You meet someone new; you like them; you send them to your Facebook page. But how accurate is this representation of you? We all want to look our best, which is why we are drawn to the ability to fudge things a bit online. How does this projection of who we are distort us into who we want to be? Facebook allows us to hide our flaws that are all too visible in real life. We can embellish or correct what (...) we said earlier, edit out what we don’t like about ourselves, and only show photos where our chin is down and the lighting is blown out just enough to hide the bump on our nose. Our prospective employers can even turn to Facebook to assess our desirability. So might the constructed aesthetic of Facebook affect our approach to ethics – to interacting with other people? Does the way we design ourselves on Facebook directly impact the other people in our lives? Is each of us really just a rough draft that needs immediate editing? What about Facebook makes it possible to achieve genuine beauty? (shrink)

This book offers an exciting re-interpretation of Auguste Comte, the founder of French sociology. Following the development of his philosophy of positivism, Comte later focused on the importance of the emotions in his philosophy resulting in the creation of a new religious system, the Religion of Humanity. Andrew Wernick provides the first in-depth critique of Comte's concept of religion and its place in his thinking on politics, sociology and philosophy of science. He places Comte's ideas in the context of (...) post-1789 French political and intellectual history, and of modern philosophy, especially postmodernism. Wernick relates Comte to Marx and Nietzsche as seminal figures of modernity and examines key features of modern and postmodern French social theory, tracing the inherent flaws and disintegration of Comte's system. Wernick offers original and fascinating insights in this rich study which will attract a wide audience from sociologists and philosophers to cultural theorists and historians. (shrink)

Newton's philosophical views are unique and uniquely difficult to categorise. In the course of a long career from the early 1670s until his death in 1727, he articulated profound responses to Cartesian natural philosophy and to the prevailing mechanical philosophy of his day. Newton as Philosopher presents Newton as an original and sophisticated contributor to natural philosophy, one who engaged with the principal ideas of his most important predecessor, René Descartes, and of his most influential critic, G. W. Leibniz. Unlike (...) Descartes and Leibniz, Newton was systematic and philosophical without presenting a philosophical system, but over the course of his life, he developed a novel picture of nature, our place within it, and its relation to the creator. This rich treatment of his philosophical ideas will be of wide interest to historians of philosophy, science, and ideas. (shrink)

The view that children's understanding of mind is constructed through social interaction is consistent with other social-constructivist models. We provide examples of similar claims in research on emotion perception, pretense understanding, autobiographical memory, and event knowledge. Identification of common elements from such socio-cultural perspectives may lead to greater theoretical integration and provide a new framework for exploring human development.

While more species are being identified as cultural on a regular basis, stark differences between human and animal cultures remain. Humans are more richly cultural, with group-specific practices and social norms guiding almost every element of our lives. Furthermore, human culture is seen as cumulative, cooperative, and normative, in contrast to animal cultures. One hypothesis to explain these differences is grounded in the observation that human children across cultures appear to spontaneously over-imitate silly or causally irrelevant behaviors that they observe. (...) The few studies on over-imitation in other species are largely taken as evidence that spontaneous over-imitation is not present in other species. This leads to the over-imitation hypothesis – that the differences between human culture and animal cultures can be traced to the human unique tendency to over-imitate. In this paper, we analyze the current state of the literature on animal over-imitation and challenge the adequacy of the over-imitation hypothesis for the differences between humans and animal cultures. To make this argument, we first argue that the function of human over-imitation is norm-learning and that over-imitation, like skill-learning, should be subject to selective social learning effects. Then we review the empirical evidence against animal over-imitation and argue that these studies do not take into account the relevant variables given the normative and selective nature of over-imitation. We then analyze positive empirical evidence of over-imitation in great apes and canids from the experimental literature and conclude that the current body of evidence suggests that some canids and primates may have the capacity for over-imitation. This paper offers a methodological suggestion for how to study animal over-imitation, and a theoretical suggestion that over-imitation might be much more widely found among species. The larger implication for claims about human uniqueness suggests that if we do find widespread evidence of over-imitation across species, many of the current theories of human uniqueness that focus on human hyper-cooperation or social norms may have only identified a difference of degree, not of kind, between humans and other animals. (shrink)

Most of us think that we can obtain knowledge about the aesthetic properties of objects via testimony – at least sometimes. We can learn that a painting is beautiful by reading a book, or learn that a film is awful by talking to a friend (as long as our sources are reliable). At the same time, if we go on to share this knowledge we have to carefully qualify it as second-hand in order to avoid misleading our audience. Simply stating (...) that a painting is beautiful or that a film is awful is liable to give off the impression that we have experienced it ourselves. In this paper I draw on my other work in the pragmatics of normative language to explain why aesthetic discourse has these distinctive features. Because our aesthetic practices have developed as a way for us to share both our beliefs and our affective states, traditional theories of assertion and testimony fail to capture the full richness of what we are up to in our aesthetic conversations. (shrink)

Decomposition is a bracing, revisionary, and provocative inquiry into music—from Beethoven to Duke Ellington, from Conlon Nancarrow to Evelyn Glennie—as a personal and cultural experience: how it is composed, how it is idiosyncratically perceived by critics and reviewers, and why we listen to it the way we do. Andrew Durkin, best known as the leader of the West Coast–based Industrial Jazz Group, is singular for his insistence on asking tough questions about the complexity of our presumptions about music and (...) about listening, especially in the digital age. In this winning and lucid study he explodes the age-old concept of musical composition as the work of individual genius, arguing instead that in both its composition and reception music is fundamentally a collaborative enterprise that comes into being only through mediation. Drawing on a rich variety of examples—Big Jay McNeely’s “Deacon’s Hop,” Biz Markie’s “Alone Again,” George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, Frank Zappa’s “While You Were Art,” and Pauline Oliveros’s “Tuning Meditation,” to name only a few—Durkin makes clear that our appreciation of any piece of music is always informed by neuroscientific, psychological, technological, and cultural factors. How we listen to music, he maintains, might have as much power to change it as music might have to change how we listen. (shrink)

The living mycelium networks are capable of efficient sensorial fusion over very large areas and distributed decision making. The information processing in the mycelium networks is implemented via propagation of electrical and chemical signals en pair with morphological changes in the mycelium structure. These information processing mechanisms are manifested in experimental laboratory findings that show that the mycelium networks exhibit rich dynamics of neuron-like spiking behaviour and a wide range of non-linear electrical properties. On an example of a single (...) real colony of _Aspergillus niger_, we demonstrate that the non-linear transformation of electrical signals and trains of extracellular voltage spikes can be used to implement logical gates and circuits. The approaches adopted include numerical modelling of excitation propagation on the mycelium network, representation of the mycelium network as a resistive and capacitive network and an experimental laboratory study on mining logical circuits in mycelium bound composites. (shrink)

This essay surveys the writings of Walter Rodney, the late Guyanese scholar-activist, in an effort to elicit a distinctive way of thinking politically about underdevelopment. Focusing on a range of primary sources, including a series of unpublished notes and lectures on Marxism and development theory, I consider how Rodney’s engagement with the concrete struggles of Black people informed his appropriation of historical materialism. An avowed “Black Marxist” working at the onset of the neocolonial order, Rodney suggested that collective human development, (...) the historical expansion of productive and social capacity, had become routinely delimited by racially charged political blockages, the effects of a kind of zero-sum game in which development for some was secured only through the active underdevelopment of others. Ultimately I suggest that Rodney’s work invites serious reconsideration of the enduring explanatory power of the Black radical and Marxist legacies, in this case by providing a rich theoretical framework that can help to orient and sustain critical engagement with the elusive racial politics of persistent underdevelopment. (shrink)

This paper seeks to explore the empirical agenda of business ethics research from a methodological perspective. It is argued that the quality of empirical research in the field remains relatively poor and unconvincing. Drawing on the distinctions between the two main philosophical positions from which methodologies in the social sciences are derived – positivism and interpretism – it is argued that it is business ethics' tradition of positivist, and highly quantitative approaches which may be at the root of these epistemological (...) problems. Six distinct aspects of business ethics research are identified and assessed according to their methodological impact. Accordingly, it is argued that more interpretive approaches may offer substantial liberating potential in the development of a stronger and more theory-rich empirical base. The author concludes by arguing for greater plurality and diversity in empirical research methodologies in the business ethics field. (shrink)

In ‘Considering Equality’, Mrs Margaret Coady criticizes my discussion of Professor Bernard Williams's justly renowned essay ‘The Idea of Equality’. During the course of her paper, Mrs Coady ascribes to me views that I do not hold. But I shall not consider these points of detail because they deflect from the substantive disagreement between Professor Williams and myself. I shall merely examine what, as I see it, is the core of Mrs Coady's case against me. This certainly does relate to (...) the substantive issue. (shrink)

Untangling Self invites us to see nonself, interdependence, and mindfulness as rational, real-world solutions to the human condition of suffering. In psychologically rich essays that equally probe traditional Buddhist thought and contemporary issues, Andrew Olendzki helps us to reconcile ancient Buddhist thought with our day-to-day life. His writing is sophisticated and engaged, filled with memorable imagery and insight drawn from decades of study, reflection, and meditation on Buddhist teachings. Seasoned Buddhist readers and anyone interested in the intellectual heart (...) of Buddhism will find this collection of fascinating essays rewarding. (shrink)

Founded in 1894 at a peak of social and industrial turmoil, the Chicago school of pragmatist philosophy is emblematic of the progressive spirit of early twentieth-century America. The Chicago pragmatists under the leadership of John Dewey pursued a close critique of the modern workplace, school, and neighborhood which provided a theoretical base for the progressive reform agenda. Andrew Feffer here provides a richly textured group portrait of Dewey and his colleagues George Herbert Mead and James Hayden Tufts against the (...) backdrop of Chicago's social history. In this nuanced intellectual biography of the Chicago pragmatists, Feffer retraces the story of their personal involvement in reform movements and examines how they revised contemporary political rhetoric and social theory in order to reestablish the foundations of democracy in productive and rewarding work. Drawing on liberal Christian reformist as well as philosophical idealist traditions, the pragmatists advanced a radically humanistic social theory that attacked the regimentation of factory life and demanded the democratization of industry and education. Feffer also gives an account of certain elitist and anti-democratic assumptions of pragmatist theory; he shows, in particular, how progressive reformers inherited the pragmatists' mistrust of the political impulses of the industrial workers they championed. (shrink)

Aristotle knew things about happiness, habits, and human nature. This book is about his book, the Nichomachean Ethics. What this book will NOT do: -Make you feel good. -Make you rich. -Make you a good person. -Make you happy. What this book MIGHT do: -Teach you some tips on how to become a better person. -And that might make you happy, which feels pretty good. -And maybe that will help you get rich (I don't know, I've never done (...) that). Want to know how being good, being happy, and feeling good are related? Buy this book. And then read it. Or buy it for your kids or nephews or whatever. (shrink)

In TEACHING THE MEDIA: INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES Andrew Hart initiates a challenging dialogue about approaches to Media teaching in the major English-speaking nations of the world, including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. By animating actual lessons and the considered views of classroom practitioners, TEACHING THE MEDIA encourages readers to develop new perspectives on Media teaching, to examine approaches that differ from their own, and to reflect critically on their own practices with a view to (...) understanding them more fully and enhancing their effectiveness in the classroom. Based on original research that began in England in the early 1990s, this is the first international comparative study to focus on Media Education in English-speaking countries. It systematically examines classroom strategies for Media teaching in the light of the major theoretical paradigms which have emerged globally over the last 50 years. It analyses the rich diversity of different educational concerns, goals, and classroom practices through a series of national studies of teachers and lessons. As a result, not only do we see how Media is actually taught in range of classroom contexts, but existing models of Media teaching can now be more precisely critiqued and made more accessible for further research and development. (shrink)

In their book Identity, Personhood and the Law,1 authors Charles Foster and Jonathan Herring seek, among other things, to show that the law is based on overly simplistic assumptions about the nature of personal identity. In their Author Meets Critics précis, they summarise the main contentions of the book on this issue. Difficulties in the law’s simplistic approach are, they claim, exposed when we think about people with dementia, ‘where [in advanced cases] I may turn into a person with no (...) apparent continuity at all with my own self’ and where: > X2 will simply inhabit a body composed of some of the same cells as belonged to X1. Deep brain stimulation ‘may similarly transform ‘my’ attributes to such an extent that it seems false to continue to talk about ‘me’ at all.’ Other examples, including cases of patients suffering severe anorexia or who have fallen into a permanent vegetative state, are given. All of them ‘call into question the atomistic, billiard-ball model of identity used by the law and by our uninterrogated intuitions.’ The authors’ approach is to begin with these and a number of other examples and raise several philosophical and ethical issues. They then discuss the issues and develop principles which they apply to the same examples at the end of the book. In this commentary, I cannot do justice to all the claims and challenges to the law the authors make in their rich and highly recommended book. I will focus only on the issue of personal identity and their remarks about the simplistic assumptions made by the courts on this issue. Although my comments will not always be in agreement with theirs, these remarks should be taken …. (shrink)

Engaging with the account of pathic subjectivation developed by Félix Guattari, this article explores the ways in which his thinking about the production of subjectivity takes up and transforms the concept of the pathic dimension of experience that emerges from the rich tradition of existential-phenomenological psychiatry and the thematisation of contact it entails. Explicitly foregrounding the link made within that tradition between aesthetics and existence, this article considers the origins of Guattari’s conception of pathic subjectivation in his work on (...) Proust, the experimental understanding of the semiotic transformations of sensory experience it entails and the practical role it plays in catalysing the creative emergence of new modes of existence. (shrink)

The most comprehensive collection of its kind, this unique anthology presents fifty-four readings--many of them not widely available--by the most important and influential Christian, Jewish, and Muslim philosophers of the Middle Ages. The text is organized topically, making it easily accessible to students, and the large selection of readings provides instructors with maximum flexiblity in choosing course material. Each thematic section is comprised of six chronologically arranged readings. This organization focuses on the major philosophical issues and allows a smooth introduction (...) to the material. The topics covered are: (1) The Existence of God, (2) Ethics and the Problem of Evil, (3) God's Foreknowledge and Free Will, (4) Theology, (5) Political Philosophy, 6) Knowledge and Sensation, (7) Universals, (8) Logic and the Philosophy of Language and (9) Physics. Each text is preceded by a biographical note on the author and a brief analytical introduction. Unlike other anthologies, which present sources as a series of truncated excerpts, this collection avoids intrusive editing and includes many selections in their entirety, thus preserving the rich flavor of the medieval mind at work. (shrink)

Violent conflict between individuals and groups was as common in the ancient world as it has been in more recent history. Detested in theory, it nevertheless became as frequent as war between sovereign states. The importance of such ‘_stasis_’ was recognised by political thinkers of the time, especially Thucydides and Aristotle, both of whom tried to analyse its causes. Violence, Civil Strife and Revolution in the Classical City, first published in 1982, gives a conspectus of _stasis_ in the societies of (...) Greek antiquity, and traces the development of civil strife as city-states grew in political, social and economic sophistication. Aristocratic rivalry, tensions between rich and poor, imperialism and constitutional crisis are all discussed, while special consideration is given to the attitudes of the participants and the theoretical explanations offered at the time. In conclusion, civil strife in the ancient world is compared to more recent conflicts, both domestic and international. (shrink)

What is this thing called literature? Why study it? And how? Relating literature to topics such as dreams, politics, life, death, the ordinary and the uncanny, This Thing Called Literature establishes a sense of why and how literature is an exciting and rewarding subject to study. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle expertly weave an essential love of literature into an account of what literary texts do, how they work and the sort of questions and ideas they provoke. The book's (...) three parts reflect the fundamental components of studying literature: reading, thinking and writing. The authors use helpful and wide-ranging examples and summaries, offering rich reflections on the question 'What is literature?' and on what they term 'creative reading'. The new edition has been revised throughout with extensive updates to the further reading, and a new chapter on creative non-fiction. Bennett and Royle's accessible and thought-provoking style encourages a deep engagement with literary texts. This essential guide to the study of literature is as an eloquent celebration of the value and pleasure of reading. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Trois récits utopiques classiques: Gabriel de Foigny, La Terre Australe connue; Denis Veiras, Histoire des Sévarambes; Bernard de Fontenelle, Histoire des Ajaoïens ed. by Jean-Michel RacaultAndrew CremerJean-Michel Racault, ed. Trois récits utopiques classiques: Gabriel de Foigny, La Terre Australe connue; Denis Veiras, Histoire des Sévarambes; Bernard de Fontenelle, Histoire des Ajaoïens. Saint-Denis (La Réunion): Presses Universitaires Indianocéaniques. 2020. 539 pp., illus. Paperback, €16. ISBN: 978 2 490596 24 (...) 9.M. Jean-Michel Racault, Emeritus Professor of the University of La Réunion and general editor of the Œuvres complètes of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in progress under the Classiques Garnier imprint, is an acknowledged expert in utopian studies, and works edited and presented by him in this field will be justly welcomed with keen interest and appreciation. It inspires confidence [End Page 168] that this edition should be the fruit of many years’ study and find its origins in his two theses of 1981 and 1987 and articles of 1991, 2003, and 2010 (21 n. 21). The blurb announces this volume as bringing together “three major works of political thought of the end of the seventeenth century representative of ‘Louis XIV utopias,’” a label that could be supposed to imply an anti-absolutist outlook in the three writers. But Racault argues that the idea, as put forward by the late Myriam Yardeni in her 1980 study Utopie et révolte sous Louis XIV, that these classical utopias express revolt against the monarchy of Louis XIV should be treated in a nuanced way, even with serious reservations (7, 217–18).Racault writes with impressive depth and clarity and makes a superb guide, yet it by no means follows that these works are easy to interpret. Indeed, part of his achievement is to show they may not be so and to offer evidence to suggest that they may invite “multiple possible readings.” The blurb gives fair warning of irony, ambiguity, and contradictoriness, and states that the utopia of these experimental fictions can be inverted to become an “anti-utopia.” As Racault observes with admirable honesty in his preface, “Ambivalence, uncertainty, and a sense of complexity are in fact characteristics of these utopias, in which one sometimes has the impression that the author develops lines of thought that are ideologically incompatible and does not know himself on which side he stands” (19). Racault exemplifies this paradox by reference to Foigny’s hero, “a Pascalian libertin as well as a Christian deist” (19–20). One might be allowed to object that this is to offer the reader who seeks it no clear utopian vision, and that such ambiguity leads to confusion worse confounded; indeed, I am tempted to wonder if ambiguity here reveals subtlety of thought less than a mere lack of perspicuity. Racault makes the highly important point that a similar duality “penetrates the accounts of Veiras and Fontenelle and prevents one from seeing them as simple preludes to Enlightenment thought” (20). Two more vigorous quotations may suffice to convey the flavor of this argument of duality: “the deism of La Terre Australe connue can also be read as a critique of deism, the [...] democratic humanism of the Histoire des Ajaoïens includes a utilitarian system of colonial domination” (21). Again, “the ‘heliocratic’ Sevarambian system inspired by the empire of the Incas after Garcilaso de la Vega [?1501–36] is essentially a theocratic absolutism in the end not much different from the monarchy of Louis XIV. Ajao, on the other hand, has no monarchy, and no ministers” (460). As to this variety between the texts, another indication is that Foigny’s land is anarchical (but [End Page 169] well ordered!), whereas Veiras’s can be understood as embracing certain policies of Colbert (236 and n. 14, 292 and n. 46), to whose protégé Pierre-Paul Riquet, baron de Bonrepos (1609–80), Veiras’s account is dedicated (231–34, 306–7).This substantial but not overlong volume is tastefully adorned with attractive covers and five splendid and richly annotated plates of maps illustrating the subject of the “Imaginary Voyage” or “Extraordinary Voyage,” a term used in a... (shrink)

Publishers love titles that begin How or Why. Better still, How and Why, combining edification with utility. The target group is that overlap between the self-help audience and the idly curious—which is to say, most of us. And since emotions are very much about self-help and self-harm, they offer rich pickings in a burgeoning market. Flanagan's How to Do things with Emotions is a philosopher's take on moral emotions, the allusion to J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with (...) Words chiming with the self-help milieu. Reviewing cases, Flanagan points out that most scientific work in this field derives from experiments on psychology students, about as unrepresentative a slice of humanity as you could find. For Flanagan, they are too WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) to tell us much about the non-weird majority. To learn to “do emotions better,” he argues, we have to look farther afield. Although the emotional lives of cultural others are surely different from those taking Psychology 101, at some functional level they might be similar. Work out the conceptual logic and practical rationale of culturally elaborated emotions—Minangkabau “shame,” Ifaluk “righteous anger,” American “road rage”—and there is scope for comparison. Indeed, anthropology has shown as much, and it is from anthropology that Flanagan takes his cues. To mention two famous cases, what can we learn about anger management from Utku igloo-dwellers and Ilongot headhunters? Mutually dependent for survival in their snowy isolation, the Utku cannot risk getting angry. (They mercilessly tease their children into learning the futility of anger.) In the jungles of Luzon, Ilongot youths cast away their anger in externally directed violence: headhunting as cathartic sport. We can think of parallels closer to home.Flanagan's vigorously argued book, a tour de force of its kind, is both an anatomizing of anger and shame—two moral emotions we tend to “do badly”—and a proposal to “change how we do these emotions.” Indignation is fine, but anger that is vengeful or “pain-passing,” rather than righteous, is irrational and socially harmful. Shame can be incapacitating and cruel (the undeserved burn of a Twitter pile-on). What we need is reflective anger directed at injustice and a “mature sense of shame” that reminds us of the social contract and stops us misbehaving.In its How-and-Why format, the book combines theory and practice, metaethics with moralism. Here is how a prof should do self-help. But if the diagnosis is well made, the remedy is hard to imagine. As Flanagan recognizes, moral sentiments and practices are embedded in intricate forms of life and not readily detachable. Anger Utku-style is not a transferable skill, nor are educative routines forged in social ecologies remote from our own. Lacking serviceable models, Flanagan falls back on the anthropological justification that knowledge of cultural diversity expands our sense of human possibility, of other roads taken. In a globalizing world, difference is its own reward. For me, an anthropologist, that maxim is enough. Yet difference bedevils comparison, jinxing the units, warping criteria. Most languages lack a word for emotion or an equivalent umbrella concept; nor do emotion words translate well across languages. Emotion may be an incoherent notion, or at best a heuristic.Flanagan's use of the WEIRD tag makes things a bit too easy. Does it cover farmhands and factory workers? Are we so democratic, anyway? More damagingly, a typological approach blurs the circumstances of family, community, and biography that define an emotional episode and shape its phenomenology, the way it is felt and experienced—what a violent outburst or fearful exit means in the context of a life. Take Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, who flees a scene of failure and derails his life. It requires a long narrative to unravel the implications of his jumping ship and the paralyzing shame he experiences before the judgment of society. Or consider the scene in Anna Karenina in which the dignified and self-important Karenin, apprised of Anna's adulterous liaison, agonizes over the threat to his existence. To call his response jealousy would not scratch the surface. Characteristically for Tolstoy, the emotions go unnamed. Instead, we witness Karenin's fervid deliberations (emotions involve thoughts), vacillations (emotions have action tendencies), anguished calculations of impending scandal (emotions are appraisals), and bodily changes (emotions are cognized feelings). We shudder at the brutal metaphors through which he grasps his predicament and its cure: like rooting out a bad tooth, he decides. That welter of particularities escapes the theorist who needs clear-cut, comparable units, formulaic instances of jealousy or anger. But what are you left with if you omit the details? What would remain of Karenin's existential crisis?The novelist's privileged access to subjectivity is, of course, unavailable to the scientist, but the larger context of plot and character—a history of relations that gives emotional episodes their shape and power—has its analog in the ethnographic domain. Emotions are public as well as private events, their meanings and effects depending on a fit with social reality, a clash of perspectives. In thought and feeling, we are never really alone. All of which suggests that narrative, fictional or nonfictional, can capture the ongoing moment in a way that eludes other methods. If what we are after is living emotion, it is the movie, not the snapshot, that surely matters. No point in comparing “emotions” no one ever really experienced outside of an experiment.But there's the rub. In generalization—the goal of emotion theory—an emotion's social meaning, personal significance, pragmatic function, and narrative context get stripped out. All that makes it what it is! Even in doggedly empirical anthropology, detailed emotional episodes are rare (Jean Briggs's Utku ethnography Never in Anger, published in 1970, is still unsurpassed). Instead we get recollections and summary examples, lacking the constitutive detail, real-time evolutions, and consequences of the real thing. Yet these must serve for comparison, fodder for countless theoretical speculations. Are we at risk of analyzing faux emotions and building theories on cardboard constructions?An empty Arctic stage, a handful of characters, life simplified to survival: Briggs is a hard act to follow. Bare life does not make for basic emotions. On the white set, emotions prove hard to parse. That gruff hesitation, that flashing glint—are they tokens of anger? Empathy will not suffice. As Briggs shows, narrative context is all. And in our more cluttered emotional worlds, the value of backstory, interwoven biographies, and emotional plots is all the greater. Flanagan is right; we must do emotions better. (shrink)

The plague narrates the stories of a group of men whose lives interconnect around the experience of exile during the event of a plague. This article selects and summarizes themes from each of their stories. The purpose of these selections is to present an interpretation of Camus’ narratives that can be juxtaposed to an analysis, overleaf, of the educational nature of narratives, and in particular of the event of the tragedy. This article then maps out the narrative of the town (...) and of seven men. It may be read alone as a reading of Camus’ novel with rich, yet unmapped, contributions to thinking about education, or it may be read concurrently with its analytical partner through which the meaning of Camus’ work is traced onto a contemporary tragedy and a city’s educational responses. (shrink)

"Permanent Things reminds us that some of the century's most imaginative minds - G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, and Evelyn Waugh - were profoundly at odds with the secularist spirit of the age, seeing progressive enlightenment as ushering in, not a millennium of perfect freedom, but a Waste Land whose inhabitants - Waugh's "vile bodies," Eliot's "hollow men," Lewis's "men without chests" - can find refuge from their boredom and anomie only in the ceaseless (...) acquisition of things or in the consoling illusions of pseudo religions - "distracted from distraction by distraction," as Eliot memorably put it." "How does one explain the desolation of a world which, though richly endowed with material comforts, is mentally and spiritually impoverished? The essayists here are united, as were their subjects, by a need to try to answer this question. Modern man's poverty of spirit, visible alike in so much of his art and architecture, his literature and philosophy and political science, reflects his loss of any good reasons for living - his loss of the Permanent Things." "The Christian writers whose work is eloquently interpreted in this book repay our attention for at least two reasons. First is their ability to sharpen our awareness of what, by any previous civilized standards, must be called the abnormal condition of modern man. For all the writers treated in this book, it was never enough to simply capture the spiritual aridity of modern life. It was also necessary to speak of a moral order that may yet be restored by the expressive power and beauty of the written word."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

John Dewey’s conception of democracy as the political form devoted to the maximum individual self-realization of the citizenry, in the broadest sense of that term, promises to lift democracy above angry populism while avoiding untenable and contentious metaphysical commitments. The idea of self-realization is traditionally tied to a hierarchical and therefore unacceptable model of society. Dewey breaks this tie by stripping the idea of its metaphysical commitments. But Dewey requires supplementation. I argue that Dewey’s own insights can be best kept (...) alive by being read in light of Stanley Cavell’s understanding of Emersonian Perfectionism, in particular the latter’s focus on the failure of the self to realize itself and its ordinary resistance to doing so. Bringing this Romanticism to bear upon Dewey’s ideas would temper them in important ways, preserving and developing what is best in the rich conception of democratic citizenship he has left us. (shrink)

This article provides a survey of key papers that characterise computable functions, but also provides some novel insights as follows. It is argued that the power of algorithms is at least as strong as functions that can be proved to be totally computable in type-theoretic translations of subsystems of second-order Zermelo Fraenkel set theory. Moreover, it is claimed that typed systems of the lambda calculus give rise naturally to a functional interpretation of rich systems of types and to a (...) hierarchy of ordinal recursive functionals of arbitrary type that can be reduced by substitution to natural number functions. (shrink)

I am the full-time father of two very curious boys aged 7 and 8 for whom I do the daily school run commute and drop off, before I do my other job of teaching high school philosophy. It is a constant challenge to keep my car companions occupied every day, so I’m indebted to the ‘ABC Short and Curly’ podcast. My boys are big fans of the show, and our daily car journeys have been enlivened with often heated discussions about (...) who we would save in a fire, or should we rob the rich to help the poor? Such questions have transformed my humble family car into a mobile ‘Philosophy in Schools’ classroom for our morning commute. The podcast provides the stimulus, while I facilitate the discussion as I navigate rush-hour traffic—it is a great way to prepare me for my school day. As a result, I was excited to receive a copy of the accompanying series book 'The Short and Curly guide to life. 'The book is written by the Short and Curly’s resident Philosopher and Ethicist Dr Matt Beard and Kyla Slaven. The book approaches ethical issues in the style of a collection of ‘field research reports’ that are completed by characters from the ‘Brains Trust’ who take on the role of research agents. Twelve ethical issues are investigated at length, with a chapter being allocated to each—examples being lying, happiness, fairness, promises, friendship, bravery and integrity. (shrink)

Church’s type theory, aka simple type theory, is a formal logical language which includes classical first-order and propositional logic, but is more expressive in a practical sense. It is used, with some modifications and enhancements, in most modern applications of type theory. It is particularly well suited to the formalization of mathematics and other disciplines and to specifying and verifying hardware and software. It also plays an important role in the study of the formal semantics of natural language. When utilizing (...) it as a meta-logic to semantically embed expressive non-classical logics further topical applications are enabled in artificial intelligence and philosophy. A great wealth of technical knowledge can be expressed very naturally in it. With possible enhancements, Church’s type theory constitutes an excellent formal language for representing the knowledge in automated information systems, sophisticated automated reasoning systems, systems for verifying the correctness of mathematical proofs, and a range of projects involving logic and artificial intelligence. Some examples and further references are given in Sections 1.2.2 and 5 below. Type theories are also called higher-order logics, since they allow quantification not only over individual variables, but also over function, predicate, and even higher order variables. Type theories characteristically assign types to entities, distinguishing, for example, between numbers, sets of numbers, functions from numbers to sets of numbers, and sets of such functions. As illustrated in Section 1.2.2 below, these distinctions allow one to discuss the conceptually rich world of sets and functions without encountering the paradoxes of naive set theory. Church’s type theory is a formulation of type theory that was introduced by Alonzo Church in Church 1940. In certain respects, it is simpler and more general than the type theory introduced by Bertrand Russell in Russell 1908 and Whitehead & Russell 1927a. Since properties and relations can be regarded as functions from entities to truth values, the concept of a function is taken as primitive in Church’s type theory, and the λ-notation which Church introduced in Church 1932 and Church 1941 is incorporated into the formal language. Moreover, quantifiers and description operators are introduced in a way so that additional binding mechanisms can be avoided, λ-notation is reused instead. λ-notation is thus the only binding mechanism employed in Church’s type theory. (shrink)

Lucretius' Epicurean account of dreams in Book IV of De Rerum Natura indicates that they are wholly void of prophetic significance and of little practical significance. Dreams, rightly apprehended, do little more than mirror our daily preoccupations. For Lucretius, all dreams pass through the gate of ivory and all are reducible to psychophysical phenomena.In this paper, I examine Lucretius' account of sleep and the formation of dreams in light of the Epicurean aims of the poem as a whole. In doing (...) so, I give what I take to be a plausible sketch of the formation of dreams through what I call Lucretius' "selection model" of dreams. The selection model forbids, strictly speaking, the phenomenon of genuine prophecy through dreams, while at the same time it allows for a surprisingly rich psychophysical explanation of the genesis of seemingly prophetic dreams in sleepers. Thus, I argue, a proper grasp of the Lucretian account of oneiric formation is itself a significant part of the Epicurean cure for superstitions and religiously based ills of his day. (shrink)

Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Piraha˜ is exceptional in displaying ‘inexplicable gaps’, that these gaps follow from a cultural principle restricting communication to ‘immediate experience’, and that this principle has ‘severe’ consequences for work on universal grammar. We argue against each of these claims. Relying on the available documentation and descriptions of the language, especially the rich material in Everett 1986, 1987b, we argue that many of the exceptional grammatical ‘gaps’ supposedly characteristic of Piraha˜ are misanalyzed (...) by Everett (2005) and are neither gaps nor exceptional among the world’s languages. We find no evidence, for example, that Piraha˜ lacks embedded clauses, and in fact find strong syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of their existence in Piraha˜. Likewise, we find no evidence that Piraha˜ lacks quantifiers, as claimed by Everett (2005). Furthermore, most of the actual properties of the Piraha˜ constructions discussed by Everett (for example, the ban on prenominal possessor recursion and the behavior of WH-constructions) are familiar from languages whose speakers lack the cultural restrictions attributed to the Piraha˜. Finally, following mostly Gonc¸alves (1993, 2000, 2001), we also question some of the empirical claims about Piraha˜ culture advanced by Everett in primary support of the ‘immediate experience’ restriction. We conclude that there is no evidence from Piraha˜ for the particular causal relation between culture and grammatical structure suggested by Everett. (shrink)

Morin has written a rich and valuable book. Its main aim is to isolate the factors involved in maintaining behavioural lineages over time, and to understand how these factors might interact. In doing so, it takes issue with the abstract and idealised models and arguments of dual-inheritance theorists, which are alleged in this account to rely on an overly simplistic notion of imitative learning. Morin’s book is full of ethnographic, anthropological, and psychological research, and there is much to commend (...) in it. However, Morin’s arguments against the dual-inheritance theorists are less convincing when put under scrutiny, and his positive picture which includes appeals to ostensive communication, intrinsic appeal and cultural attraction has some difficulties. I argue that when we contrast dual-inheritance theorists and Morin, we find that there may be fewer differences and greater commonalities than Morin’s book might suggest. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Humanizing Ritual: Finding the Way to Say “I Love You” Plato and Confucius: The Importance of the Father‐Son Relationship The Guide of Excellence: Making Sense of the Master Making Sense of Virtue: Excelling at Relating From Theory to Practice: Wisely Applied Wisely Balancing Discipline Conclusion: Building a Happy Family on Ritual, Excellence, and Wisdom Notes.

Instead of an editorial, in this issue of Environmental Values the publishers have been invited to comment on a local environmental issue that currently looms large in our Scottish island backyard. Divided from mainland Scotland by fifty miles of sea, the Outer Hebrides are a peripheral part of the already peripheral Scottish Highlands - a region of low production, and high demands on thinly spread national services. Fifteen years ago our economic salvation was to be the creation of the largest (...) stone quarry in Europe, to supply aggregate for the construction industry in South-east England and mainland Europe. After two Public Inquiries and much legal wrangling this proposal was eventually laid to rest. Its eventual defeat was at least partly due to the united front against the proposed development that was maintained by a coalition of virtually all the environmental NGOs that function north of the English border.1In environmental terms, aggregates, the landscape damage caused by quarrying, and the connection with road-building and increasing motor traffic are readily characterised as a 'bad thing', but the latest threat to the Scottish and island landscape is a less clear-cut environmental bad. The prospect of large-scale windfarms, and the associated transmission lines that would be required to deliver electric power from them to markets in the South, is one that has already divided environmental groups; with Friends of the Earth generally in favour, Greenpeace equivocal, and landscape- and wildlife-oriented NGOs against. For wind energy has long been promoted as a 'green' alternative to damaging fossil fuels and dangerous nuclear power, and its proponents argue that we should not be deflected on merely aesthetic grounds from grasping a technology that could save the world from climate catastrophe. This division of the environmental camp inevitably makes it more likely the developers will prevail. As with the superquarry, scale is part of the problem: the proposed developments are massive - mouth-wateringly so to local councils and landowners attracted by the prospect of multi-million pound revenues, devastatingly so to the majority of local residents and to the many walkers and climbers who visit the Highlands and Islands for their majestic and unspoilt scenery.The following extracts from recent press releases by the John Muir Trust and the local campaigning group Moorlands Without Turbines, and the developers' mock-up of thevisual impact of one of the local proposals above, will convey to readers the scale of proposals for Scottish windfarms, the strength of local feeling and the real dilemmas faced by NGOs in developing a coherent response.... targets set in the [renewable energy] strategy for Highland Council area are greater than those of the Scottish Executive for the whole of Scotland ... The Scottish Executive has a renewable energy target for 2020 which requires another 3,400 MW in Scotland. The Highland Council Renewable Strategy sets a target of over 4,000 MW from new renewable energy.The Highland Council targets do not seem to have been strategically set in relation to factors outside the Highlands but look as if they are based on the maximum possible installation based on the most liberal planning regime.2Scottish Executive Minister Allan Wilson has given the first official statistics on the number of objections for the proposed North Lewis Peatlands Windfarm - the world's largest onshore windfarm.In a response to written questions by Green MSP Shiona Baird, Mr. Wilson states: 'Prior to Comhairle nan Eilean Siar [Western Isles Council] submitting its consultation response the Executive recorded six responses in support and 2,713 objections to the Lewis Windpower proposal from Western Isles residents. Since Western Isles Council submitted their consultation response, the Executive has recorded 11 responses of support and 1,860 objections to the Lewis Windpower proposal, from Western Isles residents'In total a massive 6,131 objections have been received of which 4,573 come from local people. The figures show that for every person who wrote to support the scheme from the islands 269 people wrote and objected.Lewis based Moorland without Turbines chairperson Catriona Campbell, who is campaigning against the joint AMEC and British Energy project said:'At last we have official confirmation of the unprecedented level of protest against this industrialisation of our land. Till now our local MSP and Council have refused to acknowledge the sentiment of the island. The Council voted in favour of it against the wishes of those who will be affected. Every community council and councillor in North Lewis, the area directly affected, has voted resoundingly against it.'...The proposed 234 turbines, each higher than the Forth Rail bridge, and 167km of new road would cover moorland that is protected by European Law for its wildlife interest, including international populations of species such as Golden Eagles, Red-throated Divers and Golden Plovers.3The Lingerabay Superquarry saga was a rich source for academic case-studies; we confidently predict that we shall hear more about the 'green energy' debate in the pages of this journal. (shrink)

Globalization is hailed by its advocates as a means of spreading cosmopolitan values, ideals of sustainability and better standards of living all around the world. Its critics, however, see globalization as a new form of colonialism imposed by rich countries and transnational corporations on the rest of the world, a process in which the rhetoric of sustainability and equality does not match the realities of exploitation and impoverishment of people and nature. This paper endorses neither view. Globalization is not (...) new, but it continually produces new challenges for conceptions of 'home' and 'belonging'. While some enthusiasts regard the 'liberal' and 'environmental' values of the West as the best remedy for what is wrong with the world, others argue that a resource for resisting the destructive effects of globalization may be found in the sense of identity and importance of place found in the traditional scientific and medical traditions of both India and China. Instead of trying to merge these two views in some grand synthesis, this paper argues that traditional conservative and modern liberal values should continually interact with each other to produce novel ideas in debates about home, place and belonging. (shrink)

Written by a noted expert in criminal law, this book explores the philosophical underpinnings of the law's major doctrines concerning actus reus, mens rea, and defences, showing that they are not always driven by culpability. They are grounded also in principles of moral responsibility, ascriptive responsibility, and wrongdoing. As such, they engage wider debates about wrongdoing, and about the boundaries between liability and freedom. This multi-textured analysis allows this book to take more nuanced positions about many important controversies in criminal (...) law. It argues, for example, that liability for omissions and for negligence-and even some strict liability elements-can sometimes be legitimate yet, at the same time, should be relatively rare. It also explains why principles of causation can differ in the criminal law from other contexts; what is wrong with the 'voluntary act' requirement; and why luck can affect the wrongs we commit without changing our degree of blameworthiness for committing them. The book concludes with an account of the major types of defences, and of how they interact with an agent's wrong and her underlying motivations.This volume presents a coherent and rich vision of the criminal law that, by its sheer breadth, makes a distinctive contribution to the literature, of interest to lawyers and philosophers alike. (shrink)

The Four Branches of the Mabinogi is a work, or perhaps a cycle of four related works, composed in Middle Welsh prose probably near the end of the eleventh century and perhaps in southwest Wales. It is the most important surviving prose fiction produced in Britain before the romances of Malory four centuries later and is all the more valuable in that we do not have from medieval Britain, as we do from Ireland, a rich legacy of vernacular prose (...) fiction. It draws freely from a broad background of traditional narratives, many known to us primarily as oral folktales, and yet is certainly the work of an author, composed in writing: few of the telltale signs of oral composition appear in its controlled and economical style. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us by Christine D. PohlAndrew WattsLiving into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us CHRISTINE D. POHL Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. 176 pp. $15.00With Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us, Christine Pohl provides a useful and accessible companion to her first book, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Practice (Eerdmans, 1999). Concerned that “church and culture have not (...) provided the skills or virtues for us to be part of the very communities we long for and try to create” (4), she again challenges the identity of the Christian community. She likewise draws again upon the rich contributions of John Calvin and John Wesley as well as Catholic social movements such as L’Arche as she examines three core practices that engender hospitality: gratitude, promise-keeping, and truth-telling.This book grew out of a grant to participate in the Lilly Endowment project, “Sustaining Pastoral Excellence.” In partnership with her church, Pohl gathered a group of pastors, leaders of intentional communities, and seminary professors to think about gratitude, promise-keeping, truth-telling, and hospitality. The group met for three days twice a year, sharing and reflecting on examples of these practices in their ministries. Pohl provides the practical and theological fruit of their conversations, hoping this work will be used by leaders and members to strengthen their communities. She lays out three sections of three chapters each addressing gratitude, promise-keeping, and truth-telling. Each chapter works from the previous one, examining the practices from historical, biblical, theological, and philosophical perspectives. The last section on hospitality integrates the previous ones rather than simply reworking her previous published material. The book is strengthened by Pohl’s ability to connect together various scholarly and pastoral threads—an ability aided by the practical wisdom of a good working group—to offer helpful practical insights.For example, in the first chapter on gratitude, “Grateful Hearts,” she examines the theological attitudes of gratitude, generosity, and debt contrasted with entitlement and dissatisfaction, or grumbling—ever-present cultural complications for “good” and “holy” communities. In the second section, “Promise-Keeping,” she works through different kinds of promises in order to initiate [End Page 245] the hard work of communal reflection. There, rather than resting in the beautiful but abstract insights of thinkers such as Margaret Farley and Hannah Arendt, she distinguishes contractual and covenantal promises from one another and describes their consequences.Throughout the first two sections, qualities of contemporary culture—individualism, freedom, autonomy, mobility, distrust of institutions—affect and deform the practices of gratitude and promise-keeping essential to healthy and faithful communities. This attention to contemporary culture produces vital insight for the section on promise-keeping: while most Christian organizations appear to operate with covenantal expectations, “we actually work with a hybrid of covenantal and contractual obligations” (78). This “contemporary confusion” can lead to betrayal and loss and impede the mediation of fierce disagreements.Although Pohl provides helpful biblical narrative to support her analysis of each practice, she does not provide an adequate analysis of contemporary culture. One suspects that for Pohl—much like H. Richard Niebuhr—culture exists as a construct external to the well-formed community. It appears responsible for many of the attitudes deforming the essential practices she examines. Yet this suspicion is never fully confirmed, in part because she addresses sin as a present deforming power.Perhaps the most eloquent analysis in the book is found in its discussion of truth-telling. Rather than concede to Augustine’s (theological) or Immanuel Kant’s (rational) prohibition against lying, Pohl turns to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s invocation of the concrete situation to analyze the practice of truth-telling. Only a community that places truthfulness within the context of covenantal relationships can deal redemptively with deception and wrongdoing. Several of her examples help the reader understand the uniqueness of this practice for healthy communities. [End Page 246]Andrew WattsBelmont UniversityCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

The project of this Précis de philosophie de la logique et des mathématiques (vol. 1 under the direction of F. Poggiolesi and P. Wagner, vol. 2 under the direction of A. Arana and M. Panza) aims to offer a rich, systematic and clear introduction to the main contemporary debates in the philosophy of mathematics and logic. The two volumes bring together the contributions of thirty researchers (twelve for the philosophy of logic and eighteen for the philosophy of mathematics), specialists (...) in the history or philosophy of logic or mathematics. Each volume consists of ten chapters; each chapter is about forty pages, is independent from the others and deals with a particular philosophical question about logic or mathematics. The objective is to offer to the French-speaking reader a reference book. On many of the issues addressed, this Précis offers the first clear and thorough synthesis that is available in French. -/- This book is intended for third year / master's students, but also for teachers of philosophy in secondary or higher education, for logicians and mathematicians willing to take a philosophical look at the fundamental concepts of their discipline, and for any reader interested in the basic issues discussed in the philosophy of logic and mathematics. Each chapter is self-contained, although some basic training in logic (or in mathematics, as the case may be) is required. The book should be looked at as a comprehensive framework for contemporary discussions in the philosophy of logic and mathematics, while also giving some guidance on the disciplinary content required by these discussions. -/- The first three chapters of the present volume (on the philosophy of mathematics) are devoted to the history of the philosophy of mathematics: from antiquity to the modern era, and from this period to the foundational crisis of the nineteenth century, to the twentieth century. Next, four chapters deal with the crucial questions for the philosophy of mathematics of the twentieth century: the opposition and/or comparison of set theory and category theory as foundational frameworks for mathematics; mathematical constructivism; the analysis of calculability; and Benaceraff's problem. The two following chapters are focused on the philosophy of mathematical practice, by treating the notion of ideals of proof, in particular explanation and purity, and the notion of informal proof and the use of visual artifacts in mathematical argumentation. Finally the last chapter deals with the applicability of mathematics, including the role of probability. -/- In Chapter 1, Sébastien Maronne and David Rabouin present the history of the philosophy of mathematics from antiquity to the modern era. The goal is to show that the philosophy of mathematics has a history as ancient as mathematics and philosophy itself, a history largely continuous with the latter, often by staying out of sync with respect to the former. In Chapter 2, Sébastien Gandon discusses the question of the foundations of mathematics from Kant to the end of the nineteenth century. By tying this question to Kant, he is able to show that the discussion of the foundations of mathematics that occupied a large part of these two centuries has much older roots. Accent is placed on the differences between the framework proposed by Kant for making sense of classical mathematics and the use made by Frege and then Russell of logical tools for giving a different reading of arithmetic and real analysis. The link between between these different conceptions and the evolution of mathematics itself is also underlined. -/- Chapter 3, written by Hourya Benis-Sinaceur and Mirna Džamonja, deals with the evolution of mathematics in the twentieth century, notably the structuralist turn of Dedekind, E. Noether, and Bourbaki, and certain more recent developments. They devote themselves, among other things, to explaining how these developments can be understood as responses to and extensions of questions posed during the foundational debate of the immediately preceding era. -/- In Chapter 4, Jean-Pierre Marquis and Jean-Jacques Szczeciniarz discuss the different foundational options coming from set theory and category theory. They discuss, among other things, Lawvere's program to replace ZF with an axiomatization of the category of sets, the latter judged better adapted to the needs of contemporary mathematics. Different reactions, as much philosophical as technical, raised by this program are also taken into account. -/- Constructive mathematics are the object of Chapter 5, in which Gerhard Heinzmann and Mark van Atten examine in a critical and comparative manner a variety of constructivisms, including intuitionism, constructive type theory, predicativism, and finitism. -/- In Chapter 6, Guido Gherardi and Maël Pegny present computability theory, stressing its philosophical consequences. They discuss the basic concepts of this theory, for the computability of both the natural numbers and the real numbers. They then tackle the theory of computational complexity. -/- In Chapter 7, Andrea Sereni and Fabrice Pataut present Benacerraf's problem, opposing every possible account of mathematical knowledge to the availability of a theory of truth founded on an abstract ontology of mathematical objects. They give an overview of the original problem and its reformulation by Hartry Field, and reconstruct the debate that this problem has raised, by meeting at once the major opposing positions today of the analytic affiliation of the philosophy of mathematics, as much those on the platonist side as on that of nominalism. -/- In Chapter 8, Valeria Giardino and Yacin Hamami treat certain crucial aspects of the philosophy of mathematical practice. They deal in particular with the notion of an informal proof and on the role of artifacts in mathematical reasoning. They consider how such proofs, making use of these means, can contribute to the understanding of theorems and mathematical theories, thanks also to the role of visualisation and the aid of computer tools. -/- Why do mathematics often give several proofs of the same theorem? This is the question that Andrew Arana raises in Chapter 9, introducing the notion of an epistemic ideal and discuss two such ideals, the explanatoriness and purity of proof. -/- Chapter 10 is devoted to the applicability of mathematics in the study of empirical phenomena. After summarizing the history of this question, going back to Plato and Aristotle and passing by Mill and Kant, Daniele Molinini and Marco Panza reconstruct the contemporary debate, in relation, among other things, to questions raised in the philosophy of science. -/- Two appendices complete the volume. In the first Frédéric Patras treats the French tradition in philosophy of mathematics of the 20th century. In the second, Maria Carla Galavotti discusses the notion of probability and its use in science. (shrink)

This article surveys four approaches to moral obligation to non-Muslims found in Islamic legal thought. The first three approaches I refer to in this article as the "revelatory-deontological," the "contractualist-constructivist" and the "consequentialist-utilitarian." The main argument of this article is that present in many of the contemporary works on the "jurisprudence of Muslim minorities" (fiqh al-aqalliyyat) is an attempt to provide an Islamic foundation for a relatively thick and rich relationship of moral obligation and solidarity with non-Muslims. This attempt (...) takes the form of a fourth "comprehensive-qualitative" approach to political ethics in that it appeals not to juridical reasoning of the type "is x permissible and in which conditions?" but rather to Islamic ideals of what it means to live a good life, of what believing, normatively-committed Muslims want to pursue in this world, not only what they may pursue without fear of punishment. This meta-ethical approach builds on and goes beyond the first three. The force of this argument is that this fourth "comprehensive-qualitative" approach to moral obligation to non-Muslims is novel, emergent and not found not in the writings of outright reformers but in those of conservative, "neo-classical," shari'a-minded - even Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated - Islamic scholars. What also adds to the force of this argument is that the other meta-ethical discourses, particularly of contract and utility (maslaha), already get these scholars quite far towards a doctrine of "loyal resident alienage" in non-Muslim societies. That even orthodox Islamic scholars go further shows that they have some interest in giving a theological or principled foundation to a much thicker and richer form of moral obligation to non-Muslims, a relationship which involves recognizing non-Muslims qua non-Muslims and contributing to their well-being. (shrink)

Anatole France’s The Red Lily is best known for this ironic aphorism: ‘The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.’ The laws mentioned in this aphorism are open to two criticisms. The first criticism is that they forbid conduct that oughtn’t to be forbidden. The second criticism is that they unfairly place greater burdens of compliance on some than on others. (...) It may be onerous for the poor to comply with the law against, say, sleeping under bridges; not so for the rich. It is this second criticism that I read France as expressing, and it is the reach of this criticism that I explore in this essay. Specifically, I want to ask whether the second criticism may apply to a law even if the first criticism does not – whether there can be laws that are good in the sense that they forbid behavior that genuinely ought to be forbidden, but that are nonetheless unfair in the distribution of compliance burdens they yield. Some examples may tempt us to say ‘no.’ It may be more burdensome for thrill-seekers than for the rest of us to comply with laws against speeding, but that does not make speeding laws unfair. But I argue that the answer is ‘yes.’ Good laws can, and surprisingly often do, yield unfair distributions of compliance burdens. I conclude the essay by showing how remedies for this sort of unfairness might work. (shrink)

In _Collected Papers 21_ Bertrand Russell grapples with the dilemma that confronted all opponents of militarism and war in the 1930s—namely, what was the most politically and morally appropriate response to international aggression. How to Keep the Peace contains some of Russell’s best-known essays, such as the famous _Auto-obituary_ and his treatment of _The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed_. Like the sixteen previous volumes in Routledge’s critical edition of Russell’s shorter writings, however, _Collected Papers 21_ also includes a number of (...) unpublished manuscripts from the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University. Moreover, it recovers for Russell scholars and general readers alike a rich vein of material that has previously appeared in print only in obscure or long-defunct newspaper and periodical publications. (shrink)

Here is a fresh look at how science contributes to the bigger picture of human flourishing, through a collage of science and philosophy, richly illustrated by the authors' own experience and personal reflection. They survey the territory of fundamental physics, machine learning, philosophy of human identity, evolutionary biology, miracles, arguments from design, naturalism, the history of ideas, and more. The natural world can be appreciated not only for itself, but also as an eloquent gesture, a narrative and a pointer beyond (...) itself. Our human journey is not to a theorem or a treatise, but to a meeting which encompasses all our capacities. In this meeting, science is the way to find out about the structure of the physical world of which we are a part, not a means to reduce ourselves and our fellow human beings to mere objects of scrutiny, and still less to attempt the utterly futile exercise of trying to do that to God. We have intellectual permission to be open to the notion that God can be trusted and known. The material world encourages an open-hearted reaching out to something more, with a freedom to seek and to be received by what lies beyond the scope of purely impersonal descriptions and attitudes. (shrink)

Criterion referenced assessment, if high stakes is not compatible with the development of rich knowledge and understanding in schools.

Schneider's History appeared at the right moment in America's cultural history. World War II had just ended; college enrollments were bursting with veterans curious about their heritage and anxious over their destiny; and the patriotic pride of an America emerging victoriously from war to take first place among the nations of the world found a partial outlet in those intellectual pursuits which inspired the introduction of college and university programs in American studies, on American history, American institutions, American literature, and (...) American thought. Above all, Schneider's book became the incomparable guide to the philosophic literature. If the reader was dismayed by Schneider's narrative, which was often too sketchy, sometimes too desultory, to portray the movement in and the depth of American thought, he could at least regale himself with the rich and copious bibliographies. Here, indeed, was food for thought, nurturing further research. (shrink)

Every ten years United States congressional districts are drawn, physically constructing political representation based on domicile. Why do we do it this way? Is territorial representation consistent with the broader normative ends of political representation). ;In section one I argue that territorial constituencies were never intended to represent local "communities of interest." Instead, physical proximity between voters was necessary to achieve the normative aims of representative government in a large nation. I begin in 13 th century England, and proceed through (...) the political theory of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Burke, the Federalists and their critics. I also provide a novel interpretation of Federalist 10. ;In sum, territory was a habit of mind for the founders of the United States, and thus there were no explicit reasons given for using territory. The silence of territory as a definer of electoral constituencies has continued to the present day. I argue that the continued silence about territorial constituencies constitutes a substantial breech of legitimacy. ;In the second section , I argue that "constituency definition" is a normatively rich institution and how constituencies are defined ought not to be determined by interested third parties. I argue that Hanna Pitkin incorrectly conflated "political representation" and "legitimacy." I argue that citizen consent to constituency definition is a central part of legitimating any representative government. Finally, I argue that there are no persuasive normative arguments for territorial constituencies today. Justifying territorial constituencies on the normative claim that "communities of interest" ought to define constituencies for political representation is simply unpersuasive. If one believes such particularity ought to be represented in one branch of the national legislature, then other kinds of particularity---race, ideology, class, et al---simply dominate. ;In section three I argue against "particularity" for electoral constituencies. I conclude with a thought experiment: randomly assign voters into 435 national, electoral constituencies for life. Having established that the concept of "constituency" is itself normatively robust and separable from "electoral systems," I argue that important considerations of "voice," can be introduced through novel means of reform. (shrink)