An inspiring collection of the personal philosophies of a fascinating group of individuals Based on the NPR series of the same name, This I Believe features eighty essays penned by the famous and the unknown—completing the thought that the book’s title begins. Each piece compels readers to rethink not only how they have arrived at their own personal beliefs but also the extent to which they share them with others. Featuring a star-studded list of contributors—including Isabel Allende, John Updike, (...) William F. Buckley, Warren Christopher, Penn Jillette, Colin Powell, Rick Moody, and Kay Redfield Jameson—the collection also contains essays by a Brooklyn lawyer; a part-time hospital clerk in Rehoboth, Massachusetts; a woman who sells yellow pages advertising in Fort Worth, Texas; and a man who serves on the state of Rhode Island’s parole board. The result is a stirring, funny, and always provocative trip inside the minds and hearts of a diverse group of Americans whose beliefs—and the incredibly varied ways in which they choose to express them—reveal the American spirit at its best. (shrink)

R. Freeman Butts was an American historian and philosopher of education who died in March 2010. This paper will investigate Butts’ various roles and writings and ask the question: why is Butts important to the contemporary generation of teacher educators and teachers? This paper will argue that the breadth of Butts’ work builds connections and is a very positive model for sub-disciplines in education. Firstly, it is critical to examine Butts’ contribution, as Butts provokes teachers to inquire about the ‘context (...) of education,’ rather than simply the ‘how to’ of teaching and the question of classroom management. Additionally, it is significant to for educators to study Butts’ life and works as they embody the essence of service – in his case, as an education diplomat. He started with what former US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton calls ‘the conversation,’ and this led eventually to projects such as the Afghan Project to bring development to Afghanistan in the era of the mid to late twentieth century. Finally, one can argue that Freeman Butts’ life and works provide educators with an interdisciplinary example as Butts’ combined the talents of an historian and an international educator, something that remains sorely needed today. (shrink)

The current ethical norms of genomic biobanking creating and maintaining large repositories of human DNA and/or associated data for biomedical research have generated criticism from every angle, at both the practical and theoretical levels. The traditional research model has involved investigators seeking biospecimens for specific purposes that they can describe and disclose to prospective subjects, from whom they can then seek informed consent. In the case of many biobanks, however, the institution that collects and maintains the biospecimens may not itself (...) be directly involved in research, instead banking the biospecimens and associated data for other researchers. Moreover, the future uses of biospecimens may be unknown, if not unknowable, at the time of collection. Biobanking may thus stretch the meanings of inform and consent to their breaking point: if you cannot inform subjects about what their biospecimens will be used for, what can they consent to? Given that informed consent by individual subjects is the ethical gold standard, the seeming dilution of the concept in the context of biobanking is a profound problem. (shrink)

There is an aporia to finitude: if I am limited as a finite being, I cannot know what the limits of my finitude are, because if I knew what those limits are, then I would have transcended them. I refer to this aporia as the "hard problem of finitude," interpreted through Graham Priest's work on inclosure paradoxes. Here I offer an interpretation of François Laruelle's theory of the Philosophical Decision in terms of his attempt to resolve this aporia through his (...) suspension of standard philosophy's form of ontological dualism. Next, I apply non-standard philosophy to the problem of religious pluralism, presenting a novel theory of "standard religion" and the "Hierophanic Decision" through a non-standard reading of Mircea Eliade's philosophy of religion, and end by pointing towards what a consistently performative and finite form of religious pluralism might look like from within the "democracy-of-thought," here rendered as the "parliament of religions.". (shrink)

In the past decade, cognitive biases and physiological arousal have each been proposed as mechanisms through which paediatric anxiety develops and is maintained over time. Preliminary studies have found associations between anxious interpretations of ambiguity, physiological arousal, and avoidance, supporting theories that link cognition, psychophysiology, and behaviour. However, little is known about the relationship between youths’ resolutions of ambiguity and physiological arousal during acute stress. Such information may have important clinical implications for use of verbal self-regulation strategies and cognitive restructuring (...) during treatments for paediatric anxiety. In this brief report, we present findings suggesting that anxious, but not typically developing, youth select avoidant goals via non-threatening resolution of ambiguity during a stressor, and that this resolution of ambiguity is accompanied by physiological reactivity. We propose future empirical research on the interplay between interpretation bias, psychophysiology, and child anxiety, as well as clinical implications. (shrink)

While improving the theoretical account of base-rate neglect, Barbey & Sloman's (B&S's) target article suffers from affect neglect by failing to consider the fundamental role of emotional processes in decisions. We illustrate how affective influences are fundamental to decision making, and discuss how the dual process model can be a useful framework for understanding hot and cold cognition in reasoning.

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

This paper seeks to defend Philosophy’s account of true happiness in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Although philosopher John Marenbon claims that Philosophy provides Boethius with two conflicting accounts of happiness, this paper argues that she consistently advocates a single account of true happiness. Ultimately, the paper claims that Marenbon is mistaken in his interpretation of Philosophy account of true happiness. What Marenbon interprets as an alternate account of the nature of true happiness is actually a component of Philosophy’s dialectical (...) method and not a separate account. (shrink)

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries antiquarians, geologists and savants debated whether the summits of particular Highland mountains were the vestiges of iron-age forts or evidence of extinct volcanoes. A blend of antiquarian-historical methodology deeply affected the geological narratives that British savants and gentlemen of science developed during this period. The histories of architecture, and the fine and practical arts regularly functioned as proxies for visualizing the history, structure and operations of the earth. The case of vitrified forts (...) discovered in Scotland highlights how the theoretical and practical arts directly informed geological theory to create what George Bellas Greenough (1778–1855) claimed was a ‘philosophical pursuit’. Focusing on the contributions of John MacCulloch (1773–1835) over the ambiguous identification of vitrified ruins, this paper shows how geological history was entwined with broad cultural interests in the progress of society and its rise from Nature. First, the essay examines the meaning and role of ‘imitation’ and ‘copying’ in art and architecture. Second, it applies these concepts within the framework of the vitrified-ruin debate that antiquarians and geologists engaged. Third, it demonstrates how the ‘imitation’ of Nature in the practical arts was a useful tool for making claims about earth structure. (shrink)

Is celebration of culturally marginalized people by the dominant culture actually benefitting those who are oppressed? Whose stakes are served in such a celebration and how are existing power relations altered? These are some of the questions John Champagne asks in this original and timely critique, which moves gay studies beyond identity politics and the "rights" discourse within which much of contemporary gay studies is positioned. Champagne argues that in the modern West, culturally marginalized people such as gays are (...) not allowed to define and legitimate their own existence outside the framework established for them by the dominant group. To illustrate his premise, Champagne analyzes a number of recent films, including "Paris is Burning", "Looking for Langston" and Marlon Riggs' 1989 video "Tongues Untied" along with gay pornography, using the work of such critics of difference as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gayatri Spivak. He calls for the marginalized individual to elaborate a practice of critical self-conduct, working to understand his or her own group as having been produced as an entity along a variety of different registers, only some of which might be said to be marginalized. "The Ethics of Marginality" situates itself at the intersection of English, cultural studies, film studies and gay and lesbian studies. It offers a powerful critique of contemporary approaches to studies of the "other" while promising to establish a ground-breaking and controversial new theoretical model for such studies. (shrink)

In the end, works of art are the only media of complete and unhindered communication between man and man that can occur in a world full of gulfs and walls that limit community of experience. Occasionally, thoughtful people familiar with both Walt Whitman and philosophical pragmatism will remark on their affinity.1 Some have even argued, correctly, that Whitman influenced American pragmatism, especially the writings of William James and to a lesser extent John Dewey.2 For instance, Raphael C. Allison (...) (2002) insightfully remarks: “Just as for James, for Dewey it is the communicability of Whitman’s art that makes it significant.”3 He then cites some of the best passages in Dewey’s entire corpus to warrant his.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche’s Voices by John SallisSean KirklandSALLIS, John. Nietzsche’s Voices. Edited by Richard Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. 202 pp. Cloth, $75.00; paper and eBook, $35.00George Bataille, perhaps the twentieth century’s most fundamentally Nietzschean thinker, suggests that a book should not be viewed as an independently existing entity to be assessed on its own terms. Rather, a book is, according to Bataille, always one brick placed (...) by the author in an already standing wall, resting upon and constituted partly by its relationship to its predecessors. John Sallis has placed an extremely rich new brick into the already extensive wall of Nietzsche scholarship, situated on the one hand between many important continentally-inflected book-length studies, by the likes of Heidegger, Klossowski, Deleuze, Kofman, Derrida, Irigaray, and Krell, and on the other those influential monographs from more traditional or analytic readers, such as Kaufmann, Danto, Hollingdale, Schacht, and Nehamas. Indeed, Sallis’s closest interlocutor is perhaps David B. Allison, whose indispensable Reading the New Nietzsche finds its way into this intermediate space as well. Sallis’s work wins its originality neither by imposing on Nietzsche’s works any fashionable theoretical frameworks or methods nor by insisting that those works conform to any purportedly established philosophical requirements or forms, mining them for comfortingly recognizable positions or claims. Rather, he engages the text utterly on its own terms with extreme sensitivity and insists on placing every line, every claim, every concept, and every argument within the encompassing textual whole, which is to say within the essay or book in which it appears and further within the context of the whole Nietzschean corpus—and for Sallis, Nietzsche’s many “voices” sing in harmony with one another over the course of his largely consistent seventeen-year philosophical career.Nietzsche’s Voices is the eleventh volume in Indiana University Press’s ongoing series The Collected Writings of John Sallis. Sallis being one of the world’s foremost interpreters of Martin Heidegger, his Collected Writings seem to be conceived somewhat on the model of that thinker’s Gesamtausgabe, gathering together not only all of Sallis’s published books but also a number of unpublished manuscripts and shorter texts, complete transcriptions of his lecture courses and seminars over the years, and indeed even some informal addresses and interviews. Richard Rojcewicz reports in his editor’s afterword that these are lecture notes for a course that took place over two semesters at Duquesne University during the 1971–72 academic year.After a brief introductory discussion of the challenge of reading Nietzsche’s unorthodox texts rigorously as philosophical works, the second chapter is devoted to a philosophical consideration of the importance of biography, especially as concerns a thinker who insists generally on the necessity of a close relationship between life and thought. The third chapter presents an extensive reading of The Birth of Tragedy and some of the contemporary unpublished materials. The early essays “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” and “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life” are treated in chapters 4 and 5. The sixth and seventh chapters turn to Nietzsche’s “free spirit” works, first addressing [End Page 726] the critique of all received moral values and the call to invent wholly new kinds of values, in Human, All Too Human and Daybreak, and then turning to The Gay Science for Nietzsche’s analysis of the loss of any ultimate foundation for morality, knowledge, and even being itself in our late-modern historical moment. The eighth and final chapter comprises over half the book’s total length, offering a very detailed reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the work Nietzsche himself saw as central to his entire corpus, indeed even central to the “history of humanity” insofar as it “splits it into two halves.”The book is full of penetrating insights into the Nietzschean text, and often Sallis’s close attentiveness and holistic approach succeed in resolving previously vexing interpretive problems. In the interest of brevity, I limit myself here to two examples.(1) In the Birth, Nietzsche famously traces the emergence of tragedy back to an almost miraculous marriage of two opposing... (shrink)

A considerable amount of academic attention has been paid to John Kennedy and to his group of advisors during the Cuban missile crisis. Next to no attention has been accorded other bodies of the Kennedy White House that had daily access to a President's most private moments and possibly to his important deliberations. Drawing on Richard Reeves' account of President Kennedy: Profile of Power, I revisit the early 1960s looking for bodies of power that are culturally sexed female by (...) others and compelled into being as workaday secretaries and confidants, and para-Everythings for Kennedy. In doing so, I draw on the feminist body theorizing of Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, as well as the evocations of bodies in important but abjected places featured in Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale. After constructing the historically broad category of the handmaid to Washington power, I reread constructions of decision-making in the Cuban missile crisis offered by Graham Allison and conclude that the feint of mancentred Washington masks bodies given the locations, skills and resources to ooze into spaces of decision and power canonically forbidden to them. (shrink)

So considered, Hume is viewed as a naturalist, whose project in the first three parts of the first book of the Treatise is to provide an account of the ...

Introduction: Laughter as an expression of human nature in the Middle Ages and the early modern period: literary, historical, theological, philosophical, and psychological reflections -- Judith Hagen. Laughter in Procopius's wars -- Livnat Holtzman. "Does God really laugh?": appropriate and inappropriate descriptions of God in Islamic traditionalist theology -- Daniel F. Pigg. Laughter in Beowulf: ambiguity, ambivalence, and group identity formation -- Mark Burde. The parodia sacra problem and medieval comic studies -- Olga V. Trokhimenko. Women's laughter and gender politics (...) in medieval conduct discourse -- Madelon Köhler-Busch. Pushing decorum: uneasy laughter in Heinrich von Dem Türlîn's Diu crône -- Connie L. Scarborough. Laughter and the comic in a religious text -- John Sewell. The son rebelled and so the father made man alone: ridicule and boundary maintenance in The Nizzahon vetus -- Birgit Wiedl. Laughing at the beast: the judensau: anti-Jewish propaganda and humor from the Middle Ages to the early modern period -- Fabian Alfie. Yes . . . but was it funny? Cecco Angiolieri, Rustico Filippi and Giovanni Boccaccio -- Nicolino Applauso. Curses and laughter in medieval Italian comic poetry -- Feargal Béarra. Tromdhámh guaire: a context for laughter and audience in early modern Ireland -- Jean E. Jost. Humorous transgression in the non-conformist fabliaux: a Bakhtinian analysis of three comic tales -- Gretchen Mieszkowski. Chaucerian comedy: Troilus and Criseyde -- Sarah Gordon. Laughing and eating in the fabliaux -- Christine Bousquet-Labouérie. Laughter and medieval stalls -- Scott L. Taylor. Esoteric humor and the incommensurability of laughter -- Jean N. Goodrich. The function of laughter in The second shepherds' play -- Albrecht Classen. Laughing in late-medieval verse and prose narratives -- Rosa Alvarez perez. The workings of desire: Panurge and the dogs -- Elizabeth Chesney Zegura. Laughing out loud in the Heptaméron: a reassessment of Marguerite de Navarre's ambivalent humor -- Lia B. Ross. You had to be there: the elusive humor of the Sottie -- Kyle Diroberto. Sacred parody in Robert Greene's Groatsworth of wit -- Martha Moffitt Peacock. The comedy of the shrew: theorizing humor in early modern Netherlandish art -- Jessica Tvordi. The comic personas of Milton's Prolusion VI: negotiating masculine identity through self-directed humor -- John Alexander. Ridentum dicere verum (using laughter to speak the truth): laughter and the language of the early modern clown "pickelhering" in German literature of the late seventeenth century (1675-1700) -- Thomas Willard. Andreae's ludibrium: Menippean satire in The chymische hochzeit -- Diane Rudall. The comic power of illusion-allusion -- Allison P. Coudert. Laughing at credulity and superstition in the long eighteenth century. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 125-126 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence James E. Force and Richard H. Popkin, editors. Newton and Religion: Context, Nature, and Influence. International Archives of the History of Ideas. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999. Pp. xvii + 325. Cloth, $168.00. When James Force and Richard Popkin published their Essays on the Context, Nature, and (...) Influence of Isaac Newton's Theology in 1990, they launched a new sub-genre in Newton studies. Their seminal work opened up new scholarly vistas in the study of Newton's antitrinitarian theology, his millenarian prophetic hermeneutics, the relations between his theology and his natural philosophy, and the historical legacies of these until recently under-researched aspects of his thought. Force and Popkin have excelled particularly in leading the attack on the two variants of the "two-Newton" thesis: first, that Newton's theological and alchemical works were the result of a putative post-middle-aged madness or the meandering mind of an old man and, second, that Newton somehow disassociated his "pure" science from the problematic contaminations of alchemy and theology. This new volume of thirteen essays is the latest product of this effort to restore unity to Newton's life and thought.The first paper, by Deborah Harkness, outlines the work of the Elizabethan magus John Dee for the purpose of suggesting possible analogies with Newton. In the second essay, Allison Coudert seeks to update the Yates thesis: the proposal that modern science received an early and powerful stimulus from occult philosophy. Unlike Yates, who focused on Hermeticism, Coudert sees the main occult impetus to the rise of science in a renewed Gnosticism that emphasized the need to recover the original prisca sapientia (ancient wisdom). Coudert locates Newton in this latter tradition. In the third paper, James Bono sets out to revise and extend William Ashworth's 1990 study of the impact on the history of science of the "emblematic" world view. Bono seeks to show that Newton retained a commitment to the unity of the Books of Nature and Scripture, even while rejecting what he saw as the corruption and idolatry of man-made systems of symbols in favor of a program of discovering God's hand at work in creation.In the fourth and fifth papers, Justin Champion and Rob Iliffe detail aspects of Newton's engagement with Catholicism. Champion skillfully demonstrates how and why Newton appropriated what he saw as acceptable elements of the incipient textual criticism of the Catholic priest Richard Simon. Notwithstanding his use of this product of Catholic scholarship, Newton's virulent anti-Catholicism is detailed in a sophisticated account by Iliffe, who shows that it extended well beyond Newton's already explicated anti-papist prophetic exegesis.The sixth, seventh, and ninth essays examine Newton's study of history. In the sixth paper, Robert Markley shows how Newton deployed universal history in his quest to trace the origin and subsequent corruption of pure religion. Continuing the theme of religious apostasy, in the seventh essay Matt Goldish examines Newton's ecclesiastical history "Of the Church." Goldish describes how Newton's painstaking research uncovered the corruption of primitive religion by paganism, gnosticism, kabbalism, emanationist doctrines, and other such human interventions. The ninth paper by Kenneth Knoespel contains a study of Newton's ponderous and often impenetrable manuscript Theologiae gentilis origins philosophicae. Knoespel argues that this document helps illustrate Newton's belief that his Principia not so much represented a discovery of new knowledge as it embodied a recovery of ancient revealed truth.The eighth, tenth, and thirteenth papers feature accounts of Newton's prophetic exegesis and millenarian thought. The eighth and thirteenth papers, by Sarah Hutton and Reiner Smolinski respectively, make great strides in the understanding of the unity of Newton's theology by illustrating how crucial aspects of his heterodox doctrine helped shape his prophetic thought. Hutton focuses on the impact of Newton's Arian Christology on his exegesis of Revelation, while Smolinski relates Newton's mortalism and rejection of evil spirits to... (shrink)

The contents of our conscious mind can seem unpredictable, whimsical, and free from external control. When instructed to attend to a stimulus in a work setting, for example, one might find oneself thinking about household chores. Conscious content thus appears different in nature from reflex action. Under the appropriate conditions, reflexes occur predictably, reliably, and via external control. Despite these intuitions, theorists have proposed that, under certain conditions, conscious content resembles reflexes and arises reliably via external control. We introduce the (...) Reflexive Imagery Task, a paradigm in which, as a function of external control, conscious content is triggered reliably and unintentionally: When instructed to not subvocalize the name of a stimulus object, participants reliably failed to suppress the set-related imagery. This stimulus-elicited content is considered ‘high-level’ content and, in terms of stages of processing, occurs late in the processing stream. We discuss the implications of this paradigm for consciousness research. (shrink)

THE Concluding Unscientific Postscript is generally regarded as the most philosophically significant of Kierkegaard's works. In terms of a subjectivistic orientation it seems to present both an elaborate critique of the pretensions of the Hegelian philosophy and an existential analysis which points to the Christian faith as the only solution to the "human predicament." Furthermore, on the basis of such a straightforward reading of the text, Kierkegaard has been both vilified as an irrationalist and praised as a profound existential thinker (...) who has uncovered the only legitimate starting point for a philosophical analysis of the religious life and a Christian apologetic. (shrink)

“Is the Kantian Universalization Demand a Suficient Procedure forthe Establishment of Moral-Ethical Contents? Some Considerations Regardinga Negative Answer to this Question”. In this article we analyze the thesis thatclaims the suficiency of the Kantian universalization procedure expressed inthe categorical imperative of the general law (Groundwork of the Metaphysics ofMorals) to determine the content of morality, with the aim of holding that thisthesis contradicts Kant’s inal conception of Ethics as it is expounded in Metaphysicsof Morals, insofar as it is structured upon (...) the normative priority of the“end of humanity”. The effective adoption of this end –or practical principle– isa necessary condition for the ascription of morality and for the determination ofthe “content” of the “moral law”. In order to achieve this aim, we analyze two ofthe most inluential interpretations that are at the base of the aforementionedthesis, v.gr., John R. Silber’s, in “Procedural Formalism in Kant’s Ethics”, andHenry E. Allison’s in “Morality and Freedom: Kant’s Reciprocity Thesis”. (shrink)

Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy: Series Editors, Karl Ameriks and Desmond M. Clarke. Ren Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy with Selections from the Objections and Replies . Translated and edited by John Cottingham. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xlvi + 120. 25., 7.95 pb. ISBN 0-521-55252-4 (hb.). ISBN 0-521-55818-2 (pb.). Ralph Cudworth, A Treatise Concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality with A Treatise of Freewill . Edited by Sarah Hutton. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xxxvi + (...) 218. 37.50 hb., 13.95 pb., ISBN 0-521-47362-4 (hb.). ISBN 0-521-47918-5 (pb.). Anne Conway: The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy . Translated and edited by Allison P. Coudert and Taylor Corse. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xxxix + 73. 35.00 hb., 12.95 pb. ISBN 0-521-47335-7 (hb.). ISBN 0-521-47904-5 (pb.). Julien Offray de La Mettrie: Machine Man and Other Writings . Translated and edited by Ann Thomson. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xxx + 179. 35.00 (hb.), 12.95. ISBN 0-521-47258-X (hb.). ISBN 0-521-47849-9 (pb.). (shrink)

Wall, G. Locke's attack on innate knowledge.--Harris, J. Leibniz and Locke on innate ideas.--Greenlee, D. Locke's idea of idea.--Aspelin, G. Idea and perception in Locke's essay.--Greenlee, D. Idea and object in the essay.--Mathews, H. E. Locke, Malebranche and the representative theory.--Alexander, P. Boyle and Locke on primary and secondary qualities.--Ayers, M. R. The ideas of power and substance in Locke's philosophy.--Allison, H. E. Locke's theory of personal identity.--Kretzmann, N. The main thesis of Locke's semantic theory.--Woozley, A. D. Some remarks (...) on Locke's account of knowledge.--Laudan, L. The nature and sources of Locke's views on hypotheses. (shrink)

"Investigates the role of Catholic philosophers in confronting the ideas brought about by modern developments in philosophy, medicine,and politics"--Provided by publisher.

Abstract: Contrary to received opinion, Descartes' view on the merits of the ontological proof may actually agree with that of Thomas Aquinas, whose rejection of the a priori existence proof has stocked the armories of anti-Anselmians ever since. In a rarely noted passage of the First Replies, Descartes claims not to differ in any respect from Thomas on the proof, a claim that gains sense in light of recent work on the Fifth Meditation. That work in turn reveals a well-founded, (...) if surprising, understanding of the Cartesian proof and of Cartesianism's true relation to Thomism. (shrink)