This book, the product of a lifetime of research by one of the founders of developmental psychology, takes on the powerful assumptions behind these questions- ...

There is something embarrassing about money. Everybody is seeking it but at the same time they are reluctant to talk about their bank balances and stock holdings. As a society we have so much of it that we can install 7000 saffron curtains all over Central Park, send tourists into outer space, and analyze the gas on the surface of Titan, yet we fail to spend it on millions of poverty-stricken people who die of disease or starvation each year. We (...) do open our pocketbooks sometimes, but only when television images of massive destruction overwhelm our sensibilities. Money often dominates our consciousness and bombards us in the headlines: Our national debt is 7.7 trillion dollars and it's increasing by more than 2 billion dollars a day; corporate executives of Enron walk away with millions while their employees lose their jobs and their pensions; and we had an endless fascination with Martha Stewart, who is worth millions, but went to jail trying to save a few thousand. (shrink)

This article discusses several problems affecting progress in research on emotion: (1) disagreements over the appropriate referents for an emotion; (2) the modest relations between the brain states provoked by an emotional incentive and the accompanying semantic appraisals or behaviors; and (3) the abstract nature and indifference to origin of the English words used to name emotions. The final section contains some suggestions for future research.

This work exposes the practices that are controlling education and reducing it to little more than skills development in preparation for work. It questions the strategy of mentoring to show how its dynamic requires docility from the learner and thus perpetuates inequality.

The algebra of sets has, basically, two different types of symbols. One type of symbol (∩, ?, +, ?) defines another set from two other sets. A second type of symbol (?, ?, =, ?) makes a proposition about two sets. When the construction of these two types of symbols is based on the same four-dot matrix as the logic symbols described in a previous paper, the three symbol types then dovetail together into a harmonious whole that greatly simplifies derivation (...) in the algebra of sets. (shrink)

“Imagine A rather short-sighted person told to read an inscription in small letters from some way off….' So begins the quest for “the real nature of justice and injustice” undertaken in response to the challenge of Glaucon and Adeimantus to show that “justice pays”. It is often alleged that the search leads through analogy to a monster “organic” state that lives by devouring individual rights. I believe that these charges are mistaken. Plato's political theory does not derive from an analogy (...) which makes the state a monster individual with interests superior to and independent of those of ordinary citizens; it derives rather from a doctrine of objective interests discernible by those with special training and ability, interests which later thinkers have taken to be the object of a “real will”, unerring even where a person's mere empirical desires are shortsightedly misdirected. Plato identifies the interests of his ideal state with the objective interests of its citizens , and in his harmonious world, metaphysics, moral psychology, and political organization combine to ensure that those interests need never override individual mundane interests for they never conflict: they coincide. That the whole theory is dubious should not prevent us from seeing that just what the theory is may be clarified by examining the arguments which putatively lead to it, and that those arguments provide grounds for not confounding Plato's theory with others which may reach similar conclusions about political organization and obligation. (shrink)

Progress in understanding the relation between brain profiles and emotions is being slowed by the belief in a collection of basic emotional states, with the names: fear, anger, joy, disgust, and sadness, that do not specify the species or age of the experiencing agent, the origin of the state, or the evidence used to infer it. This article evaluates critically the premise that decontextualized emotional words refer to natural kinds. It also suggests that investigators set aside the currently popular words (...) and search for relations, in humans and animals, between patterns of measures to varied incentives presented in distinctive contexts. (shrink)

Education has always been at the heart of most, if not all, human endeavours. This explains the growing interest of many scholars in educational issues. Self-Reliance, one of Emerson’s most impressive and influential works, provides an outstanding contribution to education in general and particularly to the personal development of individuals in society. The relevance of the educational values addressed in Self-Reliance makes it an appropriate context for academic reflection. This paper scrutinises the educational dimension of Emerson’s work with a focus (...) on language didactics. My concern is to provide evidence that the educational values expressed instruct didactics. The study of Self-Reliance reveals the expression of some values, the main ones being trust, responsibility, commitment, creativity, autonomy, independence, self-esteem, self-determination, self-evaluation, and individual talents. By reflecting on their educational dimension with a focus on their didactic implications I come to conclude that even though didactics does not draw directly on Emerson’s educational philosophy, it integrates some aspects, notably the values referred to in this paper. (shrink)

This collection of articles pays homage to the creativity and scientific rigor Jerome Singer has brought to the study of consciousness and play. It will interest personality, social, clinical and developmental psychologists alike.

One of the interesting aspects of the study of children's play is that it permits us to see clearly how an awareness of rules is built up in us against factors of wildness, and how this awareness of rules, little by little, pervades the child's behavior. Now, the child's experience can inform us about the experience of the species: if the processes of the acquisition of self-control cannot be exactly the same, as Stanley Hall thought, the very differences allow us (...) to specify the importance and exact role of an environment which is not the same for the child and for early mankind. For example, the existence of a coherent, stable, adult group makes for the institutionalization and perpetuation in terms of an adult tradition of behavior which, in the child, cannot take on its full development for lack of that social, and so to speak, institutional co-efficient. Thus, all at once, childhood turbulence is transformed into adult techniques of ecstacy and intoxication, or playing according to rules, sloughs off in the adult as religion, art, or even philosophy. (shrink)

Here in more than a hundred photographs is portrayed Liebling's Minnesota. During two decades marked by social, political and cultural change, Liebling travelled the state and found his largest subject -- the depiction and interpretation of commonplace human experience. The images range from the grain elevators and skid row of Minneapolis to the slaughterhouses in South St. Paul and the poor, working-class streets of St. Paul's West Side; from the Iron Range and the Red Lake Indian reservation in the north (...) to the farming towns in the south. The vision of Minnesota that emerges from the extraordinary photographs is uniquely that of the artist, yet it leads viewers effortlessly to an enhanced understanding of the places, the times, and, always, the people. (shrink)

This volume focuses on the role language plays at all levels of the argumentation process. It explores the effects that specific linguistic choices may have in the production and the reception of arguments and in doing so, it moves beyond the first, necessary, descriptive stance provided by current literature on the topic. Each chapter provides an original take illuminating one or more of the following three issues: the range of linguistic resources language users draw on as they argue; how cognitive (...) processes of meaning construction may influence argumentative practices; and which discursive devices can be used to fulfil a number of argumentative goals. The volume includes theoretical and empirical or applied stances, providing the reader both with state-of-the-art reflections on the relationship between argumentation and language, and with concrete examples of how this relationship plays out in naturally occurring argumentative practices, such as classroom interaction, and political, parliamentary or journalistic discourse. This is a very original, timely and welcome contribution to the study of argumentation conducted with the tools of the language sciences. The collection of papers relevantly tackles key linguistic, discursive and cognitive aspects of argumentative practices whose treatment is underrepresented in mainstream argumentation studies by offering new and exciting linguistically-grounded theoretical accounts. As such, the volume testifies both to the vigour of the linguistic current within the discipline and to the high standards of scholarly commitment and quality that the younger generation is pushing forward. Without question, this book marks an important milestone in the relationships between linguistics and argumentation theory. Christian Plantin, Professor Emeritus. (shrink)

In addition to being a great aesthetician who established the teaching and research of aesthetics in France, Étienne Souriau is an important philosopher, notably for his contribution to ontology. His aesthetics and his ontology are closely entangled. The purpose of this article is to study the relationship between these two rings, in this case inseparable, but distinct, of philosophy. We will use a comparison with the phenomenology of Charles Peirce, relevant insofar as, by different ways, art for the first one, (...) semiotics for the second one, the two philosophers participate in a theory of the representation. (shrink)

Ce texte, à la manière même de Bernard Teyssèdre, est centré sur l’esthétique de Hegel qu’il a rencontrée dès ses études et premiers enseignements sous l’aile d’Althusser, qu’il a alors examinée en raison du contexte des voyages du philosophe, prenant dès ce moment sa distance vis-à-vis d’une philosophie « pure » oublieuse de l’histoire, qu’il a ensuite approfondie à l’aune des arts visuels et plastiques ou de l’iconographie, qu’il a soutenue et promue institutionnellement, et qui, en outre, a inspiré à (...) Jean-Luc Godard une allusion filmique singulière. (shrink)

In ‘Rethinking Disease’, Powell and Scarffe1 propose what in effect is a modification of Jerome Wakefield’s2 3 harmful dysfunction analysis (HDA) of medical (including mental) disorder. The HDA maintains that ‘disorder’ (or ‘disease’ in Powell and Scarffe’s terminology) is a hybrid factual and value concept requiring that a biological dysfunction, understood as a failure of some feature to perform a naturally selected function, causes harm to the individual as evaluated by social values. Powell and Scarffe accept both the HDA’s evolutionary (...) biological function component and its incorporation of a value component. Their proposed ‘new twist’ is to revise the value component: ‘Our proposed definition of disease is as follows: a biomedical state is a disease only if it implicates a biological dysfunction that is, or would be, properly disvalued’. So, they propose that a disorder is a ‘properly disvalued dysfunction’ rather than a ‘harmful dysfunction’, an approach they term ‘thickly normative’ in contrast to the thin normative approach of the HDA. There has been a surge of interest recently in better understanding the ‘harm’ component of the HDA. Powell and Scarffe’s analysis is a helpful contribution to this discussion. We focus here exclusively on their proposal regarding the analysis of the concept of disorder and ignore many important related issues that the authors address, ranging from prioritising resource allocation between disorders and non-disorders to whether the concept of disorder should be replaced by a generic welfarist concept. The resolution of these additional issues depends on first understanding ‘disorder’. The authors’ proposed changes to the HDA also deserve evaluation because the HDA, which has been endorsed by leading nosologists,4 plays an influential role in nosological debate across categories of disorder ranging, for example, from sexual paraphilias5 to psychopathy.6 A basic problem is that Powell and Scarffe misinterpret …. (shrink)

Christopher Boorse’s biostatistical theory of medical disorder claims that biological part-dysfunction (i.e., failure of an internal mechanism to perform its biological function), a factual criterion, is both necessary and sufficient for disorder. Jerome Wakefield’s harmful dysfunction analysis of medical disorder agrees that part-dysfunction is necessary but rejects the sufficiency claim, maintaining that disorder also requires that the part-dysfunction causes harm to the individual, a value criterion. In this paper, I present two considerations against the sufficiency claim. First, I analyze Boorse’s (...) central argument for the sufficiency claim, the “pathologist argument,” which takes pathologists’ intuitions about pathology as determinative of medical disorder and conclude that it begs the question and fails to support the sufficiency claim. Second, I present four counterexamples from the medical literature in which salient part-dysfunctions are considered nondisorders, including healthy disease carriers, HIV-positive status, benign mutations, and situs inversus totalis, thus falsifying the sufficiency claim and supporting the harm criterion. (shrink)

L'influence de la philosophie sur le cinéma peut être observée sous trois éclairages : la manière dont le cinéma représente le philosophe ; les tentatives pour adapter à l'écran les textes philosophiques ; la capacité enfin du cinéma à philosopher. Cinéma et philosophie en dresse un bilan à la fois historique et critique et témoigne d'une phase nouvelle de la théorie du cinéma. Dominique Château synthétise ici les contributions de Bergson, Benjamin, Eisenstein, Epstein, Bazin, Merleau-Ponty, Mitry, Cavell, Deleuze, Schefer entre (...) autres et s'arrête sur les propositions de philosophie du cinéma qui considèrent ce médium comme un phénomène historique lié à la modernité, un domaine d'expression spécifique ou encore un objet d'expérience où la philosophie autant que le cinéma sont mis à l'épreuve. Les grandes tendances de la philosophie moderne (phénoménologie, philosophie analytique, déconstruction, Gender Studies...) sont ici présentées sous l'angle de leur apport à la théorie du cinéma. Le livre s'achève enfin sur l'examen d'un projet d'une véritable esthétique du cinéma. (shrink)

First published in 1977, Emotion, Thought and Therapy is a study of Hume and Spinoza and the relationship of philosophical theories of the emotions to psychological theories of therapy. Jerome Neu argues that the Spinozists are closer to the truth; that is, that thoughts are of greater importance than feelings in the classification and discrimination of emotional states. He then contends that if the Spinozists are closer to the truth, we have the beginning of an argument to show that Freudian (...) or analytic therapies make philosophic sense. Throughout the book, careful attention is paid to modern discussions in philosophy of mind and psychology, and materials from anthropology and other relevant disciplines are considered. At the centre of the discussion is the notion of ‘thought-dependence’. Therapies for psychological disorders are placed along a spectrum in accordance with the role they assign to thoughts. The Spinozist view of the emotions can be seen as at the extreme thought end of a corresponding spectrum of theories of the emotions. The book suggests that this stream may help explain the spectrum of therapeutic theories and the possibilities that exist for psychological development and change. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy, psychology and counselling. (shrink)

La philosophie pense non seulement en délivrant des pensées, mais en réfléchissant sur les manières de penser. Ce livre concerne deux manières de penser tantôt combinées, tantôt séparées : la dialectique et l'antinomie. Il étudie la dialectique de Hegel, en son unicité et sa radicalité, mais rappelle aussi ses origines, expose sa critique et considère sa régression à l'antinomie ou encore son fantasme qui ne cesse de hanter la philosophie. Ce débat mobilise, outre Aristote et Platon, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Lyotard, (...) Marx, Peirce et quelques autres ; il se prolonge dans l'examen de la figure du chiasme et débouche sur l'esquisse d'une dissertation sur le comment de la pensée. (shrink)

Everettian quantum mechanics tells us that the fundamental dynamics of the universe are deterministic. So what are the `probabilities' that the Born rule describes? One popular answer has been to treat these probabilities as rational credences. A recent alternative, Isaac Wilhelm's centered Everett Interpretation (CEI), takes the Born probabilities to be centered chances: the objective chances that some centered propositions are true. Thus, the CEI challenges the `orthodox assumption’ that fundamental physical laws concern only uncentered facts. I provide three arguments (...) against the centered Everett Interpretation. First, I argue that the CEI is in apparent tension with a significant motivation for adopting Everettian quantum mechanics: rejecting the attribution of special significance to observers or agents in fundamental physics. I suggest the CEI can avoid this tension, but only at the cost of sacrificing its central claim that there are objective chances in an Everettian multiverse. My second argument concerns the CEI’s claim that the centered Born rule is a fundamental physical law. I provide two plausible notions of fundamentality for physical laws, and I argue that the centered Born rule satisfies neither. My final argument is that the CEI’s branch-relative laws cannot explain or constrain an agent’s rational credences in the way that the CEI claims. (shrink)

In examining the puzzle of experience, and its possible solutions, Valberg discusses relevant views of Hume, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Strawson, as well as ideas from the recent philosophy of perception. Finally, he describes and analyzes a manifestation of the puzzle outside philosophy, in everyday experience.

This remarkable book is the most comprehensive study ever written of the history of moral philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its aim is to set Kant's still influential ethics in its historical context by showing in detail what the central questions in moral philosophy were for him and how he arrived at his own distinctive ethical views. The book is organised into four main sections, each exploring moral philosophy by discussing the work of many influential philosophers of the (...) seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In an epilogue the author discusses Kant's view of his own historicity, and of the aims of moral philosophy. In its range, in its analyses of many philosophers not discussed elsewhere, and in revealing the subtle interweaving of religious and political thought with moral philosophy, this is an unprecedented account of the evolution of Kant's ethics. (shrink)