to show how justificatory liberalism provides (1) a conception of the political that takes seriously the fact that the free use of human reason leads us to sharply disagree in the domain of the political while (2) articulating a conception of the political according to which the coercive intervention of the state must be justified by public reasons. (shrink)

The evidence of blindsight is occasionally used to argue that we can see things, and thus have perceptual belief, without the distinctive visual awareness accompanying normal sight; thereby displacing phenomenality as a component of the concept of vision. I maintain that arguments to this end typically rely on misconceptions about blindsight and almost always ignore associated visual (or visuomotor) pathologies relevant to the lessons of such cases. More specifically, I conclude, first, that the phenomena very likely do not result from (...) dissociations within a single system, but from the interaction of evolutionarily distinct, if interacting, systems; second, that a closer study of spared motor abilities indicates that verbal responses of patients result not from degraded vision but from proprioception; and, finally, above chance verbal responses, being forced guesses, are not tentative beliefs and cannot become beliefs just by training patients to have more confidence in their responses. (shrink)

The American Institute of certified public accountants (AICPA) has promulgated a Code of Professional Conduct , which has served as the primary ethical standard for public accountants in the United States for more than 20 years. It is now out of date and needs to be replaced with a code of ethics. Just as U.S. generally accepted accounting principles are being migrated toward “principles-based accounting” as part of a convergence with international financial reporting standards, a similar process needs to occur (...) with ethics. This article organizes the primary rules of the AICPA Code around five essential virtues: objectivity, integrity, inquisitiveness, loyalty, and trustworthiness. These virtues correspond to the general principles set forth in the Code of Ethics for Professional Accountants of the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC). From this virtue ethics perspective, various rules of the AICPA Code are critiqued as being inadequate at best, and poorly crafted at worst. The article concludes with the proposition that principles-based ethics serves the profession and the financial reporting process better than the current rules-based approach. (shrink)

Some of the most difficult and wrenching social and political issues in U.S. society today are about the relationship between strongly held moral values and the laws of the land. There is no consensus about whether the law should deal with morality at all, and if it is to do so, there is no agreement over whose morality is to be reflected in the law.In this compact and carefully edited anthology, Gerald Dworkin presents the readings necessary for an understanding (...) of these issues. The volume contains classical and contemporary philosophical statements as well as a generous sampling of legal cases and opinions, including such topics of current interest as flag-burning, nude dancing, the sale of human organs, and sexual behavior. The volume represents the best in applied legal and moral philosophy. (shrink)