Consider this hypothetical scenario involving a choice not to vaccinate a child. Ms. S has a niece who is autistic. The girl's parents are suspicious that there is some relationship between her autism and her Measles Mumps and Rubella vaccination. They have shared their concerns with Ms. S. She then declines to have her own daughter, Jinny S., vaccinated with the MMR vaccine. To bypass the state's mandatory vaccination requirement, Ms. S claims a state-legislated philosophical exemption, whereby she simply attests (...) to the fact that she is opposed to vaccinating her daughter due to a conscientiously held belief. At the age of four, Jinny goes on a trip by airplane to Germany with her mother. After returning to the United States, she attends daycare despite having some mild cold symptoms. Subsequently, she develops a classic measles rash, at which point her mother brings her to a pediatrician and keeps her home from daycare. (shrink)

As we move toward the creation of a networked health information environment, the potential of privacy intrusions increases, with potentially devastating impact on quality and access to healthcare. This paper describes the risks we face and proposes a framework to minimize those risks. In particular, it proposes nine principles to protect privacy in an information age.

Although research has found that long-term mindfulness meditation practice promotes executive functioning and the ability to sustain attention, the effects of brief mindfulness meditation training have not been fully explored. We examined whether brief meditation training affects cognition and mood when compared to an active control group. After four sessions of either meditation training or listening to a recorded book, participants with no prior meditation experience were assessed with measures of mood, verbal fluency, visual coding, and working memory. Both interventions (...) were effective at improving mood but only brief meditation training reduced fatigue, anxiety, and increased mindfulness. Moreover, brief mindfulness training significantly improved visuo-spatial processing, working memory, and executive functioning. Our findings suggest that 4 days of meditation training can enhance the ability to sustain attention; benefits that have previously been reported with long-term meditators. (shrink)

In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

Reform of the federal income tax system has become a perennial item on the domestic policy agenda of the United States, although there is considerable uncertainty over specifics. Indeed the recent report of the President's Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform recommended not one but two divergent policy directions. In Fundamental Tax Reform, top experts in tax policy discuss a wide range of issues raised by the prospect of significant tax reform, identifying the most critical questions and considering whether the (...) answers are known, unknown--or unknowable. The debates over tax reform usually concern the advantages and disadvantages of income-based taxation as opposed to any of the several alternative forms of consumption-based taxation. The book opens with chapters that discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and political feasibility of these options. Other chapters consider the effect of tax reform on businesses, especially their investment behavior, and include a discussion of possible problems in any transition to a consumption-based tax; international taxation issues arising in an era of globalization; and individual behavioral response to tax reform, including a view of the topic from the perspective of the relatively new field of behavioral economics. ContributorsRosanne Altshuler, Alan J. Auerbach, John W. Diamond, Harry Grubert, Arnold C. Harberger, Kevin A. Hassett, Thomas J. Kniesner, Laurence J. Kotlikoff, Edward J. McCaffery, Kathryn Newmark, David Rapson, Daniel Shaviro, Joel Slemrod, James P. Ziliak, George R. ZodrowDiscussants James Alm, Henry J. Aaron, Charles L. Ballard, Leonard E. Burman, Robert S. Chirinko, Robert D. Dietz, Malcolm Gillis, Roger H. Gordon, Jane G. Gravelle, Timothy S. Gunning, James M. Poterba, Thomas S. Neubig, Alan Viard, George Yin John W. Diamond is Edward and Hermena Kelly Fellow in Tax Policy and Adjunct Professor of Economics at the Baker Institute for Public Policy, Rice University. George R. Zodrow is Professor of Economics and Rice Scholar at the Baker Institute and International Research Fellow at the Centre for Business Taxation, Oxford University. (shrink)

David McNaughton argues that in footnote 48 of my paper I provide justification for including the severely retarded among those whom we think of as with us in being human. Let me fill in the background to that note.

Where two people differ about the application of some term to a particular object, to what can they appeal to settle their disagreement? In my paper I suggested that the disputants can legitimately draw attention to various features of the contested case to try to show the continuity, or lack of it, between this case and other instances that fall under the concept. In so doing they are offering reasons to justify their judgement in this particular case.

In the introduction to his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel speaks of metaphysics as “the entire range of the universal determinations of thought, as it were the diamond net into which everything is brought and thereby first made intelligible. Every educated consciousness has its metaphysics, an instinctive way of thinking”. Both Wittgenstein and Hegel see our many languages and forms of life as constituted by different diamond nets of categories/grammars. I argue that both Wittgenstein and Hegel take a non-reductive (...) attitude toward this plurality of local ontologies, but that they disagree about what that plurality implies for history and philosophy. Their disagreements come in part from their differing choice of examples, influenced by atomism and holism. Even more, their disagreements stem from divergent notions about the structure and mode of being of those diamond nets. During the discussion, I distinguish three uses of the word “ontology”, and I ask each thinker about what might improve the other’s philosophical project. (shrink)

My essay is concerned with two kinds of case of asymmetries in thinking about thought. If one says that there is nothing else to think but that so and so, one may mean either that there are no considerations which could make it reasonable to think the opposite, or that to think anything else is to be in a muddle, not really to be thinking anything. A case of the latter sort is important in Elizabeth Anscombe’s criticism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, (...) while a case of the former sort is important for David Wiggins’s thought about truth in ethics. After setting out the issues, I examine Anscombe’s view and situate it in relation to ideas of Frege’s and Wittgenstein’s. I then turn to ethics and consider the relation between Anscombe’s view and that of Wiggins. (shrink)

Business students have long been noted for their differential proclivity to engage in academic misconduct. Unfortunately, the potential for misconduct has been exacerbated in recent years by rapid advances in technology, easy access to information, competitive pressures, and the proliferation of websites that provide students access to information that allows them to directly circumvent the learning process. Using a convenience sample of 631 students matriculating in various business majors at four U.S. universities and structural equations modeling procedures, this study assesses (...) the effects of psychological factors on business students’ propensities to utilize the services of homework assistance websites. Specifically, we examine how “Dark Triad” personality traits (i.e., narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) interact with Fraud Diamond elements to influence student decisions to engage the services of these websites. We find that each Dark Triad trait exerts a significant influence on at least one of the Fraud Diamond elements, which in turn have a significant direct or indirect positive association with students’ reported intentions to utilize, and reported utilization of, these websites. (shrink)

In her 1988 paper, “Losing Your Concepts,” Cora Diamond explores the interplay and overlap among different forms of conceptual loss. Diamond’s discussion emphasizes the difficulty of measuring the effect of conceptual loss, owing in part to the difficulty of determining the extent of a concept’s entanglement with other aspects of the life where that concept has its home. Diamond’s remarks are instructive for gathering and assessing Wittgenstein’s scattered remarks on the concept of hope and the questions he (...) raises regarding what it would mean to lack the concept of hope altogether. The problem Wittgenstein’s remarks reveal is the instability between the notion of a life without hope and the putatively different notion of a life without the concept of hope. I argue in the paper that the case of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus provides a vivid illustration of this instability. (shrink)

If κ is any strongly unfoldable cardinal, then this is preserved in a forcing extension in which κ fails. This result continues the progression of the corresponding results for weakly compact cardinals, due to Woodin, and for indescribable cardinals, due to Hauser.

Commentators on Schopenhauer’s philosophy have been at odds with one another concerning the signification of the “nothing” with which he closed the first volume of The World as Will and Representation in 1818, and how this relates to Schopenhauer’s proposition that the will is Kant’s thing-in-itself. This chapter contends that Schopenhauer’s works contain two conceptions of soteriological nothing: an early conception that is ontological and contrasted with the vanity of phenomenal life, and a later conception in which nothing is employed (...) as an apophatic denial of our epistemological categories. Schopenhauer sought to conceal the way in which his use and understanding of these concepts had changed by 1860 by appending a handwritten note to the close of the first volume that cited Isaak Jacob Schmidt’s translation of the Diamond-Sūtra, an explanation of the Buddhist concept of prajñāpāramitā. Examination of Schmidt’s treatise throws some light on the development of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and soteriology between 1818 and 1860. (shrink)

Jared Diamond and other leading scholars have argued that the domestication of animals for food, labor, and tools of war has advanced the development of human society. But by comparing practices of animal exploitation for food and resources in different societies over time, David A. Nibert reaches a strikingly different conclusion. He finds in the domestication of animals, which he renames "domesecration," a perversion of human ethics, the development of large-scale acts of violence, disastrous patterns of destruction, and (...) growth-curbing epidemics of infectious disease. Nibert centers his study on nomadic pastoralism and the development of commercial ranching, a practice that has been largely controlled by elite groups and expanded with the rise of capitalism. Beginning with the pastoral societies of the Eurasian steppe and continuing through to the exportation of Western, meat-centered eating habits throughout today's world, Nibert connects the domesecration of animals to violence, invasion, extermination, displacement, enslavement, repression, pandemic chronic disease, and hunger. In his view, conquest and subjugation were the results of the need to appropriate land and water to maintain large groups of animals, and the gross amassing of military power has its roots in the economic benefits of the exploitation, exchange, and sale of animals. Deadly zoonotic diseases, Nibert shows, have accompanied violent developments throughout history, laying waste to whole cities, societies, and civilizations. His most powerful insight situates the domesecration of animals as a precondition for the oppression of human populations, particularly indigenous peoples, an injustice impossible to rectify while the material interests of the elite are inextricably linked to the exploitation of animals. Nibert links domesecration to some of the most critical issues facing the world today, including the depletion of fresh water, topsoil, and oil reserves; global warming; and world hunger, and he reviews the U.S. government's military response to the inevitable crises of an overheated, hungry, resource-depleted world. Most animal-advocacy campaigns reinforce current oppressive practices, Nibert argues. Instead, he suggests reforms that challenge the legitimacy of both domesecration and capitalism. (shrink)

I wish from my Heart, I could avoid concluding, that since Morality, according to your Opinion as well as mine, is determin'd merely by Sentiment, it regards only human Nature & human Life. … If Morality were determin'd by Reason, that is the same to all rational Beings: But nothing but Experience can assure us, that the Sentiments are the same. What Experience have we with regard to superior Beings? How can we ascribe to them any Sentiments at all? They (...) have implanted those Sentiments in us for the Conduct of Life like our bodily Sensations, which they possess not themselves. When we ask whether morality ‘regards only human nature and human life’ we might be concerned with one of two kinds of question. We may be asking what kinds of being could share our moral point of view. What is the potential scope of the community of moral agents and assessors? Is the moral point of view essentially a human point of view? Could we, or should we, adopt a wider standpoint which would leave room for a significant moral dialogue with non-human moral agents, if there are any? Alternatively, we could be asking whether only human beings should be the objects of moral concern or whether we should widen the circle of concern to include other kinds of being. We may make the same point using a helpful device of Cora Diamond's. We may be concerned with what should replace x or with what should replace y in the formula: We x s assess together conduct and character in so far as it affects ourselves and our fellow y s. (shrink)

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.—Benito Mussolini. The whole [school] system should be blown up … I feel like a prophet toda...

“Terms that have histories cannot be defined.” – Nietzsche“[T]he reality to which we were attending seemed to resist our thinking it.” – Cora Diamond[1] Much has been learned in recent decades about the behaviour and abilities of many species of non-human animals. Increasingly many who reflect on the abilities of languageless animals are uncomfortable with a once prevalent dichotomy of either assigning these abilities to the realm of mere mechanism or granting such creatures full rationality and more or less (...) the entire range of abilities that involves. This has lead to no little reflection and debate regarding how to proceed in studying animal “cognition,” and about what counts as adequately or accurately explaining animal behaviour. I cautiously hope herein to contribute to the clarity of what is already a discussion too rich and complex to do any justice to here. Little of what I say will be original, but the particular way of approaching the issues herein may shed some light on why certain issues have endured. (shrink)

Utilitarianism and prioritarianism make a strong assumption about the uniqueness of measures of how good things are for people, or for short, individual goodness measures. But it is far from obvious that the presupposition is correct. The usual response to this problem assumes that individual goodness measures are determined independently of our discourse about distributive theories. This article suggests reversing this response. What determines the set of individual goodness measures just is the body of platitudes we accept about distributive theories. (...) When prioritarianism is taken to have an ex ante form, this approach vindicates the utilitarian and prioritarian presupposition, and provides an answer to an argument due to Broome that for different reasons to do with measurement, prioritarianism is meaningless. (shrink)

We prove that there are groups in the constructible universe whose automorphism towers are highly malleable by forcing. This is a consequence of the fact that, under a suitable diamond hypothesis, there are sufficiently many highly rigid non-isomorphic Souslin trees whose isomorphism relation can be precisely controlled by forcing.

It is a classic result (McKinsey & Tarski, 1944; Rasiowa & Sikorski, 1963) that if we interpret modal diamond as topological closure, then the modal logic of any dense-in-itself metric space is the well-known modal system S4. In this paper, as a natural follow-up, we study the modal logic of an arbitrary metric space. Our main result establishes that modal logics arising from metric spaces form the following chain which is order-isomorphic (with respect to the ⊃ relation) to the (...) ordinalω+ 3:$S4.Gr{z_1} \supset S4.Gr{z_2} \supset S4.Gr{z_3} \supset \cdots \,S4.Grz \supset S4.1 \supset S4.$It follows that the modal logic of an arbitrary metric space is finitely axiomatizable, has the finite model property, and hence is decidable. (shrink)

Is it possible for postmodernism to offer viable, coherent accounts of ethics? Or are our social and intellectual worlds too fragmented for any broad consensus about the moral life? These issues have emerged as some of the most contentious in literary and philosophical studies. In Renegotiating Ethics in Literature, Philosophy, and Theory a distinguished international gathering of philosophers and literary scholars address the reconceptualisations involved in this 'turn towards ethics'. An important feature of this has been a renewed interest in (...) the literary text as a focus for the exploration of ethical issues. Exponents of this trend include Charles Taylor, Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum, the latter a contributor and a key figure in this volume. This book assesses the significance of this development for ethical and literary theory and attempts to articulate an alternative postmodern account of ethics which does not rely on earlier appeals to universal truths. (shrink)

We investigate various strong notions of rigidity for Souslin trees, separating them under ♢ into a hierarchy. Applying our methods to the automorphism tower problem in group theory, we show under ♢ that there is a group whose automorphism tower is highly malleable by forcing.

We consider two topological interpretations of the modal diamond—as the closure operator (C-semantics) and as the derived set operator (d-semantics). We call the logics arising from these interpretations C-logics and d-logics, respectively. We axiomatize a number of subclasses of the class of nodec spaces with respect to both semantics, and characterize exactly which of these classes are modally definable. It is demonstrated that the d-semantics is more expressive than the C-semantics. In particular, we show that the d-logics of the (...) six classes of spaces considered in the paper are pairwise distinct, while the C-logics of some of them coincide. (shrink)

The language of linear temporal logic can be interpreted on the class of dynamic topological systems, giving rise to the intuitionistic temporal logic ${\sf ITL}^{\sf c}_{\Diamond \forall }$, recently shown to be decidable by Fernández-Duque. In this article we axiomatize this logic, some fragments, and prove completeness for several familiar spaces.

We defend the thesis that every necessarily true proposition is always true. Since not every proposition that is always true is necessarily true, our thesis is at odds with theories of modality and time, such as those of Kit Fine and David Kaplan, which posit a fundamental symmetry between modal and tense operators. According to such theories, just as it is a contingent matter what is true at a given time, it is likewise a temporary matter what is true (...) at a given possible world; so a proposition that is now true at all worlds, and thus necessarily true, may yet at some past or future time be false in the actual world, and thus not always true. We reconstruct and criticize several lines of argument in favor of this picture, and then argue against the picture on the grounds that it is inconsistent with certain sorts of contingency in the structure of time. (shrink)

The American philosophical tradition emphasizes the role of experience as part of philosophical discourse and scholarship. Individuals like Henry Bugbee and Henry David Thoreau described their experiences walking, for example, and connected these experiences with philosophical concepts. My overall contention is to remind us of the importance of sport experiences for our scholarly work. In Part One, I outline the nature of experience and why this is crucial for sport philosophers and sport philosophy. In Part Two, I turn to (...) the process of reflecting on experience, exploring how reflection happens and the import of reflection for our lives and writing. Finally, in Part Three, I move to the writing process related to sport experiences. The manner in which we articulate philosophic principles and arguments, even though these points may be written in third-person, may also be informed by and through an experiential lens. (shrink)

David Skrbina opens this timely and intriguing text with a suitably puzzling line from the Diamond Sutra: ‘‘Mind that abides nowhere must come forth.’’, and he urges us to ‘‘de-emphasise the quest for the specifically human embodiment of mind’’ and follow Empedocles, progressing ‘‘with good will and unclouded attention’’ into the text which he has drawn together as editor. If we do, we are assured that it will ‘‘yield great things’’ (p. xi). This, I am pleased to say, (...) is not an exercise in hyperbole. (shrink)

Arthur Diamond comments that "it is not clear how a donor distributes money through Hanson's market". Let me try again to be clear. Imagine David Levy were to seek funding for the regression he suggests in his comments, on the relative impact of sports versus science spending on aggregate productivity. Consider what might happen under three different funding institutions.

David Lewis asked in “A problem about permission” about the effects on context, specifically on the “sphere of permissibility,” of allowing behavior that had previously been forbidden. The framework of truthmaker semantics sheds useful light on this problem. Update procedures are definable in the truthmaker framework that capture more than Lewis was able to just with worlds. Connections are drawn with epistemic modals, belief revision and the semantics of exceptives. We consider how a truthmaker account of permissive update might (...) be integrated into a larger semantic/pragmatic account of deontic language. Bridge principles are articulated associating types of deontic act with distinct update rules. Distinct forms of permission trigger distinct procedures because they aim at spheres more or less strongly verifying ◊φ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\Diamond \varphi $$\end{document}, the claim that φ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\varphi $$\end{document} is permissible. (shrink)

Can we talk meaningfully about God? The theological movement known as Grammatical Thomism affirms that religious language is nonsensical, because the reality of God is beyond our capacity for expression. Stephen Mulhall critically evaluates the claims of this movement (as exemplified in the work of Herbert McCabe and David Burrell) to be a legitimate inheritor of Wittgenstein's philosophical methods as well as Aquinas's theological project. The major obstacle to this claim is that Grammatical Thomism makes the nonsensicality of religious (...) language when applied to God a touchstone of Thomist insight, whereas 'nonsense' is standardly taken to be solely a term of criticism in Wittgenstein's work. Mulhall argues that, if Wittgenstein is read in the terms provided by the work of Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell, then a place can be found in both his early work and his later writings for a more positive role to be assigned to nonsensical utterances--one which depends on exploiting an analogy between religious language and riddles. And once this alignment between Wittgenstein and Aquinas is established, it also allows us to see various ways in which his later work has a perfectionist dimension--in that it overlaps with the concerns of moral perfectionism, and in that it attributes great philosophical significance to what theology and philosophy have traditionally called 'perfections' and 'transcendentals', particularly concepts such as Being, Truth, and Unity or Oneness. This results in a radical reconception of the role of analogous usage in language, and so in the relation between philosophy and theology. (shrink)

In his essay “Analytic Philosophy and Metaphysics,” Frederick Stoutland argues that an unspoken metaphysical spirit underlies much of twentieth-century analytic philosophy, in spite of the fact that the word “metaphysics” has had a pejorative ring. The metaphysical habit of mind results in an activity which at best is an unproductive diversion, at worst a dialectical illusion, making claims which only appear to be truth-evaluable. I agree with Stoutland’s diagnosis, which is inspired by Wittgenstein, Georg Henrik von Wright, and Cora (...) class='Hi'>Diamond, but argue that there is a bifurcation in the metaphysical temptation which Stoutland overlooks. One form is the assumption that questions of meaning can be raised outside the context of meaningful use of an expression, the other is the urge to impose a scientific form of inquiry onto philosophy, the aims of which are quite different from those of science. The former temptation is the deeper one, running through the history of philosophy, while the attempt to model philosophical inquiry onto scientific explanation is the contemporary form taken by this temptation. As an example of the metaphysical spirit Stoutland criticizes Marion David’s defense of the correspondence theory of truth. I argue that David’s progress could have been cut off at an earlier stage, by pointing out that the examples of truth claims David uses as his starting points are themselves bewildering and far removed from anything that would intelligibly be said in the course of a normal conversation. (shrink)

David Keyt presents a clear and accurate new translation of the the fifth and sixth books of Aristotle's Politics, together with a philosophical and historical commentary. The Politics is a key document in Western political thought; it raises and discusses many political issues, theoretical and practical, which are still widely debated today. The major topics of these two books are equality, democracy, tyranny, revolution, and reform.

_Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers_ uses insights from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein to rethink bioethics. Although Wittgenstein produced little formal writing on ethics, this volume shows that, in fact, ethical issues permeate the entirety of his work. The scholars whom Carl Elliott has assembled in this volume pay particular attention to Wittgenstein’s concern with the thick context of moral problems, his suspicion of theory, and his belief in description as the real aim of philosophy. Their aim is not to (...) examine Wittgenstein’s personal moral convictions but rather to explore how a deep engagement with his work can illuminate some of the problems that medicine and biological science present. As Elliott explains in his introduction, Wittgenstein’s philosophy runs against the grain of most contemporary bioethics scholarship, which all too often ignores the context in which moral problems are situated and pays little attention to narrative, ethnography, and clinical case studies in rendering bioethical judgments. Such anonymous, impersonal, rule-writing directives in which health care workers are advised how to behave is what this volume intends to counteract. Instead, contributors stress the value of focusing on the concrete particulars of moral problems and write in the spirit of Wittgenstein’s belief that philosophy should be useful. Specific topics include the concept of “good dying,” the nature of clinical decision making, the treatment of neurologically damaged patients, the moral treatment of animals, and the challenges of moral particularism. Inspired by a philosopher who deplored “professional philosophy,” this work brings some startling insights and clarifications to contemporary ethical problems posed by the realities of modern medicine. _Contributors._ Larry Churchill, David DeGrazia, Cora Diamond, James Edwards, Carl Elliott, Grant Gillett, Paul Johnston, Margaret Olivia Little, James Lindemann Nelson, Knut Erik Tranoy. (shrink)

David Houston Jones builds a bridge between practices conventionally understood as forensic, such as crime scene investigation, and the broader field of activity which the forensic now designates, for example performance and installation art, as well as photography. Contemporary work in these areas responds both to forensic evidence, including crime scene photography, and to some of the assumptions underpinning its consumption. It asks how we look, and in whose name, foregrounding and scrutinising the enduring presence of voyeurism in visual (...) media and instituting new forms of ethical engagement. Such work responds to the object-oriented culture associated with the forensic and offers a reassessment of the relationship of human voice and material evidence. It displays an enduring debt to the discursive model of testimony which has so far been insufficiently recognised, and which forms the basis for a new ethical understanding of the forensic. Jones's analysis brings this methodology to bear upon a strand of contemporary visual activity which has the power to significantly redefine our understandings of the production, analysis and deployment of evidence. Artists examined include Forensic Architecture, Simon Norfolk, Melanie Pullen, Angela Strassheim, John Gerrard, Julian Charrière, Trevor Paglen, Laura Poitras and Sophie Ristelhueber. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, literary studies, modern languages, photography and critical theory. (shrink)

In the most radical rereading of the opening chapters of Genesis since the Zohar, David Kishik reveals the post-secular and post-human implications of an ancient text that is part of our cultural DNA.

David Levine and Mathew Bowker explore cultural and political trends organized around the conviction that the world we live in is a dangerous place to be, that it is dominated by hate and destruction, and that in it our primary task is to survive by carrying on a life-long struggle against hostile forces. Their method involves the analysis of public fantasies to reveal their hidden meanings. The central fantasy explored is the fantasy of a destroyed world, which appears most (...) commonly in the form of post-apocalyptic and dystopian narratives. Their special concern in the book is with defenses against the painful consequences of the dominance of this fantasy in the inner world, especially defenses involving the use of guilt to assure that something can be done to repair the destroyed world. Topics explored include: the formation of internal fortresses and their projection into the world outside, forms of guilt including bystander guilt and survivor guilt, the loss of and search for home, and manic forms of reparation. (shrink)

The orphaned son of an Anglican clergyman, David Hartley was originally destined for holy orders. Declining to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles, he turned to medicine and science yet remained a religious believer. This, his most significant work, provides a rigorous analysis of human nature, blending philosophy, psychology and theology. First published in two volumes in 1749, Observations on Man is notable for being based on the doctrine of the association of ideas. It greatly influenced scientists, theologians, social reformers (...) and poets: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who named his eldest son after Hartley, had his portrait painted while holding a copy. In Volume 1, Hartley utilises Newtonian science in his observations. He presents a theory of 'vibrations', explaining how the elements of the nerves and brain interact as a result of stimulation, creating 'associations' and emotions. (shrink)