_Contract Theory_ examines the logical and conceptual structures that arise in the process of making, honoring, and enforcing contracts. The touchstone of Anglo-American contract law is the determination of contractual intent. Two theories have competed for center stage: the subjective theory of the "meeting of the minds" and the objective theory in which the parties' manifestations and the transaction's contextual factors became the means for contract interpretation and enforcement. The implementation of the objective theory of contract is the "reasonable person (...) standard." Larry DiMatteo focuses on the development, construction, and application of the reasonable person standard. He undertakes a study of the origins of the reasonable person in the disciplines of philosophy, theology, and psychology and concludes with an examination of the interplay between this objective standard and the subjectivity of judgment. The importance of the synthesis of the objective and subjective elements of contracts is crucial for a complete understanding of contract law. (shrink)

Postmodernism -- Classical pragmatism : waiting at the end of the road -- Pragmatism, postmodernism, and global citizenship -- Classical pragmatism, postmodernism, and neopragmatism -- Technology -- Classical pragmatism and communicative action : Jürgen Habermas -- From critical theory to pragmatism : Andrew Feenberg -- A neo-Heideggerian critique of technology : Albert Borgmann -- Doing and making in a democracy : John Dewey -- The environment -- Nature as culture : John Dewey and Aldo Leopold -- Green pragmatism : reals (...) without realism, ideals without idealism -- Classical pragmatism -- What was Dewey's magic number? -- Cultivating a common faith : Dewey's religion -- Beyond the epistemology industry : Dewey's theory of inquiry -- The homo faber debate in Dewey and Max Scheler -- Productive pragmatism : habits as artifacts in Peirce and Dewey. (shrink)

Can one’s belief that one romantically loves another be false? If so, under what conditions may one come to reasonably doubt, or at least suspend belief, that one does so? To begin to answer these questions, I first outline an affective/volitional view of love similar to psychologist R. J. Sternberg’s “triangular theory”, which analyzes types of love in terms of the degrees to which they include states of passion, emotion, and commitment. I then outline two sources of potential bias that (...) may cause one to believe that one romantically loves another when one does not. Partly on the basis of those potential sources of bias and partly on the basis of more specific issues, I then argue that at least to the extent that one is aware of these issues, one may reasonably doubt that one is experiencing romantic love’s emotional feelings, and one may reasonably doubt that one is making romantic love’s commitments. Finally, I order by relative dubitability the propositions that must be true about one’s passions, emotions, and commitments toward another in order for one to romantically love them. (shrink)

This brief essay examines James A. Good’s argument that the Hegel of the young Dewey was functionalist, historicist, instrumentalist, and practicalist—in short, the Hegel of “centrist” Hegelians such as those then active in St. Louis and of contemporary interpreters such as Good himself and Terry Pinkard. Good’s claims are examined in terms of possible conflicts with what is known of William James’s influence on Dewey, and in the light of recently published correspondence in which Dewey comments on the Hegelian “deposit” (...) in his work. (shrink)

Hickman situates Dewey’s critique of technological culture within the debates of 20th-century Western philosophy by engaging the work of Richard Rorty, Albert Borgmann, Jacques Ellul, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, and Martin ...

A theoretical model is presented for pattern formation in an epithelium. The epithelial model consists of a thin, incompressible, viscoelastic membrane on an elastic foundation (substrate), with the component cells assumed to have active contractile properties similar to those of smooth muscle. The analysis includes the effects of large strains and material nonlinearity, and the governing equations were solved using finite differences. Deformation patterns form when the cells activate while lying on the descending limb of their total (active + passive) (...) stress-stretch curve. Various one-dimensional and two-dimensional simulations illustrate the effects of spatial and temporal variations in passive stiffness, as well as the effects of foundation stiffness and stretch activation. The model can be used to examine the mechanical aspects of pattern formation in morphogenetic processes such as angiogenesis and myocardial trabeculation. (shrink)

This dissertation focuses on psychological and epistemological issues related to our practice of accepting first-person reports of emotional state as knowledgeable. It concerns the epistemic warrant of beliefs having the form "I'm feeling X about Y" and "Y is making me feel X about Z", where X refers to an affective state, and Y and Z refer to situations. On the assumption that such "emotion-based" beliefs are true if and only if they accurately represent the "situation-directed" emotions they are about, (...) much attention is given to the initial issue of what an emotional state is. A feeling-centered, componential view of emotion is defended, one in which occurrent emotions are held to be extrinsically related combinations of affective and cognitive aspects. While the view is held to be consistent with current appraisal theories of emotion, such theories are criticized as being formally incomplete. It is argued that an adequate theory of the emotional system must distinguish between the two independent sub-processes of "affect-causation" and "affect-direction", but that appraisal theory is concerned only with the former. The model of a single emotional system with two sub-processes is defended against the objection that "affect-program" and "higher cognitive" emotions must be produced by different psychological systems. ;A notion of emotional rationality is defended that is consistent both with a feeling-centered, componential view of emotion, and with the modularity of the emotional system. It is argued that both the rationality and modularity of emotion help to facilitate the noninferential production of emotion-based beliefs. A reliabilist approach to the warrant of such beliefs is defended against its main "constitutivist" alternative, and a general entitlement to such beliefs is outlined. In the course of outlining the conditions of noninferential emotion-based knowledge, the notion of an "emotion-based equivalent" is developed: a relevant alternative state of affairs that can defeat a claim to such knowledge even when all other epistemic conditions are satisfied. However, it is argued that there is no convincing reason to think that these defeating conditions are prevalent enough to prevent us from having noninferential emotion-based knowledge in most cases. (shrink)

Despite revisions to curriculum in ethics education in business schools, there continues to be high profile examples of unethical decision making regularly spotlighted in the media. Rather than simply teaching about behaviors and how they might impact decision makers and stakeholders, we describe a suite of activities used to highlight various behaviors and biases that impact the decisions individuals might make. These activities are intertwined with course materials regarding ethics and corporate governance to remind and help students better understand how (...) decision making can be influenced and challenged by personal ethics. We provide lesson planning suggestions including adapting to remote delivery, and student handouts. This suite of activities can be incorporated into any undergraduate or graduate level course that has content dealing with ethical decision making. (shrink)

_Presenting Dewey’s new view of philosophical inquiry_ This critical edition of _The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought _presents the results of John Dewey’s patient construction, throughout the previous sixteen years, of the radically new view of the methods and concerns of philosophical inquiry. It was a view that he continued to defend for the rest of his life. In the 1910 _The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought_—the first collection (...) of Dewey’s previously published, edited essays—John Dewey provided readers with an overview of the scope and direction of his philosophical vision in one volume. The order in which the eleven essays were presented was a reverse chronology, with more recently published essays appearing first. The collection of eleven essays offered a detailed portrait of Dewey’s proposed reconstruction of the traditional concepts of knowledge and truth. It furthermore elaborated on how his new logic and his proposal regarding knowledge and truth fit comfortably together, not only with each other but also with a pragmatically proper understanding of belief, reality, and experience. Because material in the _Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953_ was published chronologically, however, the essays published together in the 1910 Darwin book have appeared in seven different volumes in the _Collected Works_. This new, critical edition restores a classic collection of essays authored and edited by John Dewey as they originally appeared in the volume. The edition is presented with ancillary materials, including responses by Dewey’s critics and an introduction by Douglas Browning. (shrink)

This article contains a brief discussion of some of the key concepts of John Dewey's theory of inquiry. Dewey presented his theory of inquiry differently to different audiences, such as fellow philosophers, teachers, and the public. Nevertheless, his many accounts exhibit a common pattern: inquiry arises out of unsettled situations, proceeds by the formulation and testing of hypotheses, and contains an affective dimension. Proposed solutions must be tested in the domain of existential affairs. Even when they are accepted, their warrant (...) is only provisional. (shrink)

Michela Bella & Matteo Santarelli – What was the state of Pragmatism studies when you first encountered pragmatism? Larry A. Hickman – After completing my undergraduate degree in psychology I decided that I wanted to study philosophy. In order to prepare for graduate school, I spent a year taking philosophy courses at the University of Texas in Austin. The faculty included Charles Hartshorne, who was co-editor of the Peirce Collected Papers. There was also David L. Miller and George Gentry, (...) b... (shrink)

This essay argues that "the family" should be understood in functional terms:whatever functions as a family should have the legal status of a family. Theauthor's argument thus avoids two extreme positions. The first is the position ofthe hard-line "platonic" essentialists who, on grounds of nature, supernature, orcultural history, argue that a family unit must comprise heterosexual partners.The second is the position of the radical relativist, who argues that there are noessences whatsoever or that essences are purely arbitrary. Treating the family (...) infunctionalist terms, the author argues, would have positive consequences thatwould strengthen the social fabric. (shrink)

Unethical conduct has reached crisis proportions in business :A1–A10, 2011) and on today’s college campuses :58–65, 2007). Despite the evidence that suggests that more than half of business students admit to dishonest practices, only about 5 % of business school deans surveyed believe that dishonesty is a problem at their schools :299–308, 2010). In addition, the AACSB which establishes standards for accredited business schools has resisted the urging of deans and business experts to require business schools to teach an ethics (...) class, and fewer than one-third of businesses schools now teach a business ethics course at the graduate or undergraduate levels. In this paper we briefly introduce the status of business ethics education and report the results of a survey of business students, deans of the top business schools, and business ethics subject matter experts about ten ethical outcomes. We then offer five specific recommendations to encourage business ethics faculty and decision makers to improve the teaching of business ethics. (shrink)

Human subjects seem to have a type of introspective access to their mental states that allows them to immediately judge the types and intensities of their occurrent emotions, as well as what those emotions are about or “directed at”. Such judgments manifest what I call “emotion-direction beliefs”, which, if reliably produced, may constitute emotion-direction knowledge. Many psychologists have argued that the “directed emotions” such beliefs represent have a componential structure, one that includes feelings of emotional responses and related but independent (...) representations of what those feelings are about. I argue that such componentiality may help to explain how emotion-direction knowledge is achievable. I begin by developing a hybrid view of introspection that combines David Chalmers’ phenomenal realism with Alvin Goldman’s “partial redeployment” account of meta-belief content. I then provide a process-reliabilist account of introspectively gained emotion-direction knowledge that outlines the minimum conditions of reliably forming emotion-direction beliefs, and specifies several ways in which the warrant of such beliefs could be defeated by relevant counterfactual alternatives. The overall account suggests how distinct introspective processes might be epistemically synergistic. (shrink)

This title presents not two, but three questions. The third question, the one that lies behind and is obscured by the two more obvious ones, concerns the nature of American philosophy. What qualifies as “American” philosophy? Is it, as some have suggested, philosophy as it is practiced in any of the Americas – North, Central, or South? Or is it perhaps philosophy as it is pursued by practitioners living in North America, or even in a more restricted sense, by practitioners (...) living in the Unite... (shrink)

Into the not so tranquil atmosphere of American race relations blew Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life proclaiming the emergence of a New Class of the “cognitive elite” and an underclass of the cognitively unfit. Public response has been both extensive and contradictory. Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman have compiled the most comprehensive anthology of these responses, which they appropriately describe as a “gale in the Zeitgeist.” Many of the selections are (...) critical because, as they point out, the book fairly reflects the weight of published opinion thus far. As for themselves, they feel the work “gives a sophisticated voice to a repressed and illiberal sentiment: a belief that ruinous divisions in society are sanctioned by nature itself (p. ix). (shrink)

"... a comprehensive canvass of Dewey’s logic, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of history, and social thought."—Choice "... a major addition to the recent accumulation of in-depth studies of Dewey." —Journal of Speculative Philosophy "Larry Hickman has done an exemplary job in demonstrating the relevance of John Dewey’s philosophy to modern-day discussions of technology."—Ethics.

In what follows I want to discuss some of the themes of John Dewey’s “new” book Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, recently published by Southern Illinois University Press. The scholarly world certainly owes a debt of gratitude to Professor Phillip Deen for his efforts to bring this volume to fruition. His careful research among the Dewey Papers in Special Collections of Morris Library at Southern Illinois University Carbondale led him to see what others had overlooked. He discovered...

Abraham Kaplan once suggested that Dewey’s “magic number” was two. His observation seems to be supported by the titles Dewey gave to his books, such as Experience and Nature. But in making this observation, Kaplan hedged a bit. Perhaps it would be better, he added, to say that Dewey had two magic numbers: he seemed to look for twos in order to turn them into ones. Looking back over the notes I have pencilled in the margins of Dewey’s Collected Works (...) over the years, I am struck with the number of times “1, 2, 3” appears. In some cases these passages are reminiscent of Peirce’s categories. In other cases, they recall Hegel’s dialectic. Dewey’s “magic numbers” are tools that can help us understand the structure and content of his work. (shrink)

Let me begin by thanking the society’s officers: President Kathleen Knight-Abowitz, President-Elect Len Waks, immediate past President Deron Boyles, Secretary-Treasurer Kyle Greenwalt, membership and development officer Mark Kissling, and of course student liaison Matt Ryg and webmaster Zane Wubbena. I know that their many efforts on behalf of this society are much appreciated by all of us.In 1955, when Will Herberg published his influential book, Protestant–Catholic–Jew, it could be said with some confidence that an essay in American religious sociology could (...) claim exhaustive coverage by restricting its analysis to those three faiths. Scarcely a decade later, however, that formula would be obsolescent. The 1960s... (shrink)

In this commentary on Evan Selinger’s book Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde, I begin with Carl Mitcham’s claim that with respect to Don Ihde’s “postphenomenology” there are “challenges both to and from pragmatism.” I discuss four points on which postphenomenology and pragmatism seem to be in agreement, and then two points on which I believe pragmatism offers a program that socially thicker.

Jo Ann Boydston, 2 July 1924 - 25 January 2011Jo Ann Boydston enjoyed a distinguished career as general editor of the Collected Works of John Dewey and director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Born in Poteau, Oklahoma of Choctaw Indian heritage, she graduated summa cum laude from Oklahoma State University in 1944. She received an M.A. from Oklahoma State (1947), a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1950), and honorary doctorates from Indiana University (1994) and Southern (...) Illinois University (2004).In 1961, Boydston joined the staff of a modest research project at Southern Illinois University called "Co-operative Research on Dewey Publications" as assistant to project .. (shrink)

Sexual lust – understood as a feeling of sexual attraction towards another – has traditionally been viewed as a sort of desire or at least as an appetite akin to hunger. I argue here that this view is, at best, significantly incomplete. Further insights can be gained into certain occurrences of lust by noticing how strongly they resemble occurrences of “attitudinal” (“object-directed”) emotion. At least in humans, the analogy between the object-directed appetites and attitudinal emotions goes well beyond their psychological (...) structure to include similar ways in which their occurrence can be introspectively recognized, resulting in similar extensions of their functionality and meaningfulness to the subject. I conclude that although further research is needed, given the strength of the analogy, the ability of lust to satisfy some general requirements for being an emotion, and perhaps certain neurological findings, lust may somewhat uniquely straddle the line between appetite and emotion. (shrink)

The present volume encapsulates the contemporary scholarship on John Dewey and shows the place of Dewey’s thought on the philosophical arena. The authors are among the leading specialists in the philosophy of John Dewey from universities across the US and in Europe.

This chapter contains section titled: What Constitutions Are What Constitutions Do Are Constitutions Desirable? References.

Constitutivists about one's cognitive access to one's mental states often hold that for any rational subject S and mental state M falling into some specified range of types, necessarily, if S believes that she has M, then S has M. Some argue that such a principle applies to beliefs about all types of mental state. Others are more cautious, but offer no criterion by which the principle's range could be determined. In this paper I begin to develop such a criterion, (...) arguing that although the principle applies when M is a belief, it does not apply when M is an emotion. I account for this asymmetry by focusing on differences in the commitments that belief and emotion conceptually involve, and briefly sketch out a psychological explanation of those differences. I conclude that one can reasonably split one's epistemological loyalties between constitutivism regarding meta-beliefs and non- constitutivism regarding beliefs about one's emotions. (shrink)

Jesse Prinz (2004) argues that emotional feelings (“state emotions”) can by themselves perceptually represent significant organism-environment relations. I object to this view mainly on the grounds that (1) it does not rule out the at least equally plausible view that emotional feelings are non-representational sensory registrations rather than perceptions, as Tyler Burge (2010) draws the distinction, and (2) perception of a relation requires perception of at least one of the relation’s relata, but an emotional feeling by itself perceives neither the (...) subject’s environment, nor in many cases the relevant subject itself. I then explore two ways in which emotional feelings as non-perceptual sensory registrations might still contribute to significant relation representation when associated with representations of the subject and/or its environment. After briefly discussing some difficulties presented by a multimodal, sensory-perceptual view of such representation, I argue in favor of a “cognitive recognition theory” that holds that significant relation instances are represented during emotion occurrences via applications of emotion-type concepts to "incoming" emotional feelings and their associated mental states. (shrink)

This article begins with a brief attempt to ascertain Nicholas Rescher's position with respect to the different versions of pragmatism mounted by Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. I then suggest that despite Rescher's self-described fealty to Peirce, his views are in some ways closer to Dewey's constructivism than he has acknowledged. I conclude, however, that his treatment of truth is quite different from Dewey's "warranted assertibility." Rescher's concept of truth appears to alternate somewhat inelegantly between truth-as-correspondence-to-fact and truth-as-trans-horizonal-limit.

This chapter presents an overview of John Dewey's life and work. John Dewey was born in Burlington, Vermont, the third of four sons of Archibald Sprague Dewey and Lucina Artemesia Rich Dewey. In 1949, on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday, Dewey was hailed by the New York Times as “America's Philosopher”. He died at his apartment on New York City on June 1, 1952. During his long and productive life, Dewey wrote widely about psychology, philosophy, art, and social issues. (...) The chapter focuses on three general topics that are recurring themes in Dewey's work. The themes are: his concept of the purpose and process of human learning; his understanding of truth as a process, instead of something absolute and unchanging; and his faith in democracy as the only means of social organization that can foster individual fulfillment, and its implications for education and the arts. (shrink)

After summarizing what I take to be the main contribution of Norton’s book––his proposal for a new vocabulary for public discourse as it pertains to environmental stability––I attempt to locate his work among some of the current debates regarding sustainability and public policy. I detail some of the ways in which this work constitutes a further development of themes he presented in 1991 in Toward unity Among Environmentalists. I discuss his prescriptions for defusing confrontations regarding environmental policy by functionalizing issues (...) in ways that cut across historically entrenched interest groups. From the standpoint of method, I␣argue that Norton has stacked a Habermas- type proceduralism on top of a pragmatic experimentalist platform (and I add that if he had constructed his method the other way around it would not have worked.) In all this I find Norton’s proposals both imaginative and full of promise. (shrink)

John Dewey (1859-1952), hailed during his lifetime as "America's Philosopher," is now recognized as one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century.