Until recently, scholars paid relatively little attention to chapter 23 of Leviathan, in which Hobbes discussed “the public ministers of sovereign power.” In the past few years, however, political theorists have used chapter 23 extensively in discussions of Hobbes’ concept of the state. But what was the significance of the chapter in its own time? This article suggests it served two purposes. First, it allowed Hobbes to bolster and elaborate arguments made elsewhere in Leviathan. Second, it responded to 1640s debates (...) between royalists and parliamentarians over the role of subordinate magistrates in a polity. By the time Leviathan was published in 1651 these debates were no longer pressing, which explains the chapter’s rapid descent into obscurity. Nonetheless, recovering this polemical context helps to understand the genesis of this small but significant part of Hobbes’ political thought. (shrink)

In the past few decades social changes have impacted how we understand justice, as societies become both more multicultural and more interconnected globally. Much philosophical thought, however, seems to proceed in isolation from these developments. While philosophers from Plato onwards have portrayed justice as an abstract, universal ideal, Miller argues that principles of justice are always rooted in particular social contexts, and connects these ideas to the changing conditions of human life. In this important contribution to political philosophy, it (...) is argued that philosophers need to pay more attention to the way that people actually think about what's fair, and only defend principles that are feasible to apply in the real world. To understand equality of opportunity, for example, we must explore the cultural constraints that people face when presented with life choices. Justice for Earthlings also explains how national boundaries make justice at global level different from social justice. (shrink)

In the Statesman , Plato brings together--only to challenge and displace--his own crowning contributions to philosophical method, political theory, and drama. In his 1980 study, reprinted here, Mitchell Miller employs literary theory and conceptual analysis to expose the philosophical, political, and pedagogical conflict that is the underlying context of the dialogue, revealing that its chaotic variety of movements is actually a carefully harmonized act of realizing the mean. The original study left one question outstanding: what specifically, in the metaphysical (...) order of things, motivated the nameless Visitor from Elea to abandon bifurcation for his consummating non-bifurcatory division of fifteen kinds at the end of the dialogue? Miller addressed in a separate essay, first published in 1999 and reprinted here. In it, he opens the horizon of interpretation to include the new metaphysics of the Parmenides , the Philebus , and the "unwritten teachings." "This study demonstrates how the Statesman is the culminating expression of Plato's lifelong effort, both in Athens and in the Academy, to bring metaphysical insight to the unending political crisis of his times."The Philosopher in Plato's Statesman a trail-blazing work. While not every reader will agree with the lessons Miller himself draws from this approach, none should fail to be impressed by its interpretive power. All this is exciting stuff. The interpretive pathway on which Miller has embarked has the potential for changing the face of scholarship on the late Platonic dialogues. Parmenides [Publishing] is to be commended for making these two important contributions available under a single cover." -- Kenneth Sayre, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame "Miller casts considerable light on virtually every aspect of the dialogue. . . . All in all, this book is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the Statesman." -- Stanley Rosen, Borden Parker Bowne Professor of Philosophy, Boston University MITCHELL MILLER is Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College. He is the author of Plato's Parmenides. (shrink)

The idea that our conscious decisions determine our actions has been challenged by a report suggesting that the brain starts to prepare for a movement before the person concerned has consciously decided to move . Libet et al. claimed that their results show that our actions are not consciously initiated. The current article describes two experiments in which we attempted to replicate Libet et al.'s comparison of participants' movement-related brain activity with the reported times of their decisions to move and (...) also the reported times of their decisions of which hand to move. We also looked at the distribution of participants' reports over time to evaluate an alternative explanation of Libet et al.'s results. Although the Readiness Potential was usually present before all of the decisions to move, consistent with the findings of Keller and Heckhausen and Libet et al. , we found that many reported decision times were before the onset of the Lateralized Readiness Potential, which measures hand-specific movement preparation. The latter finding is consistent with the conclusion that the LRP always started after the conscious decision to move. We conclude that even though activity related to movement anticipation may be present before a conscious decision to move, the cortical preparation necessary for the movement to happen immediately may not start until after the conscious decision to move. (shrink)

Arthur I. Miller is a master at capturing the intersection of creativity and intelligence. He did it with Einstein and Picasso, and now he does it with Pauli and Jung. Their shared obsession with the number 137 provides a window into their genius. --Walter Isaacson.

Our study highlights specific ways in which race and gender create inequality in the workplace. Using in-depth interviews with 67 biology PhD students, we show how engagement with research and service varies by both gender and race. By considering the intersection between gender and race, we find not only that women biology graduate students do more service than men, but also that racial and ethnic minority men do more service than white men. White men benefit from a combination of racial (...) and gender privilege, which places them in the most advantaged position with respect to protected research time and opportunities to build collaborations and networks beyond their labs. Racial/ethnic minority women emerge as uniquely disadvantaged in terms of their experiences relative to other groups. These findings illuminate how gendered organizations are also racialized, producing distinct experiences for women and men from different racial groups, and thus contribute to theorizing the intersectional nature of inequality in the workplace. (shrink)

This is a pioneering study of how multiculturalism interacts with multinationalism. Focusing specifically on post-devolution Scotland, and based on statistical analysis of over 1500 interviews, Hussain and Miller critically examine the challenges of Scotland's largest visible and invisible minorities: ethnic Pakistanis and English immigrants.

Virtue theorists have recently been focusing on the important question of how virtues are developed, and doing so in a way that is informed by empirical research from psychology. However, almost all of this recent work has dealt exclusively with the moral virtues. In this paper, we present three empirically-informed accounts of how virtues can be developed, and we assess the merits of these accounts when applied specifically to intellectual (or epistemic) virtues.

To many who develop and use free software, the GNU General Public License represents an embodiment of the meaning of free software. In this paper we examine the definition and meaning of free software in the context of three events surrounding the GNU General Public License. We use a case involving the GPU software project to establish the importance of Freedom 0 in the meaning of free software. We analyze version 3 of the GNU General Public License and conclude that (...) although a credible case can be made that the added restrictions are consistent with the definition of free software, the case requires subtle arguments. Strong arguments against the added restrictions are less subtle, and may therefore be more convincing to many users and developers. We also analyze the Affero General Public License and conclude that it is inconsistent with the definition of free software. (shrink)

Language and Learning is the latest volume to emerge from the Symposium Hellenisticum conference series. Like its predecessors, this book's alliterative title is a guide to its contents, which in this case examine a range of issues involving the philosophical treatment of language by Hellenistic philosophers (or, in a couple of cases, those preceding or following them), a topic that has been strangely neglected by specialists. And as with other volumes in the series, Language and Learning features a healthy blend (...) of relatively junior scholars and the most senior scholars in the field, all of whom were given expert guidance by the editors. Given the interest of the topic and the high quality of the contributions, it is a welcome addition to the literature on ancient philosophy. (shrink)

American psychologist and pragmatist philosopher James (1842- 1910) is generally considered too individualistic to have had any interest in politics, but Miller argues that political concerns were in fact central to his intellectual work. He finds in James a theorist of action, explores the complexities of his theory, and related his thought to Miller's own experience as a political activist and scholar. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

'Miller's writing style makes the book easy to pick up and difficult to put down. Written at a level appropriate for advanced undergraduates, it is an important and valuable acquisition for academic libraries.' |s CHOICE.

Eric Miller's affordable, elegant translation of Nemesis divina by Carolus Linnaeus reveals a little-known side of the great natural historian. A classic of Swedish literature that influenced luminaries such as August Strindberg, Nemesis divina was composed over years, apparently for the edification of Linnaeus's wayward son Carl. A surprising field-guide to theodicy, the book explores the occult operation of a Theologia experimentalis, an "empirical theology," in the lives of men and women. Many of these people were known to Linnaeus (...) himself. Eric Miller, an award-winning poet and scholar, set Linnaeus's fascinating and eloquent work in a broad literary and philosophical context, linking it to matters as diverse as New England Transcendentalism, the subculture of Black Metal, the Icelandic sagas and contemporary Swedish poetry. Nemesis divina will intrigue students of literature, religion, science, and philosophy alike. (shrink)

Mark Miller's innovative study argues that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales represent an extended mediation on agency, autonomy and practical reason. This philosophical aspect of Chaucer's interests can help us understand what is both sophisticated and disturbing about his explorations of love, sex and gender. Partly through fresh readings of the Consolation of Philosophy and the Romance of the Rose, Miller charts Chaucer's position in relation to the association in the Christian West between problems of autonomy and problems of sexuality (...) and reconstructs how medieval philosophers and literary writers approached psychological phenomena often thought of as distinctively modern. The literary experiments of the Canterbury Tales represent a distinctive philosophical achievement that remains vital to our own attempts to understand agency, desire and their histories. (shrink)

The essays in Cultural Pluralism and Moral Knowledge deal with philosophical issues that arise from the existence of a diversity of cultural traditions. The discussions range from broad examinations of the relevance of cultural pluralism to morality, to studies of specific cultural practices. Some essays explore the relationship between pluralism and political theory; some contrast pluralism with relativism or distinguish it from reasonable disagreement. Others propose and defend a set of principles that apply to all societies, forming the foundation of (...) a common moral system. Still others delve into questions of moral psychology, attempting to explain why people hold the values they do. (shrink)

Method as Identity considers how social identity shapes methodological standpoints. With a refreshing hip hop sensibility, Miller and Driscoll reorient the contemporary academic study of religion toward recognition of the costs and benefits of manufacturing “critical” distance from our objects of study.

Fiduciary law is one of the most important areas of private law, governing a wide range of relationships that affect people in their daily lives. These new and innovative essays explore the foundations of fiduciary relationships and the duties fiduciaries owe to their beneficiaries.

Due to the impact of biomedical technologies on human wellbeing, biomedical engineering presents discipline-specific ethical issues that can have global, economic, environmental, and societal consequences. Because ethics instruction is a component of accredited undergraduate engineering programs in the US, we developed an ethics assignment that provided biomedical engineering students with a framework for ethical decision-making and challenged them to critically reflect on ethical issues related to contemporary medical devices. Thematic analysis performed on student reflections (n = 73) addressed two research (...) questions: (i) what considerations do biomedical engineering undergraduates describe when asked to critically reflect on ethical issues related to contemporary medical devices; and (ii) how do students describe their participation in bioethical discussions? Students described design, economic factors, and empathy most frequently as considerations. Further, students reported confidence in their ability to engage in ethical discussion upon assignment completion. Overall, our analysis builds understanding of student attitudes and engagement to help inform future ethics curriculum development. (shrink)

Incomplete Archaeologies takes a familiar archaeological concept--assemblages--and reconsiders such groupings, collections and sets of things from the perspective of the work required to assemble them. The discussions presented here engage with the practices of collection, construction, performance and creation in the past (and present) which constitute the things and groups of things studied by archaeologists--and examine as well how these things and thing-groups are dismantled, rearranged, and even destroyed, only to be rebuilt and recreated. The ultimate aim is to reassert (...) an awareness of the incompleteness of assemblage, and thus the importance of practices of assembling (whether they seem at first creative or destructive) for understanding social life in the past as well as the present. The individual chapters represent critical engagements with this aim by archaeologists presenting a broad scope of case studies from Eurasia and the Mediterranean. Case studies include discussions of mortuary practice from numerous angles, the sociopolitics of metallurgy, human-animal relationships, landscape and memory, the assembly of political subjectivity and the curation of sovereignty. These studies emphasise the incomplete and ongoing nature of social action in the past, and stress the critical significance of a deeper understanding of formation processes as well as contextual archaeologies to practices of archaeology, museology, art history, and other related disciplines. Contributors challenge archaeologists and others to think past the objects in the assemblage to the practices of assembling, enabling us to consider not only plural modes of interacting with and perceiving things, spaces, human bodies and temporalities in the past, but also to perhaps discover alternate modes of framing these interactions and relationships in our analyses. Ultimately then, Incomplete Archaeologies takes aim at the perceived totality not only of assemblages of artefacts on shelves and desks, but also that of some of archaeology's seeming-seamless epistemological objects"--From publisher's website. (shrink)

Confronting crucial and difficult issues, the ten authors whose essays appear in this volume offer fresh perspectives on the nature and value of altruism. This collection of essays on moral philosophy deal with the balance to be struck between egoism and altruism - that is, between pursuing one's own interests and serving the interest of others - and with related issues. Contributions examine the relationship between altruism and rationality; consider cases in which one's personal needs and goals may legitimately be (...) given priority over the needs of others; question whether, and under what conditions, we may properly be forced to serve others' interests; and examine the role government should play in regulating our interactions. (shrink)

A central idea in moral and political philosophy, 'autonomy' is generally understood as some form of self-governance or self-direction. Certain Stoics, modern philosophers such as Spinoza, and most importantly, Immanuel Kant, are among the great philosophers who have offered important insights on the concept. Some theorists analyze autonomy in terms of the self being moved by its higher-order desires. Others argue that autonomy must be understood in terms of acting from reason or from a sense of moral duty independent of (...) the passions. Autonomy seems closely related to the notion of freedom, but in what sense: freedom from coercion, freedom from psychological constraints, or freedom from material necessity? Various approaches to these and similar questions yield different implications for public policy. Is capitalism, social democracy or socialism more favorable to autonomy? The essays in this volume address these important questions. (shrink)