Reproduction of the original: Mental Evolution in Man by George John Romanes.

"This book is a sorely needed corrective. Animal Spirits is an important--maybe even a decisive--contribution at a difficult juncture in macroeconomic theory.

George McClure offers here a far-reaching analysis of the role of consolation in Italian Renaissance culture, showing how the humanists' interest in despair, and their effort to open up this realm in both social and personal terms, signaled a shift toward a heightened secularization in European thought. Analyzing works by fourteenth-and fifteenth-century writers, from Petrarch to Marsilio Ficino, McClure examines the treatment of such problems as bereavement, fear of death, illness, despair, and misfortune. These writers, who evinced a belief (...) in the legitimacy of secular sadness, tried to forge a wisdom that in their view dealt more realistically with the art of living and dying than did the disputations of scholastic philosophy and theology. Arguing that consolatory concerns helped spur the revival of classical schools of psychological thought, McClure reveals that the humanists sought comfort from once-neglected troves of Stoic, Peripatetic, Epicurean, Platonic, and Christian thought. He contends that the humanists' pursuit of solace and their duty as consolers provided not only a forum but perhaps also an incentive for the articulation of prominent Renaissance themes concerning immortality, the dignity of man, and the sanctity of worldly endeavor. Originally published in 1990. 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)

Written in the intense political and intellectual tumult of the early years of the Weimar Republic, _Political Theology_ develops the distinctive theory of sovereignty that made Carl Schmitt one of the most significant and controversial political theorists of the twentieth century. Focusing on the relationships among political leadership, the norms of the legal order, and the state of political emergency, Schmitt argues in _Political Theology_ that legal order ultimately rests upon the decisions of the sovereign. According to Schmitt, only the (...) sovereign can meet the needs of an "exceptional" time and transcend legal order so that order can then be reestablished. Convinced that the state is governed by the ever-present possibility of conflict, Schmitt theorizes that the state exists only to maintain its integrity in order to ensure order and stability. Suggesting that all concepts of modern political thought are secularized theological concepts, Schmitt concludes _Political Theology_ with a critique of liberalism and its attempt to depoliticize political thought by avoiding fundamental political decisions. (shrink)

The law has therefore had two conflicting impacts on medical ethics: the positive effect of eroding paternalism and replacing it with a patient-centered ethic; and the negative effect of encouraging physicians to be more concerned with avoiding litigation than doing the "right" thing.

How closely involved with hospital ethics committees should patients and their families become? Should they routinely have access to committees, or be empowered to initiate consultations? To what extent should they be informed of the content or outcome of committee deliberations? Seeing ethics committees as the locus of competing responsibilities allows us to respond to the questions posed by a patient rights model and to acknowledge more fully the complex moral dynamics of clinical medicine.

Since at least the advent of Jack Kevorkian’s “suicide machine” the major argument against adopting physician-assisted suicide laws has been that they will lead us down a slippery slope to state-sa...

Philosophical (p-) zombies are constructs that possess all of the behavioral features and responses of a sentient human being, yet are not conscious. P-zombies are intimately linked to the hard problem of consciousness and have been invoked as arguments against physicalist approaches. But what if we were to invert the characteristics of p-zombies? Such an inverse (i-) zombie would possess all of the behavioral features and responses of an insensate being yet would nonetheless be conscious. While p-zombies are logically possible (...) but naturally improbable, an approximation of i-zombies actually exists: individuals experiencing what is referred to as “anesthesia awareness.” Patients under general anesthesia may be intubated (preventing speech), paralyzed (preventing movement), and narcotized (minimizing response to nociceptive stimuli). Thus, they appear—and typically are—unconscious. In 1-2 cases/1000, however, patients may be aware of intraoperative events, sometimes without any objective indices. Furthermore, a much higher percentage of patients (22% in a recent study) may have the subjective experience of dreaming during general anesthesia. P-zombies confront us with the hard problem of consciousness—how do we explain the presence of qualia? I-zombies present a more practical problem—how do we detect the presence of qualia? The current investigation compares p-zombies to i-zombies and explores the “hard problem” of unconsciousness with a focus on anesthesia awareness. (shrink)

This article provides a Foucauldian analysis of whiteness as a philosophical, political, anthropological and epistemological regime, undergirded by a power/knowledge nexus, which shapes what it meansto embody whiteness vis-a-vis the Black body/self. As a specific historically constructed standpoint, one that takes itselfas a “universal” value, and through a genealogical reading, whiteness is revealed as akind of emergence (Entstehung), a reactive value-creating power which shapes how the Black body/self is disciplined and how the Black body/selfcomes to introject a self-denigrating episteme. This (...) introjected episteme is explored as being fueled by white ressentiment. Coming under normalizing disciplinary techniques of whiteness, which is historically demonstrated, it is argued that Blacks carne to intemalize a form of self-ressentiment. Through the existentially rich narrative text of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the author shows that Pecola Breedlove, though a fictional character, is the racially distorted (and racially self-hating) product of certain contingent interpersonal and historical practices that once genealogically revealed create the possibility of radically dismantling their impact. (shrink)

The dream of a community of philosophers engaged in inquiry with shared standards of evidence and justification has long been with us. It has led some thinkers puzzled by our mathematical experience to look to mathematics for adjudication between competing views. I am skeptical of this approach and consider Skolem's philosophical uses of the Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem to exemplify it. I argue that these uses invariably beg the questions at issue. I say ?uses?, because I claim further that Skolem shifted his (...) position on the philosophical significance of the theorem as a result of a shift in his background beliefs. The nature of this shift and possible explanations for it are investigated. Ironically, Skolem's own case provides a historical example of the philosophical flexibility of his theorem. Our suspicion ought always to be aroused when a proof proves more than its means allow it. Something of this sort might be called ?a puffed-up proof?. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the foundations of mathematics (revised edition), vol. 2, 21. (shrink)

For over a century the economics profession has extended its reach to encompass policy formation and institutional design while largely ignoring the ethical challenges that attend the profession's influence over the lives of others. Economists have proven to be disinterested in ethics. Embracing emotivism, they often treat ethics a matter of mere preference. Moreover, economists tend to be hostile to professional economic ethics, which they incorrectly equate with a code of conduct that would be at best ineffectual and at worst (...) disruptive to good economic practice. But good ethical reasoning is not reducible to mere tastes, and professional ethics is not reducible to a code. Instead, professional economic ethics refers to a new field of investigation-a tradition of sustained and lively inquiry into the irrepressible ethical entailments of academic and applied economic practice. The Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics explores a wide range of questions related to the nature of ethical economic practice and the content of professional economic ethics. It explores current thinking that has emerged in these areas while widening substantially the terrain of economic ethics. There has never been a volume that poses so directly and intensively the question of the need for and content of professional ethics for economics. The Handbook incorporates the work of leading scholars and practitioners, including academic economists from various theoretical traditions; applied economists, beyond academia, whose work has direct and immense social impact; and philosophers, professional ethicists, and others whose work has addressed the nature of "professionalism" and its implications for ethical practice. (shrink)

This comprehensive text offers a systematic and thematic approach to West's philosophical work. It moves the reader through his distinctive form of prophetic pragmatism, his historicist and improvisational philosophy of religion, his socialist democratic and truncated Marxist political philosophy, and his reflections on a range of cultural issues.

This piece offers a retrospective review of a plenary speech at the 1969 Annual Meeting of the American Public Health Association by the leading environmentalist of the Nixon administration, attorney and judge Russell Train. Train's talk, titled “Prescription for a Planet,” can be seen as an early argument for uniting environmental health and public health as the two main determinants of both individual and population health and for the inclusion of these fields in the then‐new field of “bioethics.”.

Being, salvation, and the knowledge of God -- Presence and distance -- Time and space -- Language -- Selves and others -- Embodiment -- Possibility, nothingness, and the gift of being.

ABSTRACT The list of proposed addictions has recently grown to include television, videogames, shopping, day trading, kleptomania, and use of the Internet. These activities share with a more established entry, gambling, the property that they require no delivery of a biological stimulus that might be thought to unlock a hardwired brain process. I propose a framework for analyzing that class of incentives that do not depend on the prediction of physically privileged environmental events: people have a great capacity to coin (...) endogenous reward; we learn to cultivate it, and, where it is entrapping, to minimize it, by managing internally generated appetites for it. The basic method of cultivating endogenous reward is to learn cues that predict when best to harvest the reward that has been made possible by the growth of these appetites. This hedonic management occurs in the same motivational marketplace as the instrumental planning that seeks environmental goods in the conventional manner, and presumably obeys the same laws of temporal difference learning; but these laws are no longer limiting. Furthermore, instrumental contingencies often provide the most productive structure for hedonic management as well, for reasons that I discuss; but the needs of hedonic management create incentives both to pursue instrumental goals in a suboptimal manner and to avoid noticing how the hedonic incentive affects this pursuit. The result is the apparent irrationality that is often observed in process addictions. (shrink)

I start with a review of 20 years of proposals on the functions of consciousness. I then present a minimal number of functions that consciouness subserves, as well as as some remaining puzzles about its psychology. In the process I stress a psychologist's functional approach, asking what consciousness is for. The result is an attempt to place conscious processes within the usual flow of human information processing.

_Divine Providence_ is one of the major works of the Enlightenment scientist and religious seer Emanuel Swedenborg. It provides a coherent and satisfying solution to what has been called “the problem of evil”: How are God’s goodness and power reconcilable with evil’s presences in the larger world and in the human mind and heart? By tackling an array of issues that commonly undermine belief in God, including war, suffering, and inequality—and by revealing the wise and loving laws that lie hidden (...) behind these seemingly senseless phenomena—_Divine Providence _aims to restore our faith in the meaningfulness of the world. Despite its universal focus, _Divine Providence_ is also a highly practical book on the personal level, demonstrating how we can put aside negative attitudes and behaviors and grow into positive thought and action. The New Century Edition of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg is a modern-language, scholarly translation of Swedenborg’s theological works. The series’ easy-to-read style retains the dignity, variety, clarity, and gender-inclusive language of Swedenborg’s original Latin, bringing his thought to life. This portable edition contains the text of the New Century Edition translation, but not the introduction, annotations, or other supplementary materials found in the deluxe editions. (shrink)