We propose another positive illusion that fits with McKay & Dennett's (M&D's) criteria for adaptive misbeliefs. This illusion is pervasive in adult reasoning but we focus on its prevalence in children's developing theories. It is a strongly held conviction arising from normal functioning of the doxastic system that confers adaptive advantage on the individual.

Despite their status as high-income food producing nations, children and their caregivers, both in the United States (U.S.) and Australia can experience food insecurity. Nutrition researchers formed a joint U.S.-Australia collaboration to help advance food security for households with young children aged 0–5 years. This study investigated food insecurity from the perspective of caregivers, especially their perceptions of the impact of food insecurity on their own childhood, their current life, and for the children in their care. Semi-structured interviews were conducted (...) from July to September 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants were recruited in Omaha, Nebraska, U.S. (_n_ = 19) and Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (_n_ = 22), during periods of stay-at-home public health orders. These two case study sites enabled an exploration of some universal, and some context-specific, social, economic, and health conditions that buffer, or exacerbate, food insecurity for families in these neo-liberal political settings. An inductive thematic analysis was conducted and established six themes:_growing up poor_, _lessons learned_,_ feeding a family amidst a pandemic_,_ caregiver coping strategies_, _food security in the early years_ and _protecting (young) children_. Perspectives on local anti-hunger strategies were organized to outline participant’s preferred solutions. Household food insecurity is conceptualized in public policy in the U.S. and Australia as a short-term crisis for people, justifying austere, time-limited and patchwork solutions. A narrative of caregivers’ lived experience of food insecurity suggests that it is inter-generational, and exacerbated by a food system shock (i.e., COVID-19). These findings from two varying cities and nations offer a different conceptualization of the timespan and nature of the phenomenon of food insecurity, challenging a dominant policy narrative and highlighting the inadequacy of current so-called solutions. (shrink)

Scientific and philosophical literature on causality has become highly specialised. It is hard to find suitable access points for students, young researchers, or professionals outside this domain. This book provides a guide to the complex literature, explains the scientific problems of causality and the philosophical tools needed to address them.

Written for the general reader and the student of moral philosophy, this book provides a clear and unified treatment of Kant's theory of morals. Bruce Aune takes into account all of Kant's principal writings on morality and presents them in a contemporary idiom. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important (...) books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

What exactly are Peirce’s views about the a priori?1Though the term “a priori” and others derived from it do not occur in Peirce’s writings very frequently, they occur often enough to motivate the above question. Their best known appearance is in his “The Fixation of Belief ”, in which he famously rejects the “a priori method” in favor of the “scientific method”. Of course, we cannot take this rejection alone as sufficient evidence that his philosophy is incompatible with any claim (...) to a priori knowledge or justification, since what he opposes as the a priori method is not necessarily representative of all theories having a positive role for the a.. (shrink)

Philosophers writing on the subject of human action have found it tempting to introduce their subject by raising Wittgenstein's question, 'What is left over if you subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?' The presumption is that something of particular interest is involved in an action of raising an arm that is not present in a mere bodily movement, and the philosopher's task is to specify just what this is. Unfortunately, such (...) an approach does not take us very far, since a person could properly be said to raise his (or her) arm while asleep or hypnotized even though he (or she) would not be performing an action in the sense of 'action' with which philosophers are particularly concerned. To avoid this kind of difficulty I shall approach the subject of human action is a more academic way: I shall expound some important rival theories of human action, and introduce the relevant issues by commenting critically on those theories. One of the issues I eventually introduce is a metaphysical one. A theory of action makes sense, I contend, only on the assumption that there are such 'things' as actions (or events). After considering some key arguments bearing on the issue I conclude that, as matters currently stand in philosophy, a metaphysically noncommittal attitude toward actions and events seems justified. (shrink)

Recently in this journal Marilyn Gaye Piety argued both that the critique of Kierkegaardian choice Alasdair MacIntyre offers in After Virtue misconstrues Kierkegaard and that a reformulated version of Kierkegaardian choice offers an important gain for philosophy. I argue that Piety has underestimated the power of the Maclntyrean critique of Kierkegaard, that consequently an adequate account of rational choice remains unavailable from that quarter, and that at crucial points MacIntyre’s own socially teleological approach to choice offers a superior account.

Neoliberalism is invariably presented as a governing regime of market and competition-based systems rather than as a set of migratory practices that are re-setting the ethical standards of the academy. This article seeks to explore the way in which neoliberalism is shifting the prevailing values of the academy by drawing on two illustrations: the death of disinterestedness and the obfuscation of authorship. While there was never a golden age when norms such as disinterestedness were universally practiced they represented widely accepted (...) aesthetic ideals associated with academic life. By contrast, neoliberal academics embrace a new set of assumptions and norms that stand in sharp relief to many of the values that were previously espoused. Practices that might have been regarded as ethically dubious by earlier generations of academics, such as grantsmanship, self-justificatory expressions of interestedness and tangential claims to authorship, are now regarded as legitimate and positive virtues in a more aggressive age of hyper-performativity. (shrink)

Hospital administrators may lack familiarity with what clinical ethicists do (and do not do), and many clinical ethicists report receiving inadequate financial support for their clinical ethics consultation services (CECSs). Ethics consultation is distinct in that it is not reimbursable by third parties, and its financial benefit to the hospital may not be quantifiable. These peculiarities make it difficult for clinical ethicists to resort to tried-and-true outcome-centered evaluative strategies, like cost reduction or shortened length of stay for patients, to show (...) a “need” for ethics consultation. Likewise, it can be difficult for clinical ethicists to “speak the same language” as healthcare administrators and managers, which, in turn, means that CECSs run the risk of being unable to demonstrate value to those who pay for the service. The purpose of this descriptive article is to provide practical guidance to clinical ethicists and program directors on how to cultivate administrative support for a CECS. Specifically, we discuss two elements that clinical ethics leaders must critically appraise and successfully argue to meet the expectations of administrators— the value of a CECS and its fit in clinical workflow. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the concepts of issue legitimacy and organizational legitimacy, providing a new measure of each construct. The scales were developed and tested using data collected through a statewide survey of Alabama residents. Assessments of issue legitimacy were based on perceptions of direct-to-consumer advertising, whereas assessments of organizational legitimacy were based on perceptions of the pharmaceutical industry as a whole. The findings provide evidence that organizational legitimacy can be reliably measured using a five-item scale (...) and issue legitimacy can be reliably measured using a six-item scale. The implications of the results and potential uses of the scales are discussed. (shrink)

According to the psychological account of personal identity, our identity is based on the continuity of psychological connections, and so we do not begin to exist until these are possible, some months after conception. This entails the psychological account faces a challenge from the non-identity problem—our intuition that someone cannot be harmed by actions that are responsible for their existence, even if these actions seem clearly to cause them harm. It is usually discussed with regard to preconception harms, but in (...) the context of the psychological account, it is also applicable to prenatal harms. Inflicting prenatal injury is widely thought to be morally impermissible, but if the injury is identity-determining on the psychological account, then no-one seems to be harmed—rather, the injury is responsible for bringing them into existence. Here, I argue that identity-determining injuries can routinely occur on the psychological account, and that this undermines the account. I assess Nicola Williams’ proposal to salvage the account based on a trans-world account of personal identity, and show that it is unsuccessful. I then show that Jeff McMahan’s embodied mind account of personal identity is also susceptible. I conclude that identity-determining prenatal injuries pose a significant challenge for the psychological account and its variants, and provide a reason for supporting alternative accounts that fix personal identity at conception. (shrink)

To determine when the life of a human organism begins, Mark T. Brown has developed the somatic integration definition of life. Derived from diagnostic criteria for human death, Brown’s account requires the presence of a life‐regulation internal control system for an entity to be considered a living organism. According to Brown, the earliest point at which a developing human could satisfy this requirement is at the beginning of the fetal stage, and so the embryo is not regarded as a living (...) human organism. This, Brown claims, has significant bioethical implications for both abortion and embryo experimentation. Here, we dispute the cogency of Brown’s derivation. Diagnostic criteria for death are used to determine when an organism irreversibly ceases functioning as an integrated whole, and may vary significantly depending on how developed the organism is. Brown’s definition is derived from a specific definition of death applicable to postnatal human beings, which is insufficient for generating a general definition for human organismal life. We have also examined the bioethical implications of Brown’s view, and have concluded that they are not as significant as he believes. Whether the embryo is classified as a human organism is of peripheral interest—a far more morally relevant question is whether the embryo is a biological individual with an identity that is capable of persisting during development. (shrink)

The A Priori, Universality, and Necessity 23 Axioms and Primitive Rules of Inference 26 General Doubts about Intuitive Knowledge 28 Logical Truths and Rules of Inference 32 Alleged Self-evident Factual Truths 36 Three Final Examples, Two Old and One New 40 An Indirect Argument for Rationalism 43..

I hope to persuade Charles Fried to think again about his developing views on distributive justice. Since I live at a certain remove from Cambridge, the best I can offer is a hypothetical dialogue with an imaginary person whose views seem, to me at least, of a Friedian inspiration. My central question deals with the way Fried establishes his rights to things he candidly concedes he does not deserve. To present my problems, I shall begin with a simpler case than (...) those – involving kidneys and talents – that Fried makes central to his discussion. Rather than starting with these rather special goods, I find it clarifying to focus first on more garden variety commodities – which, to emphasize their character, I shall call apples. (shrink)

From its inception Darwinian evolutionary biology has been seen as having a problematic relationship of fact and theory. While the forging of the modern evolutionary synthesis resolved most of these issues for biologists, critics continue to argue that natural selection and common descent are “only theories.” Much of the confusion engendered by the “evolution wars” can be clarified by applying the concept of phenomena, inferred from fact, and explained by theories, thus locating where legitimate dissent may still exist. By setting (...) such analysis in the context of research traditions, it is possible to gain further insight into the complex interplay of facts, phenomena, and theories. Two case studies are explored to assess the value of such approaches, one from within evolutionary biology, the Baldwin effect, and one from outside, intelligent design. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to augment the business values literature by building upon research that claims individual value frames are subject to hierarchical re-scaling, value redefinition, and value removal or induction. In contrast to the person-organization cultural fit approach of value congruence, we postulate that the cognitive discomforts resulting from just-world needs, self-identity completion and self-concept maintenance, as moderated by contextual and dispositional variables, are resolved through the selection and accentuation of legitimating and justifying values that ultimately cast (...) the nature of the world as fair, complete central self-identities, and affirm the self. Research and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

In the same year, 1961, Peter D. Mitchell and Robert R.J.P. Williams both put forward hypotheses for the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation in mitochondria and photophosphorylation in chloroplasts. Mitchell's proposal was ultimately adopted and became known as the chemiosmotic theory. Both hypotheses were based on protons and differed markedly from the then prevailing chemical theory originally proposed by E.C. Slater in 1953, which by 1961 was failing to account for a number of experimental observations. Immediately following the publication of Williams's (...) hypothesis and before his own was published, Mitchell initiated a correspondence. Examination of the letters shows the development of a dispute based on the validity of the proposals, who should have priority and particularly whether Mitchell had drawn on Williams's work without acknowledgement. We have concluded that Mitchell's proposals were original although it is evident that prior to the correspondence Williams had considered and rejected a proposition similar to Mitchell's theory. However, a major cause of the dispute was the difference in disciplinary backgrounds of Mitchell, a microbial biochemist and Williams, a chemist. (shrink)

Bruce L. Kinzer offers a rich examination of personal and political themes in the life of John Stuart Mill, one of the most influential liberal thinkers of the nineteenth century. By investigating young Mill's formative period and his relations with his father, Harriet Taylor, and Thomas Carlyle, Kinzer casts light on the challenges Mill faced in understanding himself and what he wished to become. Kinzer's political explorations probe issues central to the appreciation of Mill as an engaged political thinker (...) and actor and offers an insightful portrait of a complex and towering figure."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

This paper is about the common thought that anger is “not worth it” because of the bad effects that it has on the angry person. It contends that this common thought is sometimes deeply puzzling, because although it looks to be a thought about anger’s unfittingness, it is hard to see what such bad effects have to do with fittingness. The paper gives an account of the elusive connection between bad effects and fit. In brief, it argues that the thought (...) that anger is “not worth it” has to do with the sense of “importance” that the anger manifests. That anger portrays its object as more important than it actually is shows it to be unfitting, but also shows why seemingly instrumental considerations like bad effects bear on fittingness, insofar as they bear on importance. The paper then shows how this account illuminates a kind of emotional dilemma often faced by oppressed people and closes with a brief discussion of some broader implications. (shrink)

We identify two aspects of the problem of maintaining perceptual stability despite an observer's eye movements. The first, visual direction constancy, is the (egocentric) stability of apparent positions of objects in the visual world relative to the perceiver. The second, visual position constancy, is the (exocentric) stability of positions of objects relative to each other. We analyze the constancy of visual direction despite saccadic eye movements.Three information sources have been proposed to enable the visual system to achieve stability: the structure (...) of the visual field, proprioceptive inflow, and a copy of neural efference or outflow to the extraocular muscles. None of these sources by itself provides adequate information to achieve visual direction constancy; present evidence indicates that all three are used.Our final question concerns how information processing operations result in a stable world. The three traditionally suggested means have been elimination, translation, or evaluation. All are rejected. From a review of the physiological and psychological evidence we conclude that no subtraction, compensation, or evaluation need take place. The problem for which these solutions were developed turns out to be a false one. We propose a “calibration” solution: correct spatiotopic positions are calculated anew for each fixation. Inflow, outflow, and retinal sources are used in this calculation: saccadic suppression of displacement bridges the errors between these sources and the actual extent of movement. (shrink)

L’émergence des marchés en Europe de l’Est, en Asie et celle du cyber-espace ne se fait pas avec la rapidité que beaucoup d’observateurs voudraient. La lenteur de ce développement provient de l’environnement institutionnel : les systèmes législatifs ne soutiennent pas les droits de propriété privée et ne font pas plus respecter les contrats. Ainsi, beaucoup soutiennent que les Etats doivent intensifier leurs efforts pour établir un droit commercial. En réalité, il faut réclamer un désengagement de l’Etat dans le droit commercial. (...) Tout au long de l’histoire, le recours efficace de l’activité commerciale est toujours provenu d’un système polycentrique de droit coutumier avec des querelles résolues par le biais de cours de commerce ou d’arbitrage eux-mêmes appuyés par des sanctions d’ostracisme imposées de façon privée, et il en est de même pour le droit commercial international aujourd’hui. Nous proposons une description des institutions et des processus du droit commercial international, suivie de discutions sur la nécessité d’un droit polycentrique et des caractéristiques du droit coutumier. Finalement, nous expliquons pourquoi nous devrions compter sur un système de droit coutumier polycentrique sans Etat pour l’émergence récente des marchés.The emergence of markets in Eastern Europe, Asia, and cyberspace is no occurring as rapidly as many observers would like. Slow development is a function of the institutional environment: legal systems do not support private property rights or enforce contracts. Thus, many contend that states must step up their efforts to establish commercial law. In reality, less state involvement in commercial law is called for. Throughout history effective recourse for commercial activity has been produced through a polycentric system of customary law with disputes resolved through merchant courts or arbitration backed by privately imposed ostracism sanctions, and the same is true for international commercial law today. A description of the institutions and processes of international commercial law is provided, followed by discussions of the desirability of polycentric law and the characteristics of customary law. Finally, an explanation is provided for why a stateless system of polycentric customary law should be relied upon in modern emerging markets. (shrink)

I examine the role played in Schürmann’s philosophy by the notion of epoch. This means showing on one side that his critique of the philosophy of history begins from a particular conception of history centered on the demise of the hegemonies, and on the other that this ultimate epoch of history itself escapes the history of hegemonies. This demonstration puts in question the ontological paradigm of the contingent, the anarchic foundation of tragic philosophy.

Postmodernism, in spite of its exaggerations and myopias, has left us with many gifts, including two strains of the critical tradition that struggle to reconcile with each other. Those strains grow from two undeniable truths: that the self can never occupy the space of the other, nor can the self extricate the other from its nature. Given the conflict between these truths, the postmodern resistance to metaphysics can never be quite as rigorous as it imagines, since the self, as inextricable (...) from what it can never be, must be an object of faith, its origin and agency rooted in an eclipsed otherness beyond our capacity to witness or understand. A sense of this eclipse, acknowledged or not, haunts the contradictions... (shrink)

In the two-envelope problem, a reasoner is offered two envelopes, one containing exactly twice the money in the other. After observing the amount in one envelope, it can be traded for the unseen contents of the other. It appears that it should not matter whether the envelope is traded, but recent mathematical analyses have shown that gains could be made if trading was a probabilistic function of amount observed. As a problem with a purely probabilistic solution, it provides a potentially (...) interesting way to test people's consistency with probabilistic models. Three experiments did this by varying the size of both the observed and maximum amounts, and their possible distribution. The results showed that trading decisions were affected by where the observed amount in the opened envelope fell in the distribution, though its size did not always do so. This suggests that participants’ trade decisions could be affected by the perceived probabilities of different observed amounts, which is consistent with the pro.. (shrink)

Bruce Kogut's writing has sketched a theory of human motivation that sees managers as social, often altruistic, sometimes as selfish, who care about their colleagues and their status among them. For the first time this book collects together key pieces that show how this view works in application to practical managerial issues.

This is a review article of two recent, complete translations of the Arabian Nights, in French by André Miquel and Jamel Eddine Bencheikh and in English by Malcolm Lyons, respectively.

Victims of abuse and violence are often pressured to forgive their perpetrators. The idea of unconditional forgiveness—forgiveness granted regardless of apology, remorse, or change of behavior—has become a norm for many in the west and those who refuse to forgive are often seen as resentful and bitter. Yet those imploring forgiveness are often the powerful and those asked to forgive are often minorities who have comparatively little power. Since forgiveness in western culture derives from Jesus’s teachings, I return to those (...) teachings. While the verse “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing,” is often cited as what Jesus taught, the reality is that his teaching about forgiveness is strongly connected to repentance or remorse. I show how those teachings have been significantly distorted to create the norm of unconditional forgiveness. Finally, I consider the value and place of resentment. (shrink)

In this study, I examined 12 reports published by a neoliberal think tank proposing to reshape public education in New Zealand. In terms of the larger social processes and structures involved, the think tank’s self-declared positioning of this advocacy is that of a primary definer, ostensibly an expert voice, communicating through the media. My two research goals in this study were to identify the types of educational change being promoted and to uncover the discursive means employed. The sample of 12 (...) reports, published from 2013 to 2018, comprised 647 pages of text. I performed three types of analysis: thematic analysis to identify the ideology of the advocacy, genre analysis of their discursive resources and corpus analysis. The thematic findings reveal proposals to reshape public education through performativity, managerialism and marketization. The genre analysis found the reports followed the structure of the business case genre and drew on elements of business memos, data presentation, sound bite and opinion journalism. The corpus findings provide further linguistic evidence for the main themes. (shrink)

The history of Russian social anthropology has long been best known for the work of three, late nineteenth‐century “exile ethnographers,” each sent to the Russian Far East for their anti‐tsarist activities as students. All three men—Vladimir Bogoraz, Vladimir Iokhel'son, and Lev Shternberg—produced voluminous and celebrated works on Russian far eastern indigenous life, but it was the young Shternberg who had perhaps the most profound effect on setting the agenda for the canonic evolutionist line soon to take hold in late Russian (...) imperial and early Soviet ethnography. This essay draws on archival, library, and field research to revisit the life and work of Shternberg in order to tell the story of “group marriage” that he documented for the life of one Sakhalin Island indigenous people, Gilyaks (or Nivkhgu, Nivkhi). Documented in this way by Shternberg, the Nivkh kinship system proved a crucial “missing link” for Friedrich Engels, who had long been eager to provide evidence of primitive communism as man's natural state. For Gilyaks, the die was cast. Their role as the quintessential savages of Engels’ favor made them famous in Russian and Soviet ethnographic literature, and significantly enhanced their importance to Soviet government planners. This essay tracks that episode and its aftermaths as a pivotal moment in the history of Russian social anthropology and of evolutionist thought more broadly. (shrink)

This essay explores ethical foundations for meeting the digital challenge via a case study of the work, life, and virtues of the greatest mathematician and natural scientist of the eighteenth century, Leonhard Euler. By biography and history one can learn of the gifts of human strength, practices, good will, dependence on others, and friendships which made possible Euler’s own astonishing corpus of work and that of many other scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technologists. Digital technology results from a combination of science (...) (demonstrable knowledge and method), technology, engineering, and art (forms and artifacts of making and expressing), and mathematics (abstract numerical, algebraic, geometrical, formal, and digital concepts, rules, representations, and logics). Joint reflection on the biographical, historical, and natural sources of mathematics and the digital is essential for any humanization or ascesis in response to the perils and promises of digital technology for human thriving. As ethics enable and embody an ethos, so technologies are means and manifestations of a telos. Thus, thought and action for thriving through the digital needs to contemplate and conciliate the ends of humans and of the digital. (shrink)

James E. Bruce explores the relationship between morality and God’s free choices in the thought of Francis Turretin. The first book-length treatment of Turretin’s natural law theory, Rights in the Law provides an important theological backdrop to Early Modern moral and political philosophy. Turretin affirms Thomas Aquinas’s approach to the natural law, calling it the common opinion of the Reformed orthodox, but he develops it, too, by introducing a threefold scheme of right —divine, natural, and positive—to explain how change (...) within the law is possible. For example, God can change the specific day for Sabbath observance from Saturday to Sunday—from positive right—without changing the natural law precept that finite creatures ought to rest. Yet even with respect to the natural law God is still free. God can make a world in which there is no such thing as murder: he can choose not to make a world that contains such a thing as man. What God cannot do is make a murderable man. So God’s free choices determine the natural law insofar as the natural law is constituted by the nature of the things that God has chosen to create. (shrink)

Treatments of God's goodness almost always appeal to the traditional Christian doctrine that God is necessarily good, but this introduces the question whether God's goodness properly can be understood as necessary. After considering an ontological conception of God's goodness, I propose that God's goodness is better understood as satisfying six criteria involving moral virtue, intellectual virtue, right actions, right motives, freedom of choice, and freedom of choice with respect to the rightness of the action. I defend the result -- that (...) God's goodness must be understood contingently, not necessarily -- against recent critics of this view. (shrink)

This book represents a series of incursions or philosophical forays between realms of Byzantine and Russian thought and territory long claimed by Western philosophy and theology. Beginning with thoughts inevitably rooted in the West, it seeks to penetrate as deeply as possible into Byzantine and Russian philosophical and spiritual landscapes, and to return with fresh insights. These are also incursions that move back and forth between the visible and the invisible realms, in the traditions of Plato and his successors as (...) well as the great monastics of Eastern Christianity. Foltz argues from various perspectives that the problematic relation between transcendence and immanence finds its answer in the philosophical and theological legacy of Eastern Christian thought, which has always sought to bring together strands tenaciously held separate in the West. This book transports contemporary readers to an ancient conceptual landscape as it expertly handles both Western and Byzantine ideas with a familiarity unusual to contemporary scholars. It is essential reading for all those wishing to engage the heart of Byzantine thought and employ its lessons to address the problems which plague Western philosophy and culture. (shrink)

In the second Meditation Descartes claims to establish beyond a doubt that he exists. In the third Meditation, however, he seems to question this claim. There he maintains that until he has proven that there is a nondeceiving God, he cannot remove the demon hypothesis and, hence, cannot "be certain of anything," In his "Descartes Self-Doubt" Donald Sievert proposes a reading of the text which would allow Descartes to make both claims without contradiction. According to Sievert, Descartes advances two distinct (...) claims for self-knowledge—that is, Descartes claims self-knowledge of an occurrent self and self- knowledge of a substantial self. While the latter is subject to doubt until the demon is dismissed, the former is never doubted. I find Sievert's interpretation enticing but incorrect. The distinction which he sees clearly in the Meditations is one which, I believe, Descartes was working toward, but one which he did not have clearly in mind. (shrink)

Written in D. H. Lawrence's most productive period, 'Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious' and 'Fantasia of the Unconscious' were undertaken initially in response to psychoanalytic criticism of his novel Sons and Lovers. They soon developed more generally to propose an alternative to what Lawrence perceived as the Freudian psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious and the incest motive. The essays also develop his ideas about the upbringing and education of children, about marriage, and about social and even political action. Lawrence described them (...) as 'this pseudo-philosophy of mine which was deduced from the novels and poems, not the reverse. The absolute need one has for some sort of satisfactory mental attitude towards oneself and things in general makes one try to abstract some definite conclusions from one's experiences as a writer and as a man'. These conclusions form an illuminating guide to his works and therein lies their peculiar value. (shrink)