Between 1234 and 1258 King Henry III, having emerged from the tutelage of ministers inherited from his father, controlled the government of England himself. Looking at this period of personal rule, it would be easy to gain the impression that Henry's kingship, in its theory, and also to some extent its practice, challenged the position of the magnates. M. T. Clanchy, for example, in a justly famous article has suggested that in the 1240s and 1250s Henry III (...) evolved a theory of royal absolutism, a theory which had threatening implications for the magnates. He has also stressed the extent to which Henry was “the initiator both of the methods and of the theory” behind Edward I's quo warranto campaign, which questioned the liberties possessed by the magnates in the field of local government. As for Henry's court, the impression has been given by R. F. Treharne that few English barons were present there, and that the king was largely surrounded by officials and foreign relatives — the latter being his wife's Savoyard uncles and his own Poitevin half-brothers of the house of Lusignan. G. W. S. Barrow has written that Henry “appeared to be excluding the barons as a class from membership of his royal council.” The question whether Henry, like his father John, was pressing magnates to pay their debts has never been investigated; but Matthew Paris's picture of the king as a “vigilant and indefatigable searcher after money” might indicate that the revolution of 1258, like that of 1215, was a “rebellion of the king's debtors.”. (shrink)

The idea of agent causation—that a system such as a living organism can be a cause of things in the world—is often seen as mysterious and deemed to be at odds with the physicalist thesis that is now commonly embraced in science and philosophy. Instead, the causal power of organisms is attributed to mechanistic components within the system or derived from the causal activity at the lowest level of physical description. In either case, the ‘agent’ itself (i.e., the system as (...) a whole) is left out of the picture entirely, and agent causation is explained away. We argue that this is not the right way to think about causation in biology or in systems more generally. We present a framework of eight criteria that we argue, collectively, describe a system that overcomes the challenges concerning agent causality in an entirely naturalistic and non-mysterious way. They are: (1) thermodynamic autonomy, (2) persistence, (3) endogenous activity, (4) holistic integration, (5) low-level indeterminacy, (6) multiple realisability, (7) historicity, (8) agent-level normativity. Each criterion is taken to be dimensional rather than categorical, and thus we conclude with a short discussion on how researchers working on quantifying agency may use this multidimensional framework to situate and guide their research. (shrink)

This essay posits that psychology’s general lack of respect as a science stems from two related problems: the continued focus on conceptually vague mentalistic constructs and the adherence to a methodology that emphasizes statistical inference over experimental analysis. The lack of a thoroughgoing experimental analysis has so far prevented psychologists from discovering a set of foundational principles thus inhibiting them from being able to predict and control individual behavior. Psychologists can remake their conceptual and methodological foundations by focusing on the (...) relationship between observed behavior and its context and by adopting methods of experimentation that would aid in the discovery of orderly functional relationships. This knowledge could be used to more parsimoniously explain complex behavior, including cognitive phenomena, and to more effectively solve practical problems. (shrink)

In my article, “Why Psychology Hasn’t Kept Its Promises” , I argued that psychology hasn’t become the science its practitioners had hoped because psychologists continue to focus on mentalistic constructs and they adhere to a methodology that emphasizes statistical inference over experimental analysis. I concluded that in order to better keep their promise of a psychological science, psychologists should return to studying the relationship between observed behavior and its context with the type of experimental analysis that characterizes the other experimental (...) sciences. In his reply, Lana suggests that there may be aspects of human social and verbal behavior that are so complex that we may not be able to carry out a solid experimental analysis, thus limiting what we can discover about our own nature. Lana concludes that the methodologies needed to understand these more complex social relationships are hermeneutic and historical rather than experimental in nature. I concur with Lana both that an experimental analysis of much of human behavior may not be possible and that psychologists must, therefore, rely on complementary descriptive, interpretive, and historical analyses. I argue, however, that the interpretive language and the historical hindsight must be based on a foundation of basic principles derived from the systematic experimental analysis of behavior. (shrink)

"The professional memoir of Henry Burroughs--former president of the White House Press Photographers Association, chairman of the Senate Standing Committee for Photographers, and "shooter" for the Associated Press for thirty-three years--whose career docu.

For this reason also the question is asked, whether happiness is to be acquired by learning or by habituation or some other sort of training, or comes in virtue of some divine providence or again by chance. Now if there is any gift of the gods to men, it is reasonable that happiness should be god-given, and most surely god-given of all human things inasmuch as it is the best. But this question would perhaps be more appropriate to another inquiry; (...) happiness seems, however, even if it is not god-sent but comes as a result of virtue and some process of learning or training, to be among the most god-like things; for that which is the prize and end of virtue seems to be the best thing in the world, and something godlike... (shrink)