The idea of role‐playing makes some people nervous – even some people who play role‐playing games (RPGs). So the idea of immersion is central to understanding how Dungeons Dragons and other aspects of participatory culture work. Phenomenology is a kind of “philosophy of mind” associated with the works of twentieth‐century philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean‐Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, among others. The domain of phenomenology encompasses the entire range of experiences in the world, paying attention to what Husserl called (...) “intentionality,” or how our consciousness is directed toward particular objects in the world. The fact that this is presented as an atypical approach to play, or at least one that requires some effort, invites us to ask about typical modes of play if visualization of in‐game events is not that mode. This chapter concluded by scratch the surface of a complete phenomenological description of role‐playing. (shrink)

In this new, updated edition of a book heralded as a clarion call to the nation's conscience, William Bennett asks why we see so little public outrage in the fade of the evidence of deep corruption within Bill Clinton's administration. The Death of Outrage examines the Monica Lewinsky scandal as it unfolded, from Clinton's denials that he had had sex with a young White House intern, to his testimony before the grand jury, to the nation's decision not to (...) remove Clinton from office. Brick by brick, Bennett dismantles the wall of defenses offered by Clinton and his apologists, and casts the clear light of moral reason and common sense on a shameful chapter in American history. (shrink)

Adam Smith and the philosophy of anti-history, by J. Weiss.--Towards a dissolution of the ontological argument, by A. C. Danto.--Romanticism, historicism, realism: toward a period concept for early 19th century intellectual history, by H. V. White.--History and humanity: the Proudhonian vision, by A. Noland.--Hintze and the legacy of Ranke, by M. Covensky.--Objections to metaphysics, by J. Cobitz.--The term expressionism in the visual arts, by V. H. Miesel.--Karl Löwith's anti-historicism, by B. Riesterer.--Antonio Gramsci; Marxism and the Italian intellectual tradition, by (...) J. Cammett.--Traditional Chinese historiography and local histories, by E. H. Pritchard.--From principle to principal: restoration and emperorship in Japan, by H. D. Harootunian.--National development and the evolution of the legal-rational bureaucracy: the prefectural governor in Japan, 1868-1945, by B. Silberman. (shrink)

In this study of Baraka's transformation of white avant-grade poetics into a unique black poetics, Harris argues that Baraka's work can be best understood in the context of a jazz aesthetic. Baraka, he says, has taken white avant-garde and postmodernist poetic modes and political ideas, and through a formal and social process of transformation typical of jazz revision, transformed them into a black poetics and metaphysics. Harris describes the failure of the postmodernists to provide suitable aesthetic and social (...) solutions for ethnic and political problems. Baraka set as his models jazzmen like John Coltrane and Charlie Parker, who attempted to destroy white music so that a new black music could be born. To "jazzify" his poetry, he adapted a "fast rap" of scatting, "songification" and other oral and performance techniques. Harris concludes a discussion of Baraka's influence on black literature. ISBN 0-8262-0483-X: $20.00. (shrink)

The corporatization of U.S. health care has directed cost containment efforts toward scrutinizing the clinical decisions of physicians. This stimulated a variety of new utilization management interventions, particularly in hospital and managed care settings. Recent changes in fee-for-service medicine and physicians' traditional agency relationships with patients, purchasers, and insurers are examined here. New information systems monitoring of physician ordering behavior has already begun to impact on physician autonomy and the relationship of physicians to provider organizations in both for-profit and not-for-profit (...) sectors. As managed care practice settings proliferate, serious ethical questions will be raised about agency relationships with patients.This article examines health system dynamics altering the historical agency relationship between the physician and patient and eroding the traditional autonomy of the medical profession in the United States. The corporatization of medicine and the accompanying information systems monitoring of physician productivity is seen to account of such change, now posing serious ethical dilemmas. (shrink)

The thymus is a unique primary lymphoid organ that supports the production of self‐tolerant T‐cells essential for adaptive immunity. Intrathymic microenvironments are microanatomically compartmentalised, forming defined cortical, and medullary regions each differentially supporting critical aspects of thymus‐dependent T‐cell maturation. Importantly, the specific functional properties of thymic cortical and medullary compartments are defined by highly specialised thymic epithelial cells (TEC). For example, in the medulla heterogenous medullary TEC (mTEC) contribute to the enforcement of central tolerance by supporting deletion of autoreactive T‐cell (...) clones, thereby counterbalancing the potential for random T‐cell receptor generation to contribute to autoimmune disease. Recent advances have further shed light on the pathways and mechanisms that control heterogeneous mTEC development and how differential mTEC functionality contributes to control self‐tolerant T‐cell development. Here we discuss recent findings in relation to mTEC development and highlight examples of how mTEC diversity contribute to thymus medulla function. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers have identified a number of moral and psychological harms associated with the attention economy (Alysworth & Castro, 2021; Castro & Pham, 2020; Williams, 2018). Missing from many of these accounts of the attention economy, however, is what exactly attention is. As a result of this neglect of the cognitive science of attention, many of these accounts are not empirically credible. They rely on oversimplified and unsophisticated accounts of not only attention, but self- control, and addiction as (...) well. Of note are accounts of the attention economy that rely on the ‘brain disease’ rhetoric of addiction and subsequent control failures (Aylsworth & Castro, 2021; Bhargava & Velasquez, 2021), accounts that rely on a strict dichotomy of top-down vs. bottom-up attention (Williams, 2018; Aylsworth & Castro, 2021), and accounts that construe attention as a limited resource (Williams, 2018). -/- Drawing on recent work from the neuroscience and psychology of attention, I demonstrate the shortcomings of these accounts and sketch a way forward for an empirically grounded account of the attention economy. These accounts tend to uphold strict dichotomies of voluntary control (e.g., compulsion versus choice, dual-process models of self-control, and top-down versus bottom-up) that cannot account for the complexities of attentional control, mental agency, and decision-making. As such, these empirically and conceptually impoverished accounts cannot adequately address the current so-called crisis of attention. To better understand the harms associated with the attention economy, we need an empirically responsible account of the nature and function of attention and mental agency. (shrink)

As several commentators and researchers have noted since late spring 2020, COVID-19 has laid bare the connections between entrenched structurally generated inequalities on one hand, and on the other hand relatively high degrees of susceptibility to contracting COVID-19 on the part of economically marginalized population segments. Far from running along the tracks of race neutrality, studies have demonstrated that the pandemic is affecting Black people more than Whites in the U.S.A. and U.K., where reliable racially-disaggregated data are available. While the (...) situation in Canada seems to follow the same pattern, race-specific data on COVID-19 are hard to come by. At present, there is no federal mandate to collect race-based data on COVID-19, though, in Ontario, at the municipal level, the City of Toronto has been releasing such data. This paper examines the entanglements of race, immigration status and the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada with particular emphasis on Black immigrants and non-immigrants in Toronto, using multiple forms of data pertaining to income, housing, immigration, employment and COVID-19 infections and deaths. Our findings show that the pandemic has had a disproportionate negative impact on Black people and other racialized people in Toronto and, indeed, Canada. (shrink)

This collection is a festschrift prepared for Williams on his retirement from the White’s Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Oxford. The topics covered include equality, consistency, comparison between science and ethics, integrity, moral reasons, the moral system, and moral knowledge. Most of the chapters combine exegetical and critical ambitions. With contributions by J. E. J. Altham, Jon Elster, Nicholas Jardine, Ross Harrison, Christopher Hookway, John McDowell, Martin Hollis, Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, and Charles Taylor, and replies by Bernard Williams.

I. INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEMAkrasia (or, weakness of the will), often defined as “the moral state of agents who act against their better judgment”—a definition first given by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, depicts one of the most human of predicaments.Risto Sarrinen, Weakness of the Will in Medieval Thought: From Augustine to Buridan (New York: E. J. Brill, 1994), p. 1. Similar definitions can be found in, e.g., Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VII, 1045b10–15; Donald Davidson, “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?” (...) in Moral Concepts, ed. J. Feinberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970) p. 93; William Charlton, Weakness of Will (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 1. We know what we ought to do, and we try. But, for one reason or other, we sometimes choose to act contrary to our better judgment.Being influenced by Socratic reasoning, some philosophers have argued that, in principle, one cannot freely and intentionally choose to act against one’s better judgment, if (1) one rationally judges what is best for oneself, (2) one prefers to act according to one’s rational judgment, and (3) one is free to make one’s own choice. See, e.g., Davidson, “How is Weakness,” pp. 93–113; and R. M. Hare, Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 78–79. Despite the logical difficulty, many believe that weakness of the will is a fact. (shrink)

Drawing upon the work of various critical race theorists, including Frantz Fanon, Kevin Quashie, Hortense J. Spillers, Calvin L. Warren and Sylvia Wynter, this article suggests that if Blackness has historically been, and continues to be, cast outside of being and into being, or what Wynter terms désêtre, then for Blackness to give expression to itself and/or to prove (or improvise) its “aliveness” is a necessarily “poetic” process, given that poetry/ poiesis is the bringing into being of that which previously (...) did not exist. Looking at a range of films, including Arthur Jafa’s Dreams are colder than Death (USA, 2014) and Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (USA, 2016), Barry Jenkins’s The Gaze (USA, 2021) and Paige Taul’s I am (USA, 2017), the article considers this cinematic poiesis in the light of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of poetry, drawing out the structuring antiblackness at work in the latter and in modernity more generally, before suggesting that cinematically to present Blackness in a loving fashion/to love Blackness through film is what Denise Ferreira da Silva might term a radical and “poethical” gesture, using poetry to decolonise our white supremacist world. (shrink)

"This book, one of the most frequently cited works on Martin Heidegger in any language, belongs on any short list of classic studies of Continental philosophy. William J. Richardson explores the famous turn in Heidegger's thought after Being in Time and demonstrates how this transformation was radical without amounting to a simple contradiction of his earlier views." "In a full account of the evolution of Heidegger's work as a whole, Richardson provides a detailed, systematic, and illuminating account of both (...) divergences and fundamental continuities in Heidegger's philosophy, especially in light of recently published works. He demonstrates that the "thinking" of Being for the later Heidegger has exactly the same configuration as the radical phenomenology of the early Heidegger, once he has passed through the "turning" of his way." Including as a preface the letter that Heidegger wrote to Richardson and a new writer's preface and epilogue, the new edition of this valuable guide will be an essential resource for students and scholars for many years to come. (shrink)

Between the opposing claims of reason and religious subjectivity may be a middle ground, William J. Wainwright argues. His book is a philosophical reflection on the role of emotion in guiding reason. There is evidence, he contends, that reason functions properly only when informed by a rightly disposed heart. The idea of passional reason, so rarely discussed today, once dominated religious reflection, and Wainwright pursues it through the writings of three of its past proponents: Jonathan Edwards, John Henry Newman, (...) and William James. He focuses on Edwards, whose work typifies the Christian perspective on religious reasoning and the heart. Then, in his discussion of Newman and James, Wainwright shows how the emotions participate in non-religious reasoning. Finally he takes up the challenges most often posed to notions of passional reason: that such views justify irrationality and wishful thinking, that they can't be defended without circularity, and that they lead to relativism. His response to these charges culminates in an eloquent and persuasive defense of the claim that reason functions best when influenced by the appropriate emotions, feelings, and intuitions. (shrink)

In this reply to James H. Fetzer’s “Minds and Machines: Limits to Simulations of Thought and Action”, I argue that computationalism should not be the view that (human) cognition is computation, but that it should be the view that cognition (simpliciter) is computable. It follows that computationalism can be true even if (human) cognition is not the result of computations in the brain. I also argue that, if semiotic systems are systems that interpret signs, then both humans and computers are (...) semiotic systems. Finally, I suggest that minds can be considered as virtual machines implemented in certain semiotic systems, primarily the brain, but also AI computers. In doing so, I take issue with Fetzer’s arguments to the contrary. (shrink)

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)

“Contextual” vocabulary acquisition is the active, deliberate acquisition of a meaning for a word in a text by reasoning from textual clues and prior knowledge, including language knowledge and hypotheses developed from prior encounters with the word, but without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. But what is “context”? Is it just the surrounding text? Does it include the reader’s background knowledge? I argue that the appropriate context for contextual vocabulary acquisition is the reader’s “internalization” of the (...) text “integrated” into the reader’s “prior” knowledge via belief revision. (shrink)

The philosophy of religion as a distinct discipline is an innovation of the last two hundred years, but its central topics--the existence and nature of the divine, humankind's relation to it, the nature of religion and its place in human life--have been with us since the inception of philosophy. Philosophers have long critically examined the truth of (and rational justification for) religious claims, and have explored such philosophically interesting phenomena as faith, religious experience and the distinctive features of religious discourse. (...) The second half of the twentieth-century has been an especially fruitful period, with philosophers using new developments in logic and epistemology to mount both sophisticated defenses of, and attacks on, religious claims. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion contains newly commissioned chapters by 21 prominent experts who cover the field in a comprehensive but accessible manner. Each chapter is expository, critical, and representative of a distinctive viewpoint. The Handbook is divided into two sections. The first, "Problems," covers the most frequently discussed topics, among them arguments for God's existence, the problem of evil, and religious epistemology. The second is called "Approaches" and contains four essays assessing the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of practicing philosophy of religion. The Handbook offers contributors of high stature who present substantive and in-depth treatment of the most central topics. It is a must-have reference for anyone with an interest in philosophy and religion. (shrink)

This project continues our interdisciplinary research into computational and cognitive aspects of narrative comprehension. Our ultimate goal is the development of a computational theory of how humans understand narrative texts. The theory will be informed by joint research from the viewpoints of linguistics, cognitive psychology, the study of language acquisition, literary theory, geography, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. The linguists, literary theorists, and geographers in our group are developing theories of narrative language and spatial understanding that are being tested by the (...) cognitive psychologists and language researchers in our group, and a computational model of a reader of narrative text is being developed by the AI researchers, based in part on these theories and results and in part on research on knowledge representation and reasoning. This proposal describes the knowledge-representation and natural-language-processing issues involved in the computational implementation of the theory; discusses a contrast between communicative and narrative uses of language and of the relation of the narrative text to the story world it describes; investigates linguistic, literary, and hermeneutic dimensions of our research; presents a computational investigation of subjective sentences and reference in narrative; studies children’s acquisition of the ability to take third-person perspective in their own storytelling; describes the psychological validation of various linguistic devices; and examines how readers develop an understanding of the geographical space of a story. This report is a longer version of a project description submitted to NSF. This document, produced in May 2007, is a L ATEX version of Technical Report 89-07 (Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science, August 1989), with slightly.. (shrink)

Contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is the deliberate acquisition of a meaning for a word in a text by reasoning from context, where “context” includes: (1) the reader’s “internalization” of the surrounding text, i.e., the reader’s “mental model” of the word’s “textual context” (hereafter, “co-text” [3]) integrated with (2) the reader’s prior knowledge (PK), but it excludes (3) external sources such as dictionaries or people. CVA is what you do when you come across an unfamiliar word in your reading, realize that (...) you don’t know what it means, decide that you need to know what it means in order to understand the passage, but there is no one around to ask, and it is not in the dictionary (or you are too lazy to look it up). In such a case, you can try to figure out its meaning “from context”, i.e., from clues in the co-text together with your prior knowledge. Our computational theory of CVA—implemented in a the SNePS knowledge representation and reasoning system [28]—begins with a stored knowledge base containing SNePS representations of relevant PK, inputs SNePS representations of a passage containing an unfamiliar word, and draws inferences from these two (integrated) information sources. When asked to define the word, definition algorithms deductively search the resulting network for information of the sort that might be found in a dictionary definition, outputting a definition frame whose slots are the kinds of features that a definition might contain (e.g., class membership, properties, actions, spatio-temporal information, etc.) and whose slot-fillers contain information gleaned from the network [6–8,20,23,24]. We are investigating ways to make our system more robust, to embed it in a naturallanguage-processing system, and to incorporate morphological information. Our research group, including reading educators, is also applying our methods to the develop-. (shrink)

H´ector-Neri Casta˜neda-Calder´on (December 13, 1924–September 7, 1991) was born in San Vicente Zacapa, Guatemala. He attended the Normal School for Boys in Guatemala City, later called the Military Normal School for Boys, from which he was expelled for refusing to fight a bully; the dramatic story, worthy of being filmed, is told in the “De Re” section of his autobiography, “Self-Profile” (1986). He then attended a normal school in Costa Rica, followed by studies in philosophy at the University of San (...) Carlos, Guatemala. He won a scholarship to the University of Minnesota, where he received his B.A. (1950), M.A. (1952), and Ph.D. (1954), all in philosophy. His dissertation, “The Logical Structure of Moral Reasoning”, was written under the direction of Wilfrid Sellars. He returned to teach in Guatemala, and then received a scholarship to study at Oxford University (1955–1956), after which he took a sabbatical-replacement position in philosophy at Duke University (1956). His first full-time academic appointment was at Wayne State University (1957– 1969), where he founded the philosophy journal Noˆus (1967, a counter-offer made to him by Wayne State to encourage him to stay there rather than to take the chairmanship of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania). In 1969, he moved (along with several of his Wayne colleagues) to Indiana University, where he eventually became the Mahlon Powell Professor of Philosophy and, later, its first Dean of Latino Affairs (1978–1981). He remained at Indiana until his death. He was also a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin (1962–1963) and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1981–1982). He received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1967–1968), the T. Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. He was elected President of the American Philosophical Association Central Division (1979– 1980), named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1990), and received the Presidential Medal of Honor from the Government of Guatemala (1991). Casta˜neda’s philosophical interests spanned virtually the entire spectrum of philosophy, and his theories form a highly interconnected whole.. (shrink)

A response to a recent critique by Cem Bozşahin of the theory of syntactic semantics as it applies to Helen Keller, and some applications of the theory to the philosophy of computer science.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Selected Letters by William, Henry JamesWilliam James EarleWilliam and Henry James. Selected Letters. Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. Introduction by John J. McDermott. Charlottesville VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997. Pp. xxxi + 570. $ 39.95.Almost fifty years of letters to and from the very diversely brilliant James brothers: in this volume a generous, and probably ample, selection of 216 from a total (...) of 740 surviving letters or postcards, from an original total, according to the present editors, of twice as many. This volume of correspondence reflects the deep, unquestioned, unshakable familial (and virtually statutory) closeness of William and Henry who happened, as adults, to be seldom in the same place. There is, it must be said, very little explicit philosophy, narrowly or broadly defined, in these letters, but the philosophical reader will—or ought to—find much raw material for philosophical reflection. For example, a reasonable historicist thesis of how brotherhood, or family connection generally, plays itself out is supported by these documents. The nineteenth century is not the same as the twentieth. For example, here is William’s comment on the will of his sister, Alice, who left more to her companion and care-giver, Katherine Loring, a [End Page 479] women of extraordinary virtue and burden, than to her brother Robertson: “I can well sympathize with Alice’s desire to leave her something handsome; but I must say that her own consent (being apparently privy to the will) strikes me as tant soit peu lacking in delicacy. Surely no one of us would like to be in such a position in her family or any other” (271). This would be, in 1998, a rather unenlightened and ungenerous attitude, but is natural enough in 1892, even if not quite inevitable, not being shared by Alice herself. There is, incidentally, much discussion of wills and bequests, for the Jameses were of the genteel class, people with small family money and modest private incomes for whom the wherewithal to maintain homes with servants and to provide themselves with country houses and recuperative European vacations was always a faintly embarrassing, and occasionally a pressing, problem.It is probably also true that the much-discussed question of Henry’s homosexuality has, somehow, to be recast in historically relative terms. Here is an early report—1869—of Henry’s from Oxford: “As I walked along the river I saw hundreds of the mighty lads of England, clad in white flannel & blue, immense, fair-haired, magnificent in their youth, lounging down the stream in their punts or pulling in straining crews & rejoicing in their godlike strength” (41). This could not, the point is, be said by anyone, gay or straight, in 1998. Yet Henry is neither generally naive nor uncritically anglophile. He says of the Warwickshire scenery, which in a way he likes, that it is “too monotonously sweet & smooth—too comfortable, too ovine, too bovine, too English in a word.” And he adds, a little surprisingly: “It seems like a vast show region kept up at the expense of the poor” (41). This is only one of many appealing comments not sparsely scattered, but unpredictably, in letters of more ordinary news. Here’s one I liked occasioned by seeing theater in Paris: “We talk about it & write about it & criticize & dogmatize & analyse to the end of time: but those brave players stand forth & exemplify it & act—create—produce!” (66).Of course the “wit and wisdom” are not the monopoly of Henry. Here is William being wise: “We all learn sooner or later that we must gather ourselves up and more or less arbitrarily concentrate our interests, throw much overboard to save any” (55–56). Again: “It is a sweet world, in the interstices of its bedevilment & brutality” (321). And William being funny: “Boils are surely the most slowly evolving things in nature—Christian doctrine is nothing to them” (393). He is talking about his own boils and was subject, at every period, to ailments and infirmities: “Since writing to you, I have been swimming in deep seas of influenza, gout and Erysipelas of the face” (443). Or as he, in 1900, sums it up: “My... (shrink)

The introduction offers a brief account of the history and nature of philosophy of religion with particular attention to the complex developments of the past 400 years. Diverse aims of and approaches to philosophy of religion are distinguished, and suggestions are offered for the future.

This essay is part of a dossier on Cristina Lafont's book Democracy without Shortcuts.

If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.

In the Fall of 1983, I offered a junior/senior-level course in Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, in the Department of Philosophy at SUNY Fredonia, after returning there from a year’s leave to study and do research in computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) at SUNY Buffalo. Of the 30 students enrolled, most were computerscience majors, about a third had no computer background, and only a handful had studied any philosophy. (I might note that enrollments have subsequently increased in the Philosophy Department’s (...) AI-related courses, such as logic, philosophy of mind, and epistemology, and that several computer science students have added philosophy as a second major.) This article describes that course, provides material for use in such a course, and offers a bibliography of relevant articles in the AI, cognitive science, and philosophical literature. (shrink)

We develop and apply a multi-dimensional conception of explanatory depth towards a comparative analysis of inflationary and bouncing paradigms in primordial cosmology. Our analysis builds on earlier work due to Azhar and Loeb (2021) that establishes initial condition fine-tuning as a dimension of explanatory depth relevant to debates in contemporary cosmology. We propose dynamical fine-tuning and autonomy as two further dimensions of depth in the context of problems with instability and trans-Planckian modes that afflict bouncing and inflationary approaches respectively. In (...) the context of the latter issue, we argue that the recently formulated trans-Planckian censorship conjecture leads to a trade-off for inflationary models between dynamical fine-tuning and autonomy. We conclude with the suggestion that explanatory preference with regard to the different dimensions of depth is best understood in terms of differing attitudes towards heuristics for future model building. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to exhibit in detail the setting for the version of the Cogito Argument that appears in Descartes’s Meditations. I believe that a close reading of the text can shed new light on the nature and role of the “evil demon”, on the nature of God as he appears in the first few Meditations, and on the place of the Cogito Argument in Descartes’s overall scheme.

This book examines the effects of the market mechanism on economies and societies. It argues that perfect competition has a tendency to promote adulteration of products and a general deterioration in quality. It also contends that it is very difficult for competitive firms to behave in socially desirable ways - being kind to the environment, contributing to worthy social programmes, handling redundancy humanely. The book goes on to propose ways in which these flaws might be remedied without subverting the market (...) mechanism. (shrink)

American democracy faces severe challenges today, as everyday life gathers pace, national borders become increasingly porous, and commodity culture becomes more dominant. Democracy and Vision assembles a cast of prominent political theorists to consider the problems confronting political life by reviewing, assessing, and expanding on the ideas of one of the most influential political thinkers of the past forty years, Sheldon Wolin. The book consists of three sections linked by the underlying theme of Wolin's monumental effort to define ''the political'' (...) and the conditions of democratic life. In the first, Nicholas Xenos, George Kateb, Fred Dallmayr, and Charles Taylor focus, in particular, on whether mass political participation, sustainable in times of upheaval as what Wolin aptly termed ''fugitive democracy,'' can be buoyed by political institutions during periods of stability. In the second section, Wendy Brown, Aryeh Botwinick, Melissa A. Orlie, and Anne Norton examine the relevance of Wolin's ideas to current debates about, for example, social diversity and the commercialization of culture. In the last, Stephen K. White, Kirstie M. McClure, Michael J. Shapiro, and J. Peter Euben address globalization and temporality in relation to Wolin's narrative of decline, asking, among other things, whether citizenship today must incorporate a cosmopolitan dimension. These essays--and an introduction by William Connolly that lucidly outlines Wolin's thought and the deep uncertainty about political theory in the 1960s that did much to inspire his work--offer unprecedented insights into Wolin's lament that modernity has meant the loss of the political. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Royce, Racism, and the Colonial IdealWhite Supremacy and the Illusion of Civilization in Josiah Royce's Account of the White Man's Burden1Tommy J. CurryNo colony can be made by a theory of Imperialism, it can only be made by people who want to colonize and are capable of maintaining themselves as colonists.—Sir Sydney OlivierIntroductionAs with most historic white figures in philosophy, their repopularization and reintroduction into contemporary circles (...) commits their work, regardless of its initial silence, to speak to the problem of anti-Black racism in America. Josiah Royce is no different in this regard. In recent years, white scholars like Jacquelyn Kegley and Shannon Sullivan have introduced revisions to Royce's thought that make it appear multicultural and antiracist, despite the anachronism of such a contention. According to Kegley, "Royce believes, as others in the contemporary scene, that 'race' as a concept cannot be eliminated, [because] it plays too crucial a role, both positive and negative, in self- and social identification" (216). While Kegley is correct that contemporary scholars like Lucius Outlaw and Cornel West have adamantly defended the importance of race as a social and cultural entity, her claim is in stark contradiction to the racial eliminativism of other scholars like Anthony Appiah and Alain Locke, whom she also contends that Royce agrees with simultaneously.2 While it makes perfect sense for Kegley to try to put Royce in conversation with contemporary Black thinkers in race theory, her work is indicative of a trend aiming to gain currency for historic white thinkers in current race debates at the expense of historical accuracy. Black scholars who studied under Royce and applied his theories to the race problem from the mid-1900s onward, like William H. Ferris3 and William T. Fontaine,4 are ignored by white scholars because the first application of Roycean philosophy supported assimilationism. It is only today with the political and ideological [End Page 10] ethicizations of racial diversity and multiculturalism that Royce's work is interpreted as critically conserving race.5In contrast to contemporary works on Royce and race, this article seeks to evaluate the current claims for the relevance of Royce's views in contemporary debates on race. I maintain that only by taking Royce out of his historical context (late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century thought) do his ideas on race acquire a level of importance that cannot be supported by the actual evidence he himself advances. Conversely, by actually placing Royce in his historical context, this article will demonstrate that Royce's 1905 article entitled "Race Questions" (later published as "Race Questions and Prejudices" in 1906) is an unapologetic extension of his 1900 article entitled "Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization," where Royce adamantly champions British colonialism and assimilation as the remedy to the burgeoning race problem both at home and abroad. I begin with a critical analysis that places Josiah Royce's attitudes firmly within the boundaries of his times. In what follows, I will attempt to contextualize Royce's seemingly progressive stance on Japan as part of a more general reaction whites had during the early 1900s to Russia's defeat by the Japanese. Instead of reading Royce's stance on Japan as a moment of exceptionalism, I contend that Royce's attitude was in fact a popular disposition that signaled the inevitable shift of race science away from biological determinism toward more environmentalist explanations. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I will show that Royce's disposition toward Blacks was firmly rooted in a colonial and assimilationist logic that ultimately sought the cultural destruction of African-descended people. A closer look at Royce's prefatory remarks on British colonialism from 1900 and his valorization of English colonial administration in Jamaica actually reveals an insidious racial dynamic in Royce's thought that is anything but antiracist. Finally, having established Royce's philosophical stake in American assimilation and Western domination, I argue that the "provincial revision" currently in vogue amongst American philosophers working with Royce is simply not enough to overturn Royce's clearly racist investments in dealing with the race question.If I Can Think It... Then I Can Do It—Reading Royce... (shrink)