Philosophical Pragmatism and International Relations bridges the gap between philosophical pragmatism and international relations, two disciplinary perspectives that together shed light on how to advance the study and conduct of foreign affairs. Authors in this collection discuss a broad range of issues, from policy relevance to peacekeeping operations, with an eye to understanding how this distinctly American philosophy, pragmatism, can improve both international relations research and foreign policy practice.

Pulvermüller's work in extending Hebb's theory into the realm of language is exciting. However, we feel that what he characterizes as a single cell assembly is actually a set of cooperating cell assemblies that form parts of larger cognitive structures. These larger structures account more easily for a variety of phenomena, including the psycholinguistic.

Page's target article makes a good case for the strength of localist models. This can be characterized as an issue of where new information is integrated with respect to existing knowledge structures. We extend the analysis by discussing the dimension of when this integration takes place, the implications, and how they guide us in the creation of cognitive models.

Although Glenberg 's theory benefits from the incorporation of a suppression concept, a more differentiated view of suppression would be even more effective. We propose such a concept, showing how it accounts for phenomena that Glenberg describes and also for phenomena that he ignores.

The theory and practice of history and its relevance to the modern world, by Britains greatest radical historian.

Kant’s philosophy is often treated as a closed system, without reference to how it was written or how Kant arrived at its familiar form, the critique. In fact, the style of the critique seems so artless that readers think of it as an unfortunate by-product—a style of stylelessness. In _Constituting Critique_, Willi Goetschel shows how this apparent gracelessness was deliberately achieved by Kant through a series of writing experiments. By providing an account of the process that culminated in his three (...) _Critiques_, this book offers a new perspective on Kant’s philosophical thought and practice. _Constituting Critique_ traces the stages in Kant’s development to reveal how he redefined philosophy as a critical task. Following the philosopher through the experiments of his early essays, Goetschel demonstrates how Kant tests, challenges, and transforms the philosophical essay in his pursuit of a new self-reflective literary genre. From these experiments, critique emerges as the philosophical form for the critical project of the Enlightenment. The imperatives of its transcendental style, Goetschel contends, not only constitute and inform the critical moment of Kant’s philosophical praxis, but also have an enduring place in post-Kantian philosophy and literature. By situating the _Critiques_ within the context of Kant’s early essays, this work will redirect the attention of Kant scholars to the origins of their form. It will also encourage contemporary critical theorists to reconsider their own practice through an engagement with its source in Kant. (shrink)

This collection furthers English-language scholarship on the philosophy of Max Scheler, with a focus on areas that are potentially integral to Scheler's continuing legacy. The chapters are divided according to Scheler's early work in phenomenology and value theory and his later work in metaphysics and anthropology.

Various, albeit largely incongruent, attempts have been made at demonstrating the critical force of phenomenology. Mohr seeks to rekindle the project by accentuating the critical potential hidden within a core phenomenological presupposition: the discrepancy between conceptual and intuitive meaning (logos and phenomenon). Phenomenological attention on the discrepancy itself as an experienced phenomenon constitutes the starting point of critical phenomenology. While Adorno famously rejects intuition as a viable candidate for grounding critique, Mohr argues that reflection on lived experiences and the nonformal (...) meanings they yield provide a robust source for critical self-reflection. As such, ideology may be most effectively unmasked by means of a proper attitudinal orientation to the intuitive meanings within one’s lived social experiences. (shrink)

The goals of medicine -- A story about a patient with aortic stenosis -- What are facts in medicine? -- Clarify the chain of events that led to the present state : the case as a narrative -- The case of Myra Manner -- Examine your presuppositions and preconceptions -- Separate and examine the values at issue -- A question of judgment -- The patient, the doctor, and the relationship -- Observation, prognosis, and prognosticating -- Thinking in medicine -- Accepting (...) the challenge. (shrink)

Originalism as Faith presents a comprehensive history of the originalism debates. It shows how the doctrine is rarely used by the Supreme Court, but is employed by academics, pundits and judges to maintain the mistaken faith that the Court decides cases under the law instead of the Justices' personal values. Tracing the development of the doctrine from the founding to present day, Eric J. Segall shows how originalism is used by judges as a pretext for reaching politically desirable results. (...) The book also presents an accurate description and evaluation of the late Justice Scalia's jurisprudence and shows how he failed to practice the originalism method that he preached. This illuminating work will be of interest to lawyers, law students, undergraduates studying the Court, law professors and anyone else interested in an honest discussion and evaluation of originalism as a theory of constitutional interpretation, a political weapon, and an article of faith. (shrink)

The Nature of Suffering underscores the change that is taking place in medicine from a basic concern with disease to a greater focus on the sick person. Cassell centers his discussion on the problem of suffering because, he says, its recognition and relief are a test of the adequacy of any system of medicine. He describes what suffering is and its relationship to the sick person: bodies do not suffer, people do. An exclusive concern with scientific knowledge of the body (...) and disease, therefore, impedes an understanding of suffering and diminishes the care of the suffering patient. The growing criticism that medicine is not sufficiently humanistic does not go deep enough to provide a basis for a new understanding of medicine. New concepts in medicine must have their basis in its history and in the development of ideas about disease and treatment. Cassell uses many stories about patients to demonstrate that, despite the current dominance of science and technology, there can be no diagnosis, search for the cause of the patient's disease, prognostication, or treatment without consideration of the individual sick person. Recent trends in medicine and society, Cassell believes, show that it is time for the sick person to be not merely an important concern for physicians but the central focus of medicine. He addresses the exciting problems involved in such a shift. In this new medicine, doctors would have to know the person as well as they know the disease. What are persons, however, and how are doctors to comprehend them? The kinds of knowledge involved are varied, including values and aesthetics as well as science. In the process of knowing the experience of patient and doctor move to center stage. He believes that the exploration of the person will engage medicine in the 21st century just as understanding the body has occupied the last hundred years. (shrink)

Felony disenfranchisement is best understood as a means of vote suppression. Quite apart from its significance as a form of criminal stigma, disenfranchisement is most properly characterized as one of the ways in which the American voting system reserves political participation for a privileged social and intellectual class. Thus understood, felony disenfranchisement reveals the theoretical underpinnings of an exclusionary version of American democracy in which more or less widespread disenfranchisement is an acceptable or necessary political tactic. Felony disenfranchisement should not (...) be characterized as a sanction for criminal conduct: It fits none of the usual justifications for punishment. Most commentators agree that felony disenfranchisement as a collateral sanction for criminal conduct stigmatizes alike a disparate collection of individuals convicted of crimes carrying a penalty of one year or more - everything from drug possession to murder - and extends, in many instances, long after former felons have completed their sentences. Justifications for refusing the vote to felons, and to former felons who are no longer incarcerated, are surprisingly weak and clearly related to larger issues of democratic participation. Accordingly, it is under the framework of democratic participation that the most persuasive justifications of disenfranchisement might be found. Under the framework of democratic participation, the disenfranchisement debate implicates competing theories of democracy, each of which has profound consequences for the constitution of the American polity. I contend that there are currently three models for the right to vote in American society: (1) a membership model premised upon popular participation in the democratic process as an expression of citizenship; (2) a deliberative model in which popular participation is conditioned upon the duty to be an informed and reflective citizen; and (3) an elite model entrenching political office in a political class that competes for votes among the electoral masses. The continuing vitality of these three models at the level of political debate and constitutional doctrine unsettles the dominant history of the franchise as one of progress from an exclusionary to an inclusionary extension of the mandate, and requires us to acknowledge felony disenfranchisement as part of a larger process of voter exclusion and suppression. (shrink)

Quality-of-life policing, responsive to the concerns of urban communities, presents a profound paradox. On the one hand, the collateral effects of drug use, especially in public and in racially fragmented, low-income communities, result in levels of crime and fear of crime that renders the communities almost uninhabitable; on the other, the collateral effects of policing drug crime, for these same communities, destroy the community's human fabric. A "new" generation of legal scholars have embraced and transformed the Broken Windows model of (...) policing urban communities. These theorists share a "social norms"perspective: they suggest that law's direct threat of imposing sanctions is not the sole means of constraining conduct. A variety of other devices, including non-legal, "social" norms, may supplement the law's coercive power. The social norms "take" on the Broken Windows argument is that public low-level crime undermines the social structures of local communities. Inner city blight sends a distinct message: that community members reject or ignore norms supporting law-abiding behavior in favor of norms supporting law-breaking. Accordingly, social norms theorists advocate empowering police and local communities through a variety of traditional and newly minted public order offenses (such as anti-loitering statutes and youth curfews) as means of attacking high crime in urban and predominantly minority neighborhoods. In this article, I take up the challenge of public order policing. My claim is that the sort of preventative policing social norms theorists advocate can and should be separated from reactive "investigative" policing directed at apprehending criminals. Separating preventative and investigative policing means that the police, as currently constituted, are the wrong people to engage in preventative policing. Instead, the appropriate people include municipal officials with no power to engage in investigation but who have the authority to enforce norms of public order. My proposal is to radically restructure the manner in which we think about the legitimacy of various policing practices and the type of authority the police wield. Our current focus on constitutional remedies for low-level police abuses has failed to ameliorate the justified resentment expressed by individuals and local communities subject to heightened amounts of increasingly invasive policing.The attempt to limit police authority through prospective constitutional (and other) norms that control their ability to search, seize, and interrogate suspects is properly confined to the police's investigative role. Limits do not work to constrain their ability to police public order and engage in crime prevention. Yet even at the investigative stage, the Court has already replaced the rule-based due-process model of authority with a series of role-based exceptions to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments' constitutional requirements. Both role- and rule-based concepts of authority concern the proper scope of legitimate authority. Rule-based authority has its basis in adherence to the content of particular rules; role-based authority is based in the powers afforded individuals in particular roles of public authority. Whereas rule-based authority derives its legitimacy primarily from the government's right to promulgate norms, role-based authority gains legitimacy from the degree to which the official's role is matched to the circumstances triggering authority. (shrink)

Taking as a guiding theme his claim that “there are effluvia from all things that have come to be,” (DK B89), the author presents a reading of Empedocles that stresses the central role of effluvia in his natural philosophy. In presentations of Empedocles, the tradition has usually emphasized the importance of the elements—earth, air, water, fire, Love, and Strife. But as an alternative to that tradition, the author here argues that one must bring to the forefront the role of the (...) effluvia, which give to Empedocles’ cosmology a fluid, viscous character. The history of western natural science has been dominated by a mechanics of solid bodies following, however indirectly, in the tradition of the atoms and void of early Greek atomism. Empedocles represents a forgotten exception to that history, and the present paper attempts to return to his philosophy, unearth its fluid mechanical foundations, and present a challenging alternative to the dominant physical paradigm. (shrink)

" Dr. Cassell discusses the world of the sick, the healing connection and healer's battle, the role of omnipotence in the healer's art, illness and disease, and ...

“What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of development, and species. Our letter formulates open research questions for cognitive science concerning the varieties of rules and representations that underwrite various LoT-based systems (...) and how these variations can help researchers taxonomize cognitive systems. (shrink)

We investigate whether age profiles of ethnobiological knowledge development are consistent with predictions derived from life history theory about the timing of productivity and reproduction. Life history models predict complementary knowledge profiles developing across the lifespan for women and men as they experience changes in embodied capital and the needs of dependent offspring. We evaluate these predictions using an ethnobiological knowledge assessment tool developed for an off-grid pastoralist population known as Choyeros, from Baja California Sur, Mexico. Our results indicate that (...) while individuals acquire knowledge of most dangerous items and edible resources by early adulthood, knowledge of plants and animals relevant to the age and sex divided labor domains and ecologies (e.g., women’s house gardens, men’s herding activities in the wilderness) continues to develop into middle adulthood but to different degrees and at different rates for men and women. As the demands of offspring on parents accumulate with age, reproductive-aged adults continue to develop their knowledge to meet their children’s needs. After controlling for vision, our analysis indicates that many post-reproductive adults show the greatest ethnobiological knowledge. These findings extend our understanding of the evolved human life history by illustrating how changes in embodied capital and the needs of dependent offspring predict the development of men’s and women’s ethnobiological knowledge across the lifespan. (shrink)

In so many of his epistemological writings, Aristotle defends a sensible flavor of gradualism about our cognitive capacities: we start with the partial grasps afforded by what is better known to us, and if things go well, we end up with understandings of those objects better known by nature. The picture is of a step-wise process, rather than a transforming moment of illumination.

Within the epistemology of the sciences, conventionalism has been the subject of regular criticism for over six decades. Critics such as W. V. Quine and Morton White, and more recently Nathan Salmon (1992), and Paul Boghossian (1996), have attacked even the most basic tenet of conventionalism, namely its claim that the truth of certain statements is fixed not by stipulation-independent facts, but by the conventions governing the meaning of those statements and their constituents.