From whence spring the sparks of creativity? It is to this very question that the field of depth psychology--especially that of C.G. Jung and his intellectual descendants--has much to contribute. Just as the Muses were the offspring of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, our memories are the ancestors of our creativity that finds its multifaceted expression in the written word, image, theater, dance, and music. The Unconscious Roots of Creativity seeks to push the investigation into that domain of memory that (...) is beyond our conscious reach. With articles from 16 contributors, the "red thread" running through each of the offerings in this volume is that, whatever its ultimate expression, the creative impulse has its roots deep in the psyche. Edited By Kathryn Madden, Leonard Cruz and Steven Buser with articles by Linda Carter, Anna Maria Costantino, Carol Thayer Cox, Leonard Cruz, Lisa Raye Garlock, James Hollis, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Ian Livingston, Kathryn Madden, Jordan S. Potash, Susan Rowland, Murray Stein, Ann Ulanov, Tjeu van den Berk, Robin van Loben Sels, and Heidi S. Volf. (shrink)

Written for students, Mind, Matter, and Nature presumes no prior philosophical training on the part of the reader. The book nevertheless holds the arguments discussed to rigorous standards and is conversant with recent literature, thus making it useful as well to more advanced students and professionals interested in a resource on Thomistic hylomorphism in the philosophy of mind.

The animalist view of personal identity, according to which we human persons are identical to animals, is arguably the simplest view of the relationship between human persons and animals. But animalism faces a serious challenge from the possibility of brain transplants. This chapter develops, on behalf of animalism, a new way of modeling such cases. The model is developed by analogy with situations of environmentally determined reference shift familiar from the literature on externalism in the philosophy of mind and language. (...) The resulting externalist animalist model is put to work in describing a range of variant cases and in accounting for certain anti-animalist intuitions. In the final section some wider consequences are elucidated, concerning the extrinsic nature of thought, and the coherence, within a broadly materialist framework, of disembodied consciousness. (shrink)

To begin with, there is a conceptual necessity implied in the very concept of cause itself, and in all concepts that have a causal element; and this definitional "must," far from being conventional or arbitrary, reflects the natural necessity of those physical systems which in fact constitute the nature of our universe. The conceptual necessity of the concept of cause can be pointed up in the following way. Assume that we have good reason for saying at to that f, g, (...) h, and i are jointly sufficient to E and hence C of E. What would we say at t1 if f, g, h, and i occurred but not E? We would clearly not say then, or ever, that while ordinarily these conditions are jointly sufficient for E, this time they were not; rather we would say that somehow we were mistaken in thinking that f, g, h, and i at t1 were identical with f, g, h, and i at t0. We might have been mistaken in either of two ways. We might have mis-identified one of the conditions at t1, erroneously thinking, say, that p was an f; or one or more of the conditions might have had its nature altered, losing some capacity or power it once had. In either case, we would withdraw the claim at t1 that C was the cause of E. Since we would withdraw the use of C at t1 and would never admit that f, g, h, and i at any t, if genuine instances of f, g, h, and i, would not produce E, we are clearly using C in such a way that actually producing E is part of its meaning. On the assumption that the conditions are genuinely the same, it follows, so to speak, from the principle of identity that they must produce the same effect. (shrink)

Part of the philosophical interest of the topic of organic individuals is that it promises to shed light on a basic and perennial question of philosophical self-understanding, the question what are we? The class of organic individuals seems to be a good place to look for candidates to be the things that we are. However there are, in principle, different ways of locating ourselves within the class of organic individuals; organic individuals occur at both higher and lower mereological levels than (...) the stereotypical bounded and physiologically unified vertebrate organism. The view that we are organic individuals smaller than the physiological organism is one that has recently been endorsed by Derek Parfit. This paper attempts to resolve a dispute between Parfit’s ‘embodied part’ view and a contrary ‘animalist’ view according to which we are whole organisms. It is explained why a problem of multiple thinkers presents a serious obstacle to a straightforward resolution of this dispute. Parfit’s own strategy for dealing with this obstacle is found to be problematic. However his strategy has a certain general shape, which can be instantiated in a different, and better, specific way. I close in the final section, not with a definite resolution of the dispute, but with illustration of how progress on the question of about which organic individuals we are requires engagement with questions about the nature and function of self-awareness. (shrink)

IN the recent past there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Thomas Reid; several new editions of his work have appeared as well as a series of articles concerning various aspects of his systematic philosophy. Interest has generalized to the whole Scottish tradition, including numerous figures in the history of American philosophy who were deeply influenced by Reid and Dugald Stewart. In addition, several recent and contemporary philosophers have used Reid's epistemic views as a point of (...) departure in developing their own adverbial theories of sensing and appearing. Others have used Reid's theory of agency in formulating their own views on freedom and responsibility. (shrink)

Probability and Frequency. Aristotle frequently used the concept of probability, but apparently he did not make any persistent effort to clarify or analyze it. His description of a fortiori argument in The Topics, e.g., depends upon “the more or less likely or probable,” but he does not explore this notion. In The Rhetoric, where he applies himself to a puzzle about probability which the Sophists had advanced, he comes closer to an analysis of probability. Aristotle quotes Agathon, One might perchance (...) say this was probable—That things improbable oft will hap to men, and elaborates thusly: “For what is improbable does happen [often], and therefore it is probable that improbable things will happen. Granted this, one might argue that ‘what is improbable is probable.’ “ Aristotle believes that one can avoid this imposture by distinguishing between “general” and “specific” probability, and apparently intends by the former the statistical sense of frequent occurrence; but he does not establish what he might mean by the probability of an individual event and so leaves the notion of “specific probability” unclear. (shrink)

Becoming an expert in any knowledge domain takes time and a great deal of learning, both theoretical and experiential. The individual’s knowledge is often supplemented through knowledge exchanges with other experts. Such exchanges are facilitated by events such as conferences or meetings. For two years we have been investigating the high profile work of scientists who work in the accredited anti-doping laboratories that are located in various countries around the world. These scientists work to curb doping in sport by conducting (...) urinary analyses which detect athletes’ use of performance enhancing substances. These international experts, in the field of anti-doping science, work in a complex socio-technical context comprising both scientific and general anti-doping practitioners such as the staff of anti-doping agencies, sporting federations, sports physicians, coaches, athletes and the media. In order to maintain the high level of expertise necessary for this work, anti-doping scientists continuously search for and integrate new knowledge into everyday laboratory practice. To facilitate this process anti-doping scientists have developed working relationships and networks with other scientists working in the area. A major enabler of this process is the annual Manfred Donike Workshop on Dope Analysis. This paper describes the contribution of this event to the work of these expert scientists from an Activity Theory perspective. (shrink)

Modern Empiricists are typically troubled by the two following problems: (1) There is an epistemic gap between experience of individuals and understanding universals such that empiricist accounts of concept formation seem to beg the question. (2) There needs to be an answer to the skeptic who denies that sensory experience warrants our belief in the existence of the material substances that underlie sensible qualities. Although Aristotle’s account of induction is subject to these problems prima facie, his theory of perception, his (...) teleologically driven reliabilism about the senses, and his broader metaphysical views concerning the relation between substance and accident serve to insulate his account of induction from the pitfalls of modern empiricism. The resolution to these problems proposed in this paper allows for a consistent reading of otherwise controversial Aristotelian texts, while recommending a defense of realism about material substance against the claims of the Humean skeptic. (shrink)

Irregularity is fundamental to both Wright's and Peirce's positions but they interpret it in radically different ways. The occurrence of things by absolute chance, Peirce's tychism, is his explanation of irregularity; chance, for him, is ontologically irre- ducible--"an objective reality, operative in the cosmos." Wright, on the other hand, interpreted irregularity as a function of causal complexity; it does not constitute an abridgement of causality but only an abridgement of our knowledge of it.

Professor Boring is best known for his work in the history of psychology and for good reason: his History of Experimental Psychology and his Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology are truly impressive works. However, he has also written numerous articles in the philosophy of science, the psychology of scientific discovery, and the sociology of scientific production, but unfortunately this material has not heretofore been readily accessible. This deficiency, however, has been corrected efficiently by the recent publication (...) of Boring's History, Psychology, and Science: Selected Papers, edited by Robert I. Watson and Donald T. Campbell. The essays in this book represent the whole range of Boring's interests and make essential reading for any serious student of the philosophy of science. Of especial value to philosophers are the essays listed under the titles “The Scientific Method” and “The Mind-Body Problem.” Since the groupings overlap, however, the following essays in other categories are also crucial: “The Nature and History of Experimental Control,” “William James and the Psychology of the Present,” and “The Influence of Evolutionary Theory Upon American Psychological Thought.” All of these essays are interesting but the ones on operationism and theory in psychology, and the one on evolutionary notions in American psychology, are classics and worth very careful consideration and comment. (shrink)

When in 1866 American publisher Ticknor and Fields released St. Martin's Summer, Anne Hampton Brewster's second full-length novel, she was already the author of more than fifty short stories, poems, and essays that had appeared in such prominent venues as Godey's Lady's Book, Graham's American Monthly Magazine, Neal's Saturday Gazette, Lippincott's Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, and Peterson's.1 Nonetheless, Brewster and this imaginative transformation of her first European Grand Tour in 1857–58, including interactions with utopian visionary and politician Robert Dale Owen, (...) remain relatively unknown in literary and utopian studies.2 St. Martin's Summer deserves more attention, especially among the latter, for the... (shrink)

Commentaries surrounding Skinner were re-examined and applied to Hull et al. Hull et al. were found to address many of these concerns by paying attention to neuroscience, by providing some discussion of the origins of behavior, and by forwarding a deterministic account that may prove as revolutionary as that of Copernicus and Darwin.

In this paper we propose to characterize Chauncey Wright's empirical psychology, or “psychozoology” as he called it, from a methodological standpoint. By a methodological characterization of any science we mean an analysis of its structure as distinguished from its actual findings. We mean, for example, a description of the kind or type of variable and law in any science as distinguished from the actual particular content of any defined variable or discovered law. This distinction between variables and the laws which (...) obtain between them is, as a matter of fact, itself a methodological description of the findings of science. Wright, it is true, did not discuss the subject matter of psychology from a methodological point of view, perhaps because he was involved in developing the body of knowledge itself. On the other hand, his discussions of physics and chemistry, areas in which the subject matter was well developed, took a methodological turn. Regardless of Wright's own practice, however, the methodological implications of his contribution in actual theory to “empirical” psychology remain, and drawing these implications is one means by which we will show the significance of his work relative to the development of psychological concepts and laws. We will consider what specific ways his position is similar to, and different from, the later American functionalists' views on these matters and on the problem of causal interaction between physical and phenomenal events. Any similarity will perhaps gain in significance if, as it is further claimed, there is an actual historical influence of Wright on Dewey, the most noted functionalist. (shrink)

The first chapter of Diet and the Disease of Civilization may be familiar to readers of Utopian Studies. An earlier version of it won Adrienne Rose Bitar the Society for Utopian Studies' Eugenio Battisti Award for the best essay published in the society's journal in 2015. "The Paleo Diet and the American Weight Loss Utopia, 1975–2014" was among several in a special issue that featured essays and book reviews on utopian foodways.The book chapter that emerged from that award-winning essay is (...) even richer within the context of Bitar's engaging longer study. The project places caveman or "paleo" diets alongside what Bitar labels "devotional" or "Eden" diets, "primitive" or "precolonial" diets, and "detox" diets. Books... (shrink)

There are a number of possible strategies open to one in meeting this problem. He can try to show that God's unlimited power and goodness are, in fact, compatible; or show, through linguistic analysis, that the problem is meaningless; or show, through the use of the notions of commitment and mysticism, that the problem can be safely ignored. There are, however, grave difficulties with all these moves. So the most reasonable alternative move for one who wishes to remain more or (...) less within the theistic tradition is to try to modify the notion of unlimited power in a way that neither does violence to this tradition nor founders on the problem of evil. Whitehead and Hartshorne are the best examples of this interesting and complicated strategy. This strategy requires careful analysis before effective criticism can be advanced. After careful analysis, however, the criticisms of this strategy can be seen to be as effective as the criticisms of all the other strategies. The ultimate result is driving another nail into the coffin of religious cosmology. (shrink)

In recent years the account of natural law that has come to be known as the “new natural law theory” has come under criticism. Rebekah Johnston has engaged quite seriously with the NNL account of marriage and sexuality and has deemed it insufficient and internally inconsistent, going so far as to argue for the legitimacy of homosexual “marriage” based on the NNL’s own system. The author argues in this essay that the NNL does not fully realize the implications of its (...) position in this regard, and that Rebekah Johnston’s critique fails similarly in providing an account of marriage and sexuality. To remedy these errors, the role of normative, natural teleology must be investigated thoroughly. (shrink)