Berkhofer ranges through a vast archive of recent writings by a broad range of authors. He explicates the opposing paradigms and their corresponding dilemmas by presenting in dialogue form the positions of modernists and postmodernists, formalists and deconstructionists, textualists and contextualists.

What is history? From Thucydides to Toynbee historians and nonhistorians alike have wondered how to answer this question. A New Philosophy of History reflects on developments over the last two decades in historical writing, not least the renewed interest in the status of narrative itself and the presence of the authorial "voice." Subjects include the problems of Grand Narrative, multiple voices and the personal presence of the historian in his text, the ambitions of the French Annales school and the so-called (...) "Grand Chronicler," and the relevance of non-literary models--museum presentations and picturings--regarding historical discourse. The range of approaches found in A New Philosophy of History ensures that this book will establish itself as required reading not only for historians, but for everyone interested in literary theory, philosophy, or cultural studies. This volume presents essays by Hans Kellner, Nancy F. Partner, Richard T. Vann, Arthur C. Danto, Linda Orr, Philippe Carrard, Ann Rigney, Allan Megill, Robert Berkhofer, Stephen Bann, and Frank Ankersmit. (shrink)

Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. provides a basic, broad, and dynamic introduction to a new manner of reading history in light of current theoretical innovations and multiculturalist theories. In order to prepare the reader for this novel historicality, the author guides the reader through an enormous terrain of texts in modernism, poststructuralism, deconstruction, feminism, poetics, and multiculturalism. Just from this standpoint, one may regard Berkhofer's work as a major contribution to the history of contemporary thought. His text, however, (...) exceeds writing another history of ideas precisely by his attempts to transform the way historians regard their texts. Although not specifically delineated, the book consists of two parts: The first half explores some of the implications of postmodernism for the writing, reading, and teaching of history. It shows how historians are able to learn from current deconstructive strategies without being bound to this kind of textualizing. The second half discloses various ways of "applying" a positive understanding of postmodernism to the urgent operation of reading concrete historical texts. (shrink)

This essay surveys the present position of postmodernism with respect to the effect of its ideas upon historiography. For this purpose it looks at a number of writings by historians that have been a response to postmodernism including the recently published collection of articles, The Postmodern History Reader. The essay argues that, in contrast to scholars in the field of literary studies, the American historical profession has been much more resistant to postmodernist doctrines and that the latters' influence upon the (...) thinking and practice of historians is not only fading but increasingly destined to fade. The essay also presents a critical discussion of the current philosophy of postmodernism in its bearing upon historiography, directed chiefly against its claim that the world has undergone an epochal transition from the modern to a postmodern age; its theory of language and linguistic idealism; its opposition to historical realism and denial of the actuality of the past as a possible object of reference; and its theory of historical narrative as unconstrained fictional construction. This discussion includes a consideration of the work of postmodernist thinkers such as J.-F. Lyotard, of the recent books by David Roberts and Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. which espouse a postmodernist theory of history, and of the narrativist theory of Hayden White. The essay also notes some of the reasons for postmodernism's appeal; and while it does not deny that postmodernist philosophy may have served a useful purpose in provoking historians to be more self-critical and aware of their presuppositions and procedures, it maintains that its skeptical and politicized view of historical inquiry is deeply mistaken, out of accord with the way historians themselves think about their work, and incapable of providing an understanding of historiography as a form of thought engaged in the attainment of knowledge and understanding of the human past. (shrink)

Autonomy -- Hydrodynamics -- Brownian motion -- From Brownian motion to bending beams -- An engineering approach -- The right variables and natural kinds.

This book argues that a conscientiously objecting medical professional should receive an exemption only if the grounds of an objector's refusal are reasonable. It defends a detailed, contextual account of public reasonability suited for healthcare, which builds from the overarching concept of Rawlsian public reason. The author analyzes the main competing positions and maintains that these other views fail precisely due to their systematic inattention to the grounding reasons behind a conscientious objection; he argues that any such view is plausible (...) to the extent that it mimics the 'reason-giving requirement' for conscience objections defended in this work. Only reasonable objections can defeat the prior professional obligation to assign primacy to patient well-being, therefore one who refuses a patient's request for a legally available, medically indicated, and safe service must be able to explain the grounds of their objection in terms understandable to other citizens within the public institutional structure of medicine. The book further offers a novel policy proposal to deploy the Reasonability View: establishing conscientious objector status in medicine. It concludes that the Reasonability View is a viable and attractive position in this debate. A New Theory of Conscientious Objection in Medicine: Justification and Reasonability will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working in bioethics, medical ethics, and philosophy of medicine, as well as thinkers interested in the intersections between law, medical humanities, and philosophy. (shrink)

Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking may be relatively effortful. Yet adults routinely engage in effortful processes when needed. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate their resources to achieve successful communication? We begin with the observation that the shared goal of communication induces a natural division of labor: The resources one agent chooses to allocate toward perspective-taking should depend on their expectations about the other's (...) allocation. We formalize this idea in a resource-rational model augmenting recent probabilistic weighting accounts with a mechanism for (costly) control over the degree of perspective-taking. In a series of simulations, we first derive an intermediate degree of perspective weighting as an optimal trade-off between expected costs and benefits of perspective-taking. We then present two behavioral experiments testing novel predictions of our model. In Experiment 1, we manipulated the presence or absence of occlusions in a director–matcher task. We found that speakers spontaneously modulated the informativeness of their descriptions to account for “known unknowns” in their partner's private view, reflecting a higher degree of speaker perspective-taking than previously acknowledged. In Experiment 2, we then compared the scripted utterances used by confederates in prior work with those produced in interactions with unscripted directors. We found that confederates were systematically less informative than listeners would initially expect given the presence of occlusions, but listeners used violations to adaptively make fewer errors over time. Taken together, our work suggests that people are not simply “mindblind”; they use contextually appropriate expectations to navigate the division of labor with their partner. We discuss how a resource-rational framework may provide a more deeply explanatory foundation for understanding flexible perspective-taking under processing constraints. (shrink)

Reflexivity is, roughly, when studying or theorising about a target itself influences that target. Fragility is, roughly, when causal or other relations are hard to predict, holding only intermittently or fleetingly. Which is more important, methodologically? By going systematically through cases that do and do not feature each of them, I conclude that it is fragility that matters, not reflexivity. In this light, I interpret and extend the claims made about reflexivity in a recent paper by Jessica Laimann. I finish (...) by assessing the benefits and costs of a focus on reflexivity. (shrink)

Author Robert Wright shows how Buddhist meditative practice can loosen the grip of anxiety, regret, and hatred, and deepen your appreciation of beauty and other people." -- Adapted from book jacket.

Mesoscale modeling is often considered merely as a practical strategy used when information on lower-scale details is lacking, or when there is a need to make models cognitively or computationally tractable. Without dismissing the importance of practical constraints for modeling choices, we argue that mesoscale models should not just be considered as abbreviations or placeholders for more “complete” models. Because many systems exhibit different behaviors at various spatial and temporal scales, bottom-up approaches are almost always doomed to fail. Mesoscale models (...) capture aspects of multi-scale systems that cannot be parameterized by simple averaging of lower-scale details. To understand the behavior of multi-scale systems, it is essential to identify mesoscale parameters that “code for” lower-scale details in a way that relate phenomena intermediate between microscopic and macroscopic features. We illustrate this point using examples of modeling of multi-scale systems in materials science and biology, where identification of material parameters such as stiffness or strain is a central step. The examples illustrate important aspects of a so-called “middle-out” modeling strategy. Rather than attempting to model the system bottom-up, one starts at intermediate scales where systems exhibit behaviors distinct from those at the atomic and continuum scales. One then seeks to upscale and downscale to gain a more complete understanding of the multi-scale system. The cases highlight how parameterization of lower-scale details not only enables tractable modeling but is also central to understanding functional and organizational features of multi-scale systems. (shrink)

Group beneficial norms are common in human societies. The persistence of such norms is consistent with evolutionary game theory, but existing models do not provide a plausible explanation for why they are common. We show that when a model of imitation used to derive replicator dynamics in isolated populations is generalized to allow for population structure, group beneficial norms can spread rapidly under plausible conditions. We also show that this mechanism allows recombination of different group beneficial norms arising in..

Develops a theory of culture based on a metaphysics that elaborates on the Platonic and Confucian traditions. In Metaphysics of Goodness, Robert Cummings Neville extends Alfred North Whitehead’s project of cultural studies, which was based on a new metaphysics that Whitehead developed in Adventures of Ideas. Neville’s focus is value or goodness in many modes. The metaphysics treated in this book derive from the Platonic and Confucian traditions, with significant modifications of Whitehead, Peirce, Dewey, Confucius, Xunzi, and Zhou Dunyi. (...) Part one develops a theory of form based on a metaphysics of harmony. Part two elaborates a theory of art based on a metaphysics of beauty. Part three sketches a theory of personhood based on a metaphysics of obligation. Part four discusses civilization in a systematic way based on a metaphysics of flourishing. Throughout the book, Neville elaborates a theory of interpretation that is inspired by Peirce, Dewey, and Xunzi but is not limited to their ideas. While the reasoning of the book is concise, it employs methodologies from many kinds of philosophy, art criticism, ethics, and cultural studies, and sees philosophy as needing to learn from all these disciplines. “Neville’s work is informed by a lifelong engagement with the most important philosophers in history, including Plato, Aristotle, Whitehead, and Dewey. Here, he offers an important argument that there is beauty not only in how people see the world, but also in the world itself.” — Kevin Schilbrack, Appalachian State University. (shrink)

Selected by CHOICE as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1995.

William Hasker has been one of the most trenchant and insightful critics of the revival of Molinism. He has focused on the “freedom problem”, a set of challenges designed to show that Molinism does not secure a place for genuinely free human action. These challenges focus on a key element in the Molinist story: the counterfactual conditionals of creaturely freedom. According to Molinism, these conditionals have contingent truth-values that are knowable to God prior to His decision of what world to (...) actualize. This divine “middle knowledge” is supposed to enable God to execute a detailed plan for world history without any loss of creaturely freedom. Hasker has argued that this middle knowledge nonetheless deprives us of the power to do otherwise than we do, a crucial element in human freedom and responsibility. I hope to accomplish three things in this paper. First, I want to step back a bit and explore the nature of the conditionals of creaturely free decision-making, bringing out some of the difficulties in delimiting their scope and nature. Second, I will explore the implications of different answers to an important question that has not been addressed in the literature: whether we have counterfactual power over the conditionals of divine freedom. And, third, I would like to recommend to Molinists a revision that offers a solution to the freedom problem. (shrink)

In this paper, I first present the ideas and arguments put forward by evolutionary psychologists that humans evolved certain capacities to creatively problem solve. Specifically, Steven Mithen thinks that creative problem solving is possible because the mind has evolved a conscious capacity he calls cognitive fluidity, the flexible exchange of information between and among mental modules. While I agree with Mithen that cognitive fluidity acts as a necessary condition for creative problem solving, I disagree that cognitive fluidity alone will suffice (...) for such an activity. I argue further that the flexible exchange of information between and among modules, as well as what I call scenario visualization - a conscious ability to segregate and integrate visual images in future scenarios - evolved in our species and accounts for certain kinds of creative problem solving. (shrink)

Complexity–nonlinear dynamics for my purposes in this essay–is rich with metaphysical and epistemological implications but is only recently receiving sustained philosophical analysis. I will explore some of the subtleties of causation and constraint in Rayleigh-Bénard convection as an example of a complex phenomenon, and extract some lessons for further philosophical reflection on top-down constraint and causation particularly with respect to causal foundationalism.

An application of Young's Habermasian critical theory of education to classroom communication problems of teachers in schools, with a special focus on the question/answer cycle and its educational role. The book uses classroom transcripts extensively in the analysis.

David Hume and other philosophers doubt that causality can be perceived directly. Instead, observers become aware of it through inference based on the perception of the two events constituting cause and effect of the causal relation. However, Hume and the other philosophers primarily consider causal relations in which one object triggers a motion or change in another. In this paper, I will argue against Hume’s assumption by distinguishing a kind of causal relations in which an agent is controlling the motion (...) or change of an object. I will call this kind of causal relations ‘causation-as-control’. In instances of causation-as-control, the observer does not become aware of the causality through inference based on the perception of two events (cause and effect). Rather, she perceives the two events directly and without further inference as cause and effect of a causal relation, and, therefore, the causality at work. (shrink)

It is often held that to have a conscious experience presupposes having some form of implicit self-awareness. The most dominant phenomenological view usually claims that we essentially perceive experiences as our own. This is the so called “mineness” character, or dimension of experience. According to this view, mineness is not only essential to conscious experience, it also grounds the idea that pre-reflective self-awareness constitutes a minimal self. In this paper, we show that there are reasons to doubt this constituting role (...) of mineness. We argue that there are alternative possibilities and that the necessity for an adequate theory of the self within psychopathology gives us good reasons to believe that we need a thicker notion of the pre-reflective self. To this end, we develop such a notion: the Pre-Reflective Situational Self. To do so, we will first show how alternative conceptions of pre-reflective self-awareness point to philosophical problems with the standard phenomenological view. We claim that this is mainly due to fact that within the phenomenological account the mineness aspect is implicitly playing several roles. Consequently, we argue that a thin interpretation of pre-reflective self-awareness—based on a thin notion of mineness—cannot do its needed job within, at least within psychopathology. This leads us to believe that a thicker conception of pre-reflective self is needed. We, therefore, develop the notion of the pre-reflective situational self by analyzing the dynamical nature of the relation between self-awareness and the world, specifically through our interactive inhabitation of the social world. (shrink)

Understanding cooperation and punishment in small-scale societies is crucial for explaining the origins of human cooperation. We studied warfare among the Turkana, a politically uncentralized, egalitarian, nomadic pastoral society in East Africa. Based on a representative sample of 88 recent raids, we show that the Turkana sustain costly cooperation in combat at a remarkably large scale, at least in part, through punishment of free-riders. Raiding parties comprised several hundred warriors and participants are not kin or day-to-day interactants. Warriors incur substantial (...) risk of death and produce collective benefits. Cowardice and desertions occur. (shrink)

Propositional relationalists about the attitudes claim to find support for their view in what they assume to be the dyadic relational logical form of the predicates by which we canonically attribute propositional attitudes. In this paper I argue that the considerations that they adduce in support of this assumption, specifically for the assumption that the that-clauses that figure in these predicates are singular terms, are suspect on linguistic grounds. Propositional relationalism may nonetheless be true, but the logical form of attitude (...) predicates provides no grounds for thinking this to be so. (shrink)

1. We are unknown to ourselves, we knowing ones, we to our own selves, and for a good reason. We have never sought ourselves – so how could it happen, that one day we would find ourselves? Someone once correctly said: “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”;1 our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are. We are always on the way to finding it; as winged creatures and honey-gatherers of the spirit, we truly care (...) for only one thing from the heart: to “bring something home.” Whatever else concerns life, the so-called “experiences” – who among us has enough seriousness for them? Or enough time? In these matters we have been, I fear, somewhat distracted: our hearts have not quite been in it, and not even our ears! More often, like some divine scatter-brain absorbed-in-himself into whose ear the bell has tolled the twelve strikes of noon at full power, who then suddenly wakes up and asks himself, “What was really just struck?”, just like that we rub our ears afterwards and ask, completely amazed, completely embarrassed, “what did we really experience?” and further, “who are we really?” and afterwards, as said, count the twelve trembling bell-strikes of our experience, our life, our being – ugh! and miscount them . . . We necessarily remain strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we must get ourselves wrong, for us the saying “Each is furthest from himself” holds for all eternity – we are not “knowing ones” with respect to ourselves. (shrink)

This is explained in a new introduction that goes beyond the interpretative enterprise of the rest of the book to assess Marx in relation to contemporary ...

Based on the thesis of R. Muller (doctoral)--Universite de Paris IV.

"This book discusses the vast and complex range of choices in between blanket amnesty and total accountability through criminal justice, and does so with ...

An Artificial Intelligence algorithm trained on data that reflect racial biases may yield racially biased outputs, even if the algorithm on its own is unbiased. For example, algorithms used to schedule medical appointments in the USA predict that Black patients are at a higher risk of no-show than non-Black patients, though technically accurate given existing data that prediction results in Black patients being overwhelmingly scheduled in appointment slots that cause longer wait times than non-Black patients. This perpetuates racial inequity, in (...) this case lesser access to medical care. This gives rise to one type of Accuracy-Fairness trade-off: preserve the efficiency offered by using AI to schedule appointments or discard that efficiency in order to avoid perpetuating ethno-racial disparities. Similar trade-offs arise in a range of AI applications including others in medicine, as well as in education, judicial systems, and public security, among others. This article presents a framework for addressing such trade-offs where Machine Learning and Optimization components of the algorithm are decoupled. Applied to medical appointment scheduling, our framework articulates four approaches intervening in different ways on different components of the algorithm. Each yields specific results, in one case preserving accuracy comparable to the current state-of-the-art while eliminating the disparity. (shrink)

Dixon, Robert Have the cultural changes of the last fifty years or so influenced the way that Australia's most active Catholics think about key Catholic beliefs and moral teachings? In this article, I will search for evidence of such an influence by examining responses from Mass attenders to selected questions in the 2011 National Church Life Survey. I will note especially the extent to which respondents' demographic characteristics are related to the way they answered those questions, and I will (...) also examine how responses to those questions have varied over successive surveys, at five-yearly intervals, from 1996 to 2011. (shrink)

The weeks-long rioting and the destruction of property were more than just a hyper reaction to apparent racial discrimination in 2020. We might interpret this anti-social and criminal behavior as having its origin with an envy and resentment over things material. We were warned about this misuse of our freedom more than forty years ago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Finding our way back from a materialist-saturated vision of the good life depends on taking up a Christian humanism which was championed by (...) Pope Saint John Paul II. We see that Christian humanism expressed vividly in family life. (shrink)

A thorough account of Langer's philosophical career.

Research on social influences often distinguishes between social and quality incentives to ascribe meaning to the value that popularity conveys. This study examines the neural correlates of those incentives through which popularity influences preferences. This research reports an functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment and a behavioral task in which respondents evaluated popular products with three focus perspectives; unspecified focus, focus on social aspects, and focus on quality. The results show that value derived with a social focus reflects inferences of approval (...) and reward value, and positively affects preferences. Value derived with a quality focus reflects inferences of quality and negatively affects preferences. This study provides evidence of two distinct inferential routes on both a neurological level, represented by different regions in the brain, and a behavioral level. These results provide the first evidence that a single popularity cue can in different ways influence the value derived from product popularity. (shrink)

Clinical ethics is a relatively new discipline within medicine, generated not so much by the Can we . . . ? questions of fact and prognosis that physicians ...

Chapter One Introduction: the concept of a teacher People teach each other many things in the course of their everyday lives. There is a distinction, ...