Changes in pupil size can reflect social interest or affect, and tend to get mimicked by observers during eye contact. Pupil mimicry has recently been observed in young infants, whereas it is unkno...

The end of World War II marked the beginning of a new chapter in German Leibniz scholarship, with conferences all over the country gearing up to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his birth in 1946, and participants intent on promoting Leibniz as a pan-European thinker. Just a few years earlier, for obvious reasons, the outlook could not have been more different. To take one example, Oskar Becker, in his lecture, “Leibniz, the German Thinker and Good European,” had divided the different (...) versions of Leibniz up along strictly national lines: “In the international Leibniz literature of today the different aspects of his philosophy… are shown in the views of one nation from this, of another nation from that side. Thus for the West European scholars Louis Couturat and Bertrand Russell Leibniz is fundamentally a logician, while for the Germans he is fundamentally a metaphysician.”. (shrink)

A major voice in late twentieth-century philosophy, Alan Donagan is distinguished for his theories on the history of philosophy and the nature of morality. The Philosophical Papers of Alan Donagan, volumes 1 and 2, collect 28 of Donagan's most important and best-known essays on historical understanding and ethics from 1957 to 1991. Volume 2 addresses issues in the philosophy of action and moral theory. With papers on Kant, von Wright, Sellars, and Chisholm, this volume also covers a range of questions (...) in applied ethics—from the morality of Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ethical questions in medicine and law. (shrink)

Upon mention of the logical structure of anything in the title of a book, many of us will, no doubt, recall a certain strain of philosophy of a few generations ago, one that ascribed to logic a centrality it has seldom enjoyed before or since. Thus might one easily be steered off course in trying to guess Andreas Blank’s primary thesis from the title he chose for his work. The reference to Carnap’s Der logische Aufbau der Welt is only an (...) apparent one: not only does the author of Der logische Aufbau von Leibniz’ Metaphysik not believe that Leibniz’s metaphysics is constructed from logic in the same way that Carnap took the world to be logically aufgebaut, but indeed, one gets the impression that it is the main purpose of this informative and well-argued new book to downplay the role of logic in the development of Leibniz’s metaphysics. (shrink)

Recent literature on causation invokes a distinction between deviant and default behavior to account for token causation. Critical examination of two prominent attempts to employ a distinction between deviants and defaults reveals that the distinction is far from clear. I clarify and develop the distinction by appeal to the notion of a modally robust process, and show how the distinction can be employed by causal process theorists to respond to cases of causation by omission. This shows that the default/deviant distinction (...) is not so much a tool for counterfactual accounts of causation, but rather for causal process theory. (shrink)

The subject is in both cases the voyage of the Argo, and therefore the use of the same words is not likely to be coincidental, even though the words themselves are scarcely uncommon. One would hesitate to deny, however, that such reminiscence might be unconscious; that Lucan had famous tags in his head is suggested by another allusion to famous opening lines.