This book offers a new interpretation of William James's ethical and religious thought. Michael Slater shows that James's conception of morality, or what it means to lead a moral and flourishing life, is intimately tied to his conception of religious faith, and argues that James's views on these matters are worthy of our consideration. He offers a reassessment of James's 'will to believe' or 'right to believe' doctrine, his moral theory, and his neglected moral arguments for religious faith. And (...) he argues that James's pragmatic account of religion is based on an ethical view of the function of religion and a realist view of the objects of religious belief and experience, and is compatible with his larger conception of pragmatism. The book will appeal to readers interested in the history of modern philosophy, especially pragmatism, as well as those interested in moral philosophy, religion, and the history of ideas. (shrink)

This book offers a new interpretation of William James's ethical and religious thought. Michael Slater shows that James's conception of morality, or what it means to lead a moral and flourishing life, is intimately tied to his conception of religious faith, and argues that James's views on these matters are worthy of our consideration. He offers a reassessment of James's 'will to believe' or 'right to believe' doctrine, his moral theory, and his neglected moral arguments for religious faith. And (...) he argues that James's pragmatic account of religion is based on an ethical view of the function of religion and a realist view of the objects of religious belief and experience, and is compatible with his larger conception of pragmatism. The book will appeal to readers interested in the history of modern philosophy, especially pragmatism, as well as those interested in moral philosophy, religion, and the history of ideas. (shrink)

We all have moral beliefs. But what if one beleif conflicts with another? DePaul argues that we have to make our beliefs cohere, but that the current coherence methods are seriously flawed. It is not just the arguments that need to be considered in moral enquiry. DePaul asserts that the ability to make sensitive moral judgements is vital to any philosophical inquiry into morality. The inquirer must consider how her life experiences and experiences with literature, film and theatre have influenced (...) her capacity for making moral judgments and attempt to ensure that this capacity is neither naive nor corrupted. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" begins with an argument against sense-datum epistemology. There is some question about the validity of this attack, stemming in part from the assumption that Sellars is concerned with epistemic foundationalism. This paper recontextualizes Sellars's argument in two ways: by showing how the argument of EPM relates to Sellars's 1940s work, which does not concern foundationalism at all; and by considering the view of H.H. Price, Sellars's teacher at Oxford and the only classical (...) datum theorist to receive substantive comment in EPM. Timm Triplett has claimed that Sellars's discussion simply begs the question against Price, but this depends on the mistaken assumption that Sellars's concern is with foundationalism. On the contrary, Sellars's argument concerns the assumption that the innate capacity for sensory experience counts as "thinking in presence" in the way needed for empiricist accounts of content acquisition. Price's distinction between noticing universals and being aware of them encapsulates the tensions empiricists face here. (shrink)

The past decade has seen a renewed interest in moral psychology. A unique feature of the present endeavor is its unprecedented interdisciplinarity. For the first time, cognitive, social, and developmental psychologists, neuroscientists, experimental philosophers, evolutionary biologists, and anthropologists collaborate to study the same or overlapping phenomena. This review focuses on moral judgments and is written from the perspective of cognitive psychologists interested in theories of the cognitive and affective processes underlying judgments in moral domains. The review will first present and (...) discuss a variety of different theoretical and empirical approaches, including both behavioral and neuroscientific studies. We will then show how these theories can be applied to a selected number of specific research topics that have attracted particular interest in recent years, including the distinction between moral and conventional rules, moral dilemmas, the role of intention, and sacred/protected values. One overarching question we will address throughout the chapter is whether moral cognitions are distinct and special, or whether they can be subsumed under more domain-general mechanisms. (shrink)

This book explores the problem of time and immanence for phenomenology in the work of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jacques Derrida. Detailed readings of immanence in light of the more familiar problems of time-consciousness and temporality provide the framework for evaluating both Husserl's efforts to break free of modern philosophy's notions of immanence, and the influence Heidegger's criticism of Husserl exercised over Merleau-Ponty's and Derrida's alternatives to Husserl's phenomenology. Ultimately exploring various notions of intentionality, these in-depth analyses (...) of immanence and temporality suggest a new perspective on themes central to phenomenology's development as a movement and raise for debate the question of where phenomenology begins and ends. (shrink)

This book provides a richly documented account of the historical, cultural, philosophical and practical dimensions of feng shui. It argues that where feng shui is entrenched educational systems have a responsibility to examine its claims, and that this examination provides opportunities for students to better learn about the key features of the nature of science, the demarcation of science and non-science, the characteristics of pseudoscience, and the engagement of science with culture and worldviews. The arguments presented for feng shui being (...) a pseudoscience can be marshalled when considering a whole range of comparable beliefs and the educational benefit of their appraisal. Feng shui is a deeply-entrenched, three-millennia-old system of Asian beliefs and practices about nature, architecture, health, and divination that has garnered a growing presence outside of Asia. It is part of a comprehensive and ancient worldview built around belief in chi the putative universal energy or life-force that animates all existence, the cosmos, the solar system, the earth, and human bodies. Harmonious living requires building in accord with local chi streams; good health requires replenishment and manipulation of internal chi flow; and a beneficent afterlife is enhanced when buried in conformity with chi directions. Traditional Chinese Medicine is based on the proper manipulation of internal chi by acupuncture, tai-chi and qigong exercise, and herbal dietary supplements. Matthews has produced another tour de force that will repay close study by students, scientists, and all those concerned to understand science, culture, and the science/culture nexus. Harvey Siegel, Philosophy, University of Miami, USA With great erudition and even greater fluidity of style, Matthews introduces us to this now-world-wide belief system. Michael Ruse, Philosophy, Florida State University, USA The book is one of the best research works published on Feng Shui. Wang Youjun, Philosophy, Shanghai Normal University, China The history is fascinating. The analysis makes an important contribution to science literature. James Alcock, Psychology, York University, Canada This book provides an in-depth study of Feng Shui in different periods, considering its philosophical, historical and educational dimensions; especially from a perspective of the ‘demarcation problem’ between science and pseudoscience. Yao Dazhi, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. (shrink)

Critical attention to Wilfrid Sellars’s “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (PSIM) has focused on the dubious Peircean optimism about scientific convergence that underwrites Sellars’s talk of “the” scientific image. Sellars’s ultimate Peircean ontology has led Willem deVries, for instance, to accuse him of being a naturalistic “monistic visionary.” But this complaint of monism misplays the status of the ideal end of science in Sellars’s thinking. I propose a novel reading of PSIM, foregrounding its opening methodological reflections. On this (...) reading, the central point of the paper is to accuse figures like Wittgenstein and Strawson, whom I call “analytical quietists,” of taking the unity of intellectual endeavor as somehow given. Such unity as is forthcoming is, Sellars tells us, a task. I conclude by noting that a structurally similar accusation of too easily presumed unity emerges at the end of the paper, against a familiar sort of anti-relativistic moral theorizing. Thus, Sellars’s conception of the task of philosophy is, at least potentially, a point of surprising ethico-political significance as well. (shrink)

Grief research in philosophy agrees that one who grieves grieves over the irreversible loss of someone whom the griever loved deeply, and that someone thus factored centrally into the griever’s sense of purpose and meaning in the world. The analytic literature in general tends to focus its treatments on the paradigm case of grief as the death of a loved one. I want to restrict my account to the paradigm case because the paradigm case most persuades the mind that grief (...) is a past-directed emotion. The phenomenological move I propose will enable us to (1) respect the paradigm case of grief and a broader but still legitimate set of grief-generating states of affairs, (2) liberate grief from the view that grief is past directed or about the past, and thus (3) account for grief in a way that separates it from its closest emotion-neighbor, sorrow, without having to rely on the affective quality of those two emotions.If the passing of the beloved causes the grief but is not what the grief is about, then we can get at the nature of grief by saying its temporal orientation is in the past (the event of the passing), but its temporal meaning is the present and future—the new significance of a world with the pervasive absence that is the world without the beloved. The no-longer of grief is a no-longer oriented by a past (that which is no longer) that is referred a present and future (that which is a no-longer understood as not now as it once was). Looking at the griever’s relation to time can tell us much about the pain and the object of grief, then. As the griever puts the past before himself with a certainty about this world “henceforth,” a look at the griever’s lived sense of the fi nality of the irreversibly lost (1) liberates grief from the tendency in the literature to be reduced to a past-directed emotion, (2) accounts for grief ’s intensity, its affective force or poignancy, and thus (3) enables us to separate grief from sorrow according to its intentionalobject in light of the temporal meaning of these emotions. (shrink)

The first edition of The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy took the dialogue of science and philosophy from Aristotle through to Newton. This second edition adds eight chapters, taking the dialogue through the Enlightenment and up to Darwin. This anthology is an attempt to help bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of philosophy.

History, Philosophy and Science Teaching argues that science teaching and science teacher education can be improved if teachers know something of the history and philosophy of science and if these topics are included in the science curriculum. The history and philosophy of science have important roles in many of the theoretical issues that science educators need to address: the goals of science education; what constitutes an appropriate science curriculum for all students; how science should be taught in traditional cultures; what (...) integrated science is; how scientific literacy can be promoted; and the conflict which can occur between science curriculum and deep-seated religious or cultural values and knowledge. In part, answers to these questions hinge on views about the nature of science, views that are best informed by historical and philosophical study. Outlining the history of liberal, or contextual, approaches to the teaching of science, Michael Matthews elaborates contemporary curriculum developments that explicitly address questions about the nature and the history of science. He provides examples of classroom teaching and develops useful arguments on constructivism, multicultural science education and teacher education. The book will appeal to school and university science teachers, educators of science teachers, and historians and philosophers of science. (shrink)

Science has always engaged with the worldviews of societies and cultures. The theme is of particular importance at the present time as many national and provincial education authorities are requiring that students learn about the nature of science (NOS) as well as learning science content knowledge and process skills. NOS topics are being written into national and provincial curricula. Such NOS matters give rise to at least the following questions about science, science teaching and worldviews: -/- What is a worldview? (...) -/- Does science have a worldview? -/- Are there specific ontological, epistemological and ethical prerequisites for the conduct of science? -/- Does science lack a worldview but nevertheless have implications for worldviews? -/- How can scientific worldviews and practice be reconciled with seemingly discordant religious and cultural worldviews? -/- In which ways do the worldviews of students impact on their interest and learning of science? -/- Should science teachers engage with the worldviews of students? -/- In addition to the NOS curricular impetus for refining understanding of science and worldviews, there are also pressing cultural and social forces that give prominence to questions about science, worldviews and education. There is something of an avalanche of popular literature on the subject that teachers and students are variously engaged by. Additionally the modernisation and science-based industrialisation of huge non-Western populations whose traditional religions and beliefs are different from those that have been associated with orthodox science make very pressing the questions of whether, and how, science is committed to and hence promotes particular worldviews and contradicts others. Hopefully this chapter, and others in the section, will contribute to a more informed understanding of the relationship between science, worldviews and education and provide assistance to teachers who are routinely engaged with the subject. (shrink)

Should we allow performance-enhancing substances in competitive athletics? The first book of its kind, Well Played answers this question by urging us to a deeper appreciation for the purpose of sport. Giving special reference to performance-enhancing substances, Shafer challenges the incompleteness of the ethical arguments and contributes a Christian voice to the discussion. He initiates a theological conversation that is both scholarly and accessible, arguing that a distinctively Christian understanding of sport will have far-reaching implications for how we treat ethical (...) issues like doping. The values, beliefs, and practices within the Christian tradition show an alternative that prioritizes humility and friendship, grace and gratitude over the "win at all costs" mentality that drives the use of performance-enhancing substances for a competitive advantage. This groundbreaking book ventures into new theological territory as it explores the intersections of theology, philosophy of sport, and the ethics of doping. Theologians, ethicists, and pastors, as well as coaches, athletes, and sports fans will benefit from this book's thoughtful reflection on how Christians can play well in the modern sports culture. (shrink)

This anthology opens new perspectives in the domain of history, philosophy, and science teaching research. Its four sections are: first, science, culture and education; second, the teaching and learning of science; third, curriculum development and justification; and fourth, indoctrination. The first group of essays deal with the neglected topic of science education and the Enlightenment tradition. These essays show that many core commitments of modern science education have their roots in this tradition, and consequently all can benefit from a more (...) informed awareness of its strengths and weaknesses. Other essays address research on leaning and teaching from the perspectives of social epistemology and educational psychology. Included here is the first ever English translation of Ernst Mach’s most influential 1890 paper on ‘The Psychological and Logical Moment in Natural Science Teaching’. This paper launched the influential Machian tradition in education. Other essays address concrete cases of the utilisation of history and philosophy in the development and justification of school science curricula. These are instances of the supportive relation of HPS&ST research to curriculum theorising. Finally, two essays address the topic of Indoctrination in science education; a subject long-discussed in philosophy of education, but inadequately in science education. This book is a timely reminder of why history and philosophy of science are urgently needed to support understanding of science. From major traditions such as the Enlightenment to the tensions around cultural studies of science, the book provides a comprehensive context for the scientific endeavour, drawing on curriculum and instructional examples. Sibel Erduran, University of Oxford, UK The scholarship that each of the authors in this volume offers deepens our understanding of what we teach in science and why that understanding matters. This is an important book exploring a wide set of issues and should be read by anyone with an interest in science or science education. Jonathan Osborne, Stanford University, USA This volume presents new and updated perspectives in the field, such as the Enlightenment Tradition, Cultural Studies, Indoctrination in Science Education, and Nature of Science. Highly recommended. Mansoor Niaz, Universidad de Oriente, Venezuela This volume provides an extremely valuable set of insights into educational issues related to the history and philosophy of science. Michael J Reiss, University College London, UK. (shrink)

Discussing Keith Donnellan's distinction between attributive and referential uses of descriptions, Gareth Evans considered a speaker he found it natural to describe as having “given expression to” a singular thought, though he insisted she was not referring to the person she has in mind. On accounts otherwise similar to Evans's, to express a singular thought just is to refer. Thus, as he does not explain why this speaker might speak this way, it is tempting to ignore this as a slip. (...) On the contrary, I shall argue, Evans has good reason to deny that picture of reference. My interest, though, is in the case itself. It turns out it is a presentational use of descriptions: it provides its audience a cognitive ability they would otherwise lack. This characterization raises deep theoretical questions which I only begin to address here. My goal is to show that we ought to address those questions, for there is no better way of understanding examples like Evans's than to see them as presentational. (shrink)

There may be a limit on our capacity to suppress anthropocentric tendencies toward non-human others. Normally, we do not reach this limit in our dealings with animals, the environment, etc. Thus, continued striving to overcome anthropocentrism when confronted with these non-human others may be justified. Anticipation of super artificial intelligence may force us to face this limit, denying us the ability to free ourselves completely of anthropocentrism. This could be for our own good.

The first edition of The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy took the dialogue of science and philosophy from Aristotle through to Newton. This second edition adds eight chapters, taking the dialogue through the Enlightenment and up to Darwin. This anthology is an attempt to help bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of philosophy.

During the 1960s and 1970s population geneticists pushed beyond models of single genes to grapple with the effect on evolution of multiple genes associated by linkage. The resulting models of multiple interacting loci suggested that blocks of genes, maybe even entire chromosomes or the genome itself, should be treated as a unit. In this context, Richard Lewontin wrote his famous 1974 book The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change, which concludes with an argument for considering the entire genome as the unit (...) of selection as a result of linkage. Why did Lewontin and others devote so much intellectual energy to the “complications of linkage” in the 1960s and 1970s? We argue that this attention to linkage should be understood in the context of research on chromosomal inversions and co-adapted gene complexes that occupied mid-century evolutionary genetics. For Lewontin, the complications of linkage were an extension of this chromosomal focus expressed in the new language of models for linkage disequilibrium. (shrink)

This paper presents Anthony Steinbock's broad theory of moral emotions and specifically the distinction he draws between the temporal orientation and the temporal meaning of emotions. The latter distinction is used in order to provide phenomenological descriptions of, and distinctions between, patience and impatience. The paper takes leading clues from Steinbock’s work in an effort to “do” phenomenology in a way that clarifies these specific natural attitude intentionalities.

In the early twentieth century, Tatsuo Aida in Japan, Øjvind Winge in Denmark, Richard Goldschmidt in Germany, and Calvin Bridges in the United States all developed different experimental systems to study the genetics of sex reversal. These locally specific experimental systems grounded these experimenters’ understanding of sex reversal as well as their interpretation of claims regarding experimental results and theories. The comparison of four researchers and their experimental systems reveals how those different systems mediated their understanding of genetic phenomena, and (...) influenced their interpretations of sex reversal. (shrink)

Both Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell reject Kant’s conclusion that the world is fundamentally unknowable, and on similar grounds: each invokes conceptual change, what I call the diachronic instability of a conceptual scheme. The similarities end there, though. It is important to Sellars that the world is only knowable at “the end of inquiry” – he rejects a commonsense realism like McDowell’s for its inability to fully appreciate diachronic instability. To evaluate this disagreement, I consider Timothy Williamson’s argument that the (...) knowability thesis, as it rules out “elusive objects”, is problematically idealistic. I argue that McDowell’s insistence on diachronic instability suffices to address Williamson’s worry, and as such that his reply ought to be available to Sellars too. That Sellars would instead invoke the end of inquiry suggests it is he who underestimates the ineliminability of conceptual change. (shrink)

Is economic liberty necessary for individuals to lead truly flourishing lives? Whether your immediate answer is yes or no, this question is deceptively simple. What do we mean by liberty? What constitutes the flourishing life? How are these related? How is economic liberty related to other goods that affect human flourishing? To answer these questions—and more—this volume brings to bear some of history’s greatest thinkers, interpreted by some of today’s leading scholars of their thought.

This chapter outlines something of Mario Bunge’s long life and career as a physicist-philosopher originally living and working in Argentina for 40 years, then in Canada for nearly 60 years. It indicates the extraordinary breadth, depth and quantity of his research publications. It deals briefly with some key components of his work, such as: systemism, causation, theory analysis, axiomatization, ontology, epistemology, physics, psychology and philosophy of mind, social science, probability and Bayesianism, defence of the Enlightenment project, and education. Finally, the (...) chapter gives an account of the structure of the festschrift, and an indication of each of the 41 contributions. (shrink)

What aspects and features of events impel people to label them as miraculous? Three studies examined people's miracle conceptions and the factors that lead them to designate an event as a miracle. Study 1 identified the basic elements of laypersons’ miracle beliefs by instructing participants to define a miracle, to list five events that they considered miraculous, and to state what they believed to be the purpose of miracles. Results showed that individuals tend to view miracles as highly improbable and (...) beneficial occurrences that instill hope and faith in people. Studies 2 and 3 investigated people's intuitive miracle theories. Findings demonstrated that people tend to label events as miracles when the events in question were of high magnitude, were obtained in an unusual manner, resulted in a beneficial health outcome, personally affected the participant, involved a person of worthy character, and depicted a low-probability event. (shrink)

In a recent article, William C. Roach offers a presuppositional critique, which is inspired by Carl F. H. Henry, of Michael R. Licona’s so-called New Historiographical Approach to defending the resurrection. More precisely, Roach attempts to defend six key theses, namely, that the NHA is an evidentialist approach, the NHA is a deductive argument, the NHA is an insufficient approach, believers and unbelievers share no common ground, the NHA does not embrace a correspondence theory of truth, and the presupposition (...) of divine revelation is necessary for apologetics. We respond to each of Roach’s arguments, respectively. (shrink)