The Concordance is designed around units of philosophical sense whose limits in the text are indicated to the line. Unlike research tools based merely on the occurrence of key words (e.g., cause), it provides precise and complete information about not only the location but also the diversity of content in all the items covered by its survey. Furthermore it provides the capability for tracing the family of topics to which a particular text may belong. In short, the Concordance tells you (...) as much as possible about a text before you look it up. (shrink)

This paper addresses some connections between conceptions of the will and the theory of practical reason. The first two sections argue against the idea that volitional commitments should be understood along the lines of endorsement of normative principles. A normative account of volition cannot make sense of akrasia, and it obscures an important difference between belief and intention. Sections three and four draw on the non-normative conception of the will in an account of instrumental rationality. The central problem is to (...) explain the grip of instrumental requirements even in cases in which agents do not fully endorse the ends they are pursuing. The solution I propose appeals to coherence constraints on the beliefs that condition the distinctive volitional stance of intention. (shrink)

Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, Franz Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Leo Lowenthal—the impact of the Frankfurt School on the sociological, political, and cultural thought of the twentieth century has been profound. _The Dialectical Imagination_ is a major history of this monumental cultural and intellectual enterprise during its early years in Germany and in the United States. Martin Jay has provided a substantial new preface for this edition, in which he reflects on the continuing relevance of the work of the Frankfurt (...) School. (shrink)

The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox is a controversial discourse, rich with facts and observations gathered by one of the most erudite minds of our ...

Using Kierkegaard's later religious writings as well as his earlier philosophical works, David Gouwens explores this philosopher's religious and theological thought, focusing on human nature, Christ, and Christian discipleship. He helps the reader approach Kierkegaard as someone who both analysed religion and sought to evoke religious dispositions in his readers. Gouwens discusses Kierkegaard's main concerns as a religious and, specifically, Christian thinker, and his treatment of religion using the dialectic of 'becoming Christian', and counters the interpretation of his religious thought (...) as privatistic and asocial. Gouwens appraises both the edifying discourses and the pseudonymous writings, including the particular problems posed by the latter. Between foundationalism and irrationalism, Kierkegaard's ideas are seen to anticipate the end of 'modernity', while standing at the centre of the Christian tradition. (shrink)

This paper was originally presented at the annual meeting of the program board of the Division of Overseas Ministries of the National Council of Churches. It followed a discussion by Jorgen Randers showing the implications of present world trends in growth of population and industrialization, depletion of natural resources, rise in population, and full utilization of agricultural land. Referring to the two hours of his talk and the ensuing discussion, Randers said, “The entire purpose is to convince you that exponential (...) growth cannot go on forever in a world of fixed size.” Randers stressed that overtaxing of the natural environment is caused more by industrialization than by population. Industrial processes use natural resources and emit pollution. Capital‐intensive agriculture in time decreases the productivity of land. Limiting of capital accumulation is as necessary as limiting of population. World civilization must and will move from growth to equilibrium, either by human choice or by the pressure of natural and social forces.Many trade‐offs and choices lie before us in the approaching equilibrium. We can press forward along the historical growth curves, exceed the limits of the world environment, and endure a collapse of population and industrialization back to a level the world can support. Or we can choose a redirection of law, policies, and religions to create a smooth transition to world equilibrium. Even in choosing equilibrium, alternatives arise. The higher the population, the lower will be the achieveable standard of living and quality of life. Trade‐offs will be made consciously or implicitly between advantages in the immediate future compared to advantages in the distant future. An inherent conflict exists between time horizons. Choosing to maximize the present quality of life condemns future generations to suffer for their predecessors' advantage.The reader should, if possible, read first any of those cited in notes1, 2, or 6 listed at the end of this paper before reading the following text, —J A Y W. FORRESTER. (shrink)

This article applies the analytic rigor of philosophy to the vexed topic of business strategy, and uses the objective, public evidence of business strategy as an existence proof for the possibility of free will and purpose in the private realm of subjective intentionality. The first part distinguishes three types of intentionality in philosophy—purposive intentionality, referential intentionality, and the problematic intentionality of a godlike, miraculous “inner intender.” After rejecting this third type of intentionality, and noting that its rejection saves the first (...) two types of intentionality from guilt by association, the second part draws parallels with three types of strategy in business: purposive, referential, and godlike. The first defines the goals and objectives of a company; the second picks out and targets consumers in market driven strategy; and the third, with the help of philosophical reflections, demands a rethinking of the function of leadership without reliance on a single, godlike leader. In the third part of this article, the existence proof from the public world of business is used to shed light on the possibility of intentionality in the private world of subjective intentionality. Finally, the article draws conclusions for its three audiences: for the philosophers, with credit to Nietzsche who saw it all, a greater clarity about intentionality and free will; for business people, greater clarity about the importance of purposiveness and strategic intent; and for business philosophers, a demonstration showing how—through strategy and intentionality—we can both create value and give meaning to the lives of our employees, ourselves, and our customers. (shrink)

I forgive the slight spin of sloganeering conveyed by the motto so frequently cited by proponents of a cosmos chock full of organisms: "Life will fed a way." Life is resilient and quite capable (especially in bacterial form) of living in the most damnably improbable places-from nearly boiling ponds in Yellowstone National Park to tiny pores in rocks as deep as two miles below the earth's surface. But even this degree of resilience must work within limits; if life ever evolved (...) on the Martian surface during its initial billion years with running water, the planet's later desiccation probably extinguished our solar system's second experiment in advanced carbon chemistry. (shrink)

Sellars’s views on the Myth of the Given and the ontological status of secondary qualities, one would have thought, are well-known, even if not always well-understood. One would not have expected his Carus Lectures, then, to offer anything radically new and exciting. The ground that they cover is, after all, familiar—from “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, from “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, from “The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem”, and from the ensuing debates with Cornman and (...) with Firth. One would not really have anticipated many surprises. But one would have been wrong. (shrink)

Once upon a time, when there was no psychoanalysis or cultural anthro-pology or meta-ethics, most philosophers believed that there was objective truth in such statements as, ‘Murder is wrong’, ‘One should not steal’, and ‘Heliogabalus was an evil man’. Many philosophers still believe that there is, and though their view is not wholly respectable in most English-speaking philosophical circles, it probably has the important merit of being true. There are serious reasons for worrying about the traditional view: it is not (...) clear how an ‘ought’ can be derived from an ‘is’; there are problems s e in trying to translate evaluative terms into descriptive ones; reflective men disagree profoundly on ethical issues; ethical judgments appear to have an emotive component; etc. Still, there are also very good reasons for believing that murder is wrong and that Heliogabalus was an evil man. I shall not defend the objectivity of statements of the form, ‘ X is good ’, for I am not at all worried about such statements passing out of the language of rational men. Even behaviourists and relativists and emotivists still make reasonably intelligent statements of this form. But I am worried about the future of a related class of statements, those of the form, ‘ X is civilized ’. These statements have been gradually disappearing from our discourse; perhaps they have been casualties of recent revolutions in social science and philosophy. And this state of affairs is a tragic one indeed, for not only is there a need for statements of this form, but of all ethical statements, these are the ones whose descriptive content is most incontrovertible. Non-cognitivistic moral philosophers generally dismiss statements about the ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarous’ along with statements about the ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘right’, and ‘wrong’. But social scientists have made statements about the ‘civilized’ and ‘barbarous’ special objects of attack. They have even suggested that people who make such statements are narrow-minded, naive, and ‘ethnocentric’. ‘Ethnocentrism’, an eminent social scientist tells us, ‘is the technical name for this view of things in which one's own group is the center of everything, and all others are scaled and rated with reference to it.’ Ethnocentrism is innocent enough up to a point, but reflective men should be careful not to allow it to blind their moral sense. The noted anthropologist, Herskovits, has given us the following warning: Cultures are sometimes evaluated by the use of the designations ‘civilized’ and ‘primitive’. These terms have a deceptive simplicity, and attempts to document the differences implied in them have proved to be of unexpected difficulty. (shrink)

At Theresa Schiavo's bedside : a guardian's role and reflections.

A collection of essays that examine how discussions of justice are most usefully shaped in our world, rethinking how we theorize justice and principles of justice.

G. K. CHESTERTON once mused over Noah's dinnertime conversations during those long nights on a And Noah he often said to his wife when he sat down to dine, "I don't care where the water goes if it doesn't get into the wine." Noah's insouciance has not been matched by defenders of his famous flood. For centuries, fundamentalists have tried very hard to find a place for the subsiding torrents. They have struggled even more valiantly to devise a source for (...) all that water. Our modern oceans, extensive as they are, will not override Mt. Everest. One seventeenth-century searcher said: "I can as soon believe that a man would be drowned in his own spittle as that the world should be deluged by. (shrink)

_Sweet Reason: A Field Guide to Modern Logic, 2nd Edition_ offers an innovative, friendly, and effective introduction to logic. It integrates formal first order, modal, and non-classical logic with natural language reasoning, analytical writing, critical thinking, set theory, and the philosophy of logic and mathematics. An innovative introduction to the field of logic designed to entertain as it informs Integrates formal first order, modal, and non-classical logic with natural language reasoning, analytical writing, critical thinking, set theory, and the philosophy of (...) logic and mathematics Addresses contemporary applications of logic in fields such as computer science and linguistics A web-site linked to the text features numerous supplemental exercises and examples, enlightening puzzles and cartoons, and insightful essays. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars' conclusion in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" that "the Given" is a "Myth" quickly elicited philosophical opposition and remains contentious fifty years later. William Alston has challenged that conclusion on several occasions by attempting to devise an acceptable account of perception committed to the givenness of perceived objects. His most recent challenge advances a "Theory of Appearing" which posits irreducible non-conceptual relations, ostensibly overlooked by Sellars, e.g., of "looking red", between the subject and the object perceived, that (...) can playa justificatory role vis-à-vis the corresponding beliefs, e.g., that the object is red. I argue that Alston undermines his positive plausibility arguments by first blurring and then ignoring crucial differencesamong various looks-concepts, and that his own putative "phenomenal" looks-concept demonstrably cannot play the justificatory role that he envisions for it. Both his critique of Sellars' arguments and his own alternative proposal thus fail on all fronts. (shrink)

According to Hume, the idea of a persisting, self-identical object, distinct from our impressions of it, and the idea of a duration of time, the mere passage of time without change, are mutually supporting "fictions". Each rests upon a "mistake", the commingling of "qualities of the imagination" or "impressions of reflection" with "external" impressions (perceptions), and, strictly speaking, we are conceptually and epistemically entitled to neither. Among Kant's aims in the First Critique is the securing of precisely these entitlements. Like (...) Hume, he acknowledges the correlativity of the notions of temporal duration and persisting self-identical objects (i.e., continuant substances). Unlike Hume, however, he undertakes to establish the legitimacy or objective validity of the schematized category of substance and, correspondingly, of the representation of time as a formal unity with duration as one of its modes. (shrink)

The Anglo-Saxon saints, like the Anglo-Saxons as a whole, once seemed to have suffered immensely because of the Norman Conquest. Respected historians, among them David Knowles and Frank Stenton, left colorful images in the historical imagination of bigoted Norman churchmen treating with contempt the old English saints who rested in the communities over which they took charge. But now, in large part because of the work of Susan Ridyard, our perceptions have altered dramatically. Norman churchmen now appear to have accepted (...) readily, rather than to have condemned suspiciously, their new saints. The present article will address these issues but will focus on a specific community—Christ Church, Canterbury. Events at Christ Church obviously have implications beyond the walls of Canterbury. As the see of Archbishop Lanfranc , it lay at the center of the Anglo-Norman ecclesiastical reform. As home to the hagiographer and historian Eadmer , it had an exceptionally rich collection of narrative sources. Hagiographic practice at Christ Church can thus tell us about the ecclesiastical thought of Lanfranc and the historical thought of Eadmer and, most interestingly, about how the two systems affected and shaped each other. (shrink)

Frost's critique reveals the limitations of the reverse-engineering approach to cognitive modeling – the style of psychological explanation in which a stipulated internal organization explains a relatively narrow set of phenomena. An alternative is to view organization as both the explanation for some phenomena and a phenomenon to be explained. This move poses new and interesting theoretical challenges for theories of word reading.

rom Flesh Gordon to Alex in Wonderland , title parodies have been a stock-in-trade of low comedy. We may not anticipate a tactical similarity between the mayhem of Mad magazine's movie reviews and the titles of major scientific works, yet two important nineteenth-century critiques of Darwin parodied his most famous phrases in their headings.

This article is an attempt to critique some of the limitations of dominant school reform discourses in education, drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault, Michael Apple, Maxine Greene, and Dennis Carlson, in addition to writers in the emerging field of what might be called ?eco-progressivism.? The intersections between ecology and education can help construct a distinct counternarrative of progressive educational reform that is informed by ecological discourses, movements, and zeitgeists. Through the field of conservation biology, I hope to connect (...) both ecology and education as crisis disciplines and suggest that the reform discourse in the field of biology utilizes a much different framework than that of current school reform orthodoxy. These differences have powerful and real consequences for the ways in which children and teachers experience school. Utilizing the well documented case of the failure of the Biosphere 2 research project as a grounding metaphor and cautionary tale, I plan to show not only the severe limitations of the current school reform orthodoxy but the ways in which the normalization of what I call the ?biospheric number? functions as a technology of power. Finally, I hope to position the emerging worldview of eco-progressivism as a useful framework for reconsidering school reform specifically and the progressive education movement more broadly. (shrink)

Hume raises the issue of how common life and philosophy are related. He presents the possibility that they are irreconcilably opposed, that philosophy rigorously and honestly pursued must lead to skepticism. I discuss some prominent interpretive issues about Hume in light of this opposition between common life and philosophy. I also argue that this opposition is a deep and general philosophical problem, and sketch an approach to this problem. ;These are my interpretive claims: I argue that Hume has constructive aims (...) in his epistemology, and that he is surprised when his naturalism subverts these constructive aims and leads to skepticism. I argue that Hume does not entertain a moral skepticism similar to his skepticism about the external world and causal relations, but that he should have entertained such a skepticism. I argue that, in the Dialogues, Philo does not concede that religious belief is natural and therefore secure despite its unreasonableness. Rather, Philo contends that religious belief is not natural, and contends that this lack of naturalness gives us principled grounds for preferring causal and moral beliefs to natural ones. However, I argue, the problem of general philosophical skepticism keeps this religious skepticism from being satisfactory. ;I use the interpretation of Hume to clarify and deepen Hume's Problem, and to begin working toward a solution of that problem. I argue that there is a perspective we can take up that makes skepticism about the status of our physical and moral beliefs and practices seem inevitable. To resolve Hume's Problem, we must show that this perspective is the wrong perspective on human life, or at least that there is some alternative perspective that does not lead to skepticism but is no less rational than the perspective that does lead to skepticism. (shrink)

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Discusses epistemic foundationalism. Examines the confrontation between Wilfrid Sellars's critique of the ‘Myth of the Given’ and William Alston's defence of ‘immediate knowledge’, and explores and endorses Sellars's strong epistemic internalism and the integrated normative accounts of justification, language‐mastery, concept‐possession, and perceptual experience that support it. The proceduralist thesis that the activity of justifying is prior to the state of being justified is elucidated and defended.

During his atomistic period, Russell felt compelled to include negative facts in his ontology. In this essay, I diagnose the grounds of that compulsion, Assess the cogency of an ontology which includes negative facts, And, Finding it inadequate, Consider finally alternative solutions within the atomistic framework to the root problems of negation.