The Essential Mystics, Poets, Saints, and Sages is a treasury of quotes and passages from the great Sufi mystics, Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, Jews, and Christians throughout the centuries. This collection, curated by religious scholar Richard Hooper, stresses the beauty of religious language and mystical experience, including hundreds of entries from world’s major religious traditions, the greatest poets, mystics, sages, and saints of all time. Included are selections from William Blake, Ramakrishna, Rumi, St. John of the Cross, Osho, Tagore, (...) Chuang Tzu, and many more. The selections are given context by the introductory essays by Hooper, which explore the Perennial Philosophy, the nature of the mystical experience, and the way of non-dualism. The Essential Mystics, Poets, Saints, and Sages is an ideal gift as well as a source for daily guidance and support, regardless of the religious or sectarian affiliations. (shrink)

Healing Emotions is the record of an extraordinary series of encounters between the Dalai Lama and prominent Western psychologists, physicians, and meditation teachers that sheds new light on the mind-body connection. Edited by Pulitzer Prize nominee and best-selling author Daniel Goleman.

_Deprivation and Freedom_ investigates the key issue of social deprivation. It looks at how serious that issue is, what we should do about it and how we might motivate people to respond to it. It covers core areas in moral and political philosophy in new and interesting ways, presents the topical example of disability as a form of social deprivation, shows that we are not doing nearly enough for certain sections of our communities and encourages that we think differently about (...) how we should best organise our societies in the future. The book develops a comprehensive yet refreshingly simple account of human freedom, which shows how the ability to realise our freedom is partly definitive of freedom itself. That account conclusively illustrates how many deprivations represent remediable inequalities of important and very basic human freedoms, posing the question as to why societies continue to do so little about them. In answering that question, Hull shows how the idea of social exclusion is misleading and, instead, tackles the far more pertinent and challenging issue of societies' failure to include. The moral seriousness of non-inclusion, the failure to provide for freedom, is evaluated via critical discussion of a variety of central themes and distinctions in ethical and political theory. The author shows how such themes and distinctions comprise a framework for evaluating a raft of social issues, in turn providing a unique resource for students of moral, political and applied philosophy. The book concludes with an innovative, challenging and effective combination of analytic and continental styles, so to address the critical question of how we might actually motivate constructive social change. In doing so, it shows how a variety of approaches can work successfully together to provide an emphatic case for greater social inclusion. _Deprivation and Freedom_ shows how even fairly modest claims about social provision illustrate that we should be doing a lot more about social deprivation than we are now. It should be of interest to anyone who is concerned with questions about the type of society in which they live, what it says about us to continue as we are - and how we might motivate realistically achievable social change. (shrink)

Contemporary literature on consciousness, with some exceptions, rarely considers the olfactory system. In this article the characteristics of olfactory consciousness, viewed from the standpoint of the phenomenal /access distinction, are examined relative to the major senses. The review details several qualitative differences in both olfactory P consciousness and A consciousness . The basis for these differences is argued to arise from the functions that the olfactory system performs and from the unique neural architecture needed to instantiate them. These data suggest, (...) at a minimum, that P and A consciousness are uniquely configured in olfaction and an argument can be made that the P and A distinction may not hold for this sensory system. (shrink)

Activators of RNA polymerase II transcription possess distinct and separable DNA‐binding and transcriptional activation domains. They are thought to function by binding to specific sites on DNA and interacting with proteins (transcription factors) binding near to the transcriptional start site of a gene. The ability of these proteins to activate transcription is a highly regulated process, with activation only occurring under specific conditions to ensure proper timing and levels of target gene expression. Such regulation modulates the ability of transcription factors (...) either to bind DNA or to interact with the transcriptional machinery. Here we discuss recent advances in our understanding of these mechanisms of transcriptional regulation in yeast. (shrink)

This book explores the moral dimensions of public policy from an Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective. Regan begins with a thorough exposition of natural law theory and proposes ways in which ethical conclusions can be drawn from it. He then goes on to link natural law theory to an analysis of particular areas of public policy as diverse as public morals, social justice, and the morality of warfare.

Claims to rights and negotiation about their shape are pervasive in our public and private culture. Rights consciousness is surely desirable and is part and parcel of the transition toward a more democratic world. In this essay I consider the proper placement of moral rights in moral theory. In a famous essay, "Taking Rights Seriously," Ronald Dworkin argues that if it is accepted that individuals have moral rights against their government, that implies serious constraints on the conduct of government and (...) the freedom of a political majority to enforce its wishes through law. I endorse the thesis that individuals have such moral rights and support taking rights seriously in Dworkin's sense. My focus is elsewhere. In this essay I shall argue that moral rights do not and should not figure in our fundamental moral principles; rights enter at the level of subordinate principles. In a very broad way, to take this stand is to side with utilitarians and consequentialists, who see rights as instruments for achieving other values, not moral goals in their own right. (shrink)

Erdelyi's version of repression is no longer recognizably Freudian. Erdelyi fails to cite directed forgetting experiments involving psychiatric patients that indicate that the motivation to forget threatening material seldom translates into an ability to do so. The early Freud of the seduction theory of hysteria did inspire the recovered memory fiasco.

[opening paragraph]: The following comments are from a psychologist, involved in the study of complex human information processing such as problem-solving, in which overt behaviour cannot be isolated from the subject's representation, since it is the prototype of goal-directed activity. In that respect perception, i.e. interpretation of the situation, is intrinsically linked to action, i.e. to changing the situation so as to complete the goal. In that field representation cannot be assimilated to consciousness, and it is very important, in my (...) opinion, to understand what makes a representation become conscious and what is changed in behaviour when an implicit representation becomes explicit and reportable; and to develop a precise methodology for obtaining and analysing verbal reports, which are in those situations the only ways of access to the subjective experience of other people. (shrink)

Martin Guggenheim, What's Wrong with Children's Rights Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, pp. 320.

Richard J. Bernstein argues that many of the important themes in philosophy during the past 150 years are variations and developments of ideas that were prominent in the classical American pragmatists: Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George H. Mead. The pragmatic thinkers reject a sharp dichotomy between subject and object, mind-body dualism, the quest for certainty, and the spectator theory of knowledge. They seek to bring about a sea change in philosophy that highlights the social character (...) of human experience and normative social practices, the self-correcting nature of all inquiry, and the continuity of theory and practice. And they - especially James, Dewey, and Mead - emphasize the democratic ethical-political consequences of a pragmatic orientation. Many of the themes developed by the pragmatic thinkers were central to the work of major twentieth-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but the so-called analytic/Continental split obscures this underlying continuity. Bernstein develops an alternative reading of contemporary philosophy that brings out the persistence and continuity of pragmatic themes. He explains why the discussion of pragmatism is alive, varied, and widespread"--Jacket. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle AgesRichard J. UtzIdeas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages, by Henry Ansgar Kelly; xvii & 257 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, $59.95.If H. A. Kelly had wanted to sing the tune of Norman Cantor’s recent book on nineteenth- and twentieth-century medievalists, he could have called his study “Inventing Tragedy.” However, besides a certain (...) revisionistic attitude, there are no correspondences between the hasty, essayistic Inventing the Middle Ages (1991) and the scholarly, thoroughly philological Ideas and Forms of Tragedy. Where Cantor attempts to convince his readers that the various critical appropriations of the Middle Ages say more about the cultures of their modern reinventors than about the subject of their researches, Kelly is positive that sound source study and textual criticism can provide secure data for a more accurate application of perhaps the most famous of all genre terms to respective historical authors and individual plays. Thus, Kelly considers his book to be a necessary critical corrective of faulty and preconceived (modern) ideas about classical and medieval notions of tragedy. His methodological insistence on a purely philological investigation is responsible for some of the [End Page 253] outstanding virtues of this investigation such as authority, exactitude, and scholarliness; at the same time it is also the cause for the omission of questions essential to a study which purports to present an account not only of the forms but also the “ideas” of tragedy from classical antiquity through late medieval times.Chapters one and two examine various ideas and practices associated with tragedy in ancient Greece and Rome. This concise survey should become assigned reading for students of literary drama because it debunks the belief that the term tragedy conjures up a uniform idea, one that has been relatively constant throughout the ages and that can be attributed to Aristotle’s discussion of the best kind of tragedy in his Poetics. Kelly demonstrates how Aristotle’s broad definition of the term (any serious story, even with a happy ending) was transformed in late antiquity to mean a story ending in irremediable misfortune.Chapter three studies the semantic shifts the word tragedy underwent in the early Middle Ages. Kelly establishes convincingly that the various early medieval lexicographers and commentators (the most intriguing discussions include Isidore of Seville, Remigius of Auxerre, and Papias) knew much less about tragedy and had a much less unified idea of tragedy than is assumed by many modern-day scholars of drama. A vague knowledge of the genre also characterizes the twelfth century (chapter four), when—with the exception of John of Salisbury—creative mélanges of authentic classical traits and postclassical distortions dominated.The fifth chapter demonstrates that most commentators in the high Middle Ages, despite the reception of Aristotle directly from the Greek or through Arabic intermediaries, vary widely on the meanings they attach to the word “tragedy.” Most of them, such as John Garland, even consider it an empty, obsolete genre, one practiced only by very few poets of classical antiquity. Only Dante Aligheri believed that tragedy was a current genre and that he had made his contribution to it.The study concludes by surveying the developments in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England, France, Italy, and Spain. Kelly argues that in spite of the greatly increased currency of ideas of tragedy in the later Middle Ages, other genres (vitae of famous men or saints, exempla, complaints) negotiated stories of disaster and death. It seems problematic, however, that Kelly does not further investigate any of the cultural ramifications for and the “ideas” behind the existence and nature of these other genres and the coeval absence of (Aristotelian) tragedy. While he rightly states that medieval vitae, exempla, and planctus all do without discussions of the empathic sorrow for the misfortune of others which characterizes Aristotle’s (and Chaucer’s) ideas of tragedy, his exclusively philological approach—one concerned with sources and textual traditions but not with society or mentalities—makes him circumnavigate essential deliberations about the causes for these conspicuous medieval notions. [End Page 254] Thus, Kelly’s book does not even attempt to answer the... (shrink)

Prioritarianism holds that improvements in someone's life are morally more valuable, the worse off the person would otherwise be. The doctrine is impartial, holding that a gain in one person's life counts exactly the same as an identical gain in the life of anyone equally well off. If we have some duty of beneficence to make the world better, prioritarianism specifies the content of the duty. Unlike the utilitarian, the prioritarian holds that we should not only seek to increase human (...) well-being, but also distribute it fairly across persons, by tilting in favor of the worse off. A variant version adds that we should also give priority to the morally deserving – to saints over scoundrels. The view is a standard for right choice of individual actions and public policies, offering a distinctive alternative to utilitarianism, sufficiency and egalitarianism. (shrink)

Nietzsche announces his intentions to publish a “physiology of aesthetics”, namely a naturalistic explanation for how aesthetic judgements are grounded in the physiology of both the one experiencing the work, and the creator of it. But as well as the physiological reduction of aesthetic judgements, Nietzsche in many places across his oeuvre frames the apparatus of physiology, especially the prescriptive dimension of self-cultivation, in terms amenable to being treated as ‘aesthetic’. The first section will mount a (re-) defense of the (...) use of aestheticized language for discussing Nietzschean self-cultivation. The second section demonstrates an aesthetic evaluation of capacities that make possible the acquisition and removal of instinctual components, ultimately arguing for Nietzsche’s qualified indeterminism regarding the capacity for self-cultivation. The third section will assess the pres- ence of another aesthetic measure, this time in terms of envisaging one’s psycho-physiology by reference to an external spectacle. The final section discusses metaethical questions stemming from Nietzsche’s prescriptive language regarding the aestheticization of our physiology. (shrink)

This unique book clearly explains genetic and neuroimaging research on intelligence and how neuroscience findings may lead to enhancing it.

The complexities of Heidegger’s early accounts of nature provide a privileged perspective from which to understand the evolution of his thought into the 1930s and beyond. This movement seems largely driven by his response to what Karsten Harries has called “the antinomy of being”. In Heidegger’s early writings, Natur is associated with the “theoretical” and the “intraworldly.” However, less attested is an “unworlded” and thus intrinsically “incomprehensible” sense of nature, as the abyssal ground of worlding. This thread is traced through (...) key Marburg period texts, into Being and Time, and beyond it into the 1928 “metontology” appendix and its surprising transformation in the 1929 inaugural lecture. Finally, some cursory observations are made about how this trajectory unfolds in later Heideggerian thought, taking the 1936 Artwork essay as an example, showing how both sides of the antinomy of being come to be incorporated within a more comprehensive framing of the Seinsfrage. (shrink)

In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty pauses to explain what it was like to be “a red diaper anticommunist baby” and to become a “teenage Cold War liberal.” Rorty's political allegiances were virtually unknown until the 1980s. The trouble with Rorty's “inspirational” liberalism is that, at best, it tends to become merely inspirational and sentimental, without much bite. There once was a time when the work of liberal metaphysicians and theorists was important, especially when liberalism was a novelty and (...) liberal societies were just coming into existence. Indeed, economic trends suggest that there may be a collapse of liberalism and pragmatism in America. Inspirational liberalism may be a healthy antidote to legalistic rights‐based liberalism and to the abuses of the infatuation with theorizing by postmodern cultural critics. But without pragmatic toughness and a concrete program for reform, patriotic inspirational liberalism too easily degenerates into an empty rhetorical hand waving. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: I The Challenge Model II Challenge Versus Impact III Parameters and Limitations IV Tolerance, Neutrality, and Antipaternalism V Equality VI Resources Versus Welfare VII Conclusion Acknowledgement.

This paper looks to make a small contribution to the critical engagement between philosophical Thomism and phenomenology, inspired by the recent work of the German phenomenologist and hermeneutic thinker Günter Figal. My suggestion is that Figal’s proposal for a broad-based hermeneutical philosophy rooted in a renewed realism concerning things in their externality and “objectivity” provides great potential for a renewed encounter with Thomist realism. The paper takes up this issue through a brief examination of some of the more problematic idealistic (...) features of Kantian and Husserlian thought, before turning to consider how these aspects of the tradition are reframed within Figal’s phenomenological realism. The Thomist position concerning the relation between things and their understanding (including the complex matter of the verbum mentis) is then raised, drawing both on Aquinas’s own texts and the interpretations of Jacques Maritain. Some striking emerging affinities between this tradition and Figal’s hermeneutic phenomenology are noted. (shrink)

Richard Rorty (1931–2007) was one of the most provocative and controversial philosophers of the past 50 years. He had a rare ability to combine sophisticated arguments with wit, charm, and humor. He was never dull – and he reached a wide public throughout the world. Originally trained in the history of philosophy and the grand tradition of metaphysics, he became fascinated with the linguistic turn in philosophy. During his early philosophical career, he wrote articles that were at the cutting (...) edge of analytic philosophy. He developed a new approach to the mind-body problem and raised troubling questions about the viability of the conceptual analysis of ordinary language. Soon, he began to question what he called the “Kantian foundations” of analytic philosophy. In 1979, he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, a book that became an immediate sensation. Rorty, employing ingenious arguments, questioned the basis of analytic philosophy, and more generally the very idea of systematic philosophy. He called into question the Descartes-Locke-Kant tradition and claimed that the metaphor of the “mirror of nature” had misled philosophers into thinking that the task of philosophy is to “get things right” by representing objective reality. In the mid-twentieth century, the analytic-continental split in philosophy became bitterly entrenched. Many Anglo-American philosophers were convinced that linguistic analytic philosophy is “the only game in town.” They disdained what they took to be the lack of clarity and argumentative rigor among continental thinkers. The “compliment” was returned by continental thinkers who thought that much of analytic philosophy was trivial and insignificant. Rorty employed clever analytic techniques to challenge the pretentions of analytic philosophy. Many of his professional colleagues were furious. At the same time, Rorty engaged thinkers like Sartre, Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas, Derrida, and Foucault. This delighted aficionados of continental philosophy – although they frequently judged his interpretations of these thinkers to be distorted caricatures. Rorty was one of the rare philosophers who transcended the analytic-continental split. At the same time, Rorty increasingly identified himself with the American pragmatic tradition. He entitled his 1982 collection of essays, “Consequences of Pragmatism,” which included his famous 1979 presidential address to the American Philosophical Association: “‘Pragmatism’ is a vague, ambiguous, and overworked word. Nevertheless it names the glory of our country’s intellectual tradition. No other American writers have offered so radical suggestion for making our future different from the past, as have James and Dewey” (Rorty 1982, p. 160). Rorty helped to revive a serious interest in James and Dewey. In the Introduction to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he declared that the three most important philosophers of the twentieth century were Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey. Analytic philosophers might agree about the importance of Wittgenstein; continental thinkers might acknowledge the importance of Heidegger; but virtually no professional philosopher (except devotees of Dewey) would have ranked Dewey with the other two. Rorty claimed that each of these three thinkers had originally sought to find a new way to make philosophy “foundational,” but they came to realize that their earlier work was self-deceptive and they spent the rest of their time warning us against the temptations to which they had succumbed. “Their later work is therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic, designed to make the reader question his own motives for philosophizing rather than supply him with a new philosophical program.” (Rorty 1979, pp. 5–6) Rorty acknowledged that Dewey lacked Wittgenstein’s “dialectical acuity” and Heidegger’s “historical learning,” but Dewey articulated a vision of a new type of society. “In his ideal society, culture is no longer dominated by the ideal of objective cognition but by that of aesthetic enhancement. In that culture, as he said, the arts and sciences would be the ‘unforced flowers of life.” (Rorty 1979, p. 13) This was also Rorty’s vision of a liberal utopia. He developed this vision in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, where the central figure becomes the liberal ironist. Whereas Philosophy and the Mirror and Nature was filled with brilliant (although controversial) arguments, Rorty now debunked the role of argument in philosophy. “On the view of philosophy which I am offering, philosophers should not be asked for arguments against, for example, the correspondence theory of truth or the idea of the ‘intrinsic nature of reality’.” (Rorty 1989, p. 8) He favored redescription rather than argument. “I am not going to offer arguments against the vocabulary I want to replace. Instead, I am going to try to make the vocabulary I favor look attractive by showing how it may redescribe a variety of topics.” (Rorty 1989, p. 9) Interesting philosophy is not really a matter of argument at all but rather “a contrast between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed vocabulary which vaguely promises great things” (Rorty 1989, p. 9). Rorty deflated what many philosophers took to be the central concerns of philosophy, the nature of truth, reality, objectivity, knowledge, and morality. He sought to replace the appeal to objectivity with the appeal of solidarity. He is famous for his slogan “Take care of freedom and truth will take care of itself” (Rorty 1989, p. 176). Even admirers of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature were distressed by the radical turn of Contingency where he suggested that novels, journalism, and literary reflection might be more effective than philosophical argumentation in bringing about his liberal utopia. Some of his fiercest critics claimed that Rorty could no longer be taken seriously as a philosopher. Contingency was savagely criticized and ridiculed, so much so that Rorty was provoked to write his revealing and delightful autobiographical sketch, “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.” “I am sometimes told, by critics from both ends of the political spectrum, that my views are so weird as to be merely frivolous. They suspect that I will say anything to get a gasp, that I am just amusing myself by contradicting everybody else. This hurts. So I have tried, in what follows, to say something about how I got into my present position—how I got into philosophy, and then found myself unable to use philosophy for the purpose I had originally in mind.” (Rorty 1999, p. 5) What follows is an account of how Rorty grew up in a family that was deeply committed to furthering social justice. (“Trotsky” is a synecdoche for social justice.) Rorty also tells of his early nerdish love of the wild orchids of New Jersey. (“Wild orchids” is the synecdoche for private pleasures.) When Rorty became interested in philosophy, he wanted to find some intellectual or esthetic framework that would hold reality and justice in a single vision – one that would integrate social justice and private idiosyncratic pleasures. He tells the story of his eventual discovery that there was no such overarching framework and his growing realization that there was no need for such a framework. As a public citizen, one can be deeply committed to advancing social justice and at the same time, as a private person, enjoy idiosyncratic pleasures. There is no need to reconcile or synthesize these two incommensurable dimensions of human life. (shrink)