In 1996 the Pope John Center (now the National Catholic Bioethics Center) offered a workshop for bishops to examine Pope John Paul II's landmark encyclical Evangelium vitae (The Gospel of Life). This collection of essays represents the proceedings of that workshop for scholars and students.

We investigated how people design interventions to affect the outcomes of causal systems. We propose that the abstract structural properties of a causal system, in addition to people's content and mechanism knowledge, influence decisions about how to intervene. In Experiment 1, participants preferred to intervene at specific locations in a causal chain regardless of which content variables occupied those positions. In Experiment 2, participants were more likely to intervene on root causes versus immediate causes when they were presented with a (...) long-term goal versus a short-term goal. These results show that the structural properties of a causal system can guide the design of interventions. (shrink)

Edward Stuart Russell (1887–1954) was a central figure in the philosophy of biology during the first half of the twentieth century. Although he worked as a government fisheries scientist for much of his life, he still managed to establish himself as one of the most prominent biological theorists of his time. The views he developed, which were antireductionistic, organism-centred, and teleological, challenged the prevailing mechanistic orthodoxy. His book 'The Interpretation of Development and Heredity' (1930) provides one of themost (...) incisive critiques of the chromosomal theory of the gene ever published, and it has acquired a renewed relevance in light of recent empirical findings. Russell’s interest in the theoretical problems of biology is as much historical as philosophical, and many of his works, particularly his first book 'Form and Function' (1916), are still regarded today as landmark contributions to the history of biological thought. (shrink)

The excellent quality and depth of the various essays make [the book] an invaluable resource....It is likely to become essential reading in its field.—CHOICE.

This article reconsiders Kripke’s ( 1977 , in: French, Uehling & Wettstein (eds) Contemporary perspectives in the philosophy of language, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis) pragmatic, univocal account of the attributive-referential distinction in terms of a metalinguistic apparatus consisting of semantic reference and speaker reference. It is argued that Kripke’s strongest methodological argument supporting the pragmatic account, the parallel applicability of the apparatus to both names and definite descriptions, is successful only if descriptions are treated as designators in both attributive (...) and referential uses. It is not successful if descriptions are treated à la Russell, contrary to what is often assumed. Thus a third theoretical option for the semantic analysis of definite descriptions arises, neglected by both supporters and opponents of Russell: a univocal, referentialist analysis of descriptions in conjunction with a pragmatic account of the attributive-referential distinction. Contrary to Kripke, and to much of the literature, it is noted that not all so-called referential uses involve implicatures. In the course of the argument Kripke’s innovative apparatus is subjected to improvements and fine-tunings. Also, some general critical comments are made about analogical reasoning, on which Kripke’s argument is partly based. This leads to a clarification of the fundamental notion of speaker reference. The paper concludes with reflections on the challenge to and need of systematic empirical evidence in this field, a desideratum noted by Kripke and still not met. (shrink)

Aristotele. Science as a systematic explanation through causes.--Newton, I. Rules and reflections on scientific reasoning.--Carnap, R. Empiricism, semantics, and ontology.--Hempel, C. On the logic of explanation.--Nagel, E. The realist view of theories.--Quine, W. V. On the role of logic in explanation.--Harris, E. E. Method and explanation in metaphysics.--Einstein, A. Remarks on Bertrand Russell's theory of knowledge.--Sellars, W. The language of theories.--MacKinnon, E. Atomic physics and reality.--Bunge, M. Physics and reality.--Heelan, P. A. Quantum mechanics and objectivity.--Bibliographical essay (p. 285-301).

This paper attempts a critical examination of the thesis that an apprenticeship to a Lancaster druggist was, for Edward Frankland, a wholly inappropriate preparation for a career in chemistry. This view, which stems directly from Frankland himself, is defective in several ways. It fails to take into account certain benefits which he accepted as valuable; it implies an exceptional degree of ‘negligence’ which was in fact quite typical; it ignores certain positive indicators of the value of such experience; and (...) it involves questionable value-judgments on the behaviour of one individual, the druggist Stephen Ross. Although Frankland's perspective may be no longer acceptable, the reasons for its inadequacy are perhaps the most important aspect of the whole affair. Their identification raises questions of historiography of wider significance, while the whole episode underlines certain issues in scientific training that were to become crucial in the growth of Victorian chemistry in Britain. (shrink)

I present an answer to the title question which relates Russell’s writings to a remark by C.D. Broad. Russell shared the same concerns as Broad about the new postgraduate students at the University of Cambridge but instead of voicing them, his writings left a problem.

A comprehensive introduction to contemporary political ethics What is the relationship between politics and morality? May politicians bend moral constraints in the name of political necessity? Is it always wrong for leaders to lie? How much political compromise is too much? In Political Ethics, some of the world’s leading thinkers in politics, philosophy, and related fields offer a comprehensive and accessible introduction to key issues in this rapidly growing area of political theory. In a series of original essays, the contributors (...) examine a range of urgent political problems: lies and deception, compromise and refusal to compromise, the meaning and limits of political integrity, representation and failures of representation, good and bad democratic leadership, the virtues and excesses of partisanship, administrative ethics, political corruption, whistleblowing, legitimate and illegitimate claims of political emergency, and lobbying. What emerges are realistic but demanding ethical standards—and a clear-eyed understanding of the ethical challenges of political life in the twenty-first century. With contributions by Richard Bellamy, Alin Fumurescu, Edward Hall, Suzanne Dovi and Jesse McCain, Eric Beerbohm, Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum, Joseph Heath, Elizabeth David-Barrett and Mark Philp, Michele Bocchiola and Emanuela Ceva, Nomi Lazar, Phil Parvin, and Andrew Sabl. (shrink)

According to the iterative conception of set, each set is a collection of sets formed prior to it. The notion of priority here plays an essential role in explanations of why contradiction-inducing sets, such as the Russell set, do not exist. Consequently, these explanations are successful only to the extent that a satisfactory priority relation is made out. I argue that attempts to do this have fallen short: understanding priority in a straightforwardly constructivist sense threatens the coherence of the (...) empty set and raises serious epistemological concerns; but the leading realist interpretations---ontological and modal interpretations of priority---are deeply problematic as well. I conclude that the purported explanatory virtues of the iterative conception are, at present, unfounded. (shrink)

Cet article s’intéresse aux similarités entre deux tableaux : la Jeune Fille à la perle de Johannes Vermeer, et le Portrait de Béatrice Cenci par Guido Reni, dit le Guide (selon l’attribution du XIX e siècle). L’expression du visage semble indéterminée, et c’est à ce titre que ces œuvres peintes ont provoqué l’imagination littéraire ; Russell Hoban et Tracy Chevalier se sont penchés sur le premier tableau et le mystère de son expression, P.B. Shelley et Hawthorne sur le deuxième. (...) Dans Le Faune de marbre, Hawthorne évoque le tableau du Guide pour écrire une théorie de l’art où la « suggestion » tient une part essentielle. Dans Les Cenci, Shelley met en scène Béatrice, et son visage devient l’objet de projections de la part de ses ennemis. Quel discours s’élabore lorsque le visage d’une femme devient signe ambivalent, écran où sont projetées l’innocence et la culpabilité, s’inscrivant contre la personne même et sa capacité à s’exprimer? (shrink)

This skit of Bertrand Russell’s philosophy was originally published in 1918 by Russell’s correspondent friend Jourdain. The introduction explains that the contents purport to be lost papers written by Mr. B*rtr*nd R*ss*ll, a contemporary of Bertrand Russell. This politically humorous volume from the early 20 th Century parodies the writing style of Russell as well as his theories.

Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams, exemplars of the American nature writing tradition and representative examples of modern American environmentalist politics, replicate the foundationalist epistemological assumptions of mystics in the Christian tradition. I examine the work of Richard Rorty for the encouragement his pragmatism gives to environmentalists to move away from traditional metaphysical concerns and toward a politics accountable solely to democratic reason-giving practices. Such practices, which Rorty connects to the Enlightenment’s aim to emancipate thought from any nonhuman form (...) of epistemological authority, are more adept at meeting the challenge of environmental justice as well as more productive of the hope all environmentalists need in the work to stem climate change’s worst effects. I conclude by turning to Robert Brandom on the creative possibilities mystical experience opens to Abbey, Williams, and environ-mentalists like them, for which Rorty is unable to account. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Strange Death of British IdealismEdward SkidelskyIIn 1958, the Oxford philosopher G. J. Warnock opened his survey of twentieth-century English philosophy with some disparaging comments on British Idealism. It was, he writes, "an exotic in the English scene, the product of a quite recent revolution in ways of thought due primarily to German influences." Analytic philosophy, by contrast, represents a return to the venerable lineage of British empiricism, as (...) Bertrand Russell "symbolically joins hands" with his godfather John Stuart Mill. "Hume and Berkley would have been sadly puzzled by the pages of Bradley, to say nothing of Hegel's. But either might have conversed quite naturally with Moore, and with Russell too, at least in his less technical moments."1All this is rhetoric rather than history. Russell can be called the inheritor of Mill only with respect to his political and social attitudes; his main philosophical endeavour—the establishment of mathematics on a priori foundations—ran diametrically opposed to Mill. And Hume and Berkley would have been just as sadly puzzled by Moore's analysis of language—an activity they both regarded as the defining vice of scholasticism—as by anything in Bradley.Warnock's error has proved remarkably persistent. Only recently, thanks largely to the work of Peter Hylton, has the anti-empiricist, Platonist character of Russell's early thought been properly appreciated.2 I do not intend, in what follows, to retrace these philosophical arguments. My question is historical. It concerns the role of national feeling, first in the demise of Idealism after the First World War, and later in the interpretation of that demise after the Second. With regard to first question, I argue that the rejection of Idealism in Britain was in no sense [End Page 41] a reassertion of national tradition. The opposite is closer to the truth; the change in philosophical fashion was primarily a consequence of a widespread revulsion against nationalism following World War I. That this was later misinterpreted owes largely—and this is my second claim—to the very different climate prevailing in Britain after World War II. If in the twenties the British reserved their scorn for "Prussian militarism," in the fifties everything associated with Germany, its philosophy included, was viewed as irredeemably tainted. Analytic philosophy tried to present itself as a home-grown product, with deep roots in the English empiricist tradition. This partly accounts for the change in style from the highly technical scientism of Russell and the logical positivists to the concern with "ordinary language" characteristic of post-war Oxford philosophy. The fact that most of analytic philosophy's continental exponents were forced by Hitler into British or American exile assisted in the process of its naturalisation. Within a decade, it was possible to regard "analytic" and "Anglo-Saxon" philosophy as synonyms.Warnock's mistake now becomes easier to understand. He has interpreted the early twentieth century in the light of the post-war period, coming to the conclusion that Moore and Russell's rejection of Idealism was a reassertion of English national tradition. He has condensed fifty years of history into a single moment. I intend in what follows to pull apart the stages that Warnock has concertinaed together, demonstrating that national feeling played a far more complex and contradictory role in the history of British philosophy.IIOn one point Warnock is correct: Idealism did not perish of refutation. "Metaphysical systems do not yield...," he writes, "to frontal attack. Their odd property of being demonstrable only, so to speak, from within confers on them also a high resistance to attack from outside.... Such systems are much more vulnerable to ennui than to disproof" (Warnock, pp. 10–11). The claim of Russell and Moore to have "refuted" Bradley is regarded with scepticism by most recent commentators. Idealism, they point out, rested on something more substantial than a mere failure of logic or common-sense, and was therefore not vulnerable to the kind of simple knock-down arguments advanced by Russell and Moore. The causes of its decline must be sought elsewhere, in the broader cultural and political tendencies of the age.Had Russell and Moore's arguments been truly knock-down... (shrink)

I argue that absolutism, the view that absolutely unrestricted quantification is possible, is to blame for both the paradoxes that arise in naive set theory and variants of these paradoxes that arise in plural logic and in semantics. The solution is restrictivism, the view that absolutely unrestricted quantification is not possible. -/- It is generally thought that absolutism is true and that restrictivism is not only false, but inexpressible. As a result, the paradoxes are blamed, not on illicit quantification, but (...) on the logical conception of set which motivates naive set theory. The accepted solution is to replace this with the iterative conception of set. -/- I show that this picture is doubly mistaken. After a close examination of the paradoxes in chapters 2--3, I argue in chapters 4 and 5 that it is possible to rescue naive set theory by restricting quantification over sets and that the resulting restrictivist set theory is expressible. In chapters 6 and 7, I argue that it is the iterative conception of set and the thesis of absolutism that should be rejected. (shrink)

Of the critical eyes that have focused upon Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, perhaps none is as insightful as Edward Said. Said repeatedly turned to Conrad’s tale as a privileged point of access to the tensions of colonialism. What is most remarkable about Said’s reading is the hesitancy and uncertainty that surrounds it – qualities that mirror Marlow’s troubles about his own story. Said’s reading is concerned with the form of the story, with its position as a cultural artifact, a (...) tribute to the society that it represents before that’s culture’s other, that it nonetheless is placed into intimate contact with. Taking Heart of Darkness as a cultural work, while at the same time paying particular attention to the rhetorical richness of the form of the story itself (the narrative displacement, the precise description of the situation of the Nellie, the description of Marlow, the patterned interruption of his voice, etc.), allows one to glimpse the limiting function of colonial culture. At the same time, as such a limit, it provides a place of encounter for counter-narratives, a place where the difference between a colonial society and its other might be revealed through the structural affinities and dissimilarities between their narratives. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North is such a counter-narrative, and employs its structural parallels to Conrad’s novella to refashion the cultural limit between the colonizer and colonized. The center of Salih’s novel is the complicated relation between the narrator and Mustafa Sa’eed, both of whom have returned to Sudan following sojourns in England. While there is an obvious (but shallow) parallel here to Marlow and the narrator of Heart of Darkness, the echo is reinforced by the structural parallels of the narrative. The centrality of the Nile in Salih’s story – a river that serves both as a marker of native identity and as a place of civic, colonial projects – echoes both the Thames and Congo; the relations between the narrator, his past, and Sa’eed and his past, reflect and complicate the relations between Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, Marlow’s memory, and, finally, Kurtz. Most telling of Salih’s deliberate engagement with Conrad is the final, brief scene in which the narrator enters the river that (presumably) took Sa’eed’s life and there confronts the question of the maintenance of native identity in the wake of a migration to the heart of colonial power. Here Salih plays on the same structural ambiguities that Conrad only implicitly invokes, and that Said thematizes in his analysis. Like Conrad, he deliberately chooses not to offer a solution. For to offer a solution would be bind a society with a set limit. What we find in Salih’s novel is both the acceptance of culture as a form of political life, and also the rejection of culture as a justification of oppression. As Said notes, Conrad cannot find a way out of his society; he can only invent Marlow as a protest. Salih echoes this protest, but where Conrad’s tale ends in the sterility of darkness, Salih’s, precisely through the distinction of its rhetorical form from Conrad’s (one that also echoes), concludes with an urgent cry for other voices to take up the task of valorizing the multiplicity of cultures that illuminate the globe. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein is generally considered as the greatest philosopher since Immanuel Kant, and his personal life, work, and his historical moment intertwined in a fascinating, complex web. Noted scholar Edward Kanterian explores these intersections in Ludwig Wittgenstein, the newest title in the acclaimed Critical Lives series. -/- Wittgenstein’s works—from Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations —are notoriously dense, and Kanterian carefully distills them here, proposing thought-provoking new interpretations. Yet the philosopher’s passions were not solely confined to theoretical (...) musings, and the book explores Wittgenstein’s immersion in art and music and his social position as a member of the sophisticated Viennese upper class at the turn of the century. His personal and professional relationships also offer insights into his thoughts, as he was friends with the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, including John Maynard Keynes, George Edward Moore, Bertrand Russell, and Gilbert Royle. The philosopher was also deeply tormented by ethical and religious questions, and his internal turmoil, Kanterian argues, gives us a deeper understanding of the important conflicts and tensions of his age. Ultimately, the author contends, Wittgenstein’s life reveals insights into the ethical quandaries of our own time. -/- A readable and concise account, Ludwig Wittgenstein is an informative, accessible introduction to the one of the greatest thinkers of our age. (shrink)

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a frequent point of reference for Edward Said’s investigations into the various forces that structure and define the encounter of imperial societies with others. In Culture and Imperialism, Said explains the importance of Conrad’s novella by linking it to his concept of culture as the aesthetic acme of a society that simultaneously marks it and divides it from others. In Heart of Darkness, Said claims, we have a narrative that challenges its own imperial (...) society by emphasizing the ambiguity of its cultural limit. Heart of Darkness is thereby able to dramatize and emphasize the constituent elements of imperial society, even as it is unable to exceed that society’s fundamental character. Said’s reading is important, and even vital, for an appreciation of the complexities of Conrad’s novella, but it does not go far enough. The ambiguity of Conrad’s depiction of imperial society is only an ambiguity to the extent that the novella is critiqued at the level of content, with a corresponding lack of emphasis upon its rhetorical form. Through a consideration of the three primary elements of this form – the careful situation of the Nellie as the site of the narrative, the work of interruption in Marlow’s narrative, and the reverberation of Kurtz’s dying words in the conclusion of the novella – this essay argues that there is very little ambiguity in Conrad’s text. Indeed, what ambiguity remains is a function of its effort to dramatize the limit of imperialism precisely as a limitation, as a cultural determinant that through its form perpetually determines other societies as inferior, even as this very culture, as a limit set against these other societies, shows their richness to which imperialism is essentially blind. (shrink)

Though Frege was interested primarily in reducing mathematics to logic, he succeeded in reducing an important part of logic to mathematics by defining relations in terms of functions. By contrast, Whitehead & Russell reduced an important part of mathematics to logic by defining functions in terms of relations (using the definite description operator). We argue that there is a reason to prefer Whitehead & Russell's reduction of functions to relations over Frege's reduction of relations to functions. There is (...) an interesting system having a logic that can be properly characterized in relational but not in functional type theory. This shows that relational type theory is more general than functional type theory. The simplification offered by Church in his functional type theory is an over-simplification: one can't assimilate predication to functional application.<br>. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 277-278 [Access article in PDF] John Hedley Brooke, Margaret J. Osler, and Jitse M. van der Meer, editors. Science in Theistic Contexts: Cognitive Dimensions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Journals Division, 2001. Pp. xiii + 376. Cloth, $39.00. Paper, $25.00. Some twenty years ago, when I submitted a dissertation proposal to explore connections between theologies of creation and views of scientific (...) knowledge in the seventeenth century, my doctoral committee was not initially enthusiastic—my idea might make a good dissertation in religion, but was it really history of science? I doubt I would have a similar experience today. Not only has the "warfare" thesis of science and religion been laid permanently to rest, historians have begun seriously to question whether it makes sense even to treat "religion" and "science" in an essentialist manner as separate ways of thinking that do not ordinarily interact. Many detailed case studies demonstrating a variety of fascinating, often important connections between science and religion have appeared from leading scholars in the past two decades. This trend continues in the latest volume of Osiris, which contains sixteen essays documenting various ways in which religious beliefs have influenced the actual content and presentation of science.The volume opens with two companion essays laying out the terrain. First, Brooke engages the new methodological and conceptual problems that confront historians following the demise of the "warfare" thesis. Then Stephen Wykstra offers criteria for sorting out the various roles for metaphysical and religious beliefs (which he distinguishes) in shaping scientific knowledge. The case studies begin with E. Jamil Ragep's essay on medieval Islamic astronomy, arguing that religion sometimes had a constructive role—a rather novel claim for Islamic science, he points out. Noah J. Efron and Menachem Fisch show how early modern Jewish exegetical practices influenced David b. Solomon Gans's interpretations of astronomical texts, and quite possibly his interpretation of nature also. A Christian astronomer is next, as Peter Barker and Bernard R. Goldstein detail how Johannes Kepler's theology contributed directly to the discovery of scientific laws. Maurice A. Finnocchiaro then reviews various accounts of the Galileo affair, finding far more conflict in the subsequent historiography of the events than in the trial itself.Moving from astronomy to natural philosophy, Margaret G. Cook's essay on Robert Boyle examines the web of connections between theology, the mechanical philosophy, and [End Page 277] "the Aristotelian philosophy that he sought to replace." She demonstrates that Boyle used the classical art/nature distinction "to interpret the biblical account of the Creation and to argue that chemical techniques offered experimental confirmation that the world, created by art, worked by the same mechanical principles as artificial objects, not by the inherent agency of Aristotelian nature" (136). Margaret J. Osler also writes about Boyle. Contrary to the traditional view that final causes were expunged from science by the mechanical philosophy—a view that originated in the "positivism and scientific optimism" of the postwar period (168)—she proves that final causality remained central to the thought of Boyle and Pierre Gassendi. The essay by Stephen D. Snobelen presents substantial evidence that the famous General Scholium, appended to the second edition of Isaac Newton's Principia, was a carefully worded declaration of Newton's heterodox theology. "A Trinitarian," Snobelen concludes, "could not have written the General Scholium" (186). He also shows the degree to which Newton's theology shaped his overall natural philosophy, decisively debunking the late Richard S. Westfall's view that such influences could not be found.The final seven essays are mainly devoted to nineteenth-century science. Michael J. Crowe documents several ways in which Christian beliefs about divine goodness and the Incarnation affected astronomy. Martin Fichman shows how Alfred Russel Wallace's theism—not merely a vague spiritualism, as traditional accounts claim—"shaped the cognitive content of his mature evolutionary synthesis, which included a theoretical reconceptualization of the scope of natural selection" (227). In a revisionist account of Charles Darwin's philosophy of "nature," Phillip R. Sloan challenges the received view that... (shrink)

G.E. Moore, more than either Bertrand Russell or Ludwig Wittgenstein, was chiefly responsible for the rise of the analytic method in twentieth-century philosophy. This selection of his writings shows Moore at his very best. The classic essays are crucial to major philosophical debates that still resonate today. Amongst those included are: * A Defense of Common Sense * Certainty * Sense-Data * External and Internal Relations * Hume's Theory Explained * Is Existence a Predicate? * Proof of an External (...) World In addition, this collection also contains the key early papers in which Moore signals his break with idealism, and three important previously unpublished papers from his later work which illustrate his relationship with Wittgenstein. (shrink)

The authors provide an object-theoretic analysis of two paradoxes in the theory of possible worlds and propositions stemming from Russell and Kaplan. After laying out the paradoxes, the authors provide a brief overview of object theory and point out how syntactic restrictions that prevent object-theoretic versions of the classical paradoxes are justified philosophically. The authors then trace the origins of the Russell paradox to a problematic application of set theory in the definition of worlds. Next the authors show (...) that an object-theoretic analysis of the Kaplan paradox reveals that there is no genuine paradox at all, as the central premise of the paradox is simply a logical falsehood and hence can be rejected on the strongest possible grounds—not only in object theory but for the very framework of propositional modal logic in which Kaplan frames his argument. The authors close by fending off a possible objection that object theory avoids the Russell paradox only by refusing to incorporate set theory and, hence, that the object-theoretic solution is only a consequence of the theory’s weakness. (shrink)

This is an interview with Edward S. Casey, conducted by Donald A. Landes.

What happens when we glance around a room? How do we trust what we see in fleeting moments? In The World at a Glance, Edward S. Casey describes how glancing counts for more of human perception than previously imagined. An entire universe is perceived in a glance, but our quick and uncommitted attention prevents examination of these rapid acts and processes. While breaking down this paradox, Casey surveys the glance as an essential way by which we acquaint ourselves with (...) the world. This experiential tour-de-force reveals what happens in a blink of an eye. It will become a landmark study in phenomenology, philosophy, environmental philosophy, and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Psychology without genuinely thoughtful philosophy winds up as self-help gimmicks; philosophy without the insights & feeling of psychology remains an arcane academic game out of touch with life. By re-joining spirit & soul, this book is a major work of both philosophy & psychology. Casey asks puzzling questions & gives lasting answers. In a clear & vivid manner, one of America's best professional thinkers takes up one of the great themes of imagination, fantasy, hallucination, remembering & perceiving. Film & architecture (...) provide surprising material for his brilliant & useful account of basic philosophical problems which are also major mysteries of the soul. (shrink)

Yet such a contrast fails to provide an adequate account of the full scope of either philosophy or psychoanalysis. On the one hand, philosophical inquiry is not wholly pre-empted by the question of reality; it may also extend into the realm of phantasy, as can be seen in Plato's effort to determine the epistemological value of eikasia or in Husserl's consideration of Phantasie as a basis of insight into essences. On the other hand, psychoanalysts are as concerned about reality as (...) they are about phantasy. Indeed, one of the key phrases of psychoanalytic therapy is "adaptation to reality." The reason for this concern with reality is clear: if phantasies are modifications or distortions of the real, it is imperative to discern what the character of reality is, especially since it is held out as the standard of a sound state of mental health. (shrink)

An interview with Ed Casey where we discuss the intersections of his philosophical work with current political issues, including the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Shows how contemporary artists re-envision the earth in innovative painterly, sculptural, and architectural ways.

IMAGINING and remembering, two of the most frequent and fundamental acts of mind, have long been unwelcome guests in most of the many mansions of philosophy. When not simply ignored or over-looked, they have been considered only to be dismissed. This is above all true of imagination, as first becomes evident in Plato’s view that the art of making exact images tends to degenerate into the making of mere semblances. Kant, despite the importance he gives to imagination in the first (...) edition of The Critique of Pure Reason, nevertheless considers images to be lowly "monograms" that are unruly and thus untrustworthy. In more recent times, Sartre, who is nearly as ambivalent as Kant on the subject, has stressed imagination’s "essential poverty"—its character as "debased thought"—while Ryle, in covert counterpoint, has attempted to conceive imagining as parody and pretense: as mere make-believe. (shrink)

Gathering information from both published and unpublished material and interviews with Gibson's family, colleagues, and friends, Reed (philosophy, Drexel U.) chronicles Gibson's life and intellectual development and his attempts to synthesize several contrasting intellectual traditions into what he ultimately called an "ecological approach" to psychology. Annotation(c) 2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

This timely book examines the interaction of health research and regulation with law through empirical analysis and the application of key anthropological concepts to reveal the inner workings of human health research. Through ground-breaking empirical inquiry, Regulatory Stewardship of Health Research explores how research ethics committees (RECs) work in practice to both protect research participants and promote ethical research.This thought-provoking book provides new perspectives on the regulation of health research by demonstrating how RECs and other regulatory actors seek to fulfil (...) these two functions by performing a role of 'regulatory stewardship'. This involves guiding researchers through stages of research approval, as well as seeking to maximise benefits for participants and society while minimising risks. Arguing that participant protection and research promotion should rightly be treated as twin objectives for health research regulators, this book asserts that there is a need for more overt recognition of the importance and function of the deliberative space in which RECs can negotiate the risks relevant to a research application.This book is a key resource for academics and students interested in health research and regulation, and the dynamic interaction of ethics and the law. Regulators and policy-makers will also find it to be an insightful and illuminating text for the practical insights that it reveals about research governance in action. (shrink)

EVER SINCE Plato declared imagining to be mere pseudo- or shadow-knowing—a form of eikasia, the lowest species of mental activity—Western philosophers have striven to put imagination in its place: a strictly subordinate place. With the exception of isolated figures such as Vico, Collingwood, and Bachelard, philosophers have denounced imagining for its digressiveness and excoriated it for its evasiveness, though sometimes surreptitiously admiring it for these very qualities. At the same time, and as part of the same deprecatory tactic, invidious comparisons (...) have been instituted between imagining and supposedly superior psychical activities. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for example, the paradigm was pure thinking, over against which imagining appeared as deceitful and mendacious—as "the mistress of falsehood and error" in Pascal’s classic complaint. Even Kant, for all of his attention to imagination as a source of synthesis, considered the image to be "a mere set of particular qualities, determined by no assignable rule"—in contrast with the determinacy and rule-bound character of pure concepts. Kant, as much as Descartes or Pascal, Malebranche or Mersenne, Spinoza or Leibniz, would agree with Heidegger’s stern verdict that philosophical thinking is "charmless and image-poor.". (shrink)

How can I give you a reason to believe what I tell you? I can influence the evidence available to you. Or I can simply invite your trust. These two ways of giving reasons work very differently. When a speaker tells her hearer that p, I argue, she intends that he gain access to a prima facie reason to believe that p that derives not from evidence but from his mere understanding of her act. Unlike mere assertions, acts of telling (...) give reasons directly. They give reasons by inviting the hearer’s trust. This yields a novel form of anti-reductionism in the epistemology of testimony. The status of testimony as a sui generis source of epistemic warrant is entailed by the nature of the act of telling. We can discover the nature of this illocution, and its epistemic role, by examining how it functions in the real world of human relations. (shrink)

Hintikka has criticized psychologists for "hasty epistemologizing," which he takes to be an unwarranted transfer of ideas from psychology (a discipline dealing with questions of fact) into epistemology (a discipline dealing with questions of method and theory). Hamlyn argues, following Hintikka, that Gibson's theory of perception is an example of such an inappropriate transfer, especially insofar as Hamlyn feels Gibson does not answer several important questions. However, Gibson's theory does answer the relevant questions, albeit in a new and radical way, (...) which suggests that the alleged distinction between psychology and epistemology is suspect. In fact, contrary to Hintikka and Hamlyn's claims, Gibson's theory of perception appears to be a valuable source of epistemological as well as psychological ideas. (shrink)

One of the foundational texts of interpersonal psychoanalysis, _Prelogical Experience_ is a pioneering attempt to elaborate an interpersonal theory of personality that encompasses the nonpropositional, nonverbal dimension of human experience. Prelogical processes, the authors hold, cannot be consigned to infancy; rather they shape experience throughout life and are especially salient in relation to dreams, emotion, perception, and the arts. Of special note is Tauber and Green's elaboration of the clinical situation that grows out of an appreciation of prelogical experience. In (...) a striking anticipation of contemporary thinking, they approach patient-therapist interaction in terms of the continuous exchange of "presentational data" by patient and analyst. These data enable patient and therapist alike to "know" more about the other than can ever be expressed in propositional terms. This perspective assigns an important role to what Piaget would term "the cognitive unconscious" in the clinical process. It likewise sustains a view of the countertransference - which includes the analyst's own dreams - as a vital source of presentational data about the patient. As Donnel Stern notes in his Introduction, these and other insights "amount to a surprisingly contemporary description of psychoanalytic treatment.". (shrink)

The Life of the Transcendental Ego presents essays by a number of distinguished writers in the continental tradition of philosophy. The essays include problems in transcendental philosophy, the nature of autobiography, the validity of existentialism, the possibilities of phenomenology, as well as focused discussions of concrete issues in aesthetics and ethics.