"This fine book is ideal for introductory courses in philosophy, and it is executed and backed up by careful, sophisticated philosophical analysis and insight." —_W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Fordham University_ _ _ _Human Knowing_ is a clearly written, brief introduction that guides the reader through an exploration of sense perception, ordinary knowing, scientific knowing, and philosophic knowing. This journey culminates in a justification of philosophy as a genuine form of knowing and thus a natural prelude to metaphysics. Though Felt (...) manages to avoid technical language, the development of his argument is a genuine exercise in philosophic thinking. The outcome is a contemporary expression of a position similar to that of Thomas Aquinas, significantly enriched by insights from Bergson, Whitehead, and phenomenology. (shrink)

This volume -- a companion to Thomas Reid: Selected Philosophical Writings (2012) -- makes available material from Thomas Reid's autograph manuscripts and student notes of his lectures. It includes an introductory essay by Nicholas Wolterstorff.

In _Aims: A Brief Metaphysics for Today_, James W. Felt turns his attention to combining elements of Thomas Aquinas's metaphysics, especially its deep ontology, with Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy to arrive at a new possibility for metaphysics. In his distinctive style, Felt conciselypulls together the strands of epistemology, ontology, and teleology, synthesizing these elements into his own “process-enriched Thomism.” _Aims_ does not simply discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each philosopher’s position, but blends the two into a cohesive (...) argument based on principles derived from immediate experience. Felt arrives at what he calls a “Whiteheadian-type solution,” appealing to his original concept of the “essential aim” as necessary for understanding our existence in a coherent yet unique world. This concise, finely crafted discussion provides a thoroughly teleological, value-centered approach to metaphysics. _Aims_, an experiment in constructive metaphysics, is a thorough and insightful project in modern philosophy. It will appeal to philosophers and students of philosophy interested in enriching their knowledge of contemporary conceptions of metaphysics. “James Felt's _Aims: A Brief Metaphysics for Today _is an excellent book. It is engagingly written with exemplary clarity, compactness of expression, and admirable thoughtfulness. It is a work in constructive metaphysics that offers a marvelous introduction to the beginner, as well as being engaging to the advanced student. While _Aims_ shows the main influences of Aquinas and Whitehead, with Bergson and Merleau-Ponty also important, more importantly it gives expression to the singular appropriation of some of the basic metaphysical issues by James Felt himself. It develops a view of relational realism, with lucid expositions of themes such as the nature of primary being, the act of existing, freedom, participation and God, and the nature of self-knowledge. It distills the author's long reflection on these issues and communicates his considered insights with measured lucidity.” —_William Desmond, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium _ “There is a welcome freshness and easy-access approach in this creative presentation of the central philosophical discipline, metaphysics. It starts firmly anchored in our human experience, then moves easily into deeper waters of a proposed Aquinas-Whitehead synthesis.” —_W. Norris Clarke, S.J., Fordham University_ “With modifications to both Aquinas and Whitehead and their complementary interplay, and in contrast to the priority usually given to effective or originating causality, the author argues for the interactive pre-eminence of teleology and existence in the promotion and enhancement of cosmic and interpersonal value. In so doing he seeks to restore to the transcendental Good its appropriate place and role.” —_Kenneth Schmitz, University of Toronto_. (shrink)

This is a book about how we see: the environment around us (its surfaces, their layout, and their colors and textures); where we are in the environment; whether or not we are moving and, if we are, where we are going; what things are good for; how to do things (to thread a needle or drive an automobile); or why things look as they do.The basic assumption is that vision depends on the eye which is connected to the brain. The (...) author suggests that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, people look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision—and what this book is about. (shrink)

Individuals and businesses make numerous payments every day. They sometimes have choices about what forms of payment to make or accept, and at other times are effectively forced to use a particular form. Often there is an asymmetric power relationship between payer and payee that raises the issue of whether one side unfairly exploits the other. Is it unethical exploitation for an employer to pay employees with a fee-laden payroll card over other more convenient forms of payment? Does the fee (...) structure of payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard unfairly exploit merchants? The bitcoin payment system is an ethical as well as technological evolution as it was designed to be an electronic payment system that does not rely upon trust. Can an entire payment system like bitcoin be “evil,” as charged by Krugman? Payment tools as such are ethically neutral, but can be used in an ethical or unethical manner. (shrink)

This authoritative volume provides a comprehensive road map of the important and rapidly growing field of emotion regulation.

Both the psychology of perception and the philosophy of perception seem to show a new face when the process is considered at its own level, distinct from that of sensation. Unfamiliar conceptions in physics, anatomy, physiology, psychology, and phenomenology are required to clarify the separation and make it plausible. But there have been so many dead ends in the effort to solve the theoretical problems of perception that radical proposals may now be acceptable. Scientists are often more conservative than philosophers (...) of science. I end, therefore, as I began, with a plea for help. (shrink)

Recently there has been an outpouring of consumer frustration over rising food and energy prices. Many politicians railed against “speculators” who allegedly drove up the prices of key necessities. Is speculation unethical? This article reviews the traditional arguments against speculation. Many of the standard criticisms confuse speculation with gambling. In much the same way as ethicists now draw distinctions between usury and normal business interest, we draw a distinction between socially useful speculation and gambling. Gambling involves taking on risk with (...) no plausible expectation of making a profit. Gambling may provide entertainment value to some people, but like other addictive activities causes grave harm to a subset of users. Speculation involves taking on a business risk with a plausible expectation that a profit will result. Speculators provide an important risk bearing service by taking on risks that others do not want. They help markets to function better by helping to incorporate information into prices as well as providing liquidity. Speculators may actually reduce shortages by causing quicker price increases that motivate producers to increase production and consumers to conserve. But even socially useful speculation may have an ethical dark side. Does such speculation cause damage by adding excess volatility to prices? Speculators may contribute to price bubbles. At what point does legitimate speculation become odious “price gouging?” We also draw an ethical distinction between speculation, which seeks to benefit from changing prices, and manipulation, actions taken to push prices away from their economically appropriate levels. (shrink)

A provocative work by medical ethicist James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg argues that technologies pushing the boundaries of humanness can radically improve our quality of life if they are controlled democratically. Hughes challenges both the technophobia of Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama and the unchecked enthusiasm of others for limitless human enhancement. He argues instead for a third way, "democratic transhumanism," by asking the question destined to become a fundamental issue of the twenty-first century: How can we use new cybernetic (...) and biomedical technologies to make life better for everyone? These technologies hold great promise, but they also pose profound challenges to our health, our culture, and our liberal democratic political system. By allowing humans to become more than human - "posthuman" or "transhuman" - the new technologies will require new answers for the enduring issues of liberty and the common good. What limits should we place on the freedom of people to control their own bodies? Who should own genes and other living things? Which technologies should be mandatory, which voluntary, and which forbidden? For answers to these challenges, Citizen Cyborg proposes a radical return to a faith in the resilience of our democratic institutions. (shrink)

This article follows Jacques Derrida, who follows the animal-machine. In his lecture The Animal That Therefore I Am, Derrida could easily have swapped “the animal” for “the machine” . In fact, throughout his readings of René Descartes, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Lacan, and Emmanuel Levinas, the machine emerges right alongside the animal. In defining the limits of the human, these thinkers present the animal and the machine together in order to elevate the human. Unlike the human, who responds, the animal-machine merely (...) reacts. The animal-machine may approximate certain human actions, but it can never, according to Descartes, in Derrida’s words, “respond to our questions” and will always suffer from a “lack .. (shrink)

Recent concern over “high frequency trading” (HFT) has called into question the fairness of the practice. What does it mean for a financial market to be “fair”? We first examine how high frequency trading is actually used. High frequency traders often implement traditional beneficial strategies such as market making and arbitrage, although computers can also be used for manipulative strategies as well. We then examine different notions of fairness. Procedural fairness can be viewed from the perspective of equal opportunity, in (...) which all market participants are treated alike. The same rules apply to HFT as to other traders. Another approach to fairness is in the equality of outcomes. Many HFT strategies are beneficial to other market participants, so one cannot categorically denounce the practice as unfair. Other strategies, for both high and low frequency trading, are not. It is thus important to distinguish between the technology and the use of the technology to make judgments on fairness. (shrink)

Modern emotion theories emphasise the adaptive value of emotions. Emotions are by no means always helpful, however. They often must be regulated. The study of emotion regulation has its origins in the psychoanalytic and stress and coping traditions. Recently, increased interest in emotion regulation has led to crucial boundary ambiguities that now threaten progress in this domain. It is argued that distinctions need to be made between (1) regulation of emotion and regulation by emotion; (2) emotion regulation in self and (...) emotion regulation in others; and (3) conscious and nonconscious emotion regulation. Using a process model of emotion generation, this review considers promising research on basic processes and individual differences in emotion regulation and poses five theoretical challenges. (shrink)

Emotion regulation has the odd distinction of being a wildly popular construct whose scientific existence is in considerable doubt. In this article, we discuss the confusion about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can and should be distinguished from one another. We describe a continuum of perspectives on emotion, and highlight how different (often mutually incompatible) perspectives on emotion lead to different views about whether emotion generation and emotion regulation can be usefully distinguished. We argue that making differences in perspective (...) explicit serves the function of allowing researchers with different theoretical commitments to collaborate productively despite seemingly insurmountable differences in terminology and methods. (shrink)

This essay is, first, a theoretical and historical study of some classical scientific ways of studying human being in the world. The more readily accessible and more commonly discussed "models" of being human were chosen for review here, but structuralism is included because I believe it will have ,the same impact in America as it has had in France, and I hope that American readers might be forewarned about what may be ideologically at stake before the technical, and fruitful, aspects (...) of the movement become an academic fad in the United States. The subjects included are mainline experimental psychology from Wundt to Skinner, with its relatively shortlived functionalist and Watsonian-behaviorist formulations; holistic psychology from Brentano through Stumpf, Husserl, and Goldstein to Maslow, Rogers, and contemporary "third force" psychology; and the psychoanalytic model, for which the only paradigm is Freud himself. Preeminence is given to psychological paradigms, since their subject matter lies closest to the classical philosophical tradition from which "philosophical anthropology" emerged. (This book is, in the final analysis, a prolegomenon to an articulated philosophical anthropo logy. ) Sociological models are also considered: the "classical" tradition from Comte to the present, and Marxist anthropology from the manu scripts of 1844 to the present. The structuralist model, from Durkheim to Chomsky, is also considered, since it cuts across and gives new dimensions to all the foregoing models. The essay is, second, a phenomenological critique of these historico theoretical considerations. (shrink)

In relating philosophy to intercultural understanding, one of the key problems that arises is that of the relationship between tolerance and religious belief.This paper challenges the common understanding of tolerance in contemporary debates over religious diversity. It argues that tolerance is overused and over-applied in these debates, and has wrongfully come to refer to tactlessness, harshness of condemnation, and even exclusivity of belief. In seeking to clarify the concept and ensure its appropriate usage, it proposes that religious tolerance should only (...) be applied to beliefs and actions following from those beliefs. It offers a framework in which tolerance about epistemic matters and tolerance about metaphysical matters is differentiated, and proposes that rejecting a certain element of metaphysical tolerance, namely the coexistence of incompatible content, is not a legitimate condition for intolerance. These clarifications enable a more consistent way of understanding tolerance and religious diversity. (shrink)

In September of 2008, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published Dignitas Personae, which addresses several newly emerging topics in thearea of biomedical ethics. One of these topics is genetic engineering, which we can define as the intentional manipulation of genetic material so as to produce some desired trait or characteristic. Genetic engineering is discussed in Dignitas Personae, but is done so relatively briefly. In this paper, I explore some of the metaphysical and ethical questions that are key (...) in assessing the morality of this practice by examining other Church documents as well as philosophical literature. Ultimately, I will argue that aside from some instrumental restrictions, questions about the moral permissibility of genetic engineering, the distinction between therapy and enhancement, and what it means to be human are not as easily answered from a Catholic perspective as one might think. (shrink)

Speakers often do not state requests directly but employ innuendos such as Would you like to see my etchings? Though such indirectness seems puzzlingly inefficient, it can be explained by a theory of the strategic speaker, who seeks plausible deniability when he or she is uncertain of whether the hearer is cooperative or antagonistic. A paradigm case is bribing a policeman who may be corrupt or honest: A veiled bribe may be accepted by the former and ignored by the latter. (...) Everyday social interactions can have a similar payoff structure (with emotional rather than legal penalties) whenever a request is implicitly forbidden by the relational model holding between speaker and hearer (e.g., bribing an honest maitre d’, where the reciprocity of the bribe clashes with his authority). Even when a hearer’s willingness is known, indirect speech offers higher-order plausible deniability by preempting certainty, gossip, and common knowledge of the request. In supporting experiments, participants judged the intentions and reactions of characters in scenarios that involved fraught requests varying in politeness and directness. (shrink)

This paper examines the ethics of contemporary managerial compensation in the context of executive stock options. Economic considerations would dictate that executive stock options should be adjusted to eliminate the effect of overall stock market movements which are beyond the control of the executive. However, in practice, most executive stock options are not adjusted to control for these outside factors. Agency considerations are the most likely culprit. Adjusting for the influence of outside factors, such as a generally rising stock market, (...) from executive stock options sets a higher bar for managers to reach. Furthermore, traditional accounting standards permitted firms that did not adjust options to avoid reporting options as expenses. This presents CEOs and boards of directors with a major ethical dilemma. On the one hand, their duty to their shareholders and stakeholders dictates that executive stock options should be adjusted to eliminate outside noise from unrelated movements in the overall stock market. However, financial statements are presented in the language of accounting. If the overwhelming majority of the users of a language define a particular item in one way, then to deviate from the norm implies that the recipient of such a deviant statement may not properly interpret the statement. Likewise, if the standard practice is for firms to use unadjusted options and thus under-report expenses, to deviate from this industry norm risks that users of financial statements would not properly interpret the financial statements, with perhaps negative consequences for the shareholders. In short, if "everyone else does it," then it could be wrong for an individual firm to deviate from the norm as that would harm the shareholders. (shrink)

Thomas Jefferson and Philosophy: Essays on the Philosophical Cast of Jefferson’s Writings is a collection of essays on topics that relate to philosophical aspects of Jefferson’s thinking over the years. Much historical insight is given to ground the various philosophical strands in Jefferson’s thought and writing on topics such as political philosophy, moral philosophy, slavery, republicanism, wall of separation, liberty, educational philosophy, and architecture.

John Harris argues that opponents of human embryonic stem cell research, Catholics specifically, suffer an inconsistency in their moral thinking, opposing it on the basis that the sacrifice of an embryo is impermissible even for the good of curing disease. They have no objection to natural procreation, however, which results in many early miscarriages. Harris contends that Catholics tacitly endorse these miscarriages as a permissible sacrifice for the good of producing other, healthy children. This paper offers a response to the (...) argument that relies on only basic moral principles that Harris himself is likely to accept. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 12.3 (Autumn 2012): 461–476. (shrink)

The controversy over short selling has continued unabated from the introduction of modern equity trading in Amsterdam in 1610 to the present day. Nevertheless, the business ethics literature has not really addressed short selling. Short sellers not only profit from the misery of others, they also create it through their selling activities. However, they also provide a socially useful service by making prices better reflect true values, protecting other investors from purchasing overpriced securities. Short sellers can also help to provide (...) liquidity in the markets. Recently, there has been a hue and cry against so called "naked" short selling, which involves not delivering the shares that have been sold. This gives manipulators a tool for depressing stock prices and deprives purchasers of voting rights and potential stock lending revenue. Naked short selling creates ethical issues for short sellers, buyers, brokers, market makers, and regulators. Is it ethical to exploit a legal loophole that permits sellers to sell stock and delay delivering shares indefinitely? (shrink)

One of the most fundamental distinctions in the field of emotion is the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation. This distinction fits comfortably with folk theories, which view emotions as passions that arise unbidden and then must be controlled. But is it really helpful to distinguish between emotion generation and emotion regulation? In this article, we begin by offering working definitions of emotion generation and emotion regulation. We argue that in some circumstances, the distinction between emotion generation and emotion (...) regulation is indeed useful. We point both to citation patterns, which indicate that researchers from across a number of sub-areas within psychology are making this distinction, and to empirical studies, which indicate the utility of this distinction in many different research contexts. We then consider five ways in which the distinction between emotion generation and emotion regulation can be problematic. We suggest that it is time to move beyond debates about whether this distinction is useful to a more specific consideration of when and in what ways this distinction is useful, and in this spirit, we offer recommendations for future research. (shrink)