Study of Śrībhāṣya of Rāmānuja, 1017-1137, commentary on Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa, aphoristic work on Vedanta philosophy.

The paper springs from a position that economic theory is an abstract investigation of the concepts and considerations involved in real life economic decision making rather than a tool for predicting or describing real behavior. It is argued that when experimental economics is motivated by theory, it should not look to verify the predictions of theory but instead should focus on verifying that the considerations contained in the economic model are sound and in common use. It is argued that when (...) theory is motivated by experiments, the theorist should not be hasty in adopting new functional forms but should try to identify the basic psychological themes which are revealed exposed by the experiment. Finally, some critical comments on the methodology of experimental economics are presented. 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The main goal of this article is to investigate the mythical symbolic form in Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Form regarding its connection with visual perception. The article argues that mythical symbolic form is rooted in Gestalt principles of perception for organizing the perceptual field, and shows that these principles shape the main features of space and time in Cassirer’s mythical symbolic form. This argument challenges Heidegger’s critique of Cassirer’s definition of a mythical symbolic form that it is directionless and not (...) grounded in man’s being. The combination of Gestalt principles and mythical symbolic forms supports the argument about the active role of visual perception, and clarifies Cassirer’s application and re-definition of Kantian and Neo-Kantian concepts. The investigation opens a perspective for comprehending the mythic-religious phenomenon as well as for comprehending visual perception. (shrink)

This paper explores two aspects of Hume's skeptical crisis in the conclusion to _Treatise<D> Book I: his involved personal experience of the crisis, and his detached naturalistic reflection on it. I discuss several distinct states of mind reported in the text, ranging from extreme skepticism that rejects all belief, to natural dogmatism that rejects all reflection, to mitigated skepticism that tries to reconcile reflection and belief. I argue against interpretations according to which Hume's skepticism supports his naturalism, and I suggest (...) that Hume's extreme skepticism ultimately depends on a predisposition to think of the crucial elements of human cognition as "trivial", as epistemically disabling rather than enabling. (shrink)

A survey was carried out among two groups of undergraduate economics students and four groups of students in mathematics, law, philosophy and business administration. The main survey question involved a conflict between profit maximisation and the welfare of the workers who would be fired to achieve it. Significant differences were found between the choices of the groups. The results were reinforced by a survey conducted among readers of an Israeli business newspaper and PhD students of Harvard. It is argued that (...) the overly mathematical methods used to teach economics encourage students to lean towards profit maximisation. (shrink)

In her (1996) Kadri Vihvelin argues that autoinfanticide is nomologically impossible and so that there is no sense in which time travelers are able to commit it. In response, Theodore Sider (2002) defends the original Lewisian verdict (Lewis 1976) whereby, on a common understanding of ability, time travelers are able to kill their earlier selves and their failure to do so is merely coincidental. This paper constitutes a critical note on arguments put forward by both Sider and Vihvelin. I argue (...) that although Sider’s criticism starts out promisingly he doesn’t succeed in establishing that Vihvelin’s analysis fails, because (a) he neglects to rule out a class of counterfactuals to which Vihvelin’s sample-case may belong; and (b) (together with Lewis) he is wrong to suggest that future facts are irrelevant in the evaluation of time travelers’ abilities. I show instead that Vihvelin’s argument is viciously circular, indicating that even if there are nomological constraints on autoinfanticide these cannot be established a priori. (shrink)

In this major intellectual history, Ira Katznelson examines the works of Hannah Arendt, Robert Dahl, Richard Hofstadter, Harold Lasswell, Charles Lindblom, Karl Polanyi, and David Truman, detailing their engagement with the larger project of reclaiming the West's moral bearing.

_The Bus Kids_ offers a compelling and uniquely detailed examination of the experiences of kindergarten students in California participating in a voluntary school desegregation program. Ira Lit focuses on the day-to-day school life of a group of minority children bussed from their poor-performing home school district to an affluent neighboring district with high-performing schools. Through these kindergarteners’ experiences, the book sensitively illuminates the processes of school transition, socialization, and adaptation, and addresses an array of important issues relating to American education. (...) Lit acutely observes these “bus kids” and the quality of their social, emotional, cultural, and academic experiences. He presents a moving picture of the complexity of challenges, often unrecognized by teachers and parents, each young student confronted every day. (shrink)

1. Readers of Hume, even those who call attention to the depth and variety of his skeptical excursions, now happily admit that Hume is, in crucial respects, a “naturalist.” A naturalist is, broadly, someone who emphasizes the natural sources of our beliefs, attitudes, and practices; and Hume surely is at least this kind of naturalist. But understanding Hume’s naturalism to include only this general explanatory commitment obscures as much as it reveals, I will argue, about the text of Treatise I (...) iv, where Hume examines various skeptical “systems of philosophy.” To understand that part of the Treatise, we must, I will argue, understand Hume’s shifting allegiances to different kinds of naturalism. (shrink)

1. Readers of Hume, even those who call attention to the depth and variety of his skeptical excursions, now happily admit that Hume is, in crucial respects, a “naturalist.” A naturalist is, broadly, someone who emphasizes the natural sources of our beliefs, attitudes, and practices; and Hume surely is at least this kind of naturalist. But understanding Hume’s naturalism to include only this general explanatory commitment obscures as much as it reveals, I will argue, about the text of Treatise I (...) iv, where Hume examines various skeptical “systems of philosophy.” To understand that part of the Treatise, we must, I will argue, understand Hume’s shifting allegiances to different kinds of naturalism. (shrink)

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such asC.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set. A brochure listing each title in the "International Library of Psychology" series is available upon request.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dewey, Implementation, and Creating a Democratic Civic UniversityIra HarkavyThinking begins in... a forked-road situation, a situation that is ambiguous, that presents a dilemma, that poses alternatives.—John Dewey (How We Think 122)The social philosopher, dwelling in the region of his concepts, “solves” problems by showing the relationship of ideas, instead of helping men solve problems in the concrete by supplying them hypotheses to be used and tested in projects of (...) reform.—John Dewey (Reconstruction in Philosophy 192)Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.—John Dewey (The Public and Its Problems 213)democracy, as we all know, is seriously threatened throughout the world (Fisher). In the United States, the chasm-like inequities laid bare by COVID-19, the ongoing killing of black Americans, the violent insurrection at the Capitol, and the continuing attempt to subvert the electoral process are powerful indicators of a system under severe strain (Guardian Staff; Rubin). These developments are also a sign of deep and chronic problems, including the following:1. Increasing economic, political, social, educational, and health inequalities2. Increasing racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia3. Increasing attacks on science, knowledge, and democracy itself4. Declining trust in nearly all major institutionsMany things, obviously, contribute to the present situation. Among them is the failure of universities to successfully do what they are supposed to do: educate students to be ethical, empathetic, engaged, democratic citizens, and [End Page 49] advance knowledge for the continuous betterment of the human condition (Benson et al., Knowledge). To use a Marxian framework, but to reject its economic determinism, universities, in my judgment, are not a part of society’s superstructure. They are, to the contrary, a core component of its base (Marx, “Preface”). What they do matters enormously, significantly determining the kind of society we have now and will have in the future.Universities, as former Harvard president Derek Bok and others have emphasized, have become the central societal institutions in the world (Bok, Universities and the Future 3). Research universities, in my judgment, are the most central. They develop new ideas and technologies, incubate businesses, serve as cultural and artistic centers, and are engines of local, national, and global economies. As anchor institutions, they often engage in partnerships with government, the private sector, and community-based organizations to revitalize local neighborhoods and schools (“Anchor Institutions Task Force”). It is the university’s role as an educational institution, however, that is most important.The schooling system increasingly functions as the core subsystem—the strategic subsystem—of modern information societies. Schooling, more than any other subsystem, as John Dewey claimed, influences the functioning of the societal system as a whole. Viewed systemically, it has on balance the greatest “multiplier” effects, direct and indirect, short-term and long-term. Restating these points somewhat differently, I strongly agree with the Chilean sociologist Eugenio Tironi that the answer to the question “What kind of education do we need?” is to be found in the answer to the question “What kind of society do we want?” (Tironi). Education and society are dynamically interactive and interdependent. If human beings hope to maintain and develop a particular type of society, they must develop and maintain the particular type of education system conducive to it. As Dewey in effect argued: No effective democratic schooling system, no democratic society.1For William Rainey Harper, who, as the first president of the University of Chicago, brought Dewey to Chicago, universities are the primary shapers of the American schooling system. In an 1899 speech at the University of California, he perceptively observed that “[t]he school system, the character of which, in spite of itself, the university determines and in a large measure controls.... [T]hrough the school system every family in this entire broad land of ours is brought into touch with the university; for from it proceed the teachers or the teachers’ teachers” (Harper 25). Agreeing with Harper, I contend that higher education institutions powerfully shape the learning, values, and aspirations of students from kindergarten through graduate school. [End Page 50]Given the university’s societal role and influence, creating and sustaining an inclusive, just democratic society requires a... (shrink)

A conversational implicature is an inference that consists in attributing to a speaker an implicit meaning that goes beyond the explicit linguistic meaning of an utterance. This paper experimentallyinvestigates scalar implicature, a paradigmatic case of implicature in which a speaker's use of a term like Some indicates that the speaker had reasons not to use a more informative one from the samescale, e.g. All; thus, Some implicates Not all. Pragmatic theorists like Grice would predict that a pragmatic interpretation is determined (...) only after its explicit, logical meaning is incorporated (e.g. whereSome means at least one). The present work aims to developmentally unpack this prediction by showing how younger, albeit competent, reasoners initially treat a relatively weak term logically beforebecoming aware of its pragmatic potential. Three experiments are presented. Experiment 1 presents a modal reasoning scenario offering an exhaustive set of conclusions; critical among these isparticipants' evaluation of a statement expressing Might be x when the context indicates that the stronger Must be x is true. The conversationally-infelicitous Might be x can be understood logically(e.g. as compatible with Must) or pragmatically (as exclusive to must). Results from five-, seven-, and nine-year-olds as well as adults revealed that a) seven-year-olds are the youngest to demonstratemodal competence overall and that; b) seven- and nine-year-olds treat the infelicitous Might logically significantly more often than adults do. Experiment 2 showed how training with the modal taskcan suspend the implicatures for adults. Experiment 3 provides converging evidence of the developmental pragmatic effect with the French existential quantifier Certains (Some). Whilelinguistically-sophisticated children (eight- and ten-year-olds olds) typically treat Certains as compatible with Tous (All), adults are equivocal. These results, which are consistent with unanticipatedfindings in classic developmental papers, reveal a consistent ordering in which representations of weak scalar terms tend to be treated logically by young competent participants and morepragmatically by older ones. This work is also relevant to the treatment of scalar implicatures in the reasoning literature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Elliot Rubinstein BUÑUEL'S WORLD, OR THE WORLD AND BUNUEL* THE line OF descent from Surrealist cinema to chosiste fiction—the line which all the remarks that follow are meant at least to trace—is, if not direct, surely collateral. But the genealogy is so complex as to resist detailing in a brief paper. What I offer may be taken for preliminaries, observations on the cinema of Bunuel prompted in large (...) part by a rereading of Robbe-Grillet's For a New Novel. ' The world of any Bunuel film is first of all, in William S. Pechter's phrase, the worst of all possible.2 But the phrase misleads, implying that better worlds are imaginable, let alone photographable, let alone otherwise available. Neithersexual fascination {L'Aged' or, El [ This Strange Passion], Ensayo de un crimen [The Criminal Life ofArchibaldo de la Cruz], Abismos de pasión [Wuthering Heights], Diary ofa Chambermaid, Belle de Jour) nor faith (Nazartn, Robinson Crusoe, Vindiana, The Milky Way), nor any other agency of spiritual transcendence delivers us to a world fit for human habitation. Trailing clouds, but not of glory, do we come, and beneath these clouds we proceed to make fools and martyrs and killers of one another, of ourselves. Unhappily, such views, seized upon as novelties, leave Buñuel at the mercy of some of the most sophomoric adulators ever to hound a major artist. Happily, Buñuel's vision justifies his views; happily, his career transcends his vision. His particular achievement is the sheer variety of worlds he has discovered or reanimated, none quite like *This article, and the one by Stanley Cavell which follows it, grew out of remarks presented at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, December 30, 1977. The title of the symposium was "Chosisme and the Cinema: the Perception of Physical Reality in Cinema and Literature." 237 238Philosophy and Literature another except in the way it is seen—and each the worst of all possible. The world of Nazartn appears, on the relentlessly gray surface of its film stock, the most conventional in any of Buñuel's works. (I am not thinking of, for one must try to think as little as possible of, some of the potboilers Buñuel had to produce during his Mexican captivity of the late 1940s and 1950s.) Its story of a persecuted priest is left to progress without worrisome spatial or temporal discontinuities. The myth on which its story feeds, explicit in the title, is the most familiar of all, and the inescapable implications of the Quixote and of Dostoyevsky 's tale of the Grand Inquisitor further cater to our certainty of the correctness of our responses. The sole plainly Surreal moment occurs when the picture of Jesus on the priest's wall explodes into a wicked Bosch-like grin, but the image is subjective, "psychological," reflecting the delirium of a wounded prostitute whom the priest is sequestering, and seen only by her. Emotional valences are respected: there is nothing perplexing about the characters' reactions and interplayings. And things are in their place. Such an account of Nazartn recalls Robbe-Grillet's account of Balzacian fiction: All the technical elements of narrative—systematic use of the past tense and the third person, unconditional adoption of chronological development, linear plots, regular trajectory of the passions, impulses of each episode toward a conclusion, etc.—everything tended to impose the image of a stable, coherent, continuous, unequivocal, decipherable universe. Since the intelligibility of the world was not even questioned, to tell a story did not raise a problem. The style of the novel could be innocent, (p. 32) I trust there is no reason to belabor the frailness (I mean with respect to any reading of Balzac) of an argument that pushes to that last sentence. Still, the point is plain enough, and, in its way, and, in its limits, true enough. Because Nazarin (based, by the way, on a novel of Galdós) tells a story in an age when "To tell a story has become strictly impossible" (p. 33) it cannot lay claim to a place in the realm of New Narrative. But there is more to Nazarin than... (shrink)

Kant’s theory of cognition aimed to explain the possibility of scientific knowledge. Aesthetics and life science were not considered by Kant in the context of cognition. By contrast, Cassirer set himself a philosophical task to extend Kant’s theory of cognition to all forms of culture, including pre-scientific knowledge and aesthetics. The present study demonstrates how Cassirer explained the possibility of different objective forms, named symbolic, by employing and transforming Kant’s theory of cognition. For this goal, Cassirer took the following steps: (...) modified the definitions of a priori synthesis (the act of understanding) and pure intuition (the forms of space and time) - main building blocks of Kant’s cognition; indicated the necessary correlation of intuition and synthesis; characterized a priori synthesis and the intuition as notions which include contradicted meanings. Cassirer called this contradiction “twofold oppositions” as characteristic of a priori synthesis. The first argument of the article is that the possibility of various synthetic acts is rooted in the nature of a priori synthesis which carries together two different meanings: the act of uniting elements and the initial unity. One synthetic act forms the world of nature and is connected to scientific space and time, and the other is the product of immediate perceptional space and time, from which the world of myth and aesthetics appears. Thus, Cassirer expanded the scope of “pure” synthesis. The second argument is that Cassirer specified a priori synthesis and pure intuition as a functional concept. The functional concept belongs to the model of concept as-relation that Cassirer has elaborated. It includes moments that are separated and united simultaneously. This definition of concept breaks the rules of consistency. The concept of as-relation justifies the contradictory characteristics of a priori synthesis and pure intuition, which include both the combination of moments in a synthesizing act and the initial unity of intuition. (shrink)

Hume raises the issue of how common life and philosophy are related. He presents the possibility that they are irreconcilably opposed, that philosophy rigorously and honestly pursued must lead to skepticism. I discuss some prominent interpretive issues about Hume in light of this opposition between common life and philosophy. I also argue that this opposition is a deep and general philosophical problem, and sketch an approach to this problem. ;These are my interpretive claims: I argue that Hume has constructive aims (...) in his epistemology, and that he is surprised when his naturalism subverts these constructive aims and leads to skepticism. I argue that Hume does not entertain a moral skepticism similar to his skepticism about the external world and causal relations, but that he should have entertained such a skepticism. I argue that, in the Dialogues, Philo does not concede that religious belief is natural and therefore secure despite its unreasonableness. Rather, Philo contends that religious belief is not natural, and contends that this lack of naturalness gives us principled grounds for preferring causal and moral beliefs to natural ones. However, I argue, the problem of general philosophical skepticism keeps this religious skepticism from being satisfactory. ;I use the interpretation of Hume to clarify and deepen Hume's Problem, and to begin working toward a solution of that problem. I argue that there is a perspective we can take up that makes skepticism about the status of our physical and moral beliefs and practices seem inevitable. To resolve Hume's Problem, we must show that this perspective is the wrong perspective on human life, or at least that there is some alternative perspective that does not lead to skepticism but is no less rational than the perspective that does lead to skepticism. (shrink)

from now on , was to point out that the model commonly used to describe . a decision problem with imperfect recall suffers from major ambiguities in its interpretation. We claimed that several issues which were immaterial in decision problems with perfect recall may be of importance in the analysis of decision problems with imperfect recall. The issues that we raised can be summarized by the following questions.

Several theists have adopted a position known as ‘sceptical theism ’, according to which God is justified in allowing suffering, but the justification is often beyond human comprehension. A problem for sceptical theism is that if there are unknown justifications for suffering, then we cannot know whether it is right for a human being to relieve suffering. After examining several proposed solutions to this problem, I conclude that one who is committed to a revealed religion has a simpler and more (...) effective solution. In particular, according to traditional Judaism, God has permitted us, indeed commanded us, to relieve suffering, so we know that it is right for us to do so. I further show how God's command, according to Judaism, that we save lives provides an answer to an analogous argument put forward by David Hume. Thus, revealed theistic religions can sometimes solve problems more effectively than theism alone. (shrink)

In the wake of business scandals at Enron, Arthur Andersen, Global Crossing, Tyco—the list grows daily—there is an increasing sense among employees, executives, investors, and the public that the “anything goes” culture of the New Economy is over. Today, businesses must act responsibly, transparently, and with integrity. Using in-depth case studies and examples from over 50 companies that range from Starbucks to Citigroup, General Motors to General Electric, DuPont to Dell, Ira A. Jackson, former director of the Center for Business (...) and Government at Harvard’s Kennedy School, shows the quantifiable and enduring business advantage to “doing the right thing.” Companies that give back to their employees and society—focusing on values and purpose as well as profitability—often gain commpetitive advantage and improve their brand image, consumer loyalty, and employee satisfaction. Identifying seven principles of making values integral to business processes and practices, PROFITS WITH PRINCIPLES opens the door to a new kind of capitalism, providing a wealth of practical recommendations companies of all sizes can model their own efforts after. (shrink)

This book presents Ariel Rubinstein's lecture notes for the first part of his well-known graduate course in microeconomics.

The connective or can be treated as an inclusive disjunction or else as an exclusive disjunction. Although researchers are aware of this distinction, few have examined the conditions under which each interpretation should be anticipated. Based on linguistic-pragmatic analyses, we assume that interpretations are initially inclusive before either (a) remaining so, or (b) becoming exclusive by way of an implicature ( but not both ). We point to a class of situations that ought to predispose disjunctions to inclusive interpretations and (...) to situations that encourage exclusive interpretations. A disjunction's ultimate interpretation is based on its potential informativeness, where the interpretation of the disjunctive utterance having the smallest number of true conditions is considered most informative. Our investigation leads to five experiments employing arbitrary materials. Among the problems expected to encourage inclusive interpretations are those that present disjunctions in the antecedents of conditionals and in question forms. The best candidates to produce implicatures are those disjunctions that underdetermine an expected conjunctive conclusion, although other disjunctive utterances that are more informative as exclusive are discussed and tested. (shrink)