Power and authority in terms of the Ten Commandments (TCs) are discussed. The paper reviews the TCs in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The treatment and basis for power and authority in each religion are clarified. Implications of power and authority using the perspective of the TCs are provided. The paper suggests that in today's business environment people tend to be selective in identifying only with certain elements of the TCs that fit their interest and that the TCs should be viewed (...) as general moral guidelines. (shrink)

The current debate on “free agency” seems to highlight the romantic aspects of free agent and considers it a genuine response to changing economic conditions (e.g., high-unemployment rate, importance of knowledge in the labor market, the eclipse of organizational loyalty, and self pride). Little attention, if any, has been given to the religious root of the free agency concept and its persistent existence across history. In this paper, the current discourse on free agency and the conditions that have led to (...) its emergence are briefly discussed. The paper focuses on the theological perspectives of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam on the concept. Implications for management and business organizations are provided. (shrink)

This book explores how people's subjective, felt experiences of their bodies in action provide part of the fundamental grounding for human cognition and language. Cognition is what occurs when the body engages the physical and cultural world and must be studied in terms of the dynamical interactions between people and the environment. Human language and thought emerge from recurring patterns of embodied activity that constrain ongoing intelligent behavior. We must not assume cognition to be purely internal, symbolic, computational, and disembodied, (...) but seek out the gross and detailed ways that language and thought are inextricably shaped by embodied action. Embodiment and Cognitive Science describes the abundance of empirical evidence from many disciplines, including work on perception, concepts, imagery and reasoning, language and communication, cognitive development, and emotions and consciousness, that support the idea that the mind is embodied. (shrink)

Patočka’s text from 1946, right after World War II and before the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia, analyzes the important historical events he was living through from a philosophical perspective. Patočka describes the crisis in Enlightenment-based social humanism, which even though having won the war, was left battered and distrusted for not preventing the disaster. With this branch of social humanism being discredited, people turned towards its Eastern manifestation, i.e., Socialism or Communism. Patočka distinguishes the various aspects of Socialism that exist (...) undifferentiated within the term: the concept of Man, ideology, and the Idea. The liberation of the Idea is twisted when combined with a material concept of Man as just one force among other forces, which the ideology then uses and abuses for an external aim. (shrink)

Based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in the Eastern Cape, the paper explores the interconnections between dreams (amathongo, amaphupha) and medicines (amayeza, imithi, amachiza) as aspects of the Xhosa diviner’s culture, knowledge and experience. Background information is provided in the introduction, inter alia, on the Xhosa patrilineal clan (isiduko), divination (imvumisa, evumiso) and religious and cultural change. The ability to dream, inter alia of the ancestors and medicines, is central to the diviner’s intuition and professional stock-in-trade, which are part and parcel (...) of a religious healing tradition. Examples of dreams involving the ancestors (iminyanya), diviners, clients and medicinal plants are presented and analysed in relation to relevant case material. The ritual significance of dreams is explored in some detail. The distinctions between diviner (igqirha lokuvumisa) and herbalist (ixhwele), and between medicines and charms (amakhubalo), receive attention in the section on medicines. The underlying purpose of traditional Xhosa religious ideology is discussed in the conclusion. (shrink)

This article discusses the British Nationalization of Labour Society , a group formed in response to the political ideas brought forth by Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward. The article traces the roots of this group in British radicalism in general, and in campaigns for land nationalization and the works of Henry George in particular. The NLS were grounded in a deeply materialist and rationalist worldview and the influence of this on their political ideas and practice is shown. Relationships between the (...) ideas of the British Bellamyites and the ideas of British socialists are also discussed. (shrink)

Robert Gibbs radically revises standard interpretations of the two key figures of modern Jewish philosophy--Franz Rosenzweig, author of the monumental Star of Redemption, and Emmanuel Levinas, a major voice in contemporary intellectual life, who has inspired such thinkers as Derrida, Lyotard, Irigaray, and Blanchot. Rosenzweig and Levinas thought in relation to different philosophical schools and wrote in disparate styles. Their personal relations to Judaism and Christianity were markedly dissimilar. To Gibbs, however, the two thinkers possess basic affinities with (...) each other. The book offers important insights into how philosophy is continually being altered by its encounter with other traditions. (shrink)

This paper presents an examination of the Fellowship of the New Life, a pioneering British socialist organization from the 1880s and 1890s. The paper outlines the organizations and some of the prominent individuals involved in the Fellowship, presents an overview of Fellowship analyses of existing society, and details their political programmes and actions. It shows that in both their analysis and their activities the Fellowship were very much of the socialist mainstream in their day. They rejected the dichotomies of their (...) society, such as individual-society, ends-means and materialism- ethicalism, and they sought to combine these facets of life in both their thought and their political campaigns. The conclusion reached is that this complex, resourceful and potent group have been ill-served by being given the simplistic and pejorative label of 'ethical' socialism. (shrink)

Parisinus 1672, executed at the instigation of Maximus Planudes, is the only manuscript which contains all seventy-eight extant moralia of Plutarch. It may be dated soon after 1302, the year in which Planudes appended to his manuscript of the Greek Anthology a πίναξ Πλουτρχου containing the titles of the first sixty-nine of the seventy-eight treatises and concluding with the words τατα πντα εὑρθη. The addition of nine further treatises to the Corpus was made possible by the discovery of two further (...) sources, one containing Nos. 70–7 and the other No. 78. The tradition of No. 78 is established beyond doubt: we are concerned here only with the remaining eight, Nos. 70–7. (shrink)

Cognitive theories of metaphor understanding are typically described in terms of the mappings between different kinds of abstract, schematic, disembodied knowledge. My claim in this paper is that part of our ability to make sense of metaphorical language, both individual utterances and extended narratives, resides in the automatic construction of a simulation whereby we imagine performing the bodily actions referred to in the language. Thus, understanding metaphorical expressions like ‘grasp a concept’ or ‘get over’ an emotion involve simulating what it (...) must be like to engage in these specific activities, even though these actions are, strictly speaking, impossible to physically perform. This process of building a simulation, one that is fundamentally embodied in being constrained by past and present bodily experiences, has specific consequences for how verbal metaphors are understood, and how cognitive scientists, more generally, characterize the nature of metaphorical language and thought. (shrink)

In a recent broadcast talk it was said that philosophers commonly base arguments and theories on garbled versions of science. Professor Passmore's article in the April number of Philosophy seems to go some way to justifying this complaint. The article discusses the objectivity of history by a series of comparisons with science under various heads representing criteria of objectivity.

Gibbs presents a detailed exploration of classics such as Rebel Without a Cause and Lone Star. The book is an invaluable tool in understanding the expression of visual style, and an unrivalled text for the understanding of interpretative methodologies.

Through explorations of Hermann Cohen's Ethics of Pure Will, an international set of scholars opens questions both about the text itself and about the relation of ethics and the Jewish tradition. Originally published as Volume 13 (2005) of The Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy.

Benjamin Gibbs; Autonomy and Authority in Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 119–132, https://doi.org/10.1111.

Interpreting Figurative Meaning critically evaluates the recent empirical work from psycholinguistics and neuroscience examining the successes and difficulties associated with interpreting figurative language. There is now a huge, often contradictory literature on how people understand figures of speech. Gibbs and Colston argue that there may not be a single theory or model that adequately explains both the processes and products of figurative meaning experience. Experimental research may ultimately be unable to simply adjudicate between current models in psychology, linguistics and (...) philosophy of how figurative meaning is interpreted. Alternatively, the authors advance a broad theoretical framework, motivated by ideas from 'dynamical systems theory', that describes the multiple, interacting influences which shape people's experiences of figurative meaning in discourse. This book details past research and theory, offers a critical assessment of this work and sets the stage for a new vision of figurative experience in human life. (shrink)

Mandler's target article claims that infants' capacity to abstract certain kinds of information from perceptual ldisplays occurs through a special mechanism of ?perceptual meaning analysis?, which generates abstract, ?image-schemas? that are analogical representations summarizing spatial relations and movement in space. Under this view, perceptual processes give input to forming conceptual representations, but higher-order concepts are disembodied, symbolic representations that are stripped of their embodied roots. My alternative argument is that bodily experience has an enduring role in early conceptual development, and (...) throughout the lifespan, with image-schemas being continually tied to ongoing perceptual and kinesthetic actions. Many global and abstract concepts may be created in the moment given specific task demands and retain deep connections to embodied actions and experiences. (shrink)

Despite the fact that Davidson's theory of the causal relata is crucial to his response to the problem of mental causation - that of anomalous monism - it is commonly overlooked within discussions of his position. Anomalous monism is accused of entailing property epiphenomenalism, but given Davidson's understanding of the causal relata, such accusations are wholly misguided. There are, I suggest, two different forms of property epiphenomenalism. The first understands the term 'property' in an ontological sense, the second in a (...) linguistic sense. Anomalous monism cannot plausibly be accused of either. The first cannot legitimately be applied to anomalous monism as it is incompatible with Davidson's ontology. And accusations of predicate epiphenomenalism, although consistent with Davidson's ontology, are ungrounded regarding Davidson's anomalous monism. Philosophers of mind have mislocated the problem with Davidson's anomalous monism, which in fact lies with the implausible theory of the causal relata upon which it rests. (shrink)

Cognitive theories of metaphor understanding are typically described in terms of the mappings between different kinds of abstract, schematic, disembodied knowledge. My claim in this paper is that part of our ability to make sense of metaphorical language, both individual utterances and extended narratives, resides in the automatic construction of a simulation whereby we imagine performing the bodily actions referred to in the language. Thus, understanding metaphorical expressions like ‘grasp a concept’ or ‘get over’ an emotion involve simulating what it (...) must be like to engage in these specific activities, even though these actions are, strictly speaking, impossible to physically perform. This process of building a simulation, one that is fundamentally embodied in being constrained by past and present bodily experiences, has specific consequences for how verbal metaphors are understood, and how cognitive scientists, more generally, characterize the nature of metaphorical language and thought. (shrink)

According to the partial identity account of resemblance, exact resemblance is complete identity and inexact resemblance is partial identity. In this paper, I examine Arda Denkel's (1998) argument that this account of resemblance is logically incoherent as it results in a vicious regress. I claim that although Denkel's argument does not succeed, a modified version of it leads to the conclusion that the partial identity account is plausible only if the constituents of every determinate property are ultimately quantitative in nature.

The conservation laws do not establish the central premise within the argument from causal overdetermination – the causal completeness of the physical domain. Contrary to David Papineau, this is true even if there is no non-physical energy. The combination of the conservation laws with the claim that there is no non-physical energy would establish the causal completeness principle only if, at the very least, two further causal claims were accepted. First, the claim that the only way that something non-physical could (...) affect a physical system is by affecting the amount of energy or momentum within it, or redistributing the energy and momentum within it. Second, the claim that redistribution of energy and momentum cannot be brought about without supplying energy or momentum. Both of these claims, however, are exceedingly difficult to defend in the context of the argument. (shrink)

Mental causation has been a hotly disputed topic in recent years, with reductive and non-reductive physicalists vying with each other and with dualists over how to accommodate, or else to challenge, two widely accepted metaphysical principles—the principle of the causal closure of the physical domain and the principle of causal non-overdetermination—which together appear to support reductive physicalism, despite the latter’s lack of intuitive appeal. Current debate about these matters appears to have reached something of an impasse, prompting the question of (...) why this should be so. One possibility well worth exploring is that, while this debate makes extensive use of ontological vocabulary—by talking, for instance, of substances, events, states, properties, powers, and relations—relatively little attempt has been made within the debate itself to achieve either clarity or agreement about what, precisely, such terms should be taken to mean. Hence, the debate has become somewhat detached from broader developments in metaphysics and ontology, which have lately been proceeding apace, providing us with an increasingly rich and refined set of ontological categories upon which to draw, as well as a much deeper understanding of how they are related to one another. In preparing this volume, the editors invited leading metaphysicians and philosophers of mind to reflect afresh upon the problem of mental causation in the light of some of these recent developments, with a view to making new headway with one of the most challenging and seemingly intractable issues in contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The essay examines the impact of thought insertion on typical conceptions of self-consciousness. Stephens and Graham have recently argued that thought insertion is compatible with the inseparability thesis, which maintains that with regard to self-consciousness subjectivity is a proper part of introspection--introspection and subjectivity are inseparable. They argue that thought insertion is an error of agency and not an error of subjectivity. The essay contends that even if they are correct in their interpretation that thought insertion is an error of (...) agency rather than subjectivity, which is unlikely, they are incorrect to maintain that it is not also an error of subjectivity. Evidence is put forth to indicate that thought insertion is, at best, a mistake of agency and subjectivity. It is concluded that thought insertion is incompatible with the inseparability thesis, and a new inseparability thesis is thereby postulated. (shrink)

The study of metaphor is now firmly established as a central topic within cognitive science and the humanities. We marvel at the creative dexterity of gifted speakers and writers for their special talents in both thinking about certain ideas in new ways, and communicating these thoughts in vivid, poetic forms. Yet metaphors may not only be special communicative devices, but a fundamental part of everyday cognition in the form of 'conceptual metaphors'. An enormous body of empirical evidence from cognitive linguistics (...) and related disciplines has emerged detailing how conceptual metaphors underlie significant aspects of language, thought, cultural and expressive action. Despite its influence and popularity, there have been major criticisms of conceptual metaphor. This book offers an evaluation of the arguments and empirical evidence for and against conceptual metaphors, much of which scholars on both sides of the wars fail to properly acknowledge. (shrink)

Despite the fact that the nature of the properties of causation is rarely discussed within the mental causation debate, the implicit assumption is that they are universals as opposed to tropes. However, in recent literature on the problem of mental causation, a new solution has emerged which aims to address the problem by appealing to tropes. It is argued that if the properties of causation are tropes rather than universals, then a psychophysical reductionism can be advanced which does not face (...) the problem of multiple realizability. However, the 'trope solution' rests upon the assumption that one can combine a trope monism with a type dualism. I argue that such a combination cannot be allowed. Given a plausible interpretation of types within a trope ontology, trope monism in fact entails type monism. Consequently, if one identifies mental tropes with physical tropes, one must also identify mental and physical types and in doing so face a modified version of the multiple realizability argument. (shrink)