Children are the real victims of world hunger: at least 70% of the malnourished people of the world are children. By best estimates forty thousand children a day die of starvation (FAO 1989: 5). Children do not have the ability to forage for themselves, and their nutritional needs are exceptionally high. Hence, they are unable to survive for long on their own, especially in lean times. Moreover, they are especially susceptible to diseases and conditions which are the staple of undernourished (...) people: simple infections and simple diarrhea (UNICEF 1993: 22). Unless others provide adequate food, water, and care, children will suffer and die (WHO 1974: 677, 679). This fact must frame any moral discussions of the problem. And so it does — at least pre-philosophically. When most of us first see pictures of seriously undernourished children, we want to help them, we have a sense of responsibility to them, we feel sympathy toward them (Hume 1978: 368-71). Even those who think we needn't or shouldn't help the starving take this initial response seriously: they go to great pains to show that this sympathetic response should be constrained. They typically claim that assisting the hungry will demand too much of us, or that assistance would be useless and probably detrimental. The efforts of objectors to undermine this natural sympathetic reaction would be pointless unless they saw its psychological force. We want to explain and bolster this sympathetic reaction — this conviction that those of us in a position to help are responsible to the.. (shrink)

Appraisal theories of emotion generally presuppose that emotions are “directed at” various items. They also hold that emotions have motivational properties. However, although it coheres well with their views, they have yet to seriously develop the idea that the function of emotional direction is to guide those properties. I argue that this “guidance hypothesis” can open up a promising new field of research in emotion theory. But I also argue that before appraisal theorists can take full advantage of it, they (...) must drop their further assumption that to determine an emotion's direction, one need only retrace the process that caused it. Contrary to this “retracing view,” I argue for an “independence thesis”: directed emotions are produced by two functionally independent sub-processes. The first, “affect-causation,” functions in part to produce a state with certain motivational properties given certain representations. The second, “affect-direction,” has the function of optimally guiding those motivational properties by associating them with representations that may properly be quite dissimilar from the causal ones. By provisionally adopting the independence thesis and empirically testing the guidance hypothesis, I argue that appraisal theorists stand a good chance of significantly increasing the explanatory power of their theories. (shrink)

Preface -- The mood elevator -- What drives the mood elevator? -- Up the mood elevator : the big payoffs -- Escaping unhealthy normal -- Braking your mood elevator : the power of curiosity -- Interrupting your pattern -- Feeding the thoughts you favor -- Living in mild preference -- Shifting your set point : the wellness equation -- Quieting your mind -- Cultivating gratitude -- Honoring our separate realities -- Nurturing faith and optimism -- Dealing with your down days (...) -- Relationships and the mood elevator -- Pointers for riding the mood elevator -- Notes -- How this book came to be -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments -- Index -- About the author. (shrink)

Sassen is Interested in what she terms “conceptually subterranean trends” that are for the most part invisible to current analytical methods but visible, or in her words, “legible,” to other, newer sorts of analytical tools that she herself is developing. She thus emphasizes suspension of accepted methods and development of certain “analytic tactics” that function, as she puts it, “before method.” What this means more specifically is that she is not so much analyzing the structures of existing institutions but instead (...) pursuing a more functional approach, that is, seeking to determine how they are assembled, dis-assembled, and re-assembled. Her focus is thus on the making of non-material conditions, that is, their .. (shrink)

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)

From 1687, the year when Newton published his Principia, to the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, science gradually became central to Western thought and economic development. The book examines how, despite powerful opposition on the Continent, a Newtonian understanding gained acceptance and practical application.

Key Contemporary Social Theorists is a comprehensive introduction to some of the most significant figures in social, cultural, political and philosophical thought of the twentieth century. This collection of newly commissioned entries offers students and scholars an authoritative guide on current contributions to contemporary social theory and social science. Preceding the entries is a well-organized chart of the main trends of development in social theory. The result is an invaluable reference work for all those concerned with central issues in contemporary (...) social theory. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Graf and Komatsu (1994) argued that the process dissociation procedure (Jacoby, 1991) is limited in its ability to separate and measure conscious and unconscious forms of memory and so should be "handIed with caution". Given that the study of unconscious influences has always posed a difficult problem for memory researchers, we agree with the general emphasis on caution. In this paper, we too advocate caution, especially as it applies to the use of indirect tests, assessing Graf (...) and Komatsu’s critique, and using the process dissociation procedure. We address the substantive issues raised by Graf and Komatsu and also point out the errors, both factual and logical, in their paper. Any method proposing to provide separate measures of conscious and unconscious influences requires judicious use and a careful examination of its underlying assumptions. The assumptions underlying the process dissociation framework are supported by a large number of experiments spanning a diverse range of.. (shrink)

What Robots Can and Can't Be (hereinafter Robots) is, as Selmer Bringsjord says "intended to be a collection of formal-arguments-that-border-on-proofs for the proposition that in all worlds, at all times, machines can't be minds" (Bringsjord, forthcoming). In his (1994) "Précis of What Robots Can and Can't Be" Bringsjord styles certain of these arguments as proceeding "repeatedly . . . through instantiations of" the "simple schema".

This chapter presents an edited e-mail discussion based on the philosophical conversations at a conference held in Cologne, Germany, in December 2001. The discussion proceeds in three steps. First, the contributors discuss selected questions about their contributions, roughly following the sequence of the chapters in Part II of this book. Second, the contributors ask more general questions about Dewey, Pragmatism, and constructivism. Finally, the chapter ends with brief statements about why Dewey is still an indispensible thinker for them. As they (...) clarify their differences and seek common ground, they articulate concepts such as power, truth, relativism, inquiry, and democracy from Pragmatist and interactive constructivist vantage points, in ways designed to render the preceding essays even more accessible. In their views, the concluding discussion demonstrates both the enduring relevance of classical Pragmatism and the challenge of its reconstruction from the perspective of the Cologne program of interactive constructivism. (shrink)

After reviewing current proposals for standardized testing in K-12 education (United States) and for imposition of free-market economic and business models on higher education (Texas, Florida, and the United Kingdom), I argue that both types of proposals rest on flawed pedagogical assumptions and tend to undermine educational practices that promote the development of global citizens. I suggest that John Dewey was aware of the type of challenges now faced by educators and that he provided tools for blunting the force of (...) these proposals and moving educational practice toward more desirable ends. (shrink)

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)

This chapter contains sections titled: Early Years: Burlington, Baltimore, Ann Arbor, Chicago Middle Years: New York City, Japan, China Later Years: Retirement, Travel, Eleven More Books Legacy: Initial Eclipse, Revival of Interest, Rise of Neo‐pragmatism.

This collection offers close examinations of the global impact of Dewey’s philosophies, both in his time and our own.

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)