This book analyzes the prominent view that language is basically a system of signs and symbols; outlines an alternative that builds on aspects of the philosophies of Heidegger, Gadamer, Buber, and Bakhtin; and employs this alternative to criticize accounts of language developed by V.N. Volosinov, Kenneth Burke, and Calvin O. Schrag. From the perspective of communication theory, this book extends some features of the postmodern critique of representationalism to develop a post-semiotic account of the nature of language as dialogic.

The essays in this book engage the original and controversial claims from Michael Boylan's A Just Society. Each essay discusses Boylan's claims from a particular chapter and offers a critical analysis of these claims. Boylan responds to the essays in his lengthy and philosophically rich reply.

Biographical essays explore the careers of two major early photographers, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey and William James Stillman. in addition, portfolios with works by Maxime Du Camp, John Beasley Greene, Francis Frith, Robert Macpherson, Adolphe Braun and others testify to the strength and consistency of other early photographers who captured the antique worlds around the Mediterranean."--BOOK JACKET.

This book presents a collection of contemporary discourses that reconsider the relationship of democracy as a political ideology and American ideal and education as the foundation of preparing democratic citizens in America.

This updated edition of a well-established anthology of social and political philosophy combines extensive selections from classical works with significant recent contributions to the field, many of which are not easily available. Its central focus is on the liberal currents in modern Western political thought--variants of classical liberalism, modern liberalism, and libertarianism--with specific focus on differing conceptions of political obligation, freedom, distributive justice, and representative democracy. The text is organized into four thematic sections: Political Obligation and Consent, Freedom and Coercion, (...) Justice and Equality, and Democracy and Representation, making it easily accessible to students. Each chapter features selections from classical thinkers alongside writings by influential contemporary philosophers and political theorists, thus tracing the historical development and transformation of Western political thought on key issues in the field. Among the classical authors represented in this collection are Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Mill. Contemporary contributors include John Rawls, Isaiah Berlin, Thomas Scanlon, Robert Nozick, Thomas Nagel, Ronald Dworkin, and Hanna Pitkin. Each section is preceded by an introductory overview and followed by a helpful, current bibliography providing guides to further reading. (shrink)

A central and integral feature of Mill's version of Utilitarianism is the necessity for moral agents to empathize with others, for without such empathy one has little or no motivation to pursue the general good. Mill believed that Benthamite Utilitarianism failed to provide a sufficient mechanism to induce would-be moral agents to empathize with others. Mill located the requisite mechanism when reading English Romantic poetry and theory: in particular, Mill believed that to empathize completely with others requires a special kind (...) of imagination. I argue that the theory of imagination adopted by Mill was essentially Wordsworthian. The importance of this conception of imagination has far reaching effects in Mill's thought: for example, Mill's infamous proof of the principle of utility is plausible only when considered in the context of the Mill's Romantic theory of imagination. ;Mill's initiation into aesthetics occurred in the late 1820s and early 1830s when Mill was also first exposed to Continental, and particularly to French, sociologists, especially to Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. I investigate the nature and extent of their influence on Mill. Interestingly, there are some important parallels between this group and the English Romantics. Though widely divergent in political theory, all were, in some sense, conservatives and elitists. Both Comte and Coleridge, for example, thought that society ought to be run by a clerisy constituted primarily by the intellectual elite of society. This posed a serious problem for Mill both as an empiricist and as a liberal. Indeed, some have argued that, at least for some periods of his life, Mill abandoned both his empiricist heritage and his liberalism. I examine these issues in detail arguing that, in typical fashion for Mill, he attempted an amalgam of these various doctrines. In the final analysis, however, Mill remained firmly committed both to empiricism--and the reductionist and mechanistic view it implied--as well as to liberalism, though it is a liberalism with definite elitist strains within it. (shrink)

DBS Think Tank IX was held on August 25–27, 2021 in Orlando FL with US based participants largely in person and overseas participants joining by video conferencing technology. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 and provides an open platform where clinicians, engineers and researchers can freely discuss current and emerging deep brain stimulation technologies as well as the logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The consensus among the DBS Think Tank IX speakers was that DBS expanded in (...) its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. After collectively sharing our experiences, it was estimated that globally more than 230,000 DBS devices have been implanted for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. As such, this year’s meeting was focused on advances in the following areas: neuromodulation in Europe, Asia and Australia; cutting-edge technologies, neuroethics, interventional psychiatry, adaptive DBS, neuromodulation for pain, network neuromodulation for epilepsy and neuromodulation for traumatic brain injury. (shrink)

The first edition of Thomas Robert Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population is best understood as an exploration of human nature and the role of necessity in shaping the individual and society. The author’s liberal education, both from his father and his tutors at Warrington and Cambridge, is evident in his heterodox views on hell, his Lockean conceptualization of the mind, and his Foxite Whig politics. Malthus’ unpublished essay, “Crises,” his sermons, and the the last two chapters of (...) the Essay reveal a pragmatic, compassionate side of the young author that was under appreciated by both his contemporary critics and modern historians. The Essay has been mischaracterized by David McNally as a “Whig response to Radicalism” and by Patricia James as a reaction by Malthus against his father’s liberalism. This article argues that when he wrote the first edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus was himself a liberal dissenter and Foxite Whig rather than an orthodox Anglican or a Burkean defender of traditional class relations. (shrink)

John Clarke of Hull, one of the eighteenth century's staunchest proponents of psychological egoism, defended that theory in his Foundation of Morality in Theory and Practice. He did so mainly by opposing the objections to egoism in the first two editions of Francis Hutcheson's Inquiry into Virtue. But Clarke also produced a challenging, direct argument for egoism which, regrettably, has received virtually no scholarly attention. In this paper I give it some of the attention it merits. In addition to (...) reconstructing it and addressing interpretive issues about it, I show that it withstands a tempting objection. I also show that although Clarke's argument ultimately fails, to study it is instructive. It illuminates, for example, Hutcheson's likely intentions in a passage relevant to egoism. (shrink)

Some authors have claimed that ante rem structuralism has problems with structures that have indiscernible places. In response, I argue that there is no requirement that mathematical objects be individuated in a non-trivial way. Metaphysical principles and intuitions to the contrary do not stand up to ordinary mathematical practice, which presupposes an identity relation that, in a sense, cannot be defined. In complex analysis, the two square roots of –1 are indiscernible: anything true of one of them is true of (...) the other. I suggest that ‘i’ functions like a parameter in natural deduction systems. I gave an early version of this paper at a workshop on structuralism in mathematics and science, held in the Autumn of 2006, at Bristol University. Thanks to the organizers, particularly Hannes Leitgeb, James Ladyman, and Øystein Linnebo, to my commentator Richard Pettigrew, and to the audience there. The paper also benefited considerably from a preliminary session at the Arché Research Centre at the University of St Andrews. I am indebted to my colleagues Craige Roberts, for help with the linguistics literature, and Ben Caplan and Gabriel Uzquiano, for help with the metaphysics. Thanks also to Hannes Leitgeb and Jeffrey Ketland for reading an earlier version of the manuscript and making helpful suggestions. I also benefited from conversations with Richard Heck, John Mayberry, Kevin Scharp, and Jason Stanley. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Wee people at London, are so humbly immersd in slavish business, & taken up wth providing for a wretched Carkasse; yt there's nothing almost, but what is grosse & sensuall to be gotten from us. If a bright thought springs up any time here, ye Mists & Foggs extinguish it again presently, & leaves us no more, yn only ye pain, of seeing it die & perish away from us. Humphrey Ditton to Roger Cotes, ca. 1703THE CALCULUS OF ACCOMPLISHMENTDuring the (...) last decade of his life, Sir Isaac Newton took the measure of achievement. Probably shortly before 1725, Newton scribbled on the undated cover of a letter a brief list of those discoveries he believed belonged entirely ‘to the English’. Included were ‘the variation of the Variation’ ; the circulation of the blood; telescopic sights and the micrometer variously improved by his contemporaries, Robert Hooke and John Flamsteed; and ‘the Libration of the Moon’ likely in reference to Newton's own explanation of lunar eccentricity. Notably, this was not simply a personal calculation. Newton makes no mention of such controversial matters as the fluxional calculus, the refraction of light, or even the measure of universal gravitation, which he otherwise might have claimed as his own efforts. Even the private lights of the solitary genius could still accommodate a distinctly broader sense of the depth of national accomplishment. (shrink)

Corcoran’s 27 entries in the 1999 second edition of Robert Audi’s Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge UP]. -/- ancestral, axiomatic method, borderline case, categoricity, Church (Alonzo), conditional, convention T, converse (outer and inner), corresponding conditional, degenerate case, domain, De Morgan, ellipsis, laws of thought, limiting case, logical form, logical subject, material adequacy, mathematical analysis, omega, proof by recursion, recursive function theory, scheme, scope, Tarski (Alfred), tautology, universe of discourse. -/- The entire work is available online free at more (...) than one website. Paste the whole URL. http://archive.org/stream/RobertiAudi_The.Cambridge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy/Robert.Audi_The.Cambridge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy -/- The 2015 third edition will be available soon. Before you think of buying it read some reviews on Amazon and read reviews of its competition: For example, my review of the 2008 Oxford Companion to Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Logic,29:3,291-292. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01445340701300429 -/- Some of the entries have already been found to be flawed. For example, Tarski’s expression ‘materially adequate’ was misinterpreted in at least one article and it was misused in another where ‘materially correct’ should have been used. The discussion provides an opportunity to bring more flaws to light. -/- Acknowledgements: Each of these entries was presented at meetings of The Buffalo Logic Dictionary Project sponsored by The Buffalo Logic Colloquium. The members of the colloquium read drafts before the meetings and were generous with corrections, objections, and suggestions. Usually one 90-minute meeting was devoted to one entry although in some cases, for example, “axiomatic method”, took more than one meeting. Moreover, about half of the entries are rewrites of similarly named entries in the 1995 first edition. Besides the help received from people in Buffalo, help from elsewhere was received by email. We gratefully acknowledge the following: José Miguel Sagüillo, John Zeis, Stewart Shapiro, Davis Plache, Joseph Ernst, Richard Hull, Concha Martinez, Laura Arcila, James Gasser, Barry Smith, Randall Dipert, Stanley Ziewacz, Gerald Rising, Leonard Jacuzzo, George Boger, William Demopolous, David Hitchcock, John Dawson, Daniel Halpern, William Lawvere, John Kearns, Ky Herreid, Nicolas Goodman, William Parry, Charles Lambros, Harvey Friedman, George Weaver, Hughes Leblanc, James Munz, Herbert Bohnert, Robert Tragesser, David Levin, Sriram Nambiar, and others. -/- . (shrink)

The title of Stewart’s biography is a tribute to Alain Locke’s seminal work, The New Negro: An Interpretation. This 1925 anthology highlighted the works of several up-and-coming black writers of the 20th century, planting these authors and, thus, a new black intellectual movement squarely in the public eye. While Alain Locke and John Dewey did not work directly together, Dewey’s philosophical approaches, specifically aesthetic valuation, significantly influenced Locke’s life. John C. Stewart provides a dense and thorough (...) illustration of Locke’s use of aesthetic valuation in his personal, professional, and educational experiences. Locke was pursuing his doctoral degree at Harvard University in Dewey’s discipline at... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Clinical Bioethics at NIH:History and A New VisionJohn C. Fletcher (bio)On July 3, 1995, Dr. John I. Gallin, Director of the Magnuson Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), convened a one-day "Conference on the Future of Clinical Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health Intramural Program." Conferees included NIH officials and a panel of consultants from bioethics programs around the nation.1 The subject was the (...) future of NIH's intramural bioethics program and specifically a vision of a new multi-component program, presented by Dr. Gallin, the first speaker. Dr. Harold Varmus, Director of NIH, was there to assure his support for Dr. Gallin's vision. This author, honored to be second speaker, was invited to sketch a brief history of bioethics at NIH. The present article reviews some of this history and then reports on Dr. Gallin's proposal, points of consensus among speakers and conferees, and the search for a Chief of the Clinical Bioethics Program.History of Bioethics at NIHIt is often said that NIH is a well-kept secret as the nation's leading biomedical research facility. Also, few people know that NIH has a long history in bioethics. Some key events in that history are shown in Figure 1, beginning with two that occurred prior to the birth of bioethics. NIH made an early policy response to protect human subjects of research and to find acceptable limits for scientific freedom. The Clinical Center (CC), a 550-bed research hospital, opened in 1953. A subcommittee of the Medical Board, the Clinical Research Committee (CRC), was formed for prior group review of all studies with normal volunteers. The traditional practice was for researchers themselves to decide when studies would begin, which subjects to recruit, and whether informed consent would be sought. The CRC intervention bit into this tradition. In addition, patient studies that posed significant risks or departed widely from medical practice were reviewed by referral from the Clinical Directors of the various Institutes. Was this CRC an early institutional review [End Page 355] board (IRB)? As a guest researcher, I was permitted to observe the CRCs meetings between 1966 and 1969. It functioned much like an IRB but had no community or non-scientist members. Other IRB-like review groups undoubtedly existed prior to the CRC. Robert Levine (personal communication, September 7, 1995) recalls that Beth Israel Hospital in Boston had one in 1938. Historical research is clearly needed on the earliest forms of research review.Table 1. Bioethics at NIHEventYearClinical Research Committee1953Surgeon-General's PPO #1291966NIGMS funds Hastings Genetics Group1973OPRR's Mission1974NLM's grant to KennedyInstitute for Bibliography of Bioethics1974Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee1974STEP Series Bioethics Speakers1975Pre-IRBs at the CC1975-76Assistant for Bioethics to Director, CC1977RAC-Human Gene Therapy Subcommittee1983Lipsett Proposal (ICD)1983Liaison Group, CC1983Bioethics Program, CC1985Durable Power of Attorney for Researchwith Incapacitated Subjects1985-86NLM funds National Reference Centerfor Bioethics Literature1985National Institute for Nursing Research1986Bioethics Post-Doctoral Fellows Program1989ELSI Program1989Bioethicists on CC-IRBs1989CC-Ethics Committee1990Office of Human Subjects Research1992 [End Page 356]Between 1963 and 1967, the media exposed instances of ethically troubling research, and Beecher (1966) and Pappworth (1967) published sharp criticisms of the weak state of research ethics. In 1966, Surgeon-General William Stewart and NIH Director James Shannon issued a policy requiring local group review of all research involving human subjects before making an application for NIH peer review (Surgeon General 1966). The policy was the first in any nation to mandate ethics committees for clinical research. However, it did not apply to the NIH intramural program until Congress passed the National Research Act in 1974 (Public Law 93-348; 202, 88 Stat. 342, 1974). This lag permitted NIH intramural investigators the luxury of feeling above the norms imposed on ordinary mortals and guaranteed more resistance to the inevitable change to come. Resistance to change marked the intramural program from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s... (shrink)

Editors Wanda Teays, John-Stewart Gordon, and Alison Dundes Renteln have assembled the works of an interdisciplinary, international team of experts in bioethics into a comprehensive, innovative and accessible book. Topics covered range from torture and lethal injection to euthanasia, sex selection, vulnerable human subjects, to health equity, safety and public health, and environmental disasters like Bhopal, Fukushima, and more.

It is startling to realize that Canadian literature was canonized in fewer than twenty years. Here is how it happened.At the end of World War II, Canadian literature was not taught as an independent subject in Canadian schools. There was no canon. In 1957, the publishing firm McClelland and Stewart introduced its mass-market paperback reprint series entitled the New Canadian Library. It allowed teachers to discuss the work of many Canadian authors who had never been the subject of formal (...) academic study. This New Canadian Library was truly “new”: prior to its conception, there was no “library” in use. There were no Canadian classics. Northrop Frye recalls that at that time the notion of finding a classic Canadian writer remained but “a gleam in a paternal critic’s eye.”1Frye’s comment must be placed in context: he was remembering the efforts that produced the first Literary History of Canada in 1965. In T. D. MacLulich’s words, its publication “gave a definitive imprimatur of respectability to the academic study of Canadian writing.”2 It made a Canadian canon seem possible; to many, it made the canon seem real. With the advent of this history, the institution called Canadian literature was born.3 1. Northrop Frye, “Conclusion,” in Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, 2d ed., ed. Carl F. Klinck et al., 3 vols. , 3:319.2. T. D. MacLulich, “What Was Canadian Literature? Taking Stock of the Canlit Industry,” Essays on Canadian Writing 30 : 19; hereafter abbreviated “WWCL.”3. My use of the term “Canadian literature” applies to English-Canadian literature; the canonization of French-Canadian, or Québecois literature, invokes another story and another set of political imperatives that cannot be adequately treated within the scope of this discussion.4. John Guillory, “Canonical and Non-Canonical: A Critique of the Current Debate,” ELH 54 : 483. Robert Lecker is professor of English at McGill University. He is the author of several critical studies, including On the Line , Robert Kroetsch , and An Other I , and coeditor of Essays on Canadian Writing, the multi-volume Canadian Writers and Their Works , and the eight-volume Annotated Bibliography of Canada’s Major Authors . Lecker is currently preparing a collection of essays on the Canadian canon. (shrink)

In Part I, we presented and motivated a new formulation of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). Here in Part II, we present an epistemological argument in defense of HS, thus formulated. Our contention is that one can combine a modest realism about laws of nature with a proper recognition of the importance of empirical testability in the epistemology of science only if one accepts HS.

In the autumn of 1915 at Princeton, the graduate student, Charles Hendel, and the professor, Norman Kemp Smith, went for a walk. Hendel thought the time auspicious to announce his desire to write a dissertation on Rousseau. As happens not infrequently between an adviser and a student, Kemp Smith attempted to dissuade his student from his intention and advised him to look into David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, instead. The professor noted that a ‘deadlock’ had long existed between those (...) who thought the sceptic, Philo, spoke for Hume, and those who thought the theistic views of Cleanthes most nearly echoed Hume's true opinions on religion. Perhaps through researching the problem, Kemp Smith suggested, Hendel could ‘resolve that impasse and establish Hume's position on the religious question’. (shrink)

Many have claimed that ceteris paribus (CP) laws are a quite legitimate feature of scientific theories, some even going so far as to claim that laws of all scientific theories currently on offer are merely CP. We argue here that one of the common props of such a thesis, that there are numerous examples of CP laws in physics, is false. Moreover, besides the absence of genuine examples from physics, we suggest that otherwise unproblematic claims are rendered untestable by the (...) mere addition of the CP operator. Thus, “CP all Fs are Gs” when read as a straightforward statement of fact, cannot be the stuff of scientific theory. Rather, we suggest that when ``ceteris paribus'' appears in scientific works it plays a pragmatic role of pointing to more respectable claims. (shrink)

Henri Bergson's philosophy is centered on forming a concept of lived time or durée, which he saw as a process of continuous variation and flux. He believed that the study of time should be the foundation of philosophy. By studying time, we find an integration of concrete, infinite, qualitative multiplicity within consciousness that we should use to understand the essence of reality. I show that his insights into the reality of duration come directly from a metaphysical or phenomenological interpretation of (...) integral and differential calculus. Drawing on the recently published lectures from 1902–1905, I show how An Introduction to Metaphysics schematizes the methodology of Matter and Memory and Time and Free Will by means of this mathematical analogy. To Bergson, the concepts of calculus are not mere metaphors; they unleash certain metaphysical implications that problematize the mind's relation to movement, life, consciousness, time, and consequently, reality itself. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that there are both particulars and universals. Many of these philosophers, in turn, believe that universals areimmanent. On this view, universals are wholly located where their instances are located. Both Douglas Ehring and E.J. Lowe have argued that immanent universals do not exist on the grounds that nothing can be wholly located in multiple places simultaneously without contradiction. In this paper, I focus on Lowe’s argument, which has received far less attention in the literature. Using the theory (...) of location found in Josh Parsons (2007), I show how Lowe’s argument against immanent universals can be resisted. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Robert Leo CRITICISM OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN SHELLEY'S A DEFENCE OF POETRY IN his "Ode to Liberty" Shelley locates by encircling and enfolding metaphors a mythic Hellenic moment, one in which verse was yet "speechless" and philosophy still burdened with "lidless eyes." Greece— always for Shelley either the displaced Garden of prethematic unity or the mythic dream of integrated civic and aesthetic life—is about to inaugurate Athens (...) and the "wrinkled image" of historical consciousness.1 Poetry, thinking, and the tilling of an earth "to human use" are implicitly related and foreseen as destiny: from their enchanted caves Prophetic echoes flung dim melody. On the unapprehensive wild The vine, the corn, the olive mild, Grew savage yet, to human use unreconciled; And, like unfolded flowers beneath the sea, Like the man's dark thought in the infant's brain, Like aught that is which wraps what is to be, Art's deathless dreams lay veiled by many a vein Of Parian stone; and, yet a speechless child, Verse murmured, and Philosophy did strain Her lidless eyes for thee... (11. 49-60). Shelley could be describing the reading or speaking of a text, for poetic experience is an originating moment which unfolds our reflections and anticipations. Poetry elides speechlessness and the empty gaze. Its goings are all returnings, its experience is always inventive before meanings codify and resolve: "Every original language near to its source," we find in the Defence (p. 279), "is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem; the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry." What was dark to experience is now illumined, 46 John Robert Leo47 as different regions in experience are uncovered or redistributed by language across our shifting horizons. Thus this bringing-foward-intoclarity, this moving of the previously inexpressed into articulation, is the pattern not only behind Shelley's view ofGreece producing a "sun-fire garlanded" Athens (1. 68), but also the more pervasive design describing other regarded experience. James Edie puts it this way: "We... can learn to make distinctions in our experience by attending to differences of meaning which are normally below the level of our own cultural threshold. By attending to a given region of experience, we can lower the differential thresholds already sedimented in our language almost indefinitely and make what was implicit in our experience more and more explicit."2 Edie's comments may be taken as responses to questions emerging from modernist readings of Shelley and other visionary poets—Blake, Hart Crane, or Charles Olson are instances—who sense the poetic project as a criticism of consciousness, within the lived body, as it struggles to make a world. How do language and the imagination consort in the critical regeneration of our lives? In what sorts of ways is renascence the uncovering and unfolding of an indefinite wholeness by the unlayering of fixed habits and attitudes? How does Shelley's Defence of Poetry, both a text on aesthetics and a reading of the world, suggest their alignment? What methods from critical discourse make Shelley's poetics present to our experience and thought? The adjustment of these issues is the task of the remainder of my article. First I examine Shelley's organization of consciousness into "reason" and "imagination" and trace the meanings of these functions in their immediate social context. A brief dispute with the reductive idealism of Platonic tradition allows for my third procedure, which is a phenomenological description of the imaginative field according to Husserl. Finally, I try to explicate Shelley's understanding of imaginative "decentering" within our experience. I Poetry and prose are saturated with references to phenomena. Texts refer to interior and exterior events (memory, rain), which are objects ofandfor consciousness. Shelley grasps this co-givenness of consciousness and world, their correlativity, as a condition revealed and strengthened by metaphor, which itself arrests us as "that of which we are speaking through words."3 But if it is the nature of language to be both perceptual and yet transcendental, both present and absent, it still exists as the imagination's voice in... (shrink)

Much of the literature on "ceteris paribus" laws is based on a misguided egalitarianism about the sciences. For example, it is commonly held that the special sciences are riddled with ceteris paribus laws; from this many commentators conclude that if the special sciences are not to be accorded a second class status, it must be ceteris paribus all the way down to fundamental physics. We argue that the (purported) laws of fundamental physics are not hedged by ceteris paribus clauses and (...) provisos. Furthermore, we show that not only is there no persuasive analysis of the truth conditions for ceteris paribus laws, there is not even an acceptable account of how they are to be saved from triviality or how they are to be melded with standard scientific methodology. Our way out of this unsatisfactory situation to reject the widespread notion that the achievements and the scientific status of the special sciences must be understood in terms of ceteris paribus laws. (shrink)

(1997). Death at an Early Age: The Destruction of the Hearts and Minds of Negro Children in the Boston Public Schools. Educational Studies: Vol. 28, No. 1, pp. 3-14.

This is the first part of a two-part article in which we defend the thesis of Humean Supervenience about Laws of Nature (HS). According to this thesis, two possible worlds cannot differ on what is a law of nature unless they also differ on the Humean base. The Humean base is easy to characterize intuitively, but there is no consensus on how, precisely, it should be defined. Here in Part I, we present and motivate a characterization of the Humean base (...) that, we argue, enables HS to capture what is really stake in the debate, without taking on extraneous commitments. (shrink)

There was a long and lively debate in Ancient Greece on the nature of music, spanning philosophy, cosmology, and psychology. Peripatetic musicology based its understanding of the nature of music on philosophical principles derived from Aristotle’s psychology in order to address debates among their predecessors, primarily to shift the focus away from the physical sounds or their mathematical ratios, towards the investigation of the psyche, which I show was a sort of proto-phenomenology. Music involves a voluntary activity accompanied by a (...) natural joy. This joy grows and intensifies the energeia of the psyche. The nature of music is related directly to the nature, essence, or activity, of the psyche. (shrink)