John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty is widely regarded as one of the most influential and stirring pieces of political philosophy ever written. Ever relevant in our increasingly surveillance dominated culture, the statements made argue strongly in favour of the rights of the individual, privacy and freedom of expression. The Routledge Guidebook to Mill’s On Liberty introduces the major themes in Mill’s great book and aids the reader in understanding this key work, covering: The context of Mill’s work and the background (...) to his writing Each separate part of the text in relation to its goals, meanings and impact The reception the book received when first seen by the world The relevance of Mill’s work to modern philosophy With further reading included for each chapter, this text is essential reading for all students of philosophy and political theory, and all those wishing to get to grips with this classic work of political philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Not Only Sub Specie Aeternitatis, but Equally Sub Specie DurationisA Defense of Hegel's Criticisms of Spinoza's PhilosophyJ. M. Fritzman and Brianne RileyIn what seem like halcyon days, when William Jefferson Clinton was America's President, James Carville wrote We're Right, They're Wrong: A Handbook for Spirited Progressives, arguing against the Republican Party's "Contract with America" (derided by the Left as a "Contract on America") and for progressivism. In the present (...) philosophical conjuncture, what is required is a precisely analogous intervention—"Hegel's Right, Spinoza's Wrong: An Article for Spirited Hegelians." Hegel criticizes Spinoza's philosophy at various places in his writings.1 Spinozists have made several major challenges to Hegel's criticisms.2 Although there have been explications of Hegel's criticisms, there has been no effective response to the Spinozists' challenges.3 Until now. This article defends Hegel's criticisms of Spinoza's philosophy and shows that the challenges to his criticisms fail.This article presents a précis of Spinoza's system and shows the senses in which Hegel is not wholly enamored with it. It defends Hegel's criticism of Spinoza's system as an acosmism from Parkinson's challenges to it. It considers both Myers's view that Hegel's system begins where Spinoza's system ends and McMinn's charge that the systems of Spinoza and Hegel are fundamentally identical. Myers and McMinn misunderstand Hegel's dialectical method, and so they incorrectly believe that the methods of Spinoza and Hegel are complementary. Hegel's dialectics can sublate the systematic pluralism that Myers and Armour propose as its alternative. The penultimate section discusses the modifications that must be made to Spinoza's system to advance from his substance to Hegel's subject.Clinton successfully appropriated what was worthwhile in the "Contract with America," but he also effectively argued that the "Contract" would be a disaster for America. Similarly, Hegel assimilates the truth in his predecessors' philosophies while demonstrating how those philosophies remain [End Page 76] one-sided and partial. This article concludes by showing how this happens to Spinoza's philosophy.Everybody Loves SpinozaSpinoza's philosophy is a metaphysical monism. That is, he thinks that there is only one basic substance. Although there is only one substance, it necessarily expresses itself through an infinite number of attributes, and an attribute is the essence of substance as experienced by the intellect.4 Humans are capable of knowing only two of these attributes: thought and extension. Objects, ideas, and relations—Spinoza refers to all of these as "modes"—are presented through some attribute or other. Spinoza denies that a thing presented through one attribute can cause or be affected by anything presented through another attribute. Rather, each thing which is presented through an attribute has an infinite number of counterparts presented through the infinite number of attributes. Indeed, those infinite counterparts are that thing, presented through the other attributes. Substance necessarily expresses itself through the attributes and modes, according to Spinoza, and everything that is possible is also actual.5Spinoza's substance expresses itself through its attributes and modes, but what occurs at the level of the attributes and modes has no reciprocal effect on substance. Like unrequited love, expression is a one-way street. Not e pluribus unum (out of many, one), but e unibus plurum (out of one, many). Unlike the relation of the states to the federal government, the attributes and modes do not possess a relative or circumscribed autonomy vis-à-vis substance.6 Substance expressing itself through its attributes and modes is nature, according to Spinoza, and nature in turn is God. Hence, Spinoza's God is wholly immanent within the world—for him, God is the world—and so he rejects that traditional God of theism, who transcends and is wholly independent from the world. Spinoza rejects as illusory all notions of purpose and intention.7 Although individuals generally believe that their actions are performed in order to fulfill some goal, Spinoza instead maintains that human actions are entirely determined and necessary and that the belief that actions are done to accomplish something is entirely mistaken. He believes that all happenings—physical... (shrink)

Rationale: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the hippocampus is proposed for enhancement of memory impaired by injury or disease. Many pre-clinical DBS paradigms can be addressed in epilepsy patients undergoing intracranial monitoring for seizure localization, since they already have electrodes implanted in brain areas of interest. Even though epilepsy is usually not a memory disorder targeted by DBS, the studies can nevertheless model other memory-impacting disorders, such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Methods: Human patients undergoing Phase II invasive monitoring for (...) intractable epilepsy were implanted with depth electrodes capable of recording neurophysiological signals. Subjects performed a delayed-match-to-sample (DMS) memory task while hippocampal ensembles from CA1 and CA3 cell layers were recorded to estimate a multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) model of CA3-to-CA1 neural encoding and a memory decoding model (MDM) to decode memory information from CA3 and CA1 neuronal signals. After model estimation, subjects again performed the DMS task while either MIMO-based or MDM-based patterned stimulation was delivered to CA1 electrode sites during the encoding phase of the DMS trials. Each subject was sorted (post hoc) by prior experience of repeated and/or mild-to-moderate brain injury (RMBI), TBI, or no history (control) and scored for percentage successful delayed recognition (DR) recall on stimulated vs. non-stimulated DMS trials. The subject’s medical history was unknown to the experimenters until after individual subject memory retention results were scored. Results: When examined compared to control subjects, both TBI and RMBI subjects showed increased memory retention in response to both MIMO and MDM-based hippocampal stimulation. Furthermore, effects of stimulation were also greater in subjects who were evaluated as having pre-existing mild-to-moderate memory impairment. Conclusion: These results show that hippocampal stimulation for memory facilitation was more beneficial for subjects who had previously suffered a brain injury (other than epilepsy), compared to control (epilepsy) subjects who had not suffered a brain injury. This study demonstrates that the epilepsy/intracranial recording model can be extended to test the ability of DBS to restore memory function in subjects who previously suffered a brain injury other than epilepsy, and support further investigation into the beneficial effect of DBS in TBI patients. (shrink)

Aim: Participation in classroom physical activity breaks may improve children’s cognition, but few studies have involved adolescents. The primary aim of this study was to examine the effects of classroom-based resistance training with and without cognitive training on adolescents’ cognitive function.Methods: Participants were 97 secondary school students. Four-year 10 classes from one school were included in this four-arm cluster randomized controlled trial. Classes were randomly assigned to the following groups: sedentary control with no cognitive training, sedentary with cognitive training, resistance (...) training without cognitive training, and resistance training with cognitive training. Sessions varied in levels of both cognitive demand and resistance training and were administered three times per week for 4 weeks. Inhibition, cognitive flexibility, episodic memory, on-task behavior, and muscular fitness were assessed at baseline and post-test. Linear mixed models were used to examine changes within and between groups.Results: In comparison with the control group, episodic memory improved significantly in the resistance training without cognitive training group. There were no group-by-time effects for inhibition or cognitive flexibility. Classroom activity breaks both with and without cognitive demand improved participants’ on-task behavior in comparison with the control and sedentary group. The resistance training programs did not lead to improvements in muscular fitness.Conclusion: Participation in body weight resistance training without cognitive training led to selective improvements in episodic memory. No training effects were found for inhibition or cognitive flexibility. A longer study period may be necessary to induce improvements in muscular fitness and associated changes in inhibition and cognitive flexibility.Clinical Trial Registration:https://www.anzctr.org.au/ACTRN12621001341819.aspx, Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry—ACTRN12621001341819. (shrink)

Progressive supranuclear palsy is a movement disorder with prominent tau neuropathology. Brain diseases with abnormal tau deposits are called tauopathies, the most common of which is Alzheimer's disease. Environmental causes of tauopathies include repetitive head trauma associated with some sports. To identify common genetic variation contributing to risk for tauopathies, we carried out a genome-wide association study of 1,114 individuals with PSP and 3,247 controls followed by a second stage in which we genotyped 1,051 cases and 3,560 controls for the (...) stage 1 SNPs that yielded P ≤ 10-3. We found significant previously unidentified signals associated with PSP risk at STX6, EIF2AK3 and MOBP. We confirmed two independent variants in MAPT affecting risk for PSP, one of which influences MAPT brain expression. The genes implicated encode proteins for vesicle-membrane fusion at the Golgi-endosomal interface, for the endoplasmic reticulum unfolded protein response and for a myelin structural component. © 2011 Nature America, Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The essays in this book contextualize religion within a variety of cultural transformations. The methodological proposals of theologian and philosopher Bernard Lonergan, S.J. provide the inspiration and framework for these studies; and each makes its own distinct contribution beyond Lonergan's original work.

A soteriological perspective is not altogether absent in the christological hymn of Phil 2:6-11, even though the salvific value of the death and resurrection of Jesus does not receive in it special emphasis. In fact, W. Kasper and J. Moltmann - who are considered critically in the article as examples of contemporary christological/soteriological reflection - find in the hymn some hints for a soteriological reflection, which sometimes stresses a paschal perspective, sometimes an incarnational one. Both Kasper and Moltmann, however, show (...) more interest in what they must make the hymn say than in the meaning which they may discover in the hymn or receive from it. While adopting either a paschal or an incarnational perspective, this article intends to take its starting point from the meaning offered by the scriptural text, following for this the «consensus exegeticus». Two elements are brought to light in view of an implicit soteriological reflection: 1. the salvific aspect of the mystery of Christ in its entirety, from the kenosis in the incarnation to the self-emptying of the death on the cross , in Phil 2:6-8; 2. the universal salvific Lordship of Christ in Phil 2: 9-11, understood in the sense of the Lordship of Yahweh, explicitly qualified as salvific in Is 45:20-25, which is the background of the second part of the christological hymn. (shrink)

Mill's free speech doctrine is distinct from, yet compatible with, his central principle of ‘purely self-regarding’ liberty. Using the crucial analogy with trade, I claim that he defends a broad laissez-faire policy for expression, even though expression is ‘social’ or other-regarding conduct and thus legitimately subject to social regulation. An expedient laissez-faire policy admits of exceptions because speakers can sometimes cause such severe damage to others that coercive interference with the speech is justified. In those relatively few contexts where interference (...) is called for, however, the central principle of self-regarding liberty sets absolute limits to the scope of society's regulatory authority. Regulation can never amount to an outright ban of any type of expression that can be consumed by the individual without direct and immediate harm to others. Nevertheless, and perhaps surprisingly, the central liberty principle admits censorship of certain extraordinary types of expression which necessarily harm others. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill argued, in hisPrinciples of Political Economy(1848, 7th edn., 1871), that existing laws and customs of private property ought to be reformed to promote a far more egalitarian form of capitalism than hitherto observed anywhere. He went on to suggest that such an ideal capitalism might evolve spontaneously into a decentralized socialism involving a market system of competing worker co-operatives. That possibility of market socialism emerged only as the working classes gradually developed the intellectual and moral qualities required (...) for worker co-operatives to succeed against private firms. Workers would tend to reject the hierarchical wage relation as they developed the requisite personal qualities, he believed, and capitalists, facing escalating wages for skilled labour as a result of the diminishing supply of high-quality workers for hire, would tend to lend their capital to the worker co-operatives ‘at a diminishing rate of interest, and at last, perhaps, even to exchange their capital for terminable annuities. In this or some such mode’, he speculated, ‘the existing accumulations of capital might honestly, and by a kind of spontaneous process, become in the end the joint property of all who participate in their productive employment: a transformation which, thus effected, (and assuming of course that both sexes participate equally in the rights and in the government of the association) would be the nearest approach to social justice, and the most beneficial ordering of industrial affairs for the universal good, which it is possible at present to foresee.’. (shrink)

This is a book about liberal democratic values and their implications for the design of political institutions. Its distinctive feature is the use of some simple mathematical techniques (known as social choice theory) to clarify and defend a rather complex utilitarian conception of the liberal democratic 'way of life' based on John Stuart Mill's work. More specifically, the text focuses on three well-known 'social choice paradoxes' which are commonly held to destroy any possibility of an ideal harmony among liberal democratic (...) values; and draws upon suggestions implicit in Mill's writings to develop an ethically appealing liberal democratic social choice framework in which the aforementioned paradoxes no longer cause concern. The revised framework is a rather complex version of utilitarianism and should be of special interest to welfare economists, social choice theorists, democratic political theorists and philosophers concerned with utilitarian ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Little Eternities: Henry James’s Horatian Sense of Time KATHLEEN RILEY Summer’s lease hath all too short a date. —Shakespeare, Sonnet 18 On a visit to Bodiam Castle in Sussex in 1908, Henry James remarked to Edith Wharton: “Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”1 The potency of those two words derives from their immediate evocation of an (...) arrested moment between the day’s halcyon perfection and its imminent dying fall. Small wonder that those same words were later used to mythologize an Edenic Edwardian England poised on the brink of war, to preserve in aspic the fancy of a gilded innocence and order, and the promise of “blue remembered hills,”2 careless of the teeming, tumultuous reality of an England already in the shadow of the Tree of Knowledge. James’s masterpiece of 1881, The Portrait of a Lady, begins with a luxuriously redolent depiction of a summer afternoon, of the hours before dusk that constitute a pleasurable little eternity, of the languorous rhythms and rituals of what Disraeli called “the sustained splendour of [a] stately life.”3 Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not—some people of course never do,—the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.4 This passage, it strikes me, is essentially Horatian in its Epicurean delight in the passing moment. For the Augustan poet Horace, this delight, which is intrinsically elegiac, is expressed in the sympotic pleasures of wine and friendship, in the freedom aestivam sermone benigno tendere noctem (“to prolong the summer night with genial conversation,” Epistles i.5.11). For Henry James, it rests in “the ceremony known as afternoon tea,” in the lengthening shadows on an English lawn by “the reedy, silvery Thames” (PL 32). In both cases the evanescence of these simple pleasures is deeply felt and pleasure itself heightened by an undertone of melancholy, by a nostalgic apprehension of the present. LOCI AMOENI in his review of Augustus J. C. Hare’s Days near Rome (1875), Henry James commented: “The smallest pretext for quoting from Horace—the most quotable of the ancients— should always be cultivated.”5 His own facility for quoting from Horace was evident from his earliest published works, and belied an “extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous” education shuttling, at his father’s restless instigation, between New England, Britain and Continental Europe.6 James’s biographer, Leon Edel, recorded the family legend that William James (Henry’s Irish grandfather), “who was eighteen in 1789, when he set foot in the New World, 22 little eternities brought with him a ‘very small sum of money,’ a Latin grammar and a desire to visit the fresh battlefields of the Revolutionary War.”7 Young Henry’s instruction in Latin grammar seems to have begun in the Old World, under a private tutor in London in 1855, a Scotsman named Robert Thomson who later ran a small school in Edinburgh attended by Robert Louis Stevenson. It... (shrink)

"Remarkable how well Bouwsma understood Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems and how intelligently he was able to recount Wittgenstein's discussions. The bits about sensation are especially good. And the asides about the other philosophers--e.g. Dewey, Russell, Anscombe--are, while not frivolous, gossipy and titillating." --Riley Wallihan, Western Oregon University.

Before venturing to emend 39 it is as well to be certain of the meaning of 40. Here are some suggestions: ‘fill out their tale of years’ ; ‘accomplissent toute [om. Ripert] leur destinee’ ; ‘compiono interamente il loro destino’ ; ‘¨berdauert die Frist’ . This is no doubt what the words, in the context of 41–42, might be expected to mean, but is this sense in the Latin? Riley was bolder with his ‘fills its destined numbers’, but it (...) was left to Némethy to state explicitly that the passive and the active voices of the Latin verb are interchangeable and that inplentur numeris suis means ‘implent numeros annorum suorum’. (shrink)

In The Ethics of War and the Force of Law, Uwe Steinhoff argues “[t]he legitimate authority criterion should be abandoned.” (33) His position explicitly rejects the views of those defending legitimate authority as both indispensable and prior to the other criteria of the just war theory. In a subtle rejoined to these views, Steinhoff contends these accounts misrepresent the tradition and can provide no effective justification for retaining the criterion. Indeed, the criterion proves redundant. Much of Steinhoff’s analysis is compelling. (...) I shall argue, however, that despite correctly representing the tradition as more “pluralist” regarding possible authorization of war beyond the state, Steinhoff’s rejection of legitimate authority fails to account for its primary justification, namely, as identifying the proper agent through which to gauge the moral action involved in this particular use of force. My essay will advance this view by vindicating Steinhoff’s insight about the plurality of possible actors for whom “war” is appropriate necessitates the criterion of legitimate authority rather than making it redundant. (shrink)

Trait Selective Abortions (TSA) have come under critique as a medical practice that presents potential disabled infants as burdens and lacking the potential for meaningful lives. This paper, using the author’s background as a disabled person, contends that the philosophy underpinning TSAs reflects liberal society’s lack of a theory of needs. The author argues for a care ethics based approach informed by disability analyses to engage with TSAs.

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Ned Block argues that the higher-order (HO) approach to explaining consciousness is ‘defunct’ because a prominent objection (the ‘misrepresentation objection’) exposes the view as ‘incoherent’. What’s more, a response to this objection that I’ve offered elsewhere (Weisberg 2010) fails because it ‘amounts to abusing the notion of what-it’s-like-ness’ (xxx).1 In this response, I wish to plead guilty as charged. Indeed, I will continue herein to abuse Block’s notion of what-it’s-like-ness. After doing so, I will argue that the HO approach accounts (...) for the sense of what-it’s-like-ness that matters in a theory of consciousness. I will also argue that the only incoherence present in the HO theory is that generated by embracing Block’s controversial notion of what-it’s-like-ness, something no theorist of any stripe ought to do. Block is famous for (among other things) having introduced the notion of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ into contemporary philosophy of mind (Block 1995). This term is widely employed in the philosophical literature and it even appears in the empirical literature. But wide-speared usage has brought about divergent interpretations of the term. We can distinguish a ‘moderate’ and a ‘zealous’ reading of ‘phenomenal consciousness’. On the moderate reading, ‘phenomenal consciousness’ just means ‘experience’. Many people have embraced this sense of the term and use it to roughly pick out conscious experience involving sensory quality (states like conscious visual experiences or conscious pains, for example).2 On the zealous reading, however, phenomenal consciousness is held to be ‘distinct from any cognitive, intentional, or functional property’ (Block 1995: 234). That is, any explanation of phenomenal consciousness in exclusively cognitive, intentional, or functional terms will fail to capture, without remainder, what is really distinctive about phenomenal consciousness. Block, of course, is fully clear about embracing the zealous reading; indeed, his initial introduction of the notion is in those terms. The same ambiguity occurs with the much-used (and abused) idea of ‘what-it’s-like-ness’.. (shrink)

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a show that focused on teaching children an ethics of caring for oneself and care for others. This article examines those ethics through the songs “I Like You As You Are” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.” It contends that these songs focus on a celebration of the self and others, welcoming individuals as they are into the community, and embracing authenticity. This article looks to understand these ethics in a contemporary setting and argues that Mister (...) Rogers and the communal ethics of care that he taught are needed. (shrink)