One of the principal challenges to human survival will be for human beings, embedded in a plurality of cultural contexts, to engage with and learn from one another respectfully in the continuing task of creating a more liveable world. I argue here that theoretical psychology can contribute to setting some of the terms for this effort through the kind of conception it advances of the person as agent. I discuss broadly two philosophical perspectives toward human agency which have become prominent (...) in psychology in the last few decades, the humanistic and the hermeneutic. I argue that these two different frameworks make complementary contributions to the project of understanding ourselves and furthering the development of our humanity. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Ichikawa and Jarvis offer a new rationalist theory of mental content and defend a traditional epistemology of philosophy. They argue that philosophical inquiry is continuous with non-philosophical inquiry, and can be genuinely a priori, and that intuitions do not play an important role in mental content or the a priori.

What is the self? And how does it relate to the body? In the second edition of Personal Identity, Harold Noonan presents the major historical theories of personal identity, particularly those of Locke, Leibniz, Butler, Reid and Hume. Noonan goes on to give a careful analysis of what the problem of personal identity is, and its place in the context of more general puzzles about identity. He then moves on to consider the main issues and arguments which are the (...) subject of current debate, including the work of Bernard Williams and Derek Parfit, and makes new and challenging interpretations of them. This new edition contains additional material assessing the biological approach which has become increasingly popular in recent years, and extends the treatment of indeterminate identity to take account of the epistemic view of vagueness. This book covers the problem of personal identity from its origin in Locke's work to the most recent debates in the philosophical literature, and will be invaluablereading for any student of the topic. (shrink)

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)

In recent years largely due to the seminal work of Kit Fine and that of Jonathan Lowe there has been a resurgence of interest in the concept of essence and the project of explaining de re necessity in terms of it. Of course, Quine rejected what he called Aristotelian essentialism in his battle against quantified modal logic. But what he and Kripke debated was a notion of essence defined in terms of de re necessity. The new Aristotelian essentialists regard essence (...) as entailing but prior in the order of explanation to de re necessity. In what follows I argue that the concept of essence so understood has not been adequately explained and that any attempt to explain it, at least along the lines most familiar from the literature, must be flagrantly circular or make use of de re modal notions. (shrink)

One of the pioneers of modern sociology, Max Scheler ranks with Max Weber, Edmund Husserl, and Ernst Troeltsch as being among the most brilliant minds of his generation. Yet Scheler is now known chiefly for his philosophy of religion, despite his groundbreaking work in the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of emotions, and phenomenological sociology. This volume comprises some of Scheler's most interesting work—including an analysis of the role of sentiments in social interaction, a sociology of knowledge rooted in global (...) social and cultural comparisons, and a cross-cultural theory of values—and identifies some of his important contributions to the discussion of issues at the forefront of the social sciences today. Editor Harold J. Bershady provides a richly detailed biographical portrait of Scheler, as well as an incisive analysis of how his work extends and integrates problems of theory and method addressed by Durkheim, Weber, and Parsons, among others. Harold J. Bershady, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of _Ideology and Social _ _Knowledge_ and the editor of _Social Class and _ _Democratic Leadership_. Heritage of Sociology series. (shrink)

There is a lively ongoing debate among philosophers and social scientists about the reality of race and among social scientists about the reality of caste and ethnicity. This paper tries to sort out what the issues are and makes some preliminary suggestions about what the evidence shows. Standard philosophical analyses try to find the necessary and sufficient conditions of our concept of race. I argue that this is not the best way to approach the issue and that the reality of (...) these concepts should be taken as a scientific realism question; that is, do our best social scientific accounts of these phenomena show that appealing to the concepts of race, caste, and ethnicity is essential to successful social science explanation? I argue that in some cases that is the case and lay out the empirical issues involved. (shrink)

I argue that intentionalist theories of perceptual experience are unable to explain the phenomenal character of perceptual experience. I begin by describing what is involved in explaining phenomenal character, and why it is a task of philosophical theories of perceptual experience to explain it. I argue that reductionist versions of intentionalism are unable to explain the phenomenal character of perceptual experience because they mischaracterize its nature; in particular, they fail to recognize the sensory nature of experience’s phenomenal character. I argue (...) that nonreductionist versions of intentionalism are unable to explain the phenomenal character of perceptual experience because, although they recognize its sensory nature, they mislocate it. (shrink)

I develop a class of counterexamples to Blome-Tillmann’s ‘Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism’. There are cases in which subjects are ignorant of key propositions that are inconsistent with the pragmatic presuppositions in conversational contexts in which they are discussed; in such contexts, PEC wrongly predicts the subjects to satisfy certain ‘knows’ attributions.

SummaryIntense, sustained nursing lengthens inter-birth intervals and is causally linked with low natural fertility. However, in traditional settings, the effects of such nursing on fertility are difficult to disentangle from those of nutrition. Results from an prospective, direct observational study of reproductive function in well-nourished Amele women who nurse intensively and persistently but who also have high fertility are here presented. Endocrine measures show that ovarian activity resumes by median 11·0 months postpartum. Median duration of postpartum amenorrhoea is 11·3 months, (...) time to next conception is 19·0 months, and the inter-birth interval is 28·0 months. Average life time fertility is 6·8. High fertility in Amele women is due both to refractoriness of reproductive function to suckling stimuli, and to maintenance of equivalent age-specific fertility rates across the reproductive life span. (shrink)

Divers presents a set of de re modal truths which, he claims, are inconvenient for Lewisean modal realism. We argue that there is no inconvenience for Lewis.

© British Society of Aesthetics 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society of Aesthetics. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] adaptation of literary works into films has been almost completely neglected as a philosophical topic. I discuss two questions about this phenomenon:What do we mean when we say that a film is faithful to its source?Is being faithful to its source a merit in a film adaptation?In response to, I set out two distinct (...) senses of fidelity: story fidelity and thematic fidelity. I then argue, in response to, that thematic fidelity, but not story fidelity, is an aesthetic merit in a film adaptation. The key steps in this argument involve showing that merely preserving the story from one medium to another does not typically involve an aesthetically... (shrink)

In the first half of the first century BC the Academy of Athens broke up in disarray. From the wreckage of the semi-sceptical school there arose the new dogmatic philosophy of Antiochus, synthesized from Stoicism and Platonism, and the hardline Pyrrhonist scepticism of Aenesidemus. With his extensive knowledge of the ways in which Plato was read and invoked as an authority in late antiquity Dr Tarrant builds a most impressive reconstruction of Philo of Larissa's brand of Platonism and of its (...) arrival in Middle Platonism, particularly that of Plutarch, long after the Academy's institutional demise. Particularly valuable is his exploitation for this purpose of a text barely discussed since its publication 80 years ago - a commentary on Plato's Theaetetus whose unidentified author Dr Tarrant has cogently argued to be a follower of Philo. Among many other achievements, Dr Tarrant throws much light on the relation of Aenesideman scepticism to the Academy. (shrink)

I defend the prospect of good science in the social sciences by looking at the obstacles to social laws. I criticize traditional approaches, which rule for or against social laws on primarily conceptual grounds, and argue that only a close analysis of actual empirical research can decide the issue. To that end, I focus on problems caused by the ceteris paribus nature of social generalizations, outline a variety of ways those problems might be handled, and then examine in detail the (...) work of Paige on agrarian revolutions. Paige's work, I argue, handles its problems roughly as well as does some of the best work in evolutionary biology. The upshot is that some social laws can be relatively well confirmed. (shrink)

Analyzes the development of art during the past decade paying special attention to the works of Mondrian, Arp, Newman, and Dubuffet.

In this paper I argue that there is good reason to believe that we can be influenced by fictions in ways that matter morally, and some of the time we will be unaware that we have been so influenced. These arguments fall short of proving a clear causal link between fictions and specific changes in the audience, but they do reveal rather interesting and complex features of the moral psychology of fiction. In particular, they reveal that some Platonic worries about (...) the dangers of art cannot be dismissed lightly. (shrink)

New concepts are constantly being introduced into our thinking. _Conceptual Systems_ explores how these new concepts are entered into our systems along with sufficient continuity with older ideas to ensure understanding. The encyclopedic breadth of this text highlights the many different aspects and disciplines that together present an insightful view into the various theories of concepts. Harold Brown, a reputable author in the philosophy of science examines several historically influential theories of concepts as well as presenting a clear view (...) on the general theory of conceptual change. Case studies discuss examples of conceptual change in the history of physics including the move in seventeenth century physics from Galileo to Descates to Newton; and the conceptual framework of the 'standard model' in the late twentieth century high-energy physics. The key central themes in the philosophy of science that are explored in detail in this enormous book make it an essential read for academics in this field. (shrink)

Harold Laski (Manchester, 1893-Londres, 1950) es de los pocos teóricos del Estado en el mundo anglo-sajón que, desde John Stuart Mill, merece ser recordado. Sus teorías se desenvuelven en el tránsito del pensamiento liberal a la acción de tipo socialista. Fue miembro de la renombrada Fabian Society aunque renunció a su puesto en el Comité Ejecutivo Fabiano aduciendo incompatibilidad de opiniones, pues no aceptaba la posición "gradualista" y evolucionista de la socialdemocracia. Además formó parte del comité ejecutivo del partido (...) laboralista -aunque con serias disensiones con el premier MacDonald-, que debería estudiar los cambios originados en la acción socialista tras la primera Guerra Mundial. A su renombre puede haber ayudado el hecho de haber enseñado en las prestigiosas universidades de Mac-Gill de Montreal y en Harvard. De todas formas, a pesar de ser un pensador que extrajo sus teorías de la práctica y dar a sus aportaciones un contenido pragmático, como Hobbes o Locke, no se puede parangonar en ningún caso con ellos. Se trata -a pesar de sus bandazos- de un intelectual independiente de izquierda, postura que afirmó en su pertenencia al partido laborista. De esta suerte su teoría política pudo fundarse en la ética, que como se verá no se deja entremezclar con el materialismo histórico marxista. El Estado en la teoría y en la práctica corresponde al período en el que busca un acomodamiento de la teoría del Estado a las nuevas circunstancias, una fase que el autor inicia en la década de los treinta del siglo XX. Es un libro que desarrolla y amplía, como él deja claro, su libro anterior, La Democracia en crisis (1933), que también fuera traducido para Revista de Derecho Privado, y supone un perfeccionamiento de sus principios filosóficos. Laski se ocupa de diagnosticar las causas del fracaso y avanza un proyecto de teoría social que se propone desenvolver en el marco de ocho años. Este plan sería corregido después de colaboraciones en simposios y de publicaciones en diversas revistas junto a un grupo de adalides del socialismo, entre los que cabe destacar a Bernard Shaw, J.A. Hobson o Lowes Dickinson entre otros. Este libro, que se vertió al castellano en 1936, fue traducido por Vicente Herrero Ayllón. INDICE. Presentación Prefacio Capítulo I.- La concepción filosófica del Estado Capítulo II.- Estado y Gobierno en el mundo real Capítulo III.- El Estado y la comunidad internacional Capítulo IV.- Perspectivas para nuestra generación. (shrink)

Laski, Harold J. The Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays.