In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Criticism,’ Amiri Baraka was formulating his own version of nuclear futurity in Primitive World: An An...

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick FerrZ. These essays, informed by the insights of FerrZ and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick Ferré. These essays, informed by the insights of Ferré and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

Synthetic biology" is the label of a new technoscientific field with many different facets and agendas. One common aim is to "create life", primarily by using engineering principles to design and modify biological systems for human use. In a wider context, the topic has become one of the big cases in the legitimization processes associated with the political agenda to solve global problems with the aid of (bio-)technological innovation. Conceptual-level and meta-level analyses are needed: we should sort out conceptual ambiguities (...) to agree on what we talk about, and we need to spell out agendas to see the disagreements clearly. The book is based on the interdisciplinary summer school "Analyzing the societal dimensions of synthetic biology", which took place in Berlin in September 2014. The contributions address controversial discussions around the philosophical examination, public perception, moral evaluation and governance of synthetic biology. (shrink)

_Debates in Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy _offers an engaging and in-depth introduction to the philosophical questions raised by this rich and far reaching period in the history of philosophy. Throughout thirty chapters, the volume surveys the intellectual contributions of European philosophy in the nineteenth century, but it also engages the on-going debates about how these contributions can and should be understood. As such, the volume provides both an overview of nineteenth-century European philosophy and an introduction to contemporary scholarship in this field. (...) __KEY DEBATES IN EUROPEAN NINETEENTH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY__ Kristin Gjesdal Contributors Editor's Introduction I. Kantian Presuppositions 1. The Reception of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ in German Idealism by Rolf-Peter Horstmann 2. The Reception of the _Critique of Pure Reason_ in German Idealism: A Response to Rolf-Peter Horstmann by Paul Guyer II. Fichte 3. Fichte's Original Insight by Dieter Henrich 4. Fichte's Original Insight: Dieter Henrich's Pioneering Piece Half A Century Later by Günter Zöller III. Romanticism 5. Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism by Manfred Frank 6. Response to Manfred Frank, "Philosophical Foundations of Early Romanticism" by Michael N. Forster IV. Hegel 7. From Desire to Recognition: Hegel's Account of Human Sociality by Axel Honneth 8. On Honneth's Interpretation of Hegel's "Phenomenology of Self-Consciousness" by Robert B. Pippin V. Schelling 9. The Nature of Subjectivity: The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling's Philosophy of Nature by Dieter Sturma 10. Nature as Unconditioned? The Critical and Systematic Function of Schelling's Early Works by Dalia Nassar VI. Schopenhauer 11. The Real Essence of Human Beings: Schopenhauer and the Unconscious Will by Christopher Janaway 12. Emancipation from the Will by David E. Wellbery VII. Comte 13. Auguste Comte and Modern Epistemology by Johan Heilbron 14. Why Was Comte an Epistemologist? by Robert C. Scharff VIII. Mill 15. Mill: The Principle of Liberty by John Rawls 16. John Rawls on Mill's Principle of Liberty by John Skorupski IX. Darwin 17. Darwin's Theory of Natural Selection and its Moral Purpose by Robert J. Richards 18. Response to Richards by Gabriel Finkelstein X. Kierkegaard 19. Kierkegaard's _On Authority and Revelation _ by Stanley Cavell 20. A Nice Arrangement of Epigrams: Stanley Cavell on Søren Kierkegaard by Stephen Mulhall XI. Marx 21. Marx's Metacritique of Hegel: Synthesis Through Social Labor by Jürgen Habermas 22. Epistemology and Self-Reflection in the Young Marx by Espen Hammer XII. Dilthey 23. Wilhelm Dilthey after 150 Years by Hans-Georg Gadamer 24. Gadamer on Dilthey by Frederick C. Beiser XIII. Nietzsche 25. Nietzsche's Minimalist Moral Psychology by Bernard Williams 26. Naturalism, Minimalism, and the Scope of Nietzsche's Philosophical Psychology by Paul Katsafanas XIV. Freud 27. Bad Faith and Falsehood by Jean-Paul Sartre 28. Freud by Sebastian Gardner XV. Twentieth-Century Developments 29. Analytic and Conversational Philosophy by Richard Rorty 30. Not Knowing What the Right Hand is Doing: Rorty's "Ambidextrous" Analytic Redescription of Nineteenth-Century Hegelian Philosophy by Paul Redding References for Republished Texts Accompanying Original Works. (shrink)

The philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer interests a wide audience that spans the traditional distinction between European and Anglo-American philosophy. Yet one of the most important and complex aspects of his work - his engagement with German Idealism - has received comparatively little attention. In this book, Kristin Gjesdal uses a close analysis and critical investigation of Gadamer's Truth and Method to show that his engagement with Kant, Hegel, and Schleiermacher is integral to his conception of hermeneutics. She argues that (...) a failure to engage with this aspect of Gadamer's philosophy leads to a misunderstanding of the most pressing problem of post-Heideggerian hermeneutics: the tension between the commitment to the self-criticism of reason, on the one hand, and the turn towards the meaning-constituting authority of tradition, on the other. Her study provides an illuminating assessment of both the merits and the limitations of Gadamer's thought. (shrink)

There were various initial reactions to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, and among those reactions were some contradictions. There were those who demanded an explanation for the attacks, and others who condemned attempts to explain as immoral or unpatriotic. Though President George W. Bush did make some rhetorical remarks that, I believe, masqueraded as explanatory, it appears that he agrees with the latter set.

The essay takes as its point of departure the way in which the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer has recently been adopted by philosophers such as Richard Rorty, John McDowell, and Robert Brandom. While appreciating the way in which Truth and Method has gained new relevance within an Anglo-American context, I ask whether sufficient attention has been paid to Gadamer’s romantic heritage. In particular I question the way in which his notion of tradition and historical truth, designed as it is to (...) overcome the ramifications of Descartes and the Kantian enlightenment, is modeled on the example of art and aesthetic experience. (shrink)

The relationship between 20th-century phenomenology and the transcendental program launched by Immanuel Kant is crucial, but delicate. First there is Husserl, who seemed both attracted to and seriously critical of Kant's first Critique. Then there is Heidegger's ambition to scour the entire field of the three Critiques. Most important in this context, is probably his reading of the Critique of Pure Reason in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics . Faithful to his notion of a salvaging “destruction” of the philosophical (...) tradition, Heidegger argues that the earliest version of Kant's work, the so-called A-deduction, is radically different from the philosophy promoted by the neo-Kantians. Kant, he claims, was not really interested in epistemology in the narrow meaning of the term. He was, rather, a philosopher verging upon a genuine ontology of Being, but who, for reasons that remain unknown, felt forced to leave these tracks behind in order to pursue the transcendental conditions of knowledge. Then there is the second Critique, which Heidegger approaches through a discussion of the Kantian notions of freedom and causality. And, finally, there are his remarks about the Critique of Judgment, scattered all over his writing on art from the early 1930s onwards. However, Heidegger never produces a proper, systematic account of the relevance of the third Critique. Such an account, I argue in this essay, is provided by Hans-Georg Gadamer. (shrink)

What Is a People? seeks to reclaim "people" as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance. Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to (...) create an exclusionary "we," while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and Jacques Rancière comments on the futility of isolating theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a "people" is too diffuse to support them. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, the voices in this volume help separate "people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations. Together with Democracy in What State?, in which Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj i ek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, What Is a People? expands an essential exploration of political action and being in our time. (shrink)

<Hylas> It is indeed something unusual; but my thoughts were so taken up with a subject I was discoursing of last night, that finding I could not sleep, ...

Psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin, LSD and DMT are known to induce powerful alterations in phenomenology. Perhaps of most philosophical and scientific interest is their capacity to disrupt and even “dissolve” one of the most primary features of normal experience: that of being a self. Such “peak” or “mystical” experiences are of increasing interest for their potentially transformative therapeutic value. While empirical research is underway, a theoretical conception of the mechanisms underpinning these experiences remains elusive. In the following paper, psychedelic-induced (...) ego-dissolution is accounted for within an active inference framework, as a collapse in the “temporal thickness” of an agent’s deep temporal model, as a result of lowered precision on high-level priors. The argument here is composed of three moves: first, a view of the self-model is proposed as arising within a temporally deep generative model of an embodied organism navigating an affordance landscape in the service of allostasis. Next, a view of the action of psychedelics as lowering the precision of high-level priors within the generative model is unpacked in terms of a high Bayesian learning rate. Finally, the relaxation of high-level priors is argued to cause a “collapse” in the temporal thickness of the generative model, resulting in a collapse in the self-model and a loss of the ordinary sense of being a self. This account has implications for our understanding of ordinary self-consciousness and disruptions in self-consciousness present in psychosis, autism, depression, and dissociative disorders. The philosophical, theoretical and therapeutic implications of this account are touched upon. (shrink)

Normal propositional modal systems This first chapter has two main aims. One is to give a general account of the propositional modal systems that we shall ...

George Berkeley's two major works, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, are presented here, together with perhaps the most searching examination his ideas received during his lifetime, that of the American Samuel Johnson, who corresponded with Berkeley during his stay in the country.

Most authors who discuss willpower assume that everyone knows what it is, but our assumptions differ to such an extent that we talk past each other. We agree that willpower is the psychological function that resists temptations – variously known as impulses, addictions, or bad habits; that it operates simultaneously with temptations, without prior commitment; and that use of it is limited by its cost, commonly called effort, as well as by the person's skill at executive functioning. However, accounts are (...) usually not clear about how motivation functions during the application of willpower, or how motivation is related to effort. Some accounts depict willpower as the perceiving or formation of motivational contingencies that outweigh the temptation, and some depict it as a continuous use of mechanisms that interfere with re-weighing the temptation. Some others now suggest that impulse control can bypass motivation altogether, although they refer to this route as habit rather than willpower.It is argued here that willpower should be recognized as either or both of two distinct functions, which can be calledresolveandsuppression. Resolve is based on interpretation of a current choice as a test case for a broader set of future choices, which puts at stake more than the outcome of the current choice. Suppression is inhibiting valuation of (modulating) and/or keeping attention from (filtering) immediate alternatives to a current intention. Perception of current choices as test cases for broader outcomes may result in reliable preference for these outcomes, which is experienced as an effortlesshabit– a successful result of resolve, not an alternative method of self-control. Some possible brain imaging correlates are reviewed. (shrink)

From the late 1950s until 1975, cognition was understood mainly as disembodied symbol manipulation in cognitive psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and the nascent field of Cognitive Science. The idea of embodied cognition entered the field of Cognitive Linguistics at its beginning in 1975. Since then, cognitive linguists, working with neuroscientists, computer scientists, and experimental psychologists, have been developing a neural theory of thought and language (NTTL). Central to NTTL are the following ideas: (a) we think with our brains, that is, (...) thought is physical and is carried out by functional neural circuitry; (b) what makes thought meaningful are the ways those neural circuits are connected to the body and characterize embodied experience; (c) so-called abstract ideas are embodied in this way as well, as is language. Experimental results in embodied cognition are seen not only as confirming NTTL but also explained via NTTL, mostly via the neural theory of conceptual metaphor. Left behind more than three decades ago is the old idea that cognition uses the abstract manipulation of disembodied symbols that are meaningless in themselves but that somehow constitute internal “representations of external reality” without serious mediation by the body and brain. This article uniquely explains the connections between embodied cognition results since that time and results from cognitive linguistics, experimental psychology, computational modeling, and neuroscience. (shrink)

The realities and myths of long-term care and the challenges it poses for the ethics of autonomy are analyzed in this perceptive work. The book defends the concept of autonomy, but argues that the standard view of autonomy as non-interference and independence has only a limited applicability for long term care. The treatment of actual autonomy stresses the developmental and social nature of human persons and the priority of identification over autonomous choice. The work balances analysis of the ethical concepts (...) associated with autonomy with discussion of the implications of the ethical analysis for long term care. A central chapter involves a phenomenological analysis of four general features of everyday experience (space, time, communication, and affectivity) and explores their practical implications for long term care. This work concludes with a discussion of the advantages associated with a phenomenologically-inspired treatment of actual autonomy for the ethics of long-term care. (shrink)

RECENT PHILOSOPHICAL ATTENTION TO THE LANGUAGE OF DISEASE HAS FOCUSED PRIMARILY ON THE QUESTION OF ITS VALUE-NEUTRALITY OR NON-NEUTRALITY. PROPONENTS OF THE VALUE-NEUTRALITY THESIS SYMBOLICALLY COMBINE POLITICAL AND OTHER CRITICISMS OF MEDICINE IN AN ATTACK ON WHAT THEY SEE AS VALUE-INFECTED USES OF DISEASE LANGUAGE. THE PRESENT ESSAY ARGUES AGAINST TWO THESES ASSOCIATED WITH THIS VIEW: A METHODOLOGICAL THESIS WHICH TENDS TO DIVORCE THE ANALYSIS OF DISEASE LANGUAGE FROM THE CONTEXT OF THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE AND A SUBSTANTIVE THESIS WHICH (...) HOLDS THAT DISEASE LANGUAGE IS EVALUATIVELY NEUTRAL. IN PARTICULAR, THE ESSAY CRITICALLY FOCUSES ON THE VALUE NEUTRAL POSITION ADOPTED BY CHRISTOPHER BOORSE, WHICH HE TERMS A FUNCTIONAL THEORY OF DISEASE. THE ARGUMENT CONCERNS WHETHER OR NOT ONE CAN HAVE VALUE NEUTRAL DESCRIPTION OF DISEASE STATES OR WHETHER DISEASE LANGUAGE ESSENTIALLY INVOLVES VALUES. (shrink)

To be sure, Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophy has received increased attention in recent philosophical debates. For although older confrontations, such as Gadamer's debate with Habermas, have receded in the background, scholars such as John McDowell, Cristina Lafont, Ruth Sonderegger, Albrecht Wellmer, and Günther Figal have revitalized some of Gadamer's main philosophical insights and demonstrated the importance of hermeneutics for contemporary philosophy. In addition, the newly-founded Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics has helped to give this recent attention a new academic forum for fresh (...) and vibrant work on Gadamer.Kristin Gjesdal's book fits neatly into this newly-discovered interest in Gadamer's philosophy, especially since it focuses on important, but less frequently discussed, historical sources of Gadamer's philosophy and their systematic impact on both hermeneutics in general and a theory of interpretation in particular. Gjesdal's book is lucidly written, paying much attention to the underlying arguments that are implied in Gadamer's critical and often reductive accounts of philosophers who belong to the tradition of "German Idealism." However, having said this, the title of her book is misleading: though the reader might expect an extensive discussion of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, the author focuses mainly on the sources of. (shrink)

A number of commentators on the work of berkeley have maintained that berkeleyan minds are related to ideas by the relation of inherence. Thus, Ideas are taken to inhere in minds in something like the way that accidents were supposed to inhere in substances for the aristotelian. This inherence account, As I call it, Is spelled out in detail and critically evaluated. Ultimately it is rejected despite its considerable initial plausibility.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

American healthcare -- Bioterror and bioart -- State of emergency -- Licensed to torture -- Hunger strikes -- War -- Cancer -- Drug dealing -- Toxic tinkering -- Abortion -- Culture of death -- Patient safety -- Global health -- Statue of security -- Pandemic fear -- Bioidentifiers -- Genetic genocide.

George Loewenstein is one of the pioneers of the rapidly growing field of behavioral economics. For over twenty years he has been working at the intersection of economics and psychology and is one of the few people of whom it can be said that their work is equally respected and well known within both disciplines. This book brings together a selection of his papers focusing on what he calls "exotic preferences"-- the disparate motives that drive human behavior. Anoriginal introduction (...) outlines Loewenstein's general approach to research, and there are short introductions to each paper outlining briefly when, how and why they came to be written, providing a fascinating and vivid insight into the process of intellectual creativity. (shrink)

Necessary and sufficient conditions are presented for the (first-order) theory of a universal class of algebraic structures (algebras) to have a model completion, extending a characterization provided by Wheeler. For varieties of algebras that have equationally definable principal congruences and the compact intersection property, these conditions yield a more elegant characterization obtained (in a slightly more restricted setting) by Ghilardi and Zawadowski. Moreover, it is shown that under certain further assumptions on congruence lattices, the existence of a model completion implies (...) that the variety has equationally definable principal congruences. This result is then used to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a model completion for theories of Hamiltonian varieties of pointed residuated lattices, a broad family of varieties that includes lattice-ordered abelian groups and MV-algebras. Notably, if the theory of a Hamiltonian variety of pointed residuated lattices has a model completion, it must have equationally definable principal congruences. In particular, the theories of lattice-ordered abelian groups and MV-algebras do not have a model completion, as first proved by Glass and Pierce, and Lacava, respectively. Finally, it is shown that certain varieties of pointed residuated lattices generated by their linearly ordered members, including lattice-ordered abelian groups and MV-algebras, can be extended with a binary operation to obtain theories that do have a model completion. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page 167-169.

While a number of empirical studies have appeared on impaired self-awareness (ISA) after traumatic brain injury (TBI) over the last 20 years, the relative role of denial (as a psychological method of coping) has typically not been addressed in these studies. We propose that this failure has limited our understanding of how ISA and denial differentially affect efforts to rehabilitate persons with TBI. In this selective review paper, we summarize early findings in the field and integrate those findings with more (...) recent observations (i.e., 1999–2019). We believe that this synthesis of information and expert clinical opinion will inform future research on ISA and denial as well as approaches to rehabilitation for persons with TBI. (shrink)

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and spiritual (...) context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

The debate between Ursin (2019) and Wilkinson and colleagues (2019) in this issue of The American Journal of Bioethics underscores the long-standing theoretical controversy about the equivalence of...

Me, You, Us addresses a range of issues in moral and political philosophy and moral psychology, but are unified by their starkly individualistic view of the moral subject. They challenge recent tendencies to conceptualize normative issues in terms of relationships, collectivities, and social meanings.

Scientists and engineers often are not much interested in theoretical-ethics discussions. Frequently, like Harvard’s Cass Sunstein (2002), they propose “freemarket environmentalism,” basing environmental decisions on cost-benefit analysis and on saving the greatest number of lives for the fewest number of dollars. They say that when society overregulates, by emotively and irrationally rejecting environmental-risk decisions based only on cost-benefit analysis (CBA), it reduces manufacturing jobs, shrinks the economic pie, makes people poorer, and thus causes unnecessary deaths. To avoid these economic problems—that (...) harm everyone—Sunstein (2002, ix, 7) and others argue “for a kind of cost-benefit state” that .. (shrink)

This study shows how Kierkegaard's mature theological writings reflect his engagement with the wide range of theological positions which he encountered as a student, including German and Danish Romanticism, Hegelianism and the writings of Fichte and Schleiermacher. George Pattison draws on both major and lesser-known works to show the complexity and nuances of Kierkegaard's theological position, which remained closer to Schleiermacher's affirmation of religion as a 'feeling of absolute dependence' than to the Barthian denial of any 'point of contact', (...) with which he is often associated. Pattison also explores ways in which Kierkegaard's theological thought can be related to thinkers such as Heidegger and John Henry Newman, and its continuing relevance to present-day debates about secular faith. His volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of philosophy and theology. (shrink)