Throughout his literary career Walker Percy read and studied the philosophical thought of Charles Sanders Peirce in an attempt to re-present in language the world as Percy knew it. Beginning in 1984 and ending in 1990, the year of his death, Percy corresponded with Kenneth Laine Ketner about the "semiotic" of Peirce. Their letters - honest, instructive, and often filled with down-home humor - record an epistolary friendship of two men both passionately interested in Peirce's theory of signs. (...) This volume of letters provides a rich philosophical perspective for better understanding the fiction and nonfiction of Walker Percy. (shrink)

pt. 1. The need for a philosophy of pain and suffering. The circle of life on the earth. The misuse of fear. Pain. The problems of old age. Rejuvenation. Death and dying. The hereafter. The circle of recurrence.--pt. 2. Doctors and doctoring. Surgery. Psycho-therapy. The two worlds.

The dark house.--The cell.--The endocrine glands.--Human types.--The brain and central nervous system.--Medical psychology.--Different paths to truth.--Consciousness.--The Vedânta.--Yoga.--Higher states of consciousness.--Religion.--Buddhism.--Christ and Buddha.--The church.--Mystical Christianity.--'If there had been a candle ... '--Bibliography (p. [251]-255).

Moral leadership matters. As world politics enters a new and dangerous era, judgment, constancy, moral purpose, and a willingness to overcome partisan politicking are essential for America's leaders. Tempered Strength finds the alternative standard of leadership that Americans are seeking in the classical philosophy of prudence. Ethan Fishman's new work brings together leading American political scientists—including Ronald Beiner, Kenneth L. Deutsch, and George Anastaplo—to discuss the evolution of a standard of prudential leadership both reasonable in nature and practical in (...) scope. Section One studies the meaning of prudence and its evolution in the history of political science from Aristotelian phronesis to Xenophon, Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, and Michael Oakeshott. Section Two demonstrates how the theory of prudential leadership can be applied to practical political issues. (shrink)

Percy has been studied under several headings: Catholic, Southerner, Existentialist. Two such aspects, however, have been neglected: the strong influence of Charles Sanders Peirce, plus Percy’s deep competence in laboratory science. His typescript essay, “Peirce and Modern Semiotic,” presented here, shows that Percy was well ahead of his contemporaries in understanding the scientific and philosophical importance of Peirce’s Semeiotic, the Theory of Semeioses. Percy particularly pointed to the experiential importance of “taking the other’s meaning.” He regarded that common phenomenon as (...) vital, and genuine—a kind of event that behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner or Charles Morris explained away as nothing but a dynamic dyadic causal process. Percy’s essay definitively blocks those reductions. (shrink)

In order to understand the various strands of general equilibrium theory, why it has taken the forms that it has since the time of Léon Walras, and to appreciate fully a view of the state of general equilibrium theorising, it is essential to understand Walras's work and examine its influence. The first section of this book accordingly examines the foundations of Walras's work. These include his philosophical and methodological approach to economic modelling, his views on human nature, and the basic (...) components of his general equilibrium models. The second section examines how the influence of his ideas has been manifested in the theorising of his successors, surveying the models of theorists such as H. L. Moore, Vilfredo Pareto, Knut Wicksell, Gustav Cassel, Abraham Wald, John von Neumann, J. R. Hicks, Kenneth Arrow, and Gerard Debreu. The treatment also examines models of many types in which Walras's influence is explicitly acknowledged. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language CriticismJeffrey WalkerRhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism. Walter Jost. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Pp. xiii + 346. $55.00, hardcover.As the sixth-century BCE poet Theognis once wrote, "Hearken to me, child, and discipline your wits; I'll tell / a tale not unpersuasive nor uncharming to your heart; / but set your mind to gather what I say; there's no necessity (...) / to do what's not according to your will" (Theognidea 1235–38; my translation). While this poem ostensibly is a pederastic proposition, it is also and more fundamentally (as I have argued elsewhere) a poem about poetry as a rhetorical transaction. Poetry is the poet's act of heart-charming persuasion or seduction; the duty of the audience, the object of the poet's seduction, is to "discipline your wits," that is, to exercise hermeneutic and critical judgment on the way to understanding fully and being persuaded or unpersuaded to think or do as the poet asks (for seduction is not compulsion). Finally, and as Theognis's poetry elsewhere suggests, the audience's act of being-persuaded or unpersuaded ultimately is an enactment of, a rehearsal of, an ethical or intellectual position (stance, schêma) that is on its way (with further, repeated rehearsals) to becoming part of the audience's ethical-intellectual performative repertoire, or in other words its êthos, or what Kenneth Burke would call its identity.This richly researched, densely argued, excellent book by Walter Jost could well be understood as a modern (or postmodern) instantiation of a "Theognidean" rhetorical poetics. At one point early on, for example, Jost invokes Angus Fletcher to sum up the activities of an ordinary-language approach to poetry as "thinking the poem": "taking the poem as an occasion for thought; thinking through the poem; being aware of one's thoughts as one reads the poem; looking for some logic in the poem; allowing the poem to trigger certain lines of thought," and so forth (Fletcher, Colors of the Mind, 111–12; Jost 9–10). This is "disciplining one's wits" to "gather what the poet says" and to follow out its implications on the way to judging what Jost calls "the meaning and quality... of an experienced artifact or event or performance" (10). As Jost develops his theoretical frame, which draws most heavily from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanely Cavell, and Kenneth Burke—as well as a host of others in a basically pragmatist tradition—this becomes an explicitly rhetorical approach to poetry, and specifically to Robert Frost's poetry, understood as an epideictic "showing forth" of thought that invites its audience, like Theognis's addressee, to "think [End Page 178] the poem" through and to form a relationship (whether identificational or contestatory) with the system of topoi that underwrites its judgments.Rhetorical Investigations is divided into two main parts. "Book I," titled "Rhetoric: An Advanced Primer," consists of four chapters that attempt to lay out the conceptual framework for, and to philosophically justify, Jost's rhetorical-hermeneutic approach to poetry, while also setting up Robert Frost as a distinctive exemplar of a "low modernist" practice that demonstrates the central themes of ordinary-language and pragmatist philosophy, essentially by dramatizing them, and that stands as a significant (if under-appreciated) alternative to the "high modernist" mode of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and their successors. Frost, in other words (though Jost does not say this explicitly) takes the less-traveled modernist path that Kenneth Burke embarked on in Counter-Statement and pursued for the rest of his career. The key topoi for the framework laid out in these four chapters are: dialectic/dialogue as the medium for an ordinary-language philosophical practice (chap. 1); rhetorical invention as what is missing from "high modernism's" sense of epistemological crisis and anomie (chap. 2); "grammar" as the system of topoi, or commonplaces, that underwrite ordinary language-use and are instantiated by it, and that provide the grounds (what speakers "acknowledge") for deliberation and judgment in practical thought and action (chap. 3); and logic as the implicatures of ordinary-language thought that enable epideictic argument in poetry and that make it something... (shrink)

INTRODUCTION In an age of specialists, Kenneth Burke's writings offend those who are content with a partial view of human motivation. ...

The central unifying element in the philosophy of Peter Browne is his theory of analogy. Although Browne's theory was originally developed to deal with some problems about religious language, Browne regards analogy as a general purpose cognitive mechanism whereby we substitute an idea we have to stand for an object of which we, strictly speaking, have no idea. According to Browne, all of our ideas are ideas of sense, and ideas of sense are ideas of material things. Hence we can (...) conceive of spiritual things – including even our own spirit – only by analogy. One interesting application Browne makes of his theory is an account of how concepts such as knowledge can be correctly applied to beings that have no intrinsic properties in common, such as non-human animals, humans, angels, and God. I argue that this is best understood as what, in the contemporary literature, is known as a ‘multiple realizability’ problem and that Browne's solution to this problem has important similarities to functionalist theories in recent philosophy of mind. (shrink)

An accompanying website offers a set of interactive debate tutorials, which include photographs of debates; a guide to the participants; a grammar of Tibetan debating, which includes sample propositions, responses, and strategies; the ethnomethods employed by debaters; videos of illustrative debates, complete with English translations, all analyzed in detail in the book; and an appendix comprising an interactive debate, glossary, manual, and illustrations. Please see www.thdl.org/DebateTutorials/ for this material. -- back cover.

Originally published between 1925 and 1997 the volumes in this set: Discuss the Impacts of Profitability, Business Cycles and the Capital Stock on Productivity; Evaluate various approaches to managing the uncertainty inherent in the future course of the interest rate cycle; Examine the combined effect of financial instability and industrial restructuring on postwar economic growth and recession in the US; Determine what statistical and other information is needed to formulate both the objects and the means of government economic policy; Ask (...) what theoretical tools should be used in order to clarify the issues of economic policy; Examine the sociological aspects of the business cycle. (shrink)

Although Maimonides' discussion of creation is one of his greatest contributions - he himself claims that belief in creation is second in importance only to belief in God - there is still considerable debate on what that contribution was. Kenneth Seeskin takes a close look at the problems Maimonides faced and the sources from which he drew. He argues that Maimonides meant exactly what he said: the world was created by a free act of God so that the existence (...) of everything other than God is contingent. In religious terms, existence is a gift. In order to reach this conclusion, Seeskin examines Maimonides' view of God, miracles, the limits of human knowledge, and the claims of astronomy to be a science. Clearly written and closely argued, Maimonides on the Origin of the World takes up questions of perennial interest. (shrink)

Human beings with diminished decision-making capacities are usually thought to require greater protections from the potential harms of research than fully autonomous persons. Animal subjects of research receive lesser protections than any human beings regardless of decision-making capacity. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely animals’ lack of some characteristic human capacities that is commonly invoked to justify using them for human purposes. In other words, for humans lesser capacities correspond to greater protections but for animals the opposite is true. Without explicit (...) justification, it is not clear why or whether this should be the case. Ethics regulations guiding human subject research include principles such as respect for persons—and related duties—that are required as a matter of justice while regulations guiding animal subject research attend only to highly circumscribed considerations of welfare. Further, the regulations guiding research on animals discount any consideration of animal welfare relative to comparable human welfare. This paper explores two of the most promising justifications for these differences␣between the two sets of regulations. The first potential justification points to lesser moral status for animals on the basis of their lesser capacities. The second potential justification relies on a claim about the permissibility of moral partiality as␣found in common morality. While neither potential justification is sufficient to justify the regulatory difference as it stands, there is possible common ground between supporters of some regulatory difference and those rejecting the current difference. (shrink)

In Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, leading figures in the fields of virtue ethics and ethics come together to present the first ...

This book examines the Socratic method of elenchus, or refutation.

Researchers working on drug addiction may, for a variety of reasons, want to carry out research which involves giving addicts their drug of choice. In carrying out this research consent needs to be obtained from those addicts recruited to participate in it. Concerns have been raised about whether or not such addicts are able to give this consent. Despite their differences, however, both sides in this debate appear to be agreed that the way to resolve this issue is to determine (...) whether or not addicts have irresistible cravings for drugs – if they do, then they cannot consent to this type of research; if they do not, then they can. This I will argue is a mistake. Determining whether or not addicts can say 'No' to offers of drugs will not help us to make much progress here. Instead we need to look at the various ways in which different types of research may undermine an addict's competence to give consent. What we will find is that the details of the research make a big difference here and that, as such, we need to steer a course between, on the one hand, painting all addicts as being unable to consent to research which involves providing them with drugs, and, on the other, maintaining that there are no problems in obtaining consent from addicts to take part in such research. (shrink)

Contemporary discussions of the epistemology of testimony are often framed in terms of the disagreement on this topic between Hume and Reid. However, it is widely assumed that, prior to Hume, philosophers in the grip of Enlightenment individualism neglected philosophical questions about testimony, simply treating testimony as ordinary empirical evidence. In fact, although the evidential model of testimony was popular in early modern philosophy, it was also the subject of vigorous debate. This chapter examines Locke's defence of the evidential model (...) of testimony along with the opposing views of three early critics of Locke: G. W. Leibniz, Mary Astell, and Peter Browne. (shrink)

Despite widespread interest in the topic of moral repair in the business ethics literature and in the workplace, little is currently known about moral repair with regard to the self—i.e., how and why individuals repair themselves in the aftermath of harming others within workplace contexts and what factors may influence the success of self-repair. We conducted a qualitative study in the context of health care organizations to develop an inductive model of self-repair in the workplace. Our findings reveal a set (...) of factors, including reactions to the harm incident, motivating factors, and methods of self-repair that involve intrapersonal (e.g., self-compassion) and interpersonal (e.g., seeking feedback and support from co-workers and managers) actions. We discovered that self-repair, or what we characterize as “moral self-repair” is a complex process characterized by important ethical, emotional, and social dimensions and that the effectiveness of self-repair actions is moderated by the actions of those within the organization (e.g., co-workers, managers) and outside the organization (e.g., families, friends, counselors). These social actors can promote self-repair by offering encouragement and support, or undermine self-repair by communicating a lack of trust and respect that reinforces self-blame. This model of self-repair is intended to guide future ethics research on the topic of moral self-repair and offers insight to practicing managers. (shrink)

This book sets out to generate new ways of reflecting ethically about the purposes and values of contemporary higher education in relation to agency, learning, public values and democratic life, and the pedagogies which support these.