A thoroughly researched biography of Henry James, Sr., the father of author William, philosopher Henry Jr., and diarist Alice, presents an in-depth portrait of a complex, brilliant man whose restless and driven life had a great effect on his children.

This is one of the first books in a new series that will publish the very best work in the philosophy of biology. The series will be non-sectarian in character, will extend across the broadest range of topics, and will be genuinely interdisciplinary. The Immune Self is a critical study of immunology from its origins at the end of the nineteenth century to its contemporary formulation. The book offers the first extended philosophical critique of immunology, in which the function of (...) the term 'self' that underlies the structure of current immune theory is analysed. However, this analysis is carefully integrated into a broad survey of the major scientific developments in immunology, a discussion of their historical context, and a review of the conceptual arguments that have moulded this sophisticated modern science. (shrink)

Democracies have a problem with expertise. Expert knowledge both mediates and facilitates public apprehension of problems, yet it also threatens to exclude the public from consequential judgments and decisions located in technical domains. This book asks: how can we have inclusion without collapsing the very concept of expertise? How can public judgment be engaged in expert practices in a way that does not reduce to populism? Drawing on deliberative democratic theory and social studies of science, Critical Elitism argues that expert (...) authority depends ultimately on the exercise of public judgment in a context in which there are live possibilities for protest, opposition and scrutiny. This account points to new ways of looking at the role of civil society, expert institutions, and democratic innovations in the constitution of expert authority within democratic systems. Using the example of climate science, Critical Elitism highlights not only the risks but also the benefits of contesting expertise. (shrink)

After an exposition of some key concepts in scholastic ontology, this paper examines four arguments presented by Francisco Suarez for the thesis, commonly held by Christian Aristotelians, that God's causal contribution to effects occurring in the ordinary course of nature goes beyond His merely conserving created substances along with their active and passive causal powers. The postulation of a further causal contribution, known as God's general concurrence (or general concourse), can be viewed as an attempt to accommodate an element of (...) truth present in occasionalist accounts of divine causality. (shrink)

To decide to A, as I conceive of it, is to perform a momentary mental action of forming an intention to A. I argue that ordinary instances of practical deciding, so conceived, falsify the following...

According to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the Son of God is truly but only contingently a human being. But is it also the case that Christ’s individual human nature is only contingently united to a divine person? The affirmative answer to this question, explicitly espoused by Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, turns out to be philosophically untenable, while the negative answer, which is arguably implicit in St. Thomas Aquinas, explication of the Incarnation, has some surprising and significant (...) metaphysical consequences. (shrink)

Drawing on recent empirical work, this philosophical paper explores some possible contributions of emotion to self-deception. Three hypotheses are considered: (1) the anxiety reduction hypothesis: the function of self-deception is to reduce present anxiety; (2) the solo emotion hypothesis: emotions sometimes contribute to instances of self-deception that have no desires among their significant causes; (3) the direct emotion hypothesis: emotions sometimes contribute directly to self-deception, in the sense that they make contributions that, at the time, are neither made by desires (...) nor causally mediated by desires. It is argued that (1) is false and that (3) is defensible and more defensible than (2). (shrink)

This chapter separates the problem of self-deception into two component questions: how it happens and what it is. The key to this chapter's account of self-deception is called “deflationary view”. Self-deception, it notes, does not entail “intentionally deceiving oneself; intending to deceive oneself; intending to make it easier for oneself to believe something; concurrently believing each of two explicitly contrary propositions”. The chapter also offers a discussion of the notion of “twisted self-deception”: the phenomenon of the self-deceived person believing something (...) he or she wants to be false. (shrink)

This response addresses seven main issues: (1) alleged evidence that in some instances of self-deception an individual simultaneously possesses “contradictory beliefs”; (2) whether garden-variety self-deception is intentional; (3) whether conditions that I claimed to be conceptually sufficient for self-deception are so; (4) significant similarities and differences between self-deception and interpersonal deception; (5) how instances of self-deception are to be explained, and the roles of motivation in explaining them; (6) differences among various kinds of self- deception; (7) whether a proper conception (...) of self-deception implies that definitive ascriptions of self-deception to individuals are impossible. (shrink)

For more than thirty years, Robert Audi has been one of the most creative and influential philosophical voices on a broad range of topics in the fields of ethics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and action, and philosophy of religion. This volume features thirteen chapters by renowned scholars plus new writings by Audi. Each chapter presents both a position of its author and a critical treatment of related ideas of Audi's, and he responds to each of the contributors in a way (...) that provides a lively dialogue on the topic. The book begins with an introduction by Audi that presents a thematic overview of his philosophy and connects his views in ethics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind and action. Each of the thirteen chapters that follow concentrates on one or another of these three main areas. The chapters are followed by Audi's replies. (shrink)

In the present paper, I want to contribute to a correct understanding of Aristotle's action theory by explaining just how two of the key concepts which it involves are connected and by showing that, contrary to what a number of commentators have said, there are causal concepts. The concepts in question are those of deliberation and the so-called "practical syllogism.".

The thesis of this paper is that an agent S has the power to bring it about that a proposition p is or will be true at a moment t only if S has at the same time the power to bring it about that it has always been the case that p would be true at t. The author first constructs a prima facie compelling argument for logical determinism and then argues that whoever accepts an Ockhamistic response to that (...) argument should also accept the above thesis. (shrink)

How is confabulation related to self-deception? Obviously, that depends on what confabulation and self-deception are. In the first main section, I sketch a position that I have developed elsewhere on self-deception. I turn to confabulation in the second main section. Confabulation in general is more than I can take on in this chapter. I focus on confabulations associated with a trio of delusions.

In this, the Aquinas Lecture for 1980, Alvin Plantinga proposes (p. 9) to discuss three questions: (i) does God have a nature? (ii) if so, is there a conflict between God's sovereignty and his having a nature? and (iii) how is God related to properties (including his nature), propositions, states of affairs, numbers, and other denizens of the Platonic realm of necessarily existing abstract entities? Plantinga's conclusions are straightforward: (i) God has a nature distinct from himself; (ii) the claim that (...) God has a nature, while not incompatible with the belief that God is sovereign, does conflict with a common though mistaken intuition about God's sovereignty; and (iii) in whatever way we are ultimately to conceive of God's relation to his own nature and to other necessarily existing abstract entities, it is at any rate clear that God has no control over either their existence or their essential characteristics. (shrink)

In this paper I will explore certain key features of Francisco Suarez's account of God's action in the world, with an eye toward explaining his view of the precise way in which God concurs with--that is, makes an immediate causal contribution to--free action in general and sinful action in particular. Suarez agrees with his mainly Thomistic opponents that God is an immediate cause of every effect produced by creatures--including every free act and, a fortiori , every sinful act elicited by (...) creatures with a rational or 'free' nature. But he differs markedly from them in his account of how it can be plausibly maintained that God permits sin without causing sin or, to put it somewhat differently, how it can be plausibly maintained that the moral defectiveness of a sin is not traceable to God as a source. (shrink)

In his treatise on justice St. Thomas points out that the virtue of filial piety (pietas), by which we render honor to our parents, fails to satisfy the proper definition of justice because we cannot fully repay our debt to them. The same holds true of the virtue of respectfulness (observantia), by which we render honor to our teachers and guides, all the more if they themselves are virtuous. Ralph McInerny has been teacher and guide to me, and a virtuous (...) one at that. Still, it would be deplorably small-minded merely to call Ralph virtuous without noting the sheer magnificence of his moral and intellectual contributions to the building up of the Kingdom of God on earth. As is only fitting in the Christian dispensation, these contributions have made him an object of scorn in the eyes of some who are less magnanimous than he. But, like Peter and the apostles before him, he has rejoiced at being "judged worthy of ill-treatment for the sake of the Name.". (shrink)

Emerson articulated his metaphysics of selfhood within a theistic framework; Thoreau reconfigured his ideas as a mystical pantheism. In this latter form, Transcendentalism offered twentieth century Americans a new religious sensibility based on an intimacy with nature, which became a spiritual and aesthetic resource for personal fulfillment.

The structure, content, and orientation of the contemporary medical record inadequately reflect the appropriate influence of patients' rights and bioethics on health care. Most tellingly, the medical chart reveals a remarkable absence of attention to medical ethics, except in the case of crisis management. But medical ethics informs both crisis decision-making and virtually all clinical interventions. Indeed, clinical care embodies a complex array of choices influenced by individual and cultural values, themselves reflecting religious beliefs, personal histories, psychologies, and social mores. (...) But the typical medical chart, which records clinical descriptions, analyses, and rationales for treatment, rarely identifies or accounts for this value-laden dimension of care and thus both over-simplifies and distorts the depiction of a patient's illness and its treatment. To better reflect the complex moral domain of clinical care, and assist in organizing its complex structure, a systematic procedure is proposed here to evaluate the ethical status of every patient: As a routine part of the clinical evaluation, in a designated Ethical Concerns section of the medical record, an ?ethics work-uP? is designed to serve as a moral ?diagnostic? analogous to its scientific counterpart. Adapted to the needs of individual patients, such evaluations should identify ethical problems, coordinate related data, resources, and opinion, and define the rationale for choices made and actions pursued. In establishing improved integration of the ?epistemologies? of care and the ?ethics? of care, the goals of a more humane, patient-centered medicine may be better met. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

A decision maker bets on the outcomes of a sequence of coin-tossings. At the beginning of the game the decision maker can choose one of two coins to play the game. This initial choice is irreversible. The coins can be biased and the player is uncertain about the nature of one (or possibly both) coin(s). If the player is an expected-utility maximizer, her choice of the coin will depend on different elements: the nature of the game (namely, whether she can (...) observe the outcomes of the previous tosses before making her next decision), her utility function, the prior distribution on the bias of the coin. We will show that even a risk averter might optimally choose a riskier coin when learning is allowed. We will express most of our results in the language of stochastic orderings, allowing comparisons that are valid for large classes of utility functions. (shrink)