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.

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)

Richard Wolin, in his article 'Nazism and the Complicities of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Untruth and Method' ( New Republic , 15 May 2000, pp. 36-45), wrongly accuses Gadamer of being 'in complicity' with the Nazis. The present article in reply was rejected by the New Republic , but is printed here to show that Wolin in his article is misinformed and unfair. First, Wolin makes elementary factual errors, such as stating that Gadamer was born in Breslau instead of Marburg. He (...) relies on a highly questionable source, Teresa Orozco, as 'definitive'. He argues often by misconstruing the evidence and guilt by association. For instance, he associates Gadamer with Werner Jaeger, with whom he disagreed and had little contact. Finally,he misinterprets basic terms in Gadamer's hermeneutics, Vorurteil and authority, attributing to them the popular sense of these terms instead of their place in Gadamer's hermeneutics. Vorurteil , popularly translated as 'prejudice', but better rendered as 'prejudgment', refers to the prior knowledge that one needs in order to understand a situation or a text. In some cases, this is part of the inherited tradition. Authority refers to the respect one pays to those one recognizes as having more knowledge than oneself: one's doctor, or parent, or teacher, a judge, or certain texts. It is not an abject surrender to all authority but the necessary respect for authority in human relationships and in society in general. By misconstruing these terms, Wolin attempts to discredit Gadamer's general philosophy,not just to demonstrate a connection to the Nazis. At the end, his argument turns into a misinformed general political attack on Gadamer as an enemy of Enlightenment values. (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)

128 female Ss were asked to make 4 judgments about a young woman after reading her "job application portfolio." Five characteristics of the young woman were manipulated orthogonally. Ss were asked to report how each of the 5 manipulated factors had influenced each of their judgments. "Observer Ss," who had access only to very impoverished descriptions of each of the 5 factors, were asked to predict how each of the factors would influence each of the judgments. Results show that S (...) reports about the effects of the factors on the judgments were in general highly inaccurate; observer predictions were extremely similar to S reports; for the single judgment for which Ss showed substantial accuracy, observer predictions were as accurate as S reports. Results indicate that whatever introspective access to cognitive processes may exist, it is not sufficient to produce generally accurate reports about such processes, nor even to produce reports that differ much from those of poorly informed outside observers. (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)

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)

The authors find East Asians to be holistic, attending to the entire field and assigning causality to it, making relatively little use of categories and formal logic, and relying on "dialectical" reasoning, whereas Westerners, are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The 2 types of cognitive processes are embedded in different naive metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. The authors speculate that the (...) origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long-held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process–content distinction. (shrink)

This classic, first published in 1969, introduces to English-speaking readers a field which is of increasing importance in contemporary philosophy and theology--hermeneutics, the theory of understanding, or interpretation. Richard E. Palmer, utilizing largely untranslated sources, treats principally of the conception of hermeneutics enunciated by Heidegger and developed into a "philosophical hermeneutics" by Hans-Georg Gadamer. He provides a brief overview of the field by surveying some half-dozen alternate definitions of the term and by examining in detail the contributions of Friedrich (...) Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey. In the Manifesto which concludes the book, Palmer suggests the potential significance of hermeneutics for literary interpretation. (shrink)

Thinking about thought -- Everything's an inference -- Out of context or the situation -- The rational unconscious -- The formerly dismal science -- Should you think like an economist? -- Spilt milk and free lunch -- Foiling foibles -- Coding, counting, correlation, and causality -- Odds and Ns -- Linked up -- Experiments -- Ignore the hippo -- Experiments natural and experiments proper -- Eekonomics -- Don't ask, can't tell -- Thinking, straight and curved -- Logic -- Dialecticism -- (...) Knowing the world -- Kiss and tell -- Keeping it real -- Whom to believe. (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)

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)

Much has been made of the centrality of comparison to sociological research. The world-systems perspective, however, posits a single unit of analysis that challenges the possibility of designating the independent cases demanded by the formal logic of comparative analysis. The present work suggests an alternative to comparisons of multiple cases in the form of analogies among instances of processes. The consequences of such a methodological shift are explored through the example of the contemporary “War on Terror”.

This chapter combines formal models of how the fitness of a collective can become decoupled from the fitness with more empirical work on the volvocine algae. It uses the Volvox clade as a model system. It describes the evolution of altruism in the volvocine green algae. This chapter suggests that altruism may evolve from genes involved in life-history trade-offs. It shows the several cooperation, conflict, and conflict mediation cycles in the volvocine green algae. This cycle of cooperation, conflict, and conflict (...) mediation drives evolutionary transitions in individuality. (shrink)

This essay introduces a collection of 49 essays that exemplify the breadth and the depth of James M. Buchanan’sBuchanan, James M. contributions to economics in the post-war period. Buchanan started his career in 1948 as someone who wanted to provide a different scholarly framework for a theory of public finance and managed to do so. What resulted was a scholarly output that was published in 20 volumes in 2002, to which he continued to add until his death. The essays in (...) this volume reflect the breadth and depth of Buchanan’s contributions to political economy and social philosophy. While these essays are written by people who admired and learned from Buchanan’s work, these are not essays in hagiography. They explore various questions and topics that interested Buchanan. A good number of these explorations have critical overtones, but most significantly they build upon lines of inquiry that animated Buchanan’s scholarly curiosity. (shrink)