This study explores the role that news coverage plays in the allocation of Japanese development aid. Conceptually, it is expected that democratic foreign policy officials, including those working in bureaucratic governmental structures will try to match the magnitude of their actions with what they expect is the public's perception of the importance of the recipient. News media salience serves an easily accessible indicator of that domestic political importance and, in the case of foreign aid, this suggests that higher levels of (...) news coverage of a less-developed country will lead to higher aid commitments. The statistical analysis demonstrates that the level of news coverage is a statistically significant factor in Japanese aid distributions. More significantly, the analysis demonstrates that separating grant aid from other forms of aid is critical for the empirical examination of the determinants of Japanese aid. (shrink)

Mary Douglas's retirement lasted almost a quarter of a century, quite long enough for her to fade pottering into obscurity. Yet what happened was diametrically, single-mindedly opposite: an increasing productivity well into her eighties; an unchallengeable position within British anthropology's most brilliant professional generation; and a generous reassessment within her own discipline of the work of her mid-career. Few could have predicted this outcome when in 1977 Douglas resigned her professorship at University College London in order to become (...) Director of Research on Culture at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York. Fewer still as she found herself immediately mired in the controversial sacking of the man who had hired her. Yet Douglas emerged from this fray with risk analysis added to the already formidable range of fields on which she wrote. No field of anthropology–religion, symbolism, politics, economics, cognition, to name only a few–was untouched by her ideas. (shrink)

This is an encyclopedia entry on consequentializing. It explains what consequentializing is, what makes it possible, why someone might be motivated to consequentialize, and how to consequentialize a non-consequentialist theory.

Hobbes and Wallis's "battle of the books" illuminates the intimate relationship between science and crucial seventeenth-century debates over the limits of sovereign power and the existence of God.

Many states recognize a legal right to bodily integrity, understood as a right against significant, nonconsensual interference with one’s body. Recently, some have called for the recognition of an analogous legal right to mental integrity: a right against significant, nonconsensual interference with one’s mind. In this chapter, we describe and distinguish three different rationales for recognizing such a right. The first appeals to case-based intuitions to establish a distinctive duty not to interfere with others’ minds; the second holds that, if (...) we accept a legal right to bodily integrity, then we must, on pain of philosophical inconsistency, accept a case for an analogous right over the mind; and the third holds that recent technological developments create a need for a legal right to mental integrity. (shrink)

We are thankful for the opportunity to reflect more on the difficult problem of the relationship between moral evaluations and the construct of personality disorders in response to the commentaries by Mike Martin and Louis Charland. We begin by emphasizing to readers that this important problem is complicated by the different perspectives of the various disciplines involved, especially, philosophy, psychiatry, and psychology. Incredulity, anger, and dismay are among the reactions we encountered in discussions of these issues, especially with some mental (...) health professionals. Strong reactions on either side of a disciplinary divide occasionally present barriers to a dispassionate discussion of the topic. .. (shrink)

Felix reaches up to catch a high line drive to left field and fires the ball off to Benji at home plate, who then tags the runner trying to score. For Felix to catch the ball and transfer it from his glove to his throwing hand, he needs to have a sense of where his hands are relative to one another and the rest of his body. This sort of information is subconsciously tracked in the body schema (or postural schema), (...) a representation of the current bodily posture that is updated on the basis of proprioceptive inputs. While the existence of the body schema in not in dispute, its origin is. After reviewing the competing proposals, I introduce the conceptual tools needed to move the debate forward and apply them to the question of the extent to which the body schema could be learned from perceptual input in utero. I argue that it could give rise to something recognizable as the body schema, though not quite rising to the level of the mature body schema. After considering the implications for further research on the origins of the body schema, I show how these results apply to other body representations, helping clarify the vexing question of the number, nature, and interactions among body representations in the brain. This theoretical work also promises to advance our understanding and treatment protocols for disorders affecting such body representations (e.g., anorexia nervosa). (shrink)

At the core of Swedenborg’s thought is the understanding that our purpose in this life is to progress spiritually—to learn, to grow, to do good works, and, ultimately, to allow as much of God’s love as possible to enter into us and manifest through us. Scattered throughout his works are descriptions of our mind and how it relates to both the physical and spiritual worlds. In this book, Taylor pulls these loose threads together and weaves them into a simple, coherent (...) whole, presenting Swedenborg’s teachings as a system that anyone can follow. Taylor describes the external or natural mind as primarily concerned with material things, and the inner mind, in its essence, as love. As we elevate our thoughts toward higher and higher types of love and wisdom, we draw closer to God and begin the process of regeneration, or rebirth as spiritual beings. This is the first time in many decades that a book has been published on Swedenborg’s philosophy of the mind. Taylor’s straightforward commentary gives readers a rare insight into this crucial aspect of Swedenborg’s theology. (shrink)

An essay on Pietro Pomponazzi, the philosopher and founder of the Aristotelian-Averroistic School. His great work De immortalitate animi, gave rise to a storm of controversy between the orthodox Thomists of the Catholic Church, the Averroists headed by Agostino Nifo, and the so-called Alexandrist School. The treatise was burned at Venice, and Pomponazzi himself ran serious risk of death at the hands of the Catholics. Two pamphlets followed, the Apologia and the Defensorium, wherein he explained his paradoxical position as Catholic (...) and philosophic materialist. His last two treatises, the De incantationibus and the De fato, were posthumously published in an edition of his works printed at Basel. Chapters: Aristotle in the Early Middle Ages; The Arabians and St. Thomas; Pomponazzi as an Aristotelian; Pomponazzi's Psychology; The Soul; Intelligence; Sense; Reason; Knowledge; The Nature of Virtue; and Natural Law in Human Life and Religion. (shrink)

Wesley Salmon has developed a theory of causation which makes use of the concepts of a "causal process" and a "causal interaction." Roughly, a causal process is a process which transmits its own structure, and a causal interaction is an intersection of processes which transforms the character of these processes. The cause-effect relation is analyzed as a causal interaction followed by a causal process which terminates in a further causal interaction. In this paper I present a series of problem cases (...) which run "counter" to Salmon's account. (shrink)

The third in a series, this volume is a reference book of summaries of the main works in the Advaita tradition during the primary phase of its development in the sixth and seventh centuries A.D., up to and including the works of Samkara and his pupils. Originally published in 1981. 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)

This is the introduction to my book Kantsequentialism: A Morality of Ends.

We have, to some extent, a duty to help the needy—to meet their basic needs for food, water, shelter, and health care. Call this the duty of beneficence. Below, I argue that it is best understood as a duty both (a) to adopt helping the needy as “a serious, major, continually relevant, life-shaping end” (HILL 2002, 206) and (b) to never behave in a way (via act or omission) that’s factually incompatible with having such an end. (Behaving in a given (...) way is factually incompatible with having an end if and only if someone who knows all the relevant facts couldn’t behave in this way and still count as having this end—at least not if they have both all the other ends that they’re required to have and only those other ends that they’re permitted to have.) I call this the Kantian View, and I argue that it has several advantages over four of its rivals. In particular, I argue that it has the advantage of being able to account for all the following: (1) a diachronic (over-time) duty to take a sufficient number of favorable opportunities for helping the needy over the course of our lives, (2) a synchronic (at-a-time) duty to take every golden opportunity to help the needy that arises, and (3) the relationship between the two. (shrink)

In this, the sixth chapter of _Kantsequentialism: A Morality of Ends_, I argue that the duty of beneficence is best understood as a duty both (a) to adopt helping the needy as a serious, major, continually relevant, life-shaping end and (b) to refrain from acting in a way that would manifest one’s failure to do so. What’s more, I argue that Kantsequentialism offers us the best account of whether an act manifests a failure to have adopted helping the needy as (...) such a life-shaping end. I start by considering some alternative accounts of our duty of beneficence, examining where each goes wrong. I then conclude by showing how Kantsequentialism offers us the best approach to accommodating agent-centered options. (shrink)

Drawing on a survey of over 4000 students and 1300 faculty members at the University of Maryland Global Campus, we find evidence for a reconceptualization of the use of commercialized websites offering access to “tutors” or “study help” as a type of collaborative cheating. Past studies have examined this behavior as an extension of contract cheating, but we find that students perceive the use of these sites very differently than they perceive contract cheating behaviors. In this paper we will discuss (...) how “tutor” or “study helper” websites combine the phenomena of collaborative cheating with internet-driven shifts in cultural and social perceptions to create a new type of cheating behavior that is viewed differently by students and faculty. (shrink)

To understand Nietzsche’s pedagogy of self-overcoming and to determine its true import for contemporary education, it is necessary to understand Nietzsche’s view of the self that is to be overcome. Nevertheless, previous interpretations of self-overcoming in the journals of the philosophy of education have lacked serious engagement with the Nietzschean self. I devote the first part of this paper to redressing this neglect and arguing for a view of the Nietzschean self as an assemblage of ontologically basic affects which have (...) been guided and modulated by the incorporation of perspectives. This interpretation has important consequences for self-overcoming, for it constrains the individual’s conscious agency to operations on perspectives. In light of this view I then advance a competing conception of self-overcoming and discuss some of the shortcomings of antecedent interpretations. Although previous interpreters have done their part to exhaust the characteristic actions of self-overcoming, I argue that they have either exaggerated the deleteriousness of social influence in the formation of the authentic individual, or else ignore it altogether. In the final part I reconsider the debate over the democratic or aristocratic nature of Nietzsche’s pedagogy of self-overcoming. Interestingly, self-overcoming cannot be labeled strictly as either, and out of this ambiguity grows the role of the school as an agent of cultural transformation. (shrink)

Studies of visual event individuation often consider people's representations of activities involving agents performing complex tasks. Concomitantly, theories of event individuation emphasize predictions about agents' intentions. Studies that have examined simple, non-agential occurrences leave open the possiblity that principles of visual object individuation play a role in visual event individuation. Unearthing principles that may be sufficient for event individuation which are distinct both from predictions about agents' intentions and from visual object individuation, we draw on and extend studies that reveal (...) object and event representation to be deeply analogous in our cognitive economy. We provide evidence that ‘temporal shaping' is a sufficient low-level perceptual criterion for the visual individuation of events. In our study, temporal shaping is effected by the introduction of pauses into an otherwise continuous process. Future studies should address other visual mechanisms for introducing temporal shaping (e.g., color changes). (shrink)

We argue that (1) a purported example of an infinite inference we humans can actually perform admits a faithful, finitary description, and (2) infinite inference contravenes any view which does not grant our minds uncomputable powers. These arguments block the strategy, dating back to Carnap's Logical Syntax of Language, of using infinitary inference rules to secure the determinacy of arithmetical truth on conventionalist grounds.

This paper is an expanded version of a paper presented at the 22nd meeting of the International Association for Critical Realism at Southampton, England. The paper presents a critical realist take...

Andrew Feenberg's Questioning Technology (1999) is his third book in a series of studies which undertake to provide critical theoretical and democratic political perspectives to engage technology in the contemporary era. In Critical Theory of Technology (1991), Feenberg draws on neo-Marxian and other critical theories of technology, especially the Frankfurt School, to criticize determinist and essentialist theories. In this ground-breaking work (which will go into its second edition in 2001), he discusses both how the labor process, science, and technology are (...) constituted as forms of domination of nature and human beings, and how they could be democratically transformed as part of a program of radical social transformation. In Alternative Modernity (1995), Feenberg turns to focus on constructivist theories and the ways in which individuals and groups can reconstruct technology to make it serve more humane and democratic goals. His most recent book draws on his earlier work while polemically developing his own positions within contemporary debates over technology. (shrink)

In Aristotle’s On the Soul he considers and refutes two versions of the harmonia theory of the soul’s relation to the body. According to the harmonia theory, the soul is to the body what the tuning of a musical instrument is to its material parts. Though he believes himself to have entirely dismissed the view, he has not. I argue that Aristotle’s hylomorphic account is, in fact, an instance of the harmonia theory.

This collection brings together well-established scholars to examine the limits of law, a topic that has been of broad interest since the events of 9/11 and the responses of U.S. law and policy to those events. The limiting conditions explored in this volume include marking law’s relationship to acts of terror, states of emergency, gestures of surrender, payments of reparations, offers of amnesty, and invocations of retroactivity. These essays explore how law is challenged, frayed, and constituted out of contact with (...) conditions that lie at the farthest reaches of its empirical and normative force. (shrink)

If I am injured in the course of medical investigation or treatment, I may be eligible to receive compensation for some of the adverse consequences of my injury—at least, if I live in a developed country. In most such countries, there exists some form of state-administered compensation scheme for medical injuries. However, even within the developed world, there is considerable variation in the eligibility criteria for compensation. Different countries would, for example, respond very differently to the following pair of cases...

Why is beauty consoling? Ancient and Medieval Western philosophy was primarily concerned with beauty in relation to truth and goodness. The theistic religions assume a link between beauty, goodness and truth, all of which are viewed as Divine attributes. This is one reason for the iconoclasm that all three Abrahamic religions share to a greater or lesser degree. Yet, creative fictions of great artistic beauty aspire to a certain truthfulness. A work of the imagination may deepen or purify our emotions (...) such that we gain a clearer understanding of reality. Beauty is consoling because it resolves the contradictions of experience; art can be a conduit to a supreme transcendent unity. The Iconic Imagination is both a reflection on the redemptive potential of art, and an investigation of the traditions of occidental Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Islam in their confrontations with the particular power of art to represent the transcendent. Throughout, Hedley argues that the malaise of much contemporary reflection upon beauty is a consequence of the marginalisation of beauty's religious dimension. (shrink)

Sergi Eisenstein's Potemkin provides a powerful example of how a film can present a revolutionary and socialist political perspective and ideology. A thoroughly modernist film, Potemkin is highly innovative in form and is often taken as a model of editing; it has regularly appeared on many lists of the greatest films of all time and since its release in 1925 has been a major critical success. Formally, the film embodies Eisenstein’s theory of montage, that the juxtaposition of images can generate (...) meanings and on the level of ideology, the film serves as effective propaganda for the Bolsheviks. (shrink)