In this paper, we explore Peirce's work for insights into a theory of learning and cognition for education. Our focus for this exploration is Peirce's paper The Fixation of Belief (FOB), originally published in 1877 in Popular Science Monthly. We begin by examining Peirce's assertion that the study of logic is essential for understanding thought and reasoning. We explicate Peirce's view of the nature of reasoning itself—the characteristic guiding principles or ‘habits of mind’ that underlie acts of inference, the dimensions (...) of and interaction between doubt and belief, and his four methods of resolving or ‘fixing’ belief (i.e., tenacity, authority, a priori, and experimentation). The four methods are then juxtaposed against current models of teaching and learning such as constructivism, schema theory, situated cognition, and inquiry learning. Finally, we discuss Peirce's modes of inference as they relate educationally to the resolution of doubt and beliefs and offer an example of belief resolution from an experienced teacher in a professional development environment. (shrink)

Images and ideas associated with masculinity are forever in flux. In this book, Donald Moss addresses the never-ending effort of men—regardless of sexual orientation—to shape themselves in relation to the unstable notion of masculinity. Part 1 looks at the lifelong labor faced by boys and men of assessing themselves in relation to an always shifting, always receding, ideal of "masculinity." In Part 2, Moss considers a series of nested issues regarding homosexuality, homophobia and psychoanalysis. Part 3 focuses (...) on the interface between the body experienced as a private entity and the body experienced as a public entity—the body experienced as one’s own and the body subject to the judgments, regulations and punishments of the external world. The final part looks at men and violence. Men must contend with the entwined problems of regulating aggression and figuring out its proper level, aiming to avoid both excess and insufficiency. This section focuses on excessive aggression and its damaging consequences, both to its object and to its subjects. _Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Man _will be of great interest not only to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, but also to a much wider audience of readers interested in gender studies, queer studies, and masculinity. (shrink)

This article critiques the inadequate attention given to the question of meaning in mainstream clinical psychiatry and psychology. The author reviews the history of phenomenological and existential psychiatry, especially the work of Erwin Straus, and highlights the emphasis on the personal world of experience and on such existential dimensions as time and ethical experience. Aaron Beck's school of cognitive therapy appropriates many themes and concepts from phenomenology, including the central concept of meaning, and turns them into a systematic technology for (...) personal change. The author contrasts the phenomenological and cognitive approaches to meaning. The relationship between the cognitive and existential therapies is described by analogy to William James's healthy-minded and morbid-minded religion. (shrink)

Introduction -- Defining pluralism : Simon Pokagon, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Thomas fortune -- Evolution and American Indian philosophy -- Feminist resistance : Anna Julia Cooper, Jane Addams, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman -- Labor, empire and the social gospel : Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Jane Addams -- A new name for an old way of thinking : William James -- Making ideas clear : Charles Sanders Peirce -- The beloved community and its discontents : Josiah Royce and the realists (...) -- War, anarchism, and sex : Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger -- Democracy and social ethics : John Dewey -- Naturalism and idealism, fear, and conventionality : Mary Whiton Calkins and Elsie Clews Parsons -- Race riots and the color line : W. E. B. du Bois -- Philosophy reacts : Hartley Burr Alexander and Morris R. Cohen -- Creative experience : Mary Parker Follett -- Cultural pluralism : Horace Kallen and Alain Locke -- War and the rise of logical positivism : Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap -- Mccarthyism and American empiricism : Jacob Loewenberg, Henry Sheffer, C. I. Lewis, and Charles Morris -- The linguistic turn : Gustav Bergmann, May Brodbeck, and W. V. O. Quine -- Resisting the turn : Donald Davidson, Wilfrid Sellars, and the pluralist rebellion -- Philosophy outside : John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Rachel Carson -- Economics and technology : Lewis Mumford, C. Wright Mills and John Kenneth Galbraith -- Politics : John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Michael Sandel, Martha Nussbaum, and Noam Chomsky -- Civil rights : Martin Luther King, Jr., Richard Wright and James Baldwin -- Black power : Malcolm X, James Cone, Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks, Angela Davis, and Cornel West -- Latin American American philosophy -- Red power, indigenous philosophy : Vine Deloria, Jr. and contemporary American Indian thought -- Feminism -- Engaged philosophy and the environment -- American philosophy today -- Recovering and sustaining the American tradition -- American philosophy revitalized -- The spirit of American philosophy in the new century. (shrink)

“Political epistemology” has recently emerged as an area of analytic epistemology. While it may not be an entirely new area, and its precise boundaries are up for negotiation, recent political events in the UK (e.g. Brexit) and the US (e.g. the election of Donald Trump) played a key role in its rise to prominence within contemporary analytic epistemology. Further, political epistemology is an inter-disciplinary field, drawing on relevant work in political science, political psychology, and science communication that is often (...) equally focused on the UK and US. Political epistemology is therefore parochial, though it is the kind of parochialism that is not always conscious of itself as parochial. In this talk I adopt a critical stance towards parochialism in political epistemology. But my aim is not just to point out the mistakes that can result from a parochial concern with political events in one’s own country. I suggest that we can view political epistemology as interested in certain fundamental problems and tensions, which political epistemologists may then seek to identify and address within the political context in which they are working. (shrink)

Annotation "Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective is the third volume of philosophical writings by Donald Davidson, whose influence on philosophy since the 1960s has been deep and broad. His first two collections, published by OUP in the early 1980s, are recognized as contemporary classics." "Now Davidson presents a selection of his work on knowledge, mind, and language from the 1980s and the 1990s. We all have knowledge of our own minds, knowledge of the contents of other minds, and knowledge of the (...) shared environment. Davidson examines the nature and status of each of these three sorts of knowledge, and the connections and differences among them. Along the way he has illuminating things to say about truth, human rationality, and the relations among language, thought, and the world." "This new volume offers a rich and rewarding feast for anyone interested in philosophy today, and is essential reading for anyone working on its central topics."--BOOK JACKET. Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

Forty-five years ago, while still an undergraduate student at Western Washington University’s Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, Terrence Deacon produced as his honours thesis a programmatic manifesto for re-situating the semiotic logic of Charles Sanders Peirce “out of the realm of philosophy and [revealing instead] its necessary association with the information sciences and its close parallels with current systems theories”. Deacon’s project, then and now, has been to show how, within the context of naturally occurring physical processes, Peirce’s essential insight (...) regarding a “mode of being which consists in the fact that future facts of secondness will take on a determinate general character” can be, and is continuously, manifested in living systems. Considering this explication to be the “hard problem of biosemiotics”, I therefore read the current target article as a progress report, and an extremely encouraging one, of Deacon’s ongoing efforts to develop a “proof of principle” model for the naturalistic origin and biologically instantiated logic of this ‘causalis in futuro’ mediation process unique to living systems. (shrink)

In der neuen Literatur tiber Leibniz' Spatphilosophie findet man zwei deutlich einander entgegengesetzte Theorien Uber die Realitat des Körpers. Auf der einen Seite gibt es Gesichtspunkte, die ihn mit einer Phänomenalismuslehre verbinden, nach welcher die Körper nichts anderes als koordinierte Perzeptionen unausgedehnter Monaden sind. Auf der anderen Seite gibt es Griinde, die dafur sprechen, daß Leibniz die Auffassung vertreten muß, daß Körper Aggregate von Monaden sind. In diesem Aufsatz suche ich zu zeigen, daß die phanomenalistische Interpretation aufgrund der starken Textzeugnisse, (...) die Leibniz beständig zur Aggregatthese hindrängen, zuriickzuweisen ist. Daruber hinaus weise ich jedoch die verbreitete Auffassung eben der Aggregatthese zurück, d. h. die Meinung, gewisse Vielheiten von Monaden riefen bloß die Illusion, Körper zu sein, hervor, wenn sie durch andere Monaden M falsch perzipiert" werden. Gegen diese Auffassung des falschen Perzipierens ftihre ich ins Feld, daß die Aggregatthese als ein Deutungsversuch der Natur oder des Wesens des Körpers verstanden werden mufi. Wenn Leibniz sagt, Körper seien Aggregate von Monaden, so ist das nicht als blofie Behauptung, gewisse Monaden erschienen anderen Monaden als Körper, zu verstehen, sondern als die These, daß jeder Körper seinem Wesen nach eine Vielheit von Monadenist. (shrink)

The almost 300 articles contain not only historical accounts but also some indication of the state of present day study in classical philosophy.

The article presents a new interpretation of Hume’s treatment of personal identity, and his later rejection of it in the “Appendix” to the Treatise. Hume’s project, on this interpretation, is to explain beliefs about persons that arise primarily within philosophical projects, not in everyday life. The belief in the identity and simplicity of the mind as a bundle of perceptions is an abstruse belief, not one held by the “vulgar” who rarely turn their minds on themselves so as to think (...) of their perceptions. The author suggests that it is this philosophical observation of the mind that creates the problems that Hume finally acknowledges in the “Appendix.” He is unable to explain why we believe that the perceptions by means of which we observe our minds while philosophizing are themselves part of our minds. This suggestion is then tested against seven criteria that any interpretation of the “Appendix” must meet. (shrink)

It was a genuine pleasure to read Frederick Ferré’s presidential address. He has done an elegant job of humanizing Whitehead’s account of the nature of speculative philosophy. Not only has he provided a most useful expansion of Whitehead’s rather austerely presented criteria for judging the success of a metaphysical system—coherence, logicality, applicability, and adequacy—he has wrapped the whole in his version of the axiological viewpoint in such a way that we see how norms and value judgments anchor metaphysics in an (...) unshakable practicality that goads us evermore toward living not just well, but beautifully. I find this vision not only satisfactory, but genuinely uplifting. Therefore, in what follows I will simply put forward some random thoughts concerning the practicality of metaphysics generated by Ferré’s very succinct, yet rich, presentation. (shrink)

Building on a philosophy that a future world will depend on recognition of the interdependence of all life forms and lifestyles of moderation, a volume of essays collected by a prominent Buddhist scholar outlines solutions to contemporary challenges in areas ranging from economic inequality and global health to religion and environmental stability. Original.

Engaging Eriugena, Eckhart and Cusanus contains two new essays and nine others published between 2005 and 2019. The essays explore Eriugena, Eckhart and Cusanus as bold thinkers deeply engaged with their times and culture. John Scottus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa are key figures in the medieval Christian Neoplatonic tradition. This book focuses on their engagement with practical, experiential issues and controversies. Eriugena revises Genesis' Adam and Eve narrative and makes sexual difference and overcoming it central to his (...) Periphyseon. Eckhart's Annunciation sermons urge his hearers to give birth to God's son within their lives, and he develops a distinctive approach to pain and suffering. His radical preaching on the Eucharist and mystical union was judged heretical, but was later taken up by Nicholas of Cusa. Coins and banking became key symbols in Cusanus' exploration of humanity as created in God's image, and he used mechanical clocks in reflecting on time and eternity. 'Engagement' also describes these thinkers' reception of their predecessors and how later readers appropriated their works. Eriugena struggled with the legacy of Augustine and the Greek Fathers. Eckhart's theology of suffering provoked varied responses from his students Henry Suso and Johannes Tauler, and the twentieth-century therapist Ursula Fleming. Cusanus provides the volume's lynchpin as two articles analyse his reading of Eriugena and Eckhart, and a third discusses how he deftly countered Johannes Wenck's accusations of heresy. The book will be of interest to students of Medieval Philosophy, Theology, Spirituality and their place within Cultural History. (shrink)