From its first appearance in 1844, Max Stirner’s major work, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum ,[1] has produced little agreement among its many interpreters. The very first of these interpreters was Friedrich Engels, who suggested that Stirner’s doctrines would be quite compatible with Benthamite utilitarianism, which he then admired, and even saw in these doctrines the potential of benefiting communism.[2] Marx, in short order, corrected this optimistic deviation, and then—with a surely repentant Engels—set forth the orthodox gospel for all future (...) generations of communists: Stirner, or “Sankt Max,” was but the speculative spokesman for the petty bourgeois, a decadent Hegelian boasting over the unrestraint of his self inflated ego.[3] Sidney Hook echoed Marx when he condemned Stirner’s work as but the “social defense mechanism of a petty bourgeois soul.”[4] Others, unsatisfied with this “petty” status, elevate him to that of the Grand Bourgeois, or Fascist.[5] Still others, taking an opposite stance, see in Stirner the most articulate defender of individual liberty.[6] In between, he has been called a nihilist, an anarchist, an existentialist, a solipsist, an anti Benthamite, an intemperate capitalist, or—as we might now suspect—an anti capitalist.[7] At least two commentators, lost in the confusion, have managed to escape the need to classify Stirner within the ongoing political and ethical categories and simply declare him to be insane.[8] In short, the list of radically diverse interpretations.. (shrink)

The recent profusion of studies directed to uncovering the “Young Marx” has also provoked some renewed interest in his contemporary, Johann Caspar Schmidt, better known as Max Stirner. With a few exceptions, the most important being William Brazill’s The Young Hegelians, Stirner has been retained in his traditional role as Marx’s first critic, the harried “Sankt Max” of The German Ideology. This perspective, established firmly by Sidney Hook and continued by David McLellen, does cast light upon Marx’s development, but (...) it cannot be expected to do justice to Stirner, who is more than a mere anti-Marxist. (shrink)

The question addressed by this book is what, if anything, stoic ethics would be like today if stoicism had had a continuous history to the present day as a plausible and coherent set of philosophical commitments and methods. The book answers that question by arguing that most of the ancient doctrines of Stoic ethics remain defensible today, at least when ancient Stoicism's cosmological commitments are replaced by modern scientific ones.

This book is a history of the idea of convention, the roles it played in the formative stages of English and Continental literary theory and in the development ...

This book argues for adopting a new account of the circumstances of justice ("the habilitation framework") for philosophical theories of basic justice. It proposes a concept of basic health as a metric for such theories, and healthy agency as a target for them. It does not, however, propose a specific distributive rule or set of distributive principles. Nor does it propose a specific type of theory to pursue (e.g., utilitarian, contractarian, etc.). The book is thus meant to be largely theory-independent (...) respect to standard normative theories. (shrink)

The third Earl of Shaftesbury was a pivotal figure in eighteenth-century thought and culture. Professor Klein 's study is the first to examine the extensive Shaftesbury manuscripts and offer an interpretation of his diverse writings as an attempt to comprehend contemporary society and politics and, in particular, to offer a legitimation for the new Whig political order established after 1688. As the focus of Shaftesbury's thinking was the idea of politeness, this study involves the first serious examination of the importance (...) of the idea of politeness in the eighteenth century for thinking about society and culture and organising cultural practices. Through politeness, Shaftesbury conceptualised a new kind of public and critical culture for Britain and Europe, and greatly influenced the philosophical and cultural models associated with the European Enlightenment. (shrink)

Ever since Greek antiquity "disembodied knowledge" has often been taken as synonymous with "objective truth." Yet we also have very specific mental images of the kinds of bodies that house great minds--the ascetic philosopher versus the hearty surgeon, for example. Does truth have anything to do with the belly? What difference does it make to the pursuit of knowledge whether Einstein rode a bicycle, Russell was randy, or Darwin flatulent? Bringing body and knowledge into such intimate contact is occasionally seen (...) as funny, sometimes as enraging, and more often just as pointless. Vividly written and well illustrated, Science Incarnate offers concrete historical answers to such skeptical questions about the relationships between body, mind, and knowledge. Focusing on the seventeenth century to the present, Science Incarnate explores how intellectuals sought to establish the value and authority of their ideas through public displays of their private ways of life. Patterns of eating, sleeping, exercising, being ill, and having (or avoiding) sex, as well as the marks of gender and bodily form, were proof of the presence or absence of intellectual virtue, integrity, skill, and authority. Intellectuals examined in detail include René Descartes, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Ada Lovelace. Science Incarnate is at once very funny and deeply serious, addressing issues of crucial importance to present-day discussions about the nature of knowledge and how it is produced. It incorporates much that will interest cultural and social historians, historians of science and medicine, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists. (shrink)

The standard philosophical and folk-psychological accounts of cognition and action credit us with too much spontaneity in our activities and projects. We are taken to be fundamentally active rather than reactive, to project our needs and aims and deploy our full supporting arsenal of cognitive instruments upon an essentially passive environment. The corrected point of view presented here balances this image of active agency with an appreciation of how we are also continually responding to the world, that is, to the (...) pragmatic situations that effectively select subsets of our cognitive resources to be at our disposal in generating responses. The result is a superseding of the standard Cognitive Integrationist picture by a model of a structurally divided mind, comprising a multiplicity of diverse and sometimes-conflicting standpoints, personas, and wills whose elicitation is a complex function of agent intentions and plans, the encountered environment, past experience, and temporal sequence. According to this model, the manifold stored representations constituting a person’s cognitive endowment do not form a single integrated network all equally ready for use. Cognition at any given moment is limited to drawing upon only a subset of one’s perspective, the perspect that is activated in accordance with the specific mental task or situation (the pragmatic context) that one perceives oneself to be facing. The system enlists the environmental context as trigger for practical and theoretical activity, based upon the agent’s prior experience. Though susceptible to certain kinds of error, and not inherently inclined toward innovative thinking, it enables the generally efficient use of our enormous cognitive endowments in conducting our lives in real time. (shrink)

Hans Jonas was a German Jew, pupil of Heidegger and Bultmann, lifelong friend and colleague of Hannah Arendt at the New School for Social Research, and one of the most prominent thinkers of his generation. The range of his topics never obscures their unifying thread: that our mortality is at the root of our moral responsibility to safeguard humanity's future. _Mortality and Morality_ both consummates and demonstrates the basic thrust of Jonas's thought: the inseparability of ethics and metaphysics, the reality (...) of values at the center of being. (shrink)

The article explores the influence of unproven specificity of pathogenesis manifested in clinical psychiatry and research. A selected literature review of studies attempting to identify a biological marker is presented. To date, the search for a biological marker to establish a psychiatric diagnosis has been unsuccessful. Clinical settings and programs are described which seem to be driven by psychological issues, one such example being the search for villains. Thus, specific assumptions about etiology affect therapy technique and treatment planning and may (...) be disadvantageous to patient care. Biological and psychological development in all of its phases is subject to a diverse range of perturbations, intrinsic as well as extrinsic. A flexible, balanced view is called for before specificity is extended to general theories, which, in turn, affect therapy and treatment settings. (shrink)

Though there are good arguments against physician participation in executions, physicians should be allowed to make their own decisions about whether they will participate, and professional medical organizations should not flatly destroy the careers of those who do.

If some aspects of human behavior are too murky to see into, others are too close and transparent to examine; one that has eluded both scientists and philosophers is how speakers of natural languages make words and expressions refer to specific objects in the world. Marshalling his expertise in philosophy, computers, and system science (State U. of.

Kathleen Wallace’s The Network Self: Relation, Process, and Personal Identity (2019) presents an understanding of personal identity and selfhood. Its central conundrum is how a person or self can be a something that, while being related to and even constituted by many things, including endless experiences and events and social roles, hence subject to continuous change, can nevertheless sustain an identity capable of responsible agency and all the other moral and narrative predicates so crucial to us. In response Wallace creates (...) a Cumulative Network Model of the self, rooted in the relational and social analysis of human individuality characteristic of the American philosophical tradition, that, while processural and complex in the extreme, is nevertheless capable of autonomy and responsibility. Her account provides a novel paradigm for the analysis of human self, but with its very complexity raises questions as to the relation between the referents of “person,” “self,” and “I.”. (shrink)

The neoliberal-inspired “shock therapy” policies were designed to allow efficiency considerations to shape the new capitalist economies. Most experts theorized that these policies would enable postcommunist countries to close the gap with the West. After more than a decade, this prediction has been falsified. Fieldwork in 25 Russian firms demonstrates that the neoliberal prescription of mass privatization creates shocks that make successful enterprise restructuring almost impossible. Instead, most firms lower their technological level of production and retreat to nonmarket activity to (...) survive. The result is a poorer economy with less growth potential and thus increased divergence with the West. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to identify and explain a religious paradigm in Targum Qohelet (TgQoh). Targum Qohelet is dated to a period between 500 CE and 1101 CE. This study concludes that the most probable setting for this Targum was the beit midrash (the house of study). A paradigmatic research approach is used to identify the range of translation components to explain the translation method employed in TgQoh and the rationale behind it. This research approach reveals how the (...) translator(s) used their interpretative ability to create a completely different thought-world when compared with the original Hebrew Text. Various subparadigms emerge as a network of connected religious beliefs to form a cogent systematic rabbinic theology of a perfect world order to replace the pessimism of the Hebrew base text. The Aramaic version reflects a complete solution to the existential problems raised by Biblical Qohelet. It seeks to provide humankind with guidelines for creating a ‘perfect world’ both on earth and in the afterlife. The use of a paradigmatic analysis based on the concept of a ‘perfect world’ provides an ideal model for analysing the translation strategy of TgQoh and understanding its method of rendering. Contribution: The application of paradigmatic methodology bridges the gap between the relatively secular nature of the Hebrew version of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes) and the overwhelmingly and inescapable theological forms of the Aramaic targum. The paradigms in the Aramaic translation identify how the targum applied rabbinic ideology to explain the meanings that lies behind the original Hebrew text of Qohelet. The paradigms, when taken together reveal how the cynical nature of Hebrew Qohelet was changed into a rabbinical guide for righteous living, here described as ‘perfect world’. (shrink)

Et si les scientifiques avaient trop compliqué leur processus de démonstration, la fameuse "démonstration"? Et si la démonstration, peu concluante, s'embourbait simplement parce qu'elle relève en vrai d'un raisonnement paralogique psychiatrique tel que celui que l'on rencontre dans le discours du paranoïaque, discours logique certes mais qui part d'un postulat faux? Nous sous-entendons ici que cette hypothèse est fort probable. Et par suite, l'inquiétude et la confusion seront au rendez-vous de cette démarche, de même que cette impression de ne jamais (...) arriver au bout de la description du phénomène de la vie et de la physique. Bien que la totalité des pièces du puzzle semblent présentes, comment procéder pour les assembler? La science s'est séparée depuis belle lurette de la philosophie, et c'est ainsi qu'elle a pu se targuer de porter la dénomination de "science"! Osera-t-elle recevoir des leçons de la philosophie dès lors qu'elle s'est érigée en son exacte contraposée? (shrink)

Several variant "Newtonian" theories of inertia and gravitation are described, and their scientific usefulness discussed. An examination of these theories is used to throw light on traditional epistemological and metaphysical questions about space and time. Finally these results are examined in the light of the changes induced by the transition from "Newtonian" to general relativistic spacetime.

Suitable for the scholarly study of Dewey's philosophy, this title enables the reader to appreciate the force of Dewey's thought in contending philosophical ideas of his time.

I argue that physicians can save women from life-threatening pregnancies by performing a craniotomy, placentectomy, or salpingotomy without intending death or harm. To support this conclusion, I defend the relevance thesis about intentions (a person intends X only if X explains the action). I then criticize the identity thesis (if a person intends X and knows that X is identical to Y then the person intends Y) and three mistakenly strict moral principles: (1) one may not intend something that is (...) a serious harm for an innocent person, (2) one may not intend to terminate pregnancy before viability, and (3) one may not act on a person’s body in a harmful way in order to benefit another person. (1) would prohibit procuring organs from living donors, (2) would prohibit treating hepatic pregnancies and other ectopic pregnancies, and (3) would prohibit procuring organs from living donors and performing many prenatal surgeries. (shrink)

Medicaid is uniquely equipped to serve low-income populations. We identify four features that form the “soul” of Medicaid, explain how the administration is testing them, and explore challenges in accountability contributing to this struggle. We highlight the work of watchdogs acting to protect Medicaid and conclude with considerations for future health reform.

Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence: A Case Study Using the Integrated Readiness Matrix builds on the 2015 text, Integrating Pedagogy and Technology: Improving Teaching and Learning in Higher Education with a focus on teaching in higher education. Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence is premised on our contention in the first book that, while individual faculty members can independently begin to use the IRM to improve their pedagogical and technological skills in their content areas, an organizational structure is needed (...) to sustain ongoing improvement. In addition, while the first book provided a primer on learning theory as it relates to pedagogy, Developing a Center for Teaching Excellence plumbs this topic more deeply from the perspective of the college instructor. Further, the second book is dedicated to demonstrating how the IRM can be institutionalized as the foundation for providing the structure and support to faculty and how they can help shape centers for teaching excellence by becoming more familiar with relevant learning theories and related pedagogical and technological approaches. (shrink)