This volume's aim is to clarify, criticize and theoretically develop some of Whitehead's major philosophic ideas and insights. Eighteen distinguished contributors follow Whitehead in his unique attempt to integrate the often disparate concerns of science , art, religion, social life and common sense. They manage to avoid the twin pitfalls of uncritical acceptance and impatient rejection of Whitehead's thought. They delineate Whitehead's indebtedness to and divergence from the philosophic traditions of Plato, Leibniz, Hume, Hegel, Bergson and others. Some of the (...) distinguished philosophers contributing to this volume are: Charles Hartshorne, William Ernest Hocking, Richard M. Rorty, Gregory Vlastos, William A. Christian, Sr., Nathaniel Lawrence, Ivor Leclerc, Victor Lowe, Robert M. Palter, and Donald W. Sherburne. Originally published in 1963 by Prentice-Hall, this edition contains a new preface by the editor. (shrink)

The principal theme of the book is the fundamental problem of Marxist studies: the development of a theory of history that is an "epistemological reflection of materialist historical thought" and from which a rigorous methodology can evolve. In particular, Schmidt advances a view of history that reaffirms the reality and value of the actual content of historical experience. In the first half of the book, Schmidt returns to the historical texts of Hegel and Marx, and presents an original and suggestive (...) account of Marx's appropriation of Hegel, and most importantly, of the concept of "dialectical mediation" of logic and history. These sections focus on the perennial opposition of "logic," "theory," "system", and "structure," on the one hand, and "history-as-narrative" on the other, and argue that holding with only one side of this opposition—either structure without history or history without structure—is unfaithful to Marx and also makes for inadequate history. The final half of the book presents the opposing sides of the current debate between the two most influential streams of Marxist theory—structuralism vs. critical theory—and enters the debate by outlining the critical-theoretic arguments against the structuralists and what Schmidt sees as the modern loss of the sense of history and historical consciousness, as well as by appropriating for Marxist historiography what is of value in structuralism. This debate is given concrete form through the discussion of the writings of the French structuralist Louis Althusser and of the dialectically contradictory outlook of Antonio Gramsci. (shrink)

To ask about the future of Husserlian Phenomenology at this time is actually quite a natural gesture – caught up, as it is, in the anxiety wrought by the difficulties that come with the beginning of a new millennium and the malaise of the postmodern. Though, it must be borne in mind that it is a gesture that simultaneously puts the sense of ‘naturalness’ into question. It answers to a conscientious zeitgeist that seeks to catch itself in mid-act (between breaths) (...) – as an attitudinal re-orientation, break, or moment of suspense – in order to find its bearings and to re-discover its responsibility as a rigorous philosophical praxis. And, as it does so, the history of the movement of phenomenology exemplifies nothing other than the constant re-iteration of this turn to momentarily step outside its history (or, at least, a naïve, un-reflective attitude to it) in order to re-turn to itself with greater clarity and precision. This is the epoché at the heart of phenomenology as it unfolds in time. Thus, in order to re-gather itself and to re-establish the sense / significance of its time / history so as to forge ahead, phenomenology must perpetually return to its beginnings. This is, arguably, the essence of the meaning of phenomenology as an ‘infinite task.’ This infinite task is none other than an infinite re-iteration of phenomenological questions that always remain open to further analysis. Such is the thought of a ‘phenomenology of phenomenology,’ which traces itself throughout Husserl's work.1 1 To ask about the future of Husserlian phenomenology already problematizes the idea of a ‘terminus.’ If this elicits panic and alarm in certain philosophic and scientific domains then this is only the effect of an orientation that has not grasped the meaning of epoché. It is a question of a change in consciousness itself – a transformation of the manner of waiting-towards the not-yet.. (shrink)

This anthology on creativity represents a lifetime of reading and study by the late Charles Dewey Tenney, a philosopher who had been a student of Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard. In a series of fourteen essays Tenney considers the various factors that can be identified in creativity, followed by the recorded testimony of philosophers, artists, historians, explorers, scientists and others, both theorists and practitioners. The contributors extend in time from Aristotle and Sophocles to Buckminster Fuller and May Sarton. They (...) include such diverse thinkers as Martin Luther, Karl Marx, Lewis Carroll, Julian Huxley, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Gertrude Stein, Henry Nelson Wieman and Alfred North Whitehead. In all, more than 300 of the world's most creative individuals are included. Contents: Discovery, Invention and Creation; Roots of Discovery; Environs of Discovery; Agents of Discovery; Hinderances to Discovery; Observation and Discovery; Reason in Discovery; Reverie Discovery; Imagination in Discovery; Sensibility and Discovery; Method in Discovery; Artistry in Discovery; Diffusion; and Foresight and Discovery. (shrink)

This paper addresses whether the often-bemoaned loss of unity of knowledge about humans, which results from the disciplinary fragmentation of science, is something to be overcome. The fragmentation of being human rests on a couple of distinctions, such as the nature-culture divide. Since antiquity the distinction between nature (roughly, what we inherit biologically) and culture (roughly, what is acquired by social interaction) has been a commonplace in science and society. Recently, the nature/culture divide has come under attack in various ways, (...) in philosophy as well as in cultural anthropology. Regarding the latter, for instance, the divide was quintessential in its beginnings as an academic dis-cipline, when Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the first professional anthropologists in the US, rallied for (what I call) the right to ignore—in his case, human nature—by adopting a separationist epistemic stance. A separationist stance will be understood as an epistemic research heuristic that defends the right to ignore a specif-ic phenomenon (e.g., human nature) or a specific causal factor in an explanation typical for a disciplinary field. I will use Kroeber’s case as an example for making a general point against a bias towards integration (synthesis bias, as I call it) that is exemplified, for instance, by defenders of evolutionary psychology. I will claim that, in principle, a separationist stance is as good as an integrationist stance since both can be equally fruitful. With this argument from fruitful sepa-ration in place, not just the separationist stance but also the nature/culture di-vide can be defended against its critics. (shrink)

Focusing on early twentieth-century American anthropological discourse, this paper examines diverse epistemological approaches to integrating culture within a naturalistic framework. Leslie Alvin White’s materialistic and energy-based “culturology” will be contrasted with Louis Kroeber’s emergentist perspective. Through a detailed examination of some key epistemic stances, I will illustrate how American cultural anthropology grappled with the dual pressures of scientific naturalism and the epistemic autonomy of the cultural world. The conclusion argues for distinguishing between “naturalized culture” and “naturalization of culture,” (...) suggesting that within this distinction, naturalism reveals not merely as a philosophical stance, but as a historically contingent phenomenon. (shrink)

This article discusses the epitaphs with epithets from two burial grounds at Carthage excavated by Alfred-Louis Delattre in the last decades of the 19 th century. He found more than 900 Latin inscriptions that can be dated between the late first century and the early third century CE. Most of those buried at the so-called ‘cimetières des _ officiales _ ’ were imperial slaves and freedmen together with their relatives and include almost 1300 individuals. Epithets occur just in (...) about sixty epitaphs or about 6 % of the inscriptions from the imperial burial grounds at Carthage. The inscriptions are mostly short with certain conventions. The employment of epithets characterized the moral qualities of the commemorated seen from the commemorator’s point of view and is an expression of feelings, emotions and grief. The epitaphs from Carthage come from a well-defined context within a well-defined group, which may share the same feelings and be called an emotional community. The analysis of the most common epithets demonstrates remarkable differences between their use at Carthage and in the funerary inscriptions found in Rome. (shrink)

Darwinism, Democracy, and Race examines the development and defence of an argument that arose at the boundary between anthropology and evolutionary biology in twentieth-century America. In its fully articulated form, this argument simultaneously discredited scientific racism and defended free human agency in Darwinian terms. The volume is timely because it gives readers a key to assessing contemporary debates about the biology of race. By working across disciplinary lines, the book's focal figures--the anthropologist Franz Boas, the cultural anthropologist Alfred (...) class='Hi'>Kroeber, the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, and the physical anthropologist Sherwood Washburn--found increasingly persuasive ways of cutting between genetic determinist and social constructionist views of race by grounding Boas's racially egalitarian, culturally relativistic, and democratically pluralistic ethic in a distinctive version of the genetic theory of natural selection. Collaborators in making and defending this argument included Ashley Montagu, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Lewontin. Darwinism, Democracy, and Race will appeal to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and academics interested in subjects including Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, Sociology of Race, History of Biology and Anthropology, and Rhetoric of Science. (shrink)

Le psychologue français Alfred Binet est à l'origine du développement de tests mentaux destinés à diagnostiquer le « niveau intellectuel » des enfants. Initialement conçus comme des tests cliniques, leur importation aux États-Unis dans les années 1910 a considérablement modifié leur usage, leur portée pratique et leur interprétation. Devenus les instruments de politiques eugéniques ou héréditaristes, utilisés dans des processus de sélection de grande échelle, les tests ont transformé la conception que les psychologues se faisaient de l'intelligence: initialement conçue (...) comme multiforme et qualitative, elle est devenue une grandeur unique quantifiable. C'est dans ce contexte que le psychologue américain Louis Léon Thurstone, critiquant le manque de rigueur des méthodes statistiques utilisées dans les tests, a développé une nouvelle méthode permettant de disposer d'une unité et d'un zéro absolu pour la mesure (échelonnement) de l'intelligence. Une fois objectivée, sa méthode est devenue une « loi » générale permettant de rendre compte de tous les processus mentaux, de disposer d'un outil d'analyse des opinions et des attitudes. (shrink)

Bell’s theorem admits several interpretations or ‘solutions’, the standard interpretation being ‘indeterminism’, a next one ‘nonlocality’. In this article two further solutions are investigated, termed here ‘superdeterminism’ and ‘supercorrelation’. The former is especially interesting for philosophical reasons, if only because it is always rejected on the basis of extra-physical arguments. The latter, supercorrelation, will be studied here by investigating model systems that can mimic it, namely spin lattices. It is shown that in these systems the Bell inequality can be violated, (...) even if they are local according to usual definitions. Violation of the Bell inequality is retraced to violation of ‘measurement independence’. These results emphasize the importance of studying the premises of the Bell inequality in realistic systems. (shrink)

Originally published in 1928 this book was an attempt to acquaint the general public with the fundamentals of Individual Psychology. At the same time it is a demonstration of the practical application of these principles to the conduct of everyday relationships, and the organization of our personal life. Based upon a years’ lectures to audiences at the People’s Institute in Vienna, the purpose of the book was to point out how the mistaken behaviour of the individual affects harmony of our (...) social and communal life; to teach the individual to recognize their own mistakes; and finally, to show them how they may effect a harmonious adjustment to the communal life. Adler felt that mistakes in business or in science were costly and deplorable, but mistakes in the conduct of life are usually dangerous to life itself. This book is dedicated by the author in his preface ‘to the task of illuminating man’s progress toward a better understanding of human nature.’. (shrink)

Prior to August Weismann’s 1889 germ-plasm theory, social reformers believed that humans could inherit the effects of a salubrious environment and, by passing environmentally-induced modifications to their offspring, achieve continuous progress. Weismann’s theory disrupted this logic and caused many to fear that they had little control over human development. As numerous historians have observed, this contributed to the birth of the eugenics movement. However, through an examination of the work of social scientists Lester Frank Ward, Richard T. Ely, Amos Griswold (...) Warner, James Mark Baldwin, Simon Nelson Patten, Alfred Kroeber, Walter Robinson Smith, and Luther Lee Bernard, I demonstrate that Weismann’s ideas also prompted scholars to create of theories of human progress in which the social environment had a central role and biological heredity had a diminished one. Furthermore, in creating a new theory of social progress based on a concept called “social heredity,” the thinkers surveyed in this article separated biological and social thought and asserted the independence of the American social sciences. I argue that this represents an important moment in the maturation of the human sciences, and I suggest that the germ-plasm theory of heredity deserves a larger place in histories of the development of the American social scientific disciplines. (shrink)

Is it permissible to be a fan of an artist or a sports team that has behaved immorally? While this issue has recently been the subject of widespread public debate, it has received little attention in the philosophical literature. This paper will investigate this issue by examining the nature and ethics of fandom. I will argue that the crimes and misdemeanors of the object of fandom provide three kinds of moral reasons for fans to abandon their fandom. First, being a (...) fan of the immoral may provide support for their immoral behavior. Second, fandom alters our perception in ways that will often lead us to be fail to perceive our idol’s faults and even to adopting immoral points of view in order to be able to maintain the positive view we have of them. Third, fandom, like friendship, may lead us to engage in acts of loyalty to protect the interests of our idols. This gives fans of the immoral good reason to abandon their fandom. However, these reasons will not always be conclusive and, in some cases, it may be possible to instead adopt a critical form of fandom. (shrink)

This article aims to defend a novel account of pluralism in economics. First, it argues that what justifies pluralism is its epistemological benefits. Second, it acknowledges that pluralism has limits, and defends reasonable pluralism, or the view that we should only accept those theories and methods that can be justified by their communities with reasons that other communities can accept. Clearly, reasonable pluralism is an ideal, which requires economists of different persuasions to respect certain norms of communication while evaluating each (...) other’s theories. The article ends with a discussion of the conditions under which reasonable communication becomes possible. (shrink)

In the first section, I will argue that the folk concept of necessary conditions for intentional action needs refinement. In the second and third sections, I will identify some additional issues one would need to explore in con- structing a statement of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for intentional action. I will conclude with a brief discussion of the conceptual analyst’s task.

'...In these pages I consider Reason in its relation to these contrasted aspects of history. Reason is the self-discipline of the originative element in history. Apart from the operations of Reason, this element is anarchic.' -From the Summary.

Philosophical discussions regarding the status of emotion as a scientific domain usually get framed in terms of the question whether emotion is a natural kind. That approach to the issues is wrongheaded for two reasons. First, it has led to an intractable philosophical impasse that ultimately misconstrues the character of the relevant debate in emotion science. Second, and most important, it entirely ignores valence, a central feature of emotion experience, and probably the most promising criterion for demarcating emotion from cognition (...) and other related domains. An alternate philosophical hypothesis for addressing the issues is pro- posed. It is that emotion is a naturally occurring valenced phenomenon that is.. (shrink)

ArgumentEvolutionary psychologists argue that because humans are biological creatures, cultural explanationsmustinclude biology. They thus offer to unify the natural and social sciences. Evolutionary psychologists rely on a specific history of cultural anthropology, particularly the work of Alfred Kroeber to make this point. A close examination of the history of cultural anthropology reveals that Kroeber acknowledged that humans were biological and culture had a biological foundation; however, he argued that we should treat culture as autonomous because that would (...) bring benefits to the biological sciences as well as the human sciences. Hence, the historical caricature of his work by evolutionary psychology fails. The paper concludes that cultural anthropologists were successful in creating their discipline, at least in part, because they argued by pragmatic definition. Evolutionary psychology, on the other hand, offers an essentialist definition of “culture” and thus offers a much less promising vision of interdisciplinary collaboration. (shrink)

Intention, intentional action, and the connections between them are central topics of the philosophy of action, a branch of the philosophy of mind. One who regards the subject matter of the philosophy of mind as having at its core some aspect of what lies between environmental input to beings with minds and behavioural output may be inclined to see the philosophy of action as concerned only with the output end of things. That would be a mistake. Many intentional actions depend (...) for their development on the processing of input — both from the environment and from the body. (shrink)

A raft of new philosophical problems concerning truth have recently been discovered by several theorists. These problems concern the question of how ascriptions of truth are to be grounded. Most previous commentators have taken the problems to shed light on the theory of ground. In this paper, I argue that they also shed light on the theory of truth. In particular, I argue that the notion of ground can be deployed to clearly articulate one strand of deflationary thinking about truth, (...) according to which truth is “metaphysically lightweight.” I offer a ground-theoretic explication of the lightness of truth and show how it yields a novel solution to the problems concerning how truth is grounded. So, the theory of truth and the theory of ground interact fruitfully: we can apply the notion of ground to offer a clear explication of the deflationist claim that truth is “metaphysically lightweight” that both captures the motivations for that claim and solves the problems. (shrink)

Originally published in 1929 the individual psychological interpretation of this autobiography was first presented by Alfred Adler to a group of psychiatrists and pedagogues in Vienna. The story of the development of a neurosis is told in this book. A young girl relates the fascinating story of her unhappy life, the psychologist comments on her remarks and leads the reader to an understanding of the blunders and mistakes which have made her life so full of suffering. Publication of this (...) book in its day was intended to bring the growing interest in Adler’s Individual Psychology to a wider audience. Today it can be read and enjoyed in its historical context. (shrink)

This book was originally conceived as a sequel to bertrand russell's "a history of western philosophy". it takes up where russell left off. rather than examining a wide number of philosophers superficially, this book deals with a small number of philosophers in depth. the book examines american pragmatists, the analytic movement, phenomenology and existentialism. it examines both critical and speculative philosophy. (staff).

This chapter’s topic is Benjamin Libet’s position on vetoing. To veto a conscious decision, intention, or urge is to decide not to act on it and to refrain, accordingly, from acting on it. Libet associates veto power with some fancy metaphysics. This chapter sets the metaphysical issues aside and concentrates on the empirical ones, focusing on neuroscientific research that bears on vetoing.

Der Laie spricht manchmal die Ansicht aus, die Mathematik ware heutzutage schon eine tote Wissenschaft: nachdem sie einen ungemein hohen Grad der Entwicklung erreicht hat, sei sie in ihrer steinernen Vollkommenheit erstarrt. Dies ist ein vollig irriges Bild der Situation: nur wenige Wissenschaftsgebiete befinden sich heute in der Phase einer solch intensiven Entwicklung wie die Mathematik. Diese Entwicklung ist dabei auBerordentlich vie1seitig: die Mathematik erweitert ihre Domane nach allen moglichen Richtungen, sie wachst in die Rohe, in die Weite und in (...) die Tiefe. Sie wachst in die Rohe, da auf dem Boden ihrer alten Theorien, denen eine jahrhundert-, ja sogar jahrtausend- lange Entwicklung zugrunde liegt, immer wieder neue Prob1eme auftauchen, immer scharfere und vollkommenere Resultate er- zielt werden; in die Weite, da ihre Methoden andere Wissen- schaftszweige durchdringen, ihr Untersuchungsbereich immer umfangreichere Gebiete von Erscheinungen umfaBt und immer neue Theorien in den groBen Kreis mathematischer Disziplinen einbezogen werden; und schlieBlich in die Tiefe, da ihre Grund- lagen immer mehr gefestigt, die bei ihrem Aufbau angewandten Methoden immer vollkommener werden und ihre Prinzipien an Dauerhaftigkeit gewinnen. In dem vorliegenden Buch wiinschte ich dem Leser, der fiir die gegenwartige Mathematik Interesse aufweist, aber ihr fern- steht, mindestens einen ganz allgemeinen Begriff von dieser dritten Entwicklungslinie der Mathematik, d. i. von ihrer Ent- wicklung in die Tiefe, zu geben. (shrink)

Contemporary commentators such as Rosalind Hursthouse misconstrue Aristotle’s doctrine of the ethical mean. They propose a monist account of his moral psychology, explaining each virtue in terms of the presence or absence of a single psychological trait. In contrast, the author argues that Aristotle depicts virtue as a balancing of two opposed psychological inclinations that push and pull in different directions. Each inclination is a positive force in its own right; neither is mere privation. This dualistic account of moral psychology (...) is a more specific application of a recurrent explanatory model one finds elsewhere in Aristotle’s wide-ranging philosophy. In discussing the virtuous mean, moral success can be attributed to the human agent as composite whole or to the indivisible soul. (shrink)

Mele's chapter addresses two primary aims. The first is to develop an experimentally useful conception of conscious deciding. The second is to challenge a certain source of skepticism about free will: the belief that conscious decisions and intentions are never involved in producing corresponding overt actions. The challenge Mele develops has a positive dimension that accords with the aims of this volume: It sheds light on a way in which some conscious decisions and intentions do seem to be efficacious.

An impressive variety of new forms of money has aroused in recent decades from various groups of people and various kinds of institutions. These currencies are at the heart of intense debates, which raise important, but often neglected, normative issues. The diversity of their goals, uses and charac-teristics is so large that it makes some preliminary distinctions necessary. This paper aims at provid-ing a proper background for the discussion of the possible merits and drawbacks of different kinds of currencies. It (...) proposes a classification that demarcates currencies according to how they relate to several crucial normative issues. Its aim is to show, for every type of currency, and as unambiguously as possible, to which side of these controversies it lies. (shrink)