Individuality and Beyond: Nietzsche Reads Emerson. By Zavatta Benedetta, Reynolds Alexander).

Cheerfulness or serenity is one of the most important themes in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Throughout his writings, from first to last, he can be found wrestling with conceptions of cheerfulness and promoting a cheerful mode of philosophizing. Despite the importance and recurrence of the theme of cheerfulness in Nietzsche’s entire œuvre, there have been relatively few studies specifically devoted to it. An important debate on cheerfulness has recently taken place in the literature on Nietzsche between Robert Pippin and Lanier Anderson and (...) Rachel Cristy. Both sides of the debate have explored Nietzsche’s practice of cheerfulness in direct relation to Montaigne. According to Pippin, Nietzsche never succeeds in writing with the kind of cheerfulness of Montaigne. In contrast, Anderson and Cristy have contended that both Nietzsche and Montaigne conceive of cheerfulness as a complex, non-naïve spiritual state or attitude that is to be cultivated through the practice of philosophy as a way of life. According to Anderson and Cristy, this is a deep form of love of life that both Nietzsche and Montaigne practice and perhaps achieve at least in part by and through writing. In this essay, we aim to contribute to this debate by offering a threefold argument. First, we argue that Nietzsche conceives of cheerfulness not only as a psychological ideal, as a desirable state or attitude of the spirit, but also as an aesthetic ideal, as a desirable quality or style of thinking and writing. Second, we argue that, in addition to Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson is an equally important but neglected influence on Nietzsche’s conception and practice of cheerfulness. Third, by reconstructing Nietzsche’s self-presentation as a cheerful thinker and writer in the 1886 prefaces and in Ecce homo, we conclude that it is possible to argue that starting from his middle writings Nietzsche thinks and writes cheerfully in some of his works, including a number of his most significant texts. (shrink)

An incisive exploration of Nietzsche as a bold, visionary poet-philosopher. Today, Nietzsche is justly celebrated for his rich, philosophical naturalism, but Keith Ansell-Pearson warns that we must not overlook the visionary dimension of his thinking and his focus on the need to cultivate a new care of the self and care of life. In Nietzsche's Earthbound Wisdom, Ansell-Pearson recovers Nietzsche's love for a philosophy that guides us through our passions, one that opens us more fully to the possibilities of (...) life and the joy of knowledge. Ansell-Pearson offers close readings of Nietzsche's texts in conversation with philosophical and literary figures including Augustine, Baudelaire, Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Emerson, Flaubert, Stendhal, and more. Throughout, Ansell-Pearson examines Nietzsche's sophisticated critique of literary naturalism and his alternative conception of the poet as a seer who has a deep longing for a new earth. (shrink)

The Puritan prelude.--Jonathan Edwards: theology.--Benjamin Franklin: science and morals.--John Adams: politics.--Ralph Waldo Emerson: poet-priest.--Charles S. Peirce.--William James.--John Dewey.--George Santayana.

Cheerfulness or serenity (Heiterkeit) is one of the most important themes in Nietzsche’s philosophy. Throughout his writings, from first to last, he can be found wrestling with conceptions of cheerfulness and promoting a cheerful mode of philosophizing. Despite the importance and recurrence of the theme of cheerfulness in Nietzsche’s entire œuvre, there have been relatively few studies specifically devoted to it. An important debate on cheerfulness has recently taken place in the literature on Nietzsche between Robert Pippin and Lanier Anderson (...) and Rachel Cristy. Both sides of the debate have explored Nietzsche’s practice of cheerfulness in direct relation to Montaigne. According to Pippin, Nietzsche never succeeds in writing with the kind of cheerfulness of Montaigne. In contrast, Anderson and Cristy have contended that both Nietzsche and Montaigne conceive of cheerfulness as a complex, non-naïve spiritual state or attitude that is to be cultivated through the practice of philosophy as a way of life. According to Anderson and Cristy, this is a deep form of love of life that both Nietzsche and Montaigne practice and perhaps achieve at least in part by and through writing. In this essay, we aim to contribute to this debate by offering a threefold argument. First, we argue that Nietzsche conceives of cheerfulness not only as a psychological ideal, as a desirable state or attitude of the spirit, but also as an aesthetic ideal, as a desirable quality or style of thinking and writing (sections 1–2). Second, we argue that, in addition to Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson is an equally important but neglected influence on Nietzsche’s conception and practice of cheerfulness (section 2). Third, by reconstructing Nietzsche’s self-presentation as a cheerful thinker and writer in the 1886 prefaces and in Ecce homo (1888), we conclude that it is possible to argue that starting from his middle writings Nietzsche thinks and writes cheerfully in some of his works, including a number of his most significant texts (section 3). (shrink)

Explores the intellectual contributions of eight great American thinkers (Edwards, Franklin, Adams, Emerson, Pierce, James and Dewey).

CONSENSUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES Various atomistic and individualistic theories of knowledge, language, ethics and politics have dominated philosophical ...

Responds to the idea that humans are merely survival mechanisms for their own genes, providing the tools to advance human interests over the interests of the replicators through rational self-determination.

Variations in colour perception have featured prominently in recent attempts to argue against the view that colours are objective mind-independent properties of the perceptual environment. My aim in this paper is to defend the view that colours are mind-independent properties in response to worries arising from one type of empirically documented case of perceptual variation: variation in the perception of the «unique hues». §1 sets out the challenge raised by variation in the perception of the unique hues. I argue in (...) §2 that the empirical findings are less dramatic than they might initially appear, and in §3 that accounting for the inter-personal differences is consistent with the view that colours are mind-independent properties that normal subjects veridically perceive, at least roughly speaking. (shrink)

This book examines the politics of diversity, and explores potential sources of support for an inclusive solidarity, in particular political sources of solidarity.

This book aims to provide a solution to the semantic paradoxes. It argues for a unified solution to the paradoxes generated by our concepts of denotation, predicate extension, and truth. The solution makes two main claims. The first is that our semantic expressions 'denotes', 'extension' and 'true' are context-sensitive. The second, inspired by a brief, tantalizing remark of Godel's, is that these expressions are significant everywhere except for certain singularities, in analogy with division by zero. A formal theory of singularities (...) is presented and applied to a wide variety of versions of the definability paradoxes, Russell's paradox, and the Liar paradox. Keith Simmons argues that the singularity theory satisfies the following desiderata: it recognizes that the proper setting of the semantic paradoxes is natural language, not regimented formal languages; it minimizes any revision to our semantic concepts; it respects as far as possible Tarski's intuition that natural languages are universal; it responds adequately to the threat of revenge paradoxes; and it preserves classical logic and semantics. Simmons draws out the consequences of the singularity theory for deflationary views of our semantic concepts, and concludes that if we accept the singularity theory, we must reject deflationism. (shrink)

The library of America is dedicated to publishing America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes, featuring authoritative texts. Hailed as the "finest-looking, longest-lasting editions ever made", Library of America volumes make a fine gift for any occasion. Now, with exactly one hundred volumes to choose from, there is a perfect gift for everyone.

Epistemologists are interested in what makes beliefs well justified. Even before considering competing theories of epistemic justification, however, we should ask what sort of valuational structure we are trying to explain. If, as far as epistemic justification is concerned, beliefs are like bank accounts, then all beliefs are comparable: just as in any bank account there must be more, less, or as much money as in any other, one belief must be better, worse, or as good as any other. Contemporary (...) epistemologists take for granted the assumption that beliefs are comparable in the same way that bank accounts are comparable: bank accounts have balances, sprinters have personal bests for the 100-meter dash, and beliefs have degrees of justifiedness. Alternatively, we could understand the justificatory status of a belief to be more like the expensiveness of a restaurant. Consider a concept of restaurant expensiveness on which the expensiveness of a restaurant is determined by the range of prices for meals at that restaurant. If meals at Restaurant A are $25 to $50 and meals at B are $10 to $20, then A is more expensive than B. Restaurant C, however , is neither more nor less expensive than A. Nor is it equally expensive, for there are restaurants that are more expensive than C that are not more expensive than A . Some evaluative concepts, like this concept of restaurant expensiveness, do not reduce values to single numbers. If epistemic justification is like this, then there may be pairs of beliefs such that neither is better justified than the other, but nor are they equally well justified. Such beliefs would be incomparable. While incomparability is familiar in the ethics literature, it has not previously been explored in epistemology. I discuss the implications of allowing for incomparability in epistemology, both for theories of epistemic justification and theories of knowledge. (shrink)

Interpretation is the process whereby a hearer reasons to an interpretation of a speaker's discourse. The hearer normally adopts a credulous attitude to the discourse, at least for the purposes of interpreting it. That is to say the hearer tries to accommodate the truth of all the speaker's utterances in deriving an intended model. We present a nonmonotonic logical model of this process which defines unique minimal preferred models and efficiently simulates a kind of closed-world reasoning of particular interest for (...) human cognition. Byrne's “suppression” data (Byrne, 1989) are used to illustrate how variants on this logic can capture and motivate subtly different interpretative stances which different subjects adopt, thus indicating where more fine-grained empirical data are required to understand what subjects are doing in this task. We then show that this logical competence model can be implemented in spreading activation network models. A one pass process interprets the textual input by constructing a network which then computes minimal preferred models for (3-valued) valuations of the set of propositions of the text. The neural implementation distinguishes easy forward reasoning from more complex backward reasoning in a way that may be useful in explaining directionality in human reasoning. (shrink)

Continuing Keith Ward's series on comparative religion, this book deals with religious views of human nature and destiny. The beliefs of six major traditions are presented: the view of Advaita Vedanta that there is one Supreme Self, unfolding into the illusion of individual existence; the Vaishnava belief that there is an infinite number of souls, whose destiny is to be released from material embodiment; the Buddhist view that there is no eternal Self; the Abrahamic belief that persons are essentially (...) embodied souls; and the materialistic position that persons are complex material organisms. Indian ideas of rebirth, karma, and liberation from samsara are critically analysed and compared with semitic belief in the intermediate state of Sheol, Purgatory or Paradise, the Final Judgement and the resurrection of the body. The impact of scientific theories of cosmic and biological evolution on religious beliefs is assessed, and a form of 'soft emergent materialism' is defended, with regard to the soul. In this context, a Christian doctrine of original sin and atonement is presented, stressing the idea of soterial, as opposed to forensic, justice. Finally, a Christian view of personal immortality and the 'end of all things' is developed in conversation with Jewish and Muslim beliefs about judgement and resurrection. (shrink)

Rubin and Pearl offered approaches to causal effect estimation and Lewis and Pearl offered theories of counterfactual conditionals. Arguments offered by Pearl and his collaborators support a weak form of equivalence such that notation from the rival theory can be re-purposed to express Pearl’s theory in a way that is equivalent to Pearl’s theory expressed in its native notation. Nonetheless, the many fundamental differences between the theories rule out any stronger form of equivalence. A renewed emphasis on comparative research can (...) help to guide applications, further develop each theory, and better understand their relative strengths and weaknesses. (shrink)

Nietzsche is undoubtedly one of the most original and influential thinkers in the history of philosophy. With ideas such as the overman, will to power, the eternal recurrence, and perspectivism, Nietzsche challenges us to reconceive how it is that we know and understand the world, and what it means to be a human being. Further, in his works, he not only grapples with previous great philosophers and their ideas, but he also calls into question and redefines what it means to (...) do philosophy. Nietzsche and the Philosophers for the first time sets out to examine explicitly Nietzsche’s relationship to his most important predecessors. This anthology includes essays by many of the leading Nietzsche scholars, including Keith Ansell-Pearson, Daniel Conway, Tracy B. Strong, Gary Shapiro, Babette Babich, Mark Anderson, and Paul S. Loeb. These excellent writers discuss Nietzsche’s engagement with such figures as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Socrates, Hume, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Rousseau, and the Buddha. Anyone interested in Nietzsche or the history of philosophy generally will find much of great interest in this volume. (shrink)

According to the Communicative Theory of Emotions, we experience emotions when events occur that are important for our goals and plans. A method of choice for studying these matters is the emotion diary. Emotions configure our cognitive systems and our relationships. Many of our emotions concern our relationships, and empathy is central to our experience of them. We do not always recognize our emotions or the emotions of others, but literary fiction can help improve our skills of recognition and understanding.

The concept of the 'social Trinity', which posits three conscious subjects in God, radically revised the traditional Christian idea of the Creator. It promoted a view of God as a passionate, creative and responsive source of all being. Keith Ward argues that social Trinitarian thinking threatens the unity of God, however, and that this new view of God does not require a 'social' component. Expanding on the work of theologians such as Barth and Rahner, who insisted that there was (...) only one mind of God, Ward offers a coherent, wholly monotheistic interpretation of the Trinity. Christ and the Cosmos analyses theistic belief in a scientific context, demonstrating the necessity of cosmology to theological thinking that is often overly myopic and anthropomorphic. This important volume will benefit those who seek to understand what the Trinity is, why it matters and how it fits into a scientific account of the universe. (shrink)

In metaphysics, we seem to have in every generation an oscillation between realist positions and stances that are in one way or another idealist, instrumentalist, or constructivist. Realists in the philosophy of science are those philosophers who will not conclude, from the fact that scientific theories are undoubtedly constructs of human mentality and culture, that therefore the content of these theories is inevitably some function of the human mentality and culture that have produced them. Realists are unimpressed by response-dependence. Realism (...) is metaphysical optimism; it has not abandoned the notion that exercising our capacities does not disqualify us from discovery. (shrink)

Objects appear different as the illumination under which they are perceived varies. This fact is sometimes thought to pose a problem for the view that colours are mind-independent properties: if a coloured object appears different under different illuminations, then under which illumination does the object appear the colour it really is? I argue that given the nature of natural daylight, and certain plausible assumptions about the nature of the colours it illuminates, there is a non-arbitrary reason to suppose that it (...) is under natural daylight that we are able to perceive the real colours of objects. (shrink)

The “Adam Smith Problem” is the name given to an argument that arose among German scholars during the second half of the nineteenth century concerning the compatibility of the conceptions of human nature advanced in, respectively, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and his Wealth of Nations (1776). During the twentieth century these arguments were forgotten but the problem lived on, the consensus now being that there is no such incompatibility, and therefore no problem. Rather than rehearse the arguments (...) for and against compatibility and incompatibility, this paper returns to the German writers of the 1850s–1890s and demonstrates that their engagement in this argument represents the foundation of modern Smith scholarship. It is shown that the “problem” was not simply a mistake best forgotten, but the first sustained scholarly effort to understand the importance of Smith's work, an effort that lacked any parallel in English commentary of the time. By the 1890s British writers, overwhelmingly ignorant of German commentary, assumed that there was little more to be said about Smith's work. Belated international familiarity with this German “Problem” played a major role in transforming Smith from a simple partisan of free trade into a theorist of commercial society and human action. ☆ This paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Dogmenhistorischer Auschuss of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, Lüdinghausen, June 2007. I would like to thank all those attending for their very helpful comments. In places I here draw upon material included in my essays on the Smith reception in A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith (edited by Keith Tribe, with Hiroshi Mizuta), Pickering and Chatto, London 2002, but do so in order to make a new argument concerning the contribution of German scholarship to modern Adam Smith scholarship. (shrink)

Courts are increasingly obliged to adjudicate upon challenges to allocative decisions in healthcare, but their involvement continues to be regarded with unease, imperilling the legitimacy of the judicial role in this context. A central reason for this is that judges are perceived to lack sufficient expertise to determine allocative questions. This article critically appraises the claim of lack of judicial expertise through an examination of the various components of a limit-setting decision. It is argued that the inexpertise argument is weak (...) when compared with other rationales for judicial restraint, such as the procedural unsuitability and lack of constitutional competence of courts. (shrink)

Transposable elements (TEs) are powerful facilitators of genome evolution, and hence of phenotypic diversity as they can cause genetic changes of great magnitude and variety. TEs are ubiquitous and extremely ancient, and although harmful to some individuals, they can be very beneficial to lineages. TEs can build, sculpt, and reformat genomes by both active and passive means. Lineages with active TEs or with abundant homogeneous inactive populations of TEs that can act passively by causing ectopic recombination are potentially fecund, adaptable, (...) and taxonate readily. Conversely, taxa deficient in TEs or possessing heterogeneous populations of inactive TEs may be well adapted in their niche, but tend to prolonged stasis and may risk extinction by lacking the capacity to adapt to change, or diversify. Because of recurring intermittent waves of TE infestation, available data indicate a compatibility with punctuated equilibrium, in keeping with widely accepted interpretations of evidence from the fossil record. We propose a general and holistic synthesis on how the presence of TEs within genomes makes them flexible and dynamic, so that genomes themselves are powerful facilitators of their own evolution. (shrink)

The cognitive critique of the goals and desires that are input into the implicit calculations that result in instrumental rationality is one aspect of what has been termed broad rationality (Elster, 1983). This cognitive critique involves, among other things, the search for rational integration (Nozick, 1993)—that is, consistency between first-order and second-order preferences. Forming a second-order preference involves metarepresentational abilities made possible by mental decoupling operations. However, these decoupling abilities are separable from the motive that initiates the cognitive critique itself. (...) I argue that Velleman (1992) has identified that motive (“the desire to act in accordance with reasons”), and that it might be operationalisable as a thinking disposition at a very superordinate cognitive level. This thinking disposition, the Master Rationality Motive, is likely to be of particular importance in explaining individual differences in the tendency to seek rational integration. Preliminary research on related constructs suggests that this construct is measurable. (shrink)

Executive function has become an important concept in explanations of psychiatric disorders, but we currently lack comprehensive models of normal executive function and of its malfunctions. Here we illustrate how defeasible logical analysis can aid progress in this area. We illustrate using autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as example disorders, and show how logical analysis reveals commonalities between linguistic and non-linguistic behaviours within each disorder, and how contrasting sub-components of executive function are involved across disorders. This analysis reveals (...) how logical analysis is as applicable to fast, automatic and unconscious reasoning as it is to slow deliberate cogitation. (shrink)

A successful lexicographic semantic description characterizes the concepts that occur in establishing the meaning of a listeme by modelling what the competent native-like speaker of the language knows. Because concepts can only be identified to another human through the medium of a natural language, the metalanguage used in the semantic definition of a natural language expression in the object language will always be equivalent to the natural language expression through which that metalanguage is interpreted. The metalanguage of a semantic theory (...) is a demonstrably rational abstract model developed by applying the analyst’s experience and intuitions to inferences drawn from occurrences of actual speech events. Each sense of a listeme is characterized by a description of the salient properties of its typical denotatum. To most effectively implement this project in conceptual engineering is to capture every possible sense of the listeme using metalanguage that is at the same time precise, comprehensive, and succinct. A review of several proposed lexicon/dictionary entries for the listeme cup reveals lacunae that are rectified in a decision procedure whose output characterizes the relevant sense of the input listeme using natural language and the procedural constructs/commands &, XOR, IF, ELSE, ELIF, GOTO, OUTPUT, TENABLE, NEXT ITEM. The resulting lexicographic semantic description satisfies the specified success condition. Establishing the characteristics of metalanguage is crucial to the proper investigation of conceptual engineering. (shrink)

From what has been argued, it should now be apparent how Heidegger's philosophy of the affect, its ontological disclosures and its relation to authenticity might be enlarged to meet certain marxist challenges. The most valuable instruction to be gained from these citicisms, I think, is that which Lukacs offers in the example of Szilasi's intuition of co-presence. Traditional phenomenology needs to enrich its investigations into the social and historical reality of situation. Kosik's point that Heideggerian authenticity lacks the crucial third (...) step (revolutionary change of society) is also profound but again, not incompatiblein se with Heidegger's concept. Alternatively, one might as easily say that Critical Marxism or any Marxist Humanism can still be enriched by certain Heideggerian insights. (shrink)

Executive function has become an important concept in explanations of psychiatric disorders, but we currently lack comprehensive models of normal executive function and of its malfunctions. Here we illustrate how defeasible logical analysis can aid progress in this area. We illustrate using autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) as example disorders, and show how logical analysis reveals commonalities between linguistic and non-linguistic behaviours within each disorder, and how contrasting sub-components of executive function are involved across disorders. This analysis reveals (...) how logical analysis is as applicable to fast, automatic and unconscious reasoning as it is to slow deliberate cogitation. (shrink)