H.P. Grice is known principally for his influential contributions to the philosophy of language, but his work also includes treatises on the philosophy of mind, ethics, and metaphysics--much of which is unpublished to date. This collection of original essays by such philosophers as Nancy Cartwright, Donald Davidson, Gilbert Harman, and P.F. Strawson demonstrates the unified and powerful character of Grice's thoughts on being, mind, meaning, and morals. An introductory essay by the editors provides the first overview of Grice's work.

Reviews evidence which suggests that there may be little or no direct introspective access to higher order cognitive processes. Ss are sometimes unaware of the existence of a stimulus that importantly influenced a response, unaware of the existence of the response, and unaware that the stimulus has affected the response. It is proposed that when people attempt to report on their cognitive processes, that is, on the processes mediating the effects of a stimulus on a response, they do not do (...) so on the basis of any true introspection. Instead, their reports are based on a priori, implicit causal theories, or judgments about the extent to which a particular stimulus is a plausible cause of a given response. This suggests that though people may not be able to observe directly their cognitive processes, they will sometimes be able to report accurately about them. Accurate reports will occur when influential stimuli are salient and are plausible causes of the responses they produce, and will not occur when stimuli are not salient or are not plausible causes. (shrink)

Husserl's marginal remarks in Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik clearly do not reflect the same intense effort to penetrate Heidegger's thought that we find in his marginal notes in Sein und Zeit. Merely in terms of length, Husserl's comments in the published German text occupy only one-third the number of pages.2 Pages 1-5, 43-121, and 125-1673 contain no reading marks at all-over half of the 236 pages of KPM. This suggests that Husserl either read these pages with no intention (...) of returning to the text or skipped large parts of the middle of the text altogether.4 His remarks often express frustration or a resigned recognition of the now unbridgeable, irrevocable gap between himself and Heidegger. (shrink)

A long-standing challenge to evolutionary theory has been whether it can explain the origin of complex organismal features. We examined this issue using digital organisms—computer programs that self-replicate, mutate, compete and evolve. Populations of digital organisms often evolved the ability to perform complex logic functions requiring the coordinated execution of many genomic instructions. Complex functions evolved by building on simpler functions that had evolved earlier, provided that these were also selectively favoured. However, no particular intermediate stage was essential for evolving (...) complex functions. The first genotypes able to perform complex functions differed from their non-performing parents by only one or two mutations, but differed from the ancestor by many mutations that were also crucial to the new functions. In some cases, mutations that were deleterious when they appeared served as stepping-stones in the evolution of complex features. These findings show how complex functions can originate by random mutation and natural selection. (shrink)

As its subtitle 'Skepticism, Individuality and Chastened Politics' indicates, this book is an exploration of and a largely favorable engagement with salient elements in the thinking of a theorist who is widely regarded as the greatest Anglophone political thinker and among the top rank of philosophical writers generally. In emphazing Hobbes's skepticism, Richard Flathman goes against the grain of much of the literature concerning Hobbes. The theme of individuality is more familiar, particularly from the celebrated writings on Hobbes by (...) Michael Oakeshott, but the idea of a chastened politics challenges the widely influential view that Hobbes was not only an authoritarian but an incipient or proto-totalitarian. (shrink)

This work helps highlights how the innovations in Flathman's thought have shaped the field of political theory and will be of interest to students and scholars alike.

It has been about fifty years since the topic of divine impassibility was the subject of book-length philosophical treatments in English. In recent years process and analytic philosophers have returned this issue to the forefront of professional attention. Divine Impassibility traces the issue of classical sources, relates the positions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century books, and surveys the writings of contemporary British analytic philosophers such as Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, Richard Swinburne, John Hick, and H. P. Owen, American analytic (...) philosophers such as Norman Kretzmann, Eleonore Stump, Nelson Pike, Robert Adams, and Bruce Reichenbach, and process philosophers such as Charles Hartshorne and Lewis Ford. The author shows that clear, adequate analysis of the issue must distinguish four respects in which God might be passible or impassible: nature, will, knowledge, and feeling. He shows also how decisions on this topic bear on numerous others in philosophical theology such as creation, eternality, evil, and human freedom. His creative proposals on these and other topics attempt to go beyond the difficulties of both classical and process conceptions of God. (shrink)

This book examines two questions: Do people make use of abstract rules such as logical and statistical rules when making inferences in everyday life? Can such abstract rules be changed by training? Contrary to the spirit of reductionist theories from behaviorism to connectionism, there is ample evidence that people do make use of abstract rules of inference -- including rules of logic, statistics, causal deduction, and cost-benefit analysis. Such rules, moreover, are easily alterable by instruction as it occurs in classrooms (...) and in brief laboratory training sessions. The fact that purely formal training can alter them and that those taught in one content domain can "escape" to a quite different domain for which they are also highly applicable shows that the rules are highly abstract. The major implication for cognitive science is that people are capable of operating with abstract rules even for concrete, mundane tasks; therefore, any realistic model of human inferential capacity must reflect this fact. The major implication for education is that people can be far more broadly influenced by training than is generally supposed. At high levels of formality and abstraction, relatively brief training can alter the nature of problem-solving for an infinite number of content domains. (shrink)

"Originally published in 2010 by University of Queensland Press.".

The fitness of any evolutionary unit can be understood in terms of its two basic components: fecundity (reproduction) and viability (survival). Trade-offs between these fitness components drive the evolution of life-history traits in extant multicellular organisms. We argue that these trade-offs gain special significance during the transition from unicellular to multicellular life. In particular, the evolution of germ–soma specialization and the emergence of individuality at the cell group (or organism) level are also consequences of trade-offs between the two basic fitness (...) components, or so we argue using a multilevel selection approach. During the origin of multicellularity, we study how the group trade-offs between viability and fecundity are initially determined by the cell level trade-offs, but as the transition proceeds, the fitness trade-offs at the group level depart from those at the cell level. We predict that these trade-offs begin with concave curvature in single-celled organisms but become increasingly convex as group size increases in multicellular organisms. We argue that the increasingly convex curvature of the trade-off function is driven by the cost of reproduction which increases as group size increases. We consider aspects of the biology of the volvocine green algae – which contain both unicellular and multicellular members – to illustrate the principles and conclusions discussed. (shrink)

Ethics and the Environment includes contributions from distinguished philosophers, humanists, politicians, geologists, chemists and physicists. This volume opens with an historical and philosophical background to provide a basis for discussion of significant contemporary changes in ethical theory.

Compared to truthful answers, deceptive responses to queries are expected to take longer to initiate. Yet attempts to detect lies through reaction time (RT) have met with limited success. We describe a new procedure that seems to increase the RT difference between truth-telling and lies. It relies on a Stroop-like procedure in which responses to the labels true and false are sometimes reversed. The utility of this method is assessed in a laboratory study involving both statements of fact and attitude. (...) Three different ethnic groups participated: Americans of European ancestry, East Asians, and native Arabic speakers. For all three groups, our technique allowed identification of prevarication reliably better than chance. (shrink)

This case deals with the corporate response to a crisis and the successful evacuation of approximately 900 hotel guests, staff, and family members of staff whowere stranded in the Fairmont New Orleans hotel by Hurricane Katrina. This rescue effort, spearheaded by managers at the sister Fairmont hotel in Dallas, Texas, was completed shortly after 12 a.m. on Friday, September 2, 2005, when the last bus with evacuees pulled into the Dallas Fairmont after making a round trip of more than 1000 (...) miles — and about 64 hours after planning began. This case is particularly significant for lessons that may be derived about crisis management and leadership, and it also raises several interesting ethical issues. The case, which relies on field research plus secondary sources, is appropriate for business ethics and business strategy courses. (shrink)

Can any of us ever really be free? Do we follow the rules our society gives us because we want to, or because we are forced to? Discipline, Freedom, Resistance challenges the received wisdom that discipline and freedom are opposite and mutually exclusive. Though it is typically argued that a well-ordered liberal society must discipline its more unruly citizens to maintain freedom for all, Flathman shows how resistance to rules can mean more than criminals breaking laws. Resistance can also mean (...) political protest and political dialogues about what the rules can be. Discipline, Freedom, Resistance draws on Foucault's theories of the self to describe the inner discipline it takes to resist authority-declaring that individuals must sometimes resist forces that wish to destroy freedom, to ensure freedom. (shrink)

Staged 2 different videotaped interviews with the same individual—a college instructor who spoke English with a European accent. In one of the interviews the instructor was warm and friendly, in the other, cold and distant. 118 undergraduates were asked to evaluate the instructor. Ss who saw the warm instructor rated his appearance, mannerisms, and accent as appealing, whereas those who saw the cold instructor rated these attributes as irritating. Results indicate that global evaluations of a person can induce altered evaluations (...) of the person's attributes, even when there is sufficient information to allow for independent assessments of them. Furthermore, Ss were unaware of this influence of global evaluations on ratings of attributes. In fact, Ss who saw the cold instructor actually believed that the direction of influence was opposite to the true direction. They reported that their dislike of the instructor had no effect on their rating of his attributes but that their dislike of his attributes had lowered their global evaluations of him. (shrink)