v. 1. Opuscula logica, physica, allegorica, alia -- v. 2. Opuscula psychologica, theologica, daemonologica.

This book is a provocative contribution to contemporary ethical theory challenging foundational conceptions of character that date back to Aristotle. John Doris draws on behavioral science, especially social psychology, to argue that we misattribute the causes of behavior to personality traits and other fixed aspects of character rather than to the situational context. More often than not it is the situation not the nature of the personality that really counts. The author elaborates the philosophical consequences of this research for (...) a whole array of ethical theories and shows that, once rid of the misleading conception of motivation, moral psychology can support more robust ethical theories and more humane ethical practices. (shrink)

Thinking with images -- Aesthetics without theory -- The Baroque and Bacon's popes -- Chance meeting with Duane Michals -- Étant donnés, Marcel Duchamp -- Le Mépris or Contempt, a film by Jean-Luc Godard.

Recent policy debates in the US over access to mental health care have raised several philosophically complex ethical and conceptual issues. The defeat of mental health parity legislation in the US Congress has brought new urgency and relevance to theoretical and empirical investigations into the nature of mental illness and its relation to other forms of sickness and disability. Manifold, nebulous, and often competing conceptions of mental illness make the creation of coherent public policy exceedingly difficult. Referencing a variety of (...) approaches to ethical reflection on health care, and drawing from the empirical literature on therapeutic efficacy and economic efficiency, we argue that differential rationing, ‘disparity,’ is unjustifiable. (shrink)

Although Aristotle does not explicitly address persistence, his account of persisting may be derived from a careful consideration of his account of change. On my interpretation, he supposes that motions are mereological unities of their potential temporal parts – I dub such mereological unities ‘lasting’. Aristotle’s persisting things, too, are lasting, I argue. Lasting things are unlike enduring things in that they have temporal parts; and unlike perduring things in that their temporal parts are not actual, but rather are potential. (...) Lasting, that is Aristotle’s persisting, is thus a distinctive alternative to enduring and perduring. I assess this alternative showing it to be attractive. (shrink)

Creating Public Value in Practice: Advancing the Common Good in a Multi-Sector, Shared-Power, No-One-Wholly-in-Charge World brings together a stellar cast of thinkers to explore issues of public and cross-sector decision-making within a framework of democratic civic engagement. It offers an integrative approach to understanding and applying the concepts of creating public value, public values, and the public sphere. It presents a framework and language for opening a constructive conversation on what governments, businesses, nonprofits, and citizens can achieve in a democracy (...) that honors a broad range of public values. Public officials, scholars, and citizens alike are engaged in an intense debate about the proper purpose, role, and size of government. In the midst of this debate is a growing concern that important public values are ignored by government reform efforts. This book explores the different definitions of public value and approaches to public value creation, discernment, measurement, and assessment. The text helps clarify the issues and demonstrates how the meaning of public value is intimately related to how it is theorized, operationalized, and measured. The book examines the many alternatives for recognizing, measuring, and assessing public value and addresses the pros and cons of each approach. The result is a contribution to the ongoing dialogue about the virtues and limitations of a focus on the public sphere, public values, and how to create public value in the context of developing and implementing policies, programs, projects, and plans that ideally boost confidence in public institutions. (shrink)

One foundation of Eliminative Materialism is the claim that the totality of our ordinary resources for explaining and predicting behaviour, ?Folk Psychology?, constitutes a theoretical scheme, potentially in conflict with other theories of behaviour. Recent attacks upon this claim, as well as the defence by Paul Churchland, are examined and found to be lacking in a suitably realistic conception of theory. By finding such a conception, and by correctly identifying the level of conceptual structures within which Folk Psychology is located, (...) the original claim is reinforced. (shrink)

The virtue of mercy is widely admired, but is now marginalized in contemporary public life. Yet for centuries it held a secure place in western public discourse without implying a necessary contradiction with justice. Alex Tuckness and John M. Parrish ask how and why this changed. Examining Christian and non-Christian ancient traditions, along with Kantian and utilitarian strains of thought, they offer a persuasive account of how our perception of mercy has been transformed by Enlightenment conceptions of impartiality and (...) equality that place justice and mercy in tension. Understanding the logic of this decline, they argue, will make it possible to promote and defend a more robust role for mercy in public life. Their study ranges from Homer to the late Enlightenment and from ancient tragedies to medieval theologies to contemporary philosophical texts, and will be valuable to readers in political philosophy, political theory, and the philosophy of law. (shrink)

_Essays on Politics and Society_ brings together the most significant writings on the topic by the acclaimed Victorian historian, social critic, and essayist Thomas Carlyle. This volume includes some of his most well-known and influential pieces, such as "Characteristics" and "Chartism." In keeping with the Norman and Charlotte Strouse Edition of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle, these essays are accompanied by a thorough historical introduction to the material, extensive notes providing historical and cultural context while expanding on references and allusions, (...) and a textual apparatus that carefully details and explains the editorial decisions made in reconciling the editions of each essay. (shrink)

At the end of Being and Nothingness, Sartre defines the spirit of seriousness in the following way: “The spirit of seriousness has two characteristics: it considers values as transcendent givens independent of human subjectivity, and it transfers the quality of ‘desirable’ from the ontological structure of things to their simple material constitution.” My aim in this paper is to show how Sartre is susceptible to a tu quoque in terms of how he describes the threataspect of the world of objects. (...) That is, in works such as Nausea, Sartre appears to regard the world of objects as inherently threatening, and thus he has transferred the quality of threatening from the ontological structure of things to their simple material constitution. (shrink)

The main sources here are Hume, Husserl, and De Finetti. The problem is how phenomenological investigation has to do with partial or probabilistic judgment. Behavioristic, frequentist and subjectivistic views are briefly surveyed. A variant of Hume's account of the probability of chances is developed with the help of De Finetti's concept of exchangeability. The question of transcendental elements in or behind partial judgment is considered in the light of understanding disagreement and error in partial judgment.

The interpretation of the calculus of probability as a logic of partial belief has at least two advantages: it makes the assignment of probabilities plausible in cases where classical frequentist interpretations must find such assignments meaningless, and it gives a clear meaning to partial belief and to consistency of partial belief.

In this paper I try to defend three claims: first, that there is a requirement to aid and a correlative right to be aided; second, that the conditions under which this right applies can be precisely stated and given a convincing contractualist rationale; and third, that the existence of this right has no relevance for the justifiability of social welfare programs.

This collection of articles explores a broad range of issues relating to the development of Platonism. The volume takes in such figures as John Scotus Eriugena and Salomon ibn Gabirol, while bearing witness to an understanding and appreciation of the last head of the Platonic Academy, Damascius. The volume begins with a study of an aspect of Plato himself, his distinctly ironic way of making use of the ancient concept of the golden age and the history of a notion (...) that he bequeathed to his successors, the idea that the philosopher should develop something of an art or science of erotics. The volume continues on to explore areas such as the philosophical stature of Plato's nephew and successor, Speusippus, the functioning of Platonic dialogues within the intellectual life of the school, issues and figures within middle Platonism - notably Philo of Alexandria and Plutarch - various aspects of Plotinus' thought, evidence from Porphyry and Iamblichus and different aspects of the philosophy of Proclus. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;My aim has been to present an abstract model for the acquisition of knowledge, to develop its consequences, and to compare these consequences with science$\sp1$. ;My intention has been to take this remark seriously. I hope to demonstrate that the papers which Feyerabend wrote between 1955 and the mid-1960's can most profitably be understood as a contribution to this project. The first three chapters lay the groundwork of Feyerabend's (...) earlier epistemology. They pick out the themes in his model for the acquisition of 'knowledge'. Chapter One sets out Feyerabend's rather unorthodox conception of scientific or theoretical realism, which has not received the attention which I believe it deserves. I detail Feyerabend's objections to some anti-realist positions and outline the formidable structure of his central argument for realism. I then consider a vital and problematic part of his epistemology, the 'pragmatic theory of observation'. ftn$\sp1$'Reply To Criticism: Comments on Smart, Sellars and Putnam', reprinted in Feyerabend's Philosophical Papers volume I, p.104. (shrink)

When President Donald Trump honored radio host Rush Limbaugh with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the State of the Union Address in 2020, nearly everyone knew why this was happening. A rad...

Building a framework of laws around acts of war or aggression is not easy, especially in the world of international relations, where anarchy characterizes the fundamental nature of world affairs. W...

Literature on the teaching of ethics points to the need for realistic business problems in which students deal with ethical dilemmas. This paper presents the results of an experiment in which students take on the role of a Brand Manager who must decide on the level of support to allocate to four distinct business problems. The problems were presented as business problems including realistic profit and cost considerations, rather than being posed as "ethics cases". Students were able to select from (...) a range of product support levels for each problem. The experiment isolated the factor effects which included level of realism, degree of competition, company situation in terms of fault and profit level, and problem type relative to damage and visibility. Company fault was the most important factor in determining the level of product support allocations. Allocations generally increased when there was an increase in profit level from low to medium. However, there was no additional increase in allocations above the medium profit level. The paper concludes with suggestions on how the results can be used as a springboard for discussion of the integration of ethical considerations in managerial decision making. (shrink)

A discussion of the human side of science, originally published in 1981.

Jacob (history, New School for Social Research) proposes that the science of the 17th and 18th centuries was eventually accepted because it was made compatible with larger political and economic interests. A celebration of the recently concluded 33 volume edition of the Collected works of John Stuart Mill, produced over a period of nearly 30 years, the last 20 under the guiding genius (and hand) of general editor Robson. Following a tributary history of the project itself, essays cover Mill's (...) career as a thinker and as a bureaucrat and public servant, exploring the effects of the various milieu--domestic, political, administrative, religious, and cultural--in which he moved. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

So, on 22 July 1865, under the title ‘Philosophy and Punch’, did England's premier comic weekly greet the election of J. S. Mill as MP for Westminster. Mill held his seat for only one term, until the general election of 1868, when his Whig-Liberal colleague Robert Wellesley Grosvenor was re-elected, but Mill was replaced by the loser in 1865, the Conservative W. H. Smith, Jr., who, though he never went to sea, became the ruler of the Queen's navy. The reasons (...) for that reversal have engaged the attention of many, including Mill himself; I should like to introduce into the discussion material from an ignored source, the comic weeklies, which took a continued and close look at Mill's behaviour during his parliamentary years. While this evidence generally does not disconfirm earlier judgments—including my own— it does more than merely add to the induction. First, it shows how different political stances led journals to focus on different aspects of Mill's parliamentary career, and to adopt different rhetorical strategies in portraying him in picture and word. Second, it demonstrates how the hardening of party allegiances during the parliament of 1865–68, which accelerated in the preparatory campaigns for the general election of 1868, affected Mill adversely. Third, it suggests strongly that it was not his ‘crotchets’ or ‘whims’, especially women's suffrage and proportional representation, that damaged his chances for re-election, but his advocacy of causes unpopular with the majority of Liberals as well as with Conservatives. (shrink)

In this 1976 volume, Professor Ziman paints a broad picture of science, and of its relations to the world in general. He sets the scene by the historical development of scientific research as a profession, the growth of scientific technologies out of the useful arts, the sources of invention and technical innovation, and the advent of Big Science. He then discusses the economics of research and development, the connections between science and war, the nature of science policy and the moral (...) dilemmas of social responsibility in science. Each topic is introduced by reference to easily understandable particular examples, with a large number of illustrations chosen to bring out the concreteness and reality of science as a human activity. Professor Ziman gives a chapter-by-chapter list of suggested topics for oral and written discussion, intended to provoke critical, sceptical attitudes to simplified solutions to real issues, and comments briefly on relevant books and other sources. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to give a coherent account of the different perspectives on science and technology that are normally studied under various disciplinary heads such as philosophy of science, sociology of science and science policy. It is intended for students embarking on courses in these subjects and assumes no special knowledge of any science. It is written in a direct and simple style, and technical language is introduced very sparingly. As various perspectives are sketched out in this (...) book, the reader moves towards a consistent conception of contemporary science as a rapidly changing social institution that has already grown out of its traditional forms and plays a central role in society at large. It will appeal to students in a wide range of scientific disciplines and complement well Professor Ziman's earlier books. (shrink)