In the short time since Seana Shiffrin published Speech Matters, ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ have become full-blown phenomena, and various forces have destabilized the line between truth and falsity. Now more than ever, Shiffrin’s project is one of urgent importance. This essay examines Chapter Four of Speech Matters, which asks the crucial question: when and how may the law regulate lies? Shiffrin concludes that the law could regulate lies much more often than it does, though sometimes it ought not (...) to for pragmatic reasons. For all of Shiffrin’s masterful explication, there is perhaps more to say in the space between Chapter Three’s moral account of free speech and Chapter Four’s legal one. Setting existing doctrine aside, how would a society translate the moral principles of Chapter Three into a system of law? Which worries are intrinsic to free speech, and which are purely pragmatic? In other words, what does a thinker-based account of law look like? (shrink)

In the short time since Seana Shiffrin published Speech Matters, ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ have become full-blown phenomena, and various forces have destabilized the line between truth and falsity. Now more than ever, Shiffrin’s project is one of urgent importance. This essay examines Chapter Four of Speech Matters, which asks the crucial question: when and how may the law regulate lies? Shiffrin concludes that the law could regulate lies much more often than it does, though sometimes it ought not (...) to for pragmatic reasons. For all of Shiffrin’s masterful explication, there is perhaps more to say in the space between Chapter Three’s moral account of free speech and Chapter Four’s legal one. Setting existing doctrine aside, how would a society translate the moral principles of Chapter Three into a system of law? Which worries are intrinsic to free speech, and which are purely pragmatic? In other words, what does a thinker-based account of law look like? (shrink)

From 1876, this influential work in the history of ideas focuses on the eighteenth-century deist controversy and its effects.

Objects of representation: Kant's Copernican revolution re-interpreted -- Synthetic unities of experience -- Three ways in which space and time might be said to be transcendentally ideal -- The given, the unconditioned, the transcendental object, and the reality of the past -- A theory of everything?: Kant speaks to Stephen Hawking -- Opinion, belief or faith, and knowledge -- Freedom of judgment in Descartes, Spinoza, Hume and Kant -- Six levels of mentality -- A Kantian defense of freewill.

Over three previous editions, Ten Theories of Human Nature has been a remarkably popular introduction to some of the most influential developments in Western and Eastern thought. This thoroughly revised fourth edition features substantial new chapters on Aristotle and on evolutionary theories of human nature; the latter centers on Edward O. Wilson but also outlines the ideas of Emile Durkheim, B. F. Skinner, Nikolaas Tinbergen, Konrad Lorenz, Noam Chomsky, and recent evolutionary psychology. This edition also includes a rewritten introduction that (...) invites readers (even if inclined toward fundamentalism, or to cultural relativism) to careful, critical thought about human nature; a useful new section that summarizes the history of ideas from the Stoics to the Enlightenment; and a new conclusion that suggests a way to synthesize the various theories. Lucid and accessible, Ten Theories of Human Nature, 4/e, compresses into a small space the essence of such ancient traditions as Confucianism, Hinduism, and the Old and New Testaments as well as the theories of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The authors juxtapose the ideas of these and other thinkers and traditions in a way that helps readers understand how humanity has struggled to comprehend its nature. To encourage readers to think critically for themselves and to underscore the similarities and differences between the many theories, the book examines each one on four points--the nature of the universe, the nature of humanity, the diagnosis of the ills of humanity, and the proposed cure for these problems. Ideal for introductory courses in human nature, philosophy, religious studies, and intellectual history, Ten Theories of Human Nature, 4/e, will engage and motivate students and other readers to consider how we can understand and improve both ourselves and human society. (shrink)

Venturing into ethics -- Morality and ethics -- History of the development of ethics -- Formalization of ethics -- Institutional Review Boards -- Informal ethics -- Do no harm -- Transparency and accountability -- Informed consent -- Human terrsin system -- Future 1 -- Future 2 -- Yanomami -- Napoleon A. Chagnon -- Secrets of the tribe -- The Other.

Over six previous editions, Twelve Theories of Human Nature has been a remarkably popular introduction to some of the most influential developments in Western and Eastern thought. Now titled Thirteen Theories of Human Nature, this text continues to be an ideal introduction to human nature andintellectual history. This unique volume will engage and motivate students to consider how we can understand and improve both ourselves and human society.

This article explores the relation between two different modes of cosmology: the social and the scientific. Over the twentieth century, scientific understandings of the dimensions and operations of the physical universe changed dramatically, significantly prompted by astronomical and astrophysical research undertaken at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California. Could those understandings be readily translated into social theory? Studies across a range of disciplines have intimated that the scientific cosmos might be less essential to the worlds of meaning and belonging (...) that people and communities compose around themselves than more local and relational models of an ordered whole. The article applies that proposition to the Mount Wilson Observatory itself, arguing that the observatory’s founder, George Ellery Hale, and his acolytes were deeply invested in practices of terrestrial place-making, the politics of belonging, and the cadences of civilizational time as applied to their city and its region. Moreover, they struggled to construct a philosophy integrating the cosmos they were seeking to fix at home with the contortions and careering trajectories of the universal whole. (shrink)

The term 'agnostic' was probably coined by T. H. Huxley during a speech to the Metaphysical Society in 1869. From the Greek 'agnostos', 'unknown', it was derived from St Paul's mention of an Athenian altar inscribed 'to the unknown god'. With these overtones of ancient philosophy, agnosticism became the tag of an emergent school of thought which posited that the existence of anything beyond the material and measurable should be considered unknowable. In this collection of seven essays, first published as (...) one volume in 1893, Leslie Stephen makes a study of the 'unknown'. Across the essays, he presents arguments for the intrinsic agnosticism of many of the basic tenets of deism, explores the way in which humans construct dreams and realities, and examines the relationship between physics and philosophy. This readable and entertaining book will be of interest to students of both theology and philosophy. (shrink)

To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is always a dominant sense, and that the relative ranking of the senses will be the same across different (...) cultures. We find that references to sight outstrip references to the other senses, suggesting a pan-human preoccupation with visual phenomena. However, the relative frequency of the other senses was found to vary cross-linguistically. Cultural relativity was conspicuous as exemplified by the high ranking of smell in Semai, an Aslian language. Together these results suggest a place for both universal constraints and cultural shaping of the language of perception. (shrink)

A volume in Ethics in Practice Series Editors Robert A. Giacalone, Temple University and Carole L. Jurkiewicz, Louisiana State University Making sure that performance in business enterprise is achieved ethically is no small task. Leaders, managers, and employees at every level of the organization need to utilize systems and processes that support ethical strength, establishing a workplace where responsibility, accountability, and doing the right thing are genuinely valued and practiced. Management can help support ethical performance in workers' daily task actions (...) by underscoring the importance of rules and regulations, while also moving to ensure that employees understand and care about doing what's right. Given that most firms only emphasize compliance in ethics training, there is vast room for additional development. Training people to be less bad is not good enough. With the infusion of mandatory requirements for ethics training programs in some firms and self-imposed initiatives in others, we see a range of deliverables. To advance ethics in practice, a closer look at ethics training in the workplace is warranted. This volume attempts to better understand ethics in organizational settings by taking a focused look at the science of ethics training and best practices, areas for concern, specific techniques, application outcomes, how to cultivate an ethical work environment, and considering where opportunities for additional inquiry reside. Managers and practitioners reading this book will garner specific trends and useful techniques that can inform, guide, and improve their efforts to build ethical awareness and effective ethical decisionmaking within their organizations. Academic scholars will find this book useful, providing insight as to where additional research and empirical work is needed. (shrink)

Through a witty and engaging style, this book is for anyone who has a job (employees, managers, and leaders), and who wants to do the right thing, but aren't always sure what that means, how to go about it, or how to withstand the forces that push all of us away from being ethical. By poking fun at the ironies and hypocrisies of human behavior, Exercising Your Ethics prompts readers to leverage techniques that can help us become more deliberate about (...) choosing value-driven actions. In a world that seems to reward winning, regardless of how it is achieved, we need a clearer reason for wanting to be and become our best selves. This approach to business ethics is innovative, fresh, and evocative in that the serious subject is treated in an informal and adventurous manner, poking fun at the ironies and hypocrisies of human behavior. Readers will see how our race to achieve quarterly profits, combined with a self-indulgent consumption-based economy, has shaped our entire lives. Readers will delight in the book's humor, as the ironies of human interaction prompt introspection to consider how to better equip oneself with the knowledge, tools, and techniques to engage in and support others in the path to moral action at work. Bringing Ethics to Work explains business ethics in a way that is engaging, understandable and enables the reader to recognise behaviors in themselves and others. It is ideal for adult education (students in undergraduate, Masters, or professional degree programs) and training within organizational settings (employees, management, and future leaders). HR professionals, team leaders, professional coaches, and organizational ethics trainers will find the book particularly insightful and useful. (shrink)

The Art and Craft of Political Theory provides a critical overview of the discipline's core concepts and concerns and its development of critical thinking and practical judgment. The field's interdisciplinary strengths are deployed to grapple with emerging issues and engage afresh enduring ideals and quandaries. While conventional definitions of key concepts are provided, original and controversial perspectives are also explored, revealing continuity in a tradition of thought while emphasizing its diversity and innovations. The Art and Craft of Political Theory illustrates (...) the analytic and interpretive skills, the moral and philosophic discernment, and the historical knowledge needed to appreciate a tradition of thought, to contest its claims, and to make good use of its insights. Topics include: - Science, Ideology, and Normative Theory - Biology, Culture, Human Nature, Power and Violence - Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern Political Thought - Liberty, Equality, Justice, Reason, and Democracy - Racial, Religious, Gender, and Economic Identities - Liberalism, Socialism, Capitalism, Communism, Anarchism, Feminism, and Environmentalism - Social Media, Automation, Artificial intelligence and other Emerging Technologies This concise, lively, and accessibly written book is essential reading for all students of political theory. (shrink)

Unreason will arm readers with scientific knowledge to curb the misinformation and misconceptions that increasingly threaten our civil discourse. Even further, these essays present a way for us to be better citizens, equipped to deal with the winds of misinformation and disinformation swirling about us and better able to look ahead to a world where science and reason-indeed just good old common sense-can prevail.

Apart from references to perception, words such as see and listen have shared, non-literal meanings across diverse languages. Such cross-linguistic meanings have not been systematically investigated as they appear in their natural home — informal spoken interaction. We present a qualitative examination of the semantic associations of perception verbs based on recorded everyday conversation in thirteen diverse languages. Across these diverse communities, spontaneous interaction provides evidence for two commonly-discussed extensions of perception verbs — perception~cognition, hearing~linguistic communication — as well as (...) illustrating other meanings and functions that have been less appreciated heretofore. The range of usage that is readily observable in informal conversation makes it clear that this type of data must take center stage for the empirically grounded study of semantics. Moreover, these data suggest that commonalities in polysemous meanings may rely not only on universal cognition, but also on the universal exigencies of social interaction. (shrink)

This article provides an ecological theory of face perception that elucidates the basis of the various perceptions. It then reviews research on first impressions elicited by facial qualities that are associated with fitness, emotion, race, age, and sex, in each case making links to ecological theory. It aims to identify facial qualities that inform social perceptions and reflect the zeitgeist at the time in social psychology. The emphasis is on understanding the cognitive mechanisms engaged in social perception, and this is (...) typically accomplished by providing information about social qualities in lists of trait words. The article demonstrates face perception research pertinent to the detection of socially relevant qualities in faces—attractiveness, emotions, race, age, and sex—as well as associated behavioral affordances, which have typically been assessed by trait ratings. (shrink)

This research addresses the question of whether men and women in sales differ in their ethical attitudes and decision making. The study asked 209 subjects to respond to 20 ethical scenarios, half of which were "relational" and half "non-relational." The study concludes (1) that there are significant ethical differences between the sexes in situations that involve relational issues, but not in non-relational situations, and (2) that gender-based ethical differences change with age and years of experience. The implications of these finding (...) for sales organizations are discussed. (shrink)

Smith, Glass, and Miller have reported a meta-analysis of over 500 studies comparing some form of psychological therapy with a control condition. They report that when averaged over all dependent measures of outcome, psychological therapy is. 85 standard deviations better than the control treatment. We examined the subset of studies included in the Smith et al. metaanalysis that contained a psychotherapy and a placebo treatment. The median of the mean effect sizes for these 32 studies was. 15. There was a (...) nonsignificant inverse relationship between mean outcome and the following: sample size, duration of therapy, use of measures of outcome other than undisguised self-report, measurement of outcome at follow-up, and use of real patients rather than subjects solicited for the purposes of participation in a research study. A qualitative analysis of the studies in terms of the type of patient involved indicates that those using psychiatric outpatients had essentially zero effect sizes and that none using psychiatric inpaticnts provide convincing evidence for psychotherapeutic effectiveness. The onty studies clearly demonstrating significant effects of psychotherapy were the ones that did not use real patients. For the most part, these studies involved small samples of subjects and brief treatments, occasionally described in quasibeliavioristic language. It was concluded that for real patients there is no evidence that the benefits of psychotherapy are greater than those of placebo treatment. (shrink)

Previous discussions on the value of sport in remote locations have concentrated on 1) environmental and process concerns, with the rejection of competition and goal-directed or use oriented activity, or 2) the value of risk and dangerous sport for self-affirmation. It is argued that the value of risk in remote sport is in self-knowledge rather than self-affirmation and that risk in remote sport, while enhancing certain kinds of experience, is not necessary. The value of remote sport is in offering the (...) opportunity for experience that enhances the participants’ knowledge both of self and of the environment with which they interact. (shrink)

The transitions between turns at talk in conversation tend to occur quickly, with only a slight gap of approximately 100 to 300 ms between them. This estimate of central tendency, however, hides a wealth of complex variation, as a number of factors, such as the type of turns involved, have been shown to influence the timing of turn transitions. This article considers one specific type of turn that does not conform to the statistical trend, namely turns that deal with troubles (...) of speaking, hearing, and understanding, known as other-initiations of repair. The results of a quantitative analysis of 169 other-initiations of repair in face-to-face conversation reveal that the most frequent cases occur after gaps of approximately 700 ms. Furthermore, other-initiations of repair that locate a source of trouble in a prior turn specifically tend to occur after shorter gaps than those that do not, and those that correct errors in a prior turn, while rare, tend to occur without delay. An analysis of the transitions before other-initiations of repair, using methods of conversation analysis, suggests that speakers use the extra time (i) to search for a late recognition of the problematic turn, (ii) to provide an opportunity for the speaker of the problematic turn to resolve the trouble independently, (iii) and to produce visual signals, such as facial gestures. In light of these results, it is argued that other-initiations of repair take priority over other turns at talk in conversation and therefore are not subject to the same rules and constraints that motivate fast turn transitions in general. (shrink)

The modern state claims supreme authority over the lives of all its citizens. Drawing together political philosophy, jurisprudence, and public choice theory, this book forces the reader to reconsider some basic assumptions about the authority of the state. Various popular and influential theories - conventionalism, contractarianism, and communitarianism - are assessed by the author and found to fail. Leslie Green argues that only the consent of the governed can justify the state's claims to authority. While he denies that there (...) is a general obligation to obey the law, he nonetheless rejects philosophical anarchism and defends civility - the willingness to tolerate some imperfection in institutions - as a political virtue. (shrink)

The main conclusion drawn in this text is that Piaget's accounts of the construction of necessary knowledge continue to have an intelligible and respectable bases.

Mary Astell’s theory of friendship has been interpreted either as a version of Aristotelian virtue friendship, or as aligned with a Christian and Platonist tradition. In this paper, I argue that Astell’s theory of friendship is determinedly anti-Aristotelian; it is a theory of spiritual friendship offered as an alternative to Aristotelian virtue friendship. By grounding her conception of friendship in a Christian–Platonist metaphysics, I show that Astell rejects the Aristotelian criteria of reciprocity and partiality as essential features of the friendship (...) bond and that she develops a theory of friendship that is neither reciprocal nor partial. Further, I argue that Astell’s theory of friendship advances her feminist aims by providing a justification for female–female spiritual bonds in contradistinction to female–male marriage bonds. Astell argues that the female–female bond of spiritual friendship is sanctioned by God, and is, therefore, a divinely authorized alternative to the male–female bond of marriage. Through her theory of spiritual friendship, Astell marks out a central place for female–female bonds and provides women with a justification for resisting marriage. (shrink)

There are many reasons to include texts written by women in early modern philosophy courses. The most obvious one is accuracy: women helped to shape the philosophical landscape of the time. Thus, to craft a syllabus that wholly excludes women is to give students an inaccurate picture of the early modern period. Since it seems safe to assume that we all aim for accuracy, this should be reason enough to include women writers in our courses. This article nonetheless offers an (...) additional reason: when students are exposed to philosophical texts written by women, they learn that women have been, are, and can be philosophers. Given how underrepresented women are in philosophy, this finding is significant. If we aim to change the face of philosophy—so that it includes more women—we must include texts written by women in our syllabi. The article considers various obstacles faced by those who work to respond to this call to action. (shrink)

This book marks a total departure from previous studies of the Boxer War. It evaluates the way the war was perceived and portrayed at the time by the mass media. As such the book offers insights to a wider audience than that of sinologists or Chinese historians. The important distinction made by the author is between image makers and eyewitnesses. Whole categories of powerful image makers, both Chinese and foreign, never saw anything of the Boxer War but were responsible for (...) disseminating images of that war to millions of people in China and throughout the world. (shrink)