BackgroundIn the 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission declared that allowing medical providers to advertise directly to consumers would be “providing the public with truthful information about the price, quality or other aspects of their service.” However, our understanding of the advertising content is highly limited.ObjectiveTo assess whether direct-to-consumer medical service advertisements provide relevant information on access, quality and cost of care, a content analysis was conducted.MethodTelevision and online advertisements for medical services directly targeting consumers were collected in two major urban (...) centres in Nevada, USA, identifying 313 television advertisements and 200 non-duplicate online advertisements.ResultsBoth television and online advertisements reliably conveyed information about the services provided and how to make an appointment. At the same time, less than half of the advertisements featured insurance information and hours of operation and less than a quarter of them contained information regarding the quality and price of care. The claims of quality were substantiated in even fewer advertisements. The scarcity of quality and cost information was more severe in television advertisements.ConclusionThere is little evidence that medical service advertising, in its current form, would contribute to lower prices or improved quality of care by providing valuable information to consumers. (shrink)

Introduction -- Nazi philosophy -- The expulsion of the invaders -- Philosophical method : virtue vs. vice -- The virtuous tradition : analysis, liberalism, englishness -- Epilogue.

Leo Strauss's controversial writings have long exercised a profound subterranean cultural influence. Now their impact is emerging into broad daylight, where they have been met with a flurry of poorly informed, often wildly speculative, and sometimes rather paranoid pronouncements. This book, written as a corrective, is the first accurate, non-polemical, comprehensive guide to Strauss's mature political philosophy and its intellectual influence. Thomas L. Pangle opens a pathway into Strauss's major works with one question: How does Strauss's philosophic thinking contribute (...) to our democracy's civic renewal and to our culture's deepening, critical self-understanding? This book includes a synoptic critical survey of writings from scholars who have extended Strauss's influence into the more practical, sub-philosophic fields of social and political science and commentary. Pangle shows how these analysts have in effect imported Straussian impulses into a "new" kind of political and social science. (shrink)

The Life of Wisdom in Rousseau's "Reveries of the Solitary Walker" is the first complete exegesis and interpretation of Rousseau's final and culminating work, showing its full philosophic and moral teaching. The Reveries has been celebrated as a work of literature that is an acknowledged acme of French prose writing. Thomas L. Pangle argues that this aesthetic appreciation necessitates an in-depth interpretation of the writing's complex and multileveled intended teaching about the normatively best way of life—and how essential this (...) is for a work that was initially bewildering. Rousseau stands out among modern political philosophers in that he restored, to political philosophy, what Socrates and his students (from Plato and Xenophon through Aristotle and the Stoics and Cicero) had made central—and that the previous modern, Enlightenment philosophers had eclipsed: the study of the life and soul of the exemplary, independent sage, as possessor of "human wisdom." Rousseau made this again the supreme theme and source of norms for political philosophy and for humanity's moral as well as civic existence. In his analysis of The Reveries, Pangle uncovers Rousseau's most profound exploration and articulation of his own life, personality, soul, and thought as "the man of nature enlightened by reason." He describes, in Rousseau's final work, the fullest embodiment of the experiential wisdom from which flows and to which points Rousseau's political and moral philosophy, his theology, and his musical and literary art. (shrink)

What is freedom? In this study, Thomas Dumm challenges the conventions that have governed discussions and debates concerning modern freedom by bringing the work of Michel Foucault into dialogue with contemporary liberal thought. While Foucault has been widely understood to have characterized the modern era as being opposed to the realization of freedom, Dumm shows how this characterization conflates Foucault’s genealogy of discipline with his overall view of the practices of being free. Dumm demonstrates how Foucault’s critical genealogy does (...) not shrink from understanding the ways in which modern subjects are constrained and shaped by forces greater than themselves, but how it instead works through these constraints to provide, not simply a vision of liberation, but a joyous wisdom concerned with showing us, in his words, that we “are much freer than we feel.” Both as an introduction to Foucault and as an intervention in liberal theory, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom is bound to change how we think about the limits and possibilities of freedom in late modernity. (shrink)

. What distinguishes Pangle's study from the dozens of books which have challenged or elaborated upon the republican revision is the sharpness with which he ...

Thomas L. Shaffer argues that the morals of modern American lawyers and doctors have been corrupted by misguided professionalism and weak philosophy.

There is a consensus that post-war British analytic philosophy was politically neutral. This view has been affirmed by the post-war analysts themselves, and by their critics. This paper argues that this consensus-view is false. Many central analytic philosophers claimed that their empirical philosophy had liberal outcomes, either through cultivating liberal habits of mind, or by revealing truths about the world that supported liberal conclusions. These beliefs were not subject to significant scrutiny or attempts at justification, but they do help us (...) to explain the otherwise puzzling disinclination to engage with questions of political philosophy on the part of these politically active individuals. (shrink)

Political societies frequently regard philosophers as potential threats to morality and religion, and those who speak for politics often demand a defense of philosophy. This book will address philosophy as a mode of existence put into question.

Language research has come to rely heavily on large‐scale, web‐based datasets. These datasets can present significant methodological challenges, requiring researchers to make a number of decisions about how they are collected, represented, and analyzed. These decisions often concern long‐standing challenges in corpus‐based language research, including determining what counts as a word, deciding which words should be analyzed, and matching sets of words across languages. We illustrate these challenges by revisiting “Word lengths are optimized for efficient communication” (Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, (...) 2011), which found that word lengths in 11 languages are more strongly correlated with their average predictability (or average information content) than their frequency. Using what we argue to be best practices for large‐scale corpus analyses, we find significantly attenuated support for this result and demonstrate that a stronger relationship obtains between word frequency and length for a majority of the languages in the sample. We consider the implications of the results for language research more broadly and provide several recommendations to researchers regarding best practices. (shrink)

Pangle believes liberal democracy is in grave danger of losing its way in the tricky Cold War "endgame." This philosophical discourse rethinks the foundations of democratic society through a dialogue with Locke, Kant, Jefferson, Montesquieu, Hume, Plato, and other seminal figures. Diagnosing the "disintegration all around us" from the classical republican perspective of Aristotle and Socrates, Pangle presents prescriptions involving workplace democracy and greater citizen participation in government; he espouses policies encouraging the aged to remain employed; urges tough-minded incentives for (...) hard work as part of welfare programs; and advocates civic education as the heart of American public schooling. The last chapter defines the goals of higher education in terms of a Socratic dialogue with great books. ISBN 0-8018-4262-X: $25.95. (shrink)

The Spirit of the Laws —Montesquieu’s huge, complex, and enormously influential work—is considered one of the central texts of the Enlightenment, laying the foundation for the liberally democratic political regimes that were to embody its values. In his penetrating analysis, Thomas L. Pangle brilliantly argues that the inherently theological project of Enlightenment liberalism is made more clearly—and more consequentially— in Spirit than in any other work. _ In a probing and careful reading, Pangle shows how Montesquieu believed that rationalism, (...) through the influence of liberal institutions and the spread of commercial culture, would secularize human affairs. At the same time, Pangle uncovers Montesquieu’s views about the origins of humanity’s religious impulse and his confidence that political and economic security would make people less likely to sacrifice worldly well-being for otherworldly hopes. With the interest in the theological aspects of political theory and practice showing no signs of diminishing, this book is a timely and insightful contribution to one of the key achievements of Enlightenment thought. (shrink)

Situation selection involves choosing situations based on their likely emotional impact and may be less cognitively taxing or challenging to implement compared to other strategies for regulating emotion, which require people to regulate their emotions “in the moment”; we thus predicted that individuals who chronically experience intense emotions or who are not particularly competent at employing other emotion regulation strategies would be especially likely to benefit from situation selection. Consistent with this idea, we found that the use of situation selection (...) interacted with individual differences in emotional reactivity and competence at emotion regulation to predict emotional outcomes in both a correlational and an experimental field study. Taken together, the findings suggest that situation selection is an effective strategy for regulating emotions, especially for individuals who otherwise struggle to do so. (shrink)

With _Aristotle’s Teaching in the “Politics,” _Thomas L. Pangle offers a masterly new interpretation of this classic philosophical work. It is widely believed that the _Politics_ originated as a written record of a series of lectures given by Aristotle, and scholars have relied on that fact to explain seeming inconsistencies and instances of discontinuity throughout the text. Breaking from this tradition, Pangle makes the work’s origin his starting point, reconceiving the _Politics_ as the pedagogical tool of a master teacher. With (...) the _Politics_, Pangle argues, Aristotle seeks to lead his students down a deliberately difficult path of critical thinking about civic republican life. He adopts a Socratic approach, encouraging his students—and readers—to become active participants in a dialogue. Seen from this perspective, features of the work that have perplexed previous commentators become perfectly comprehensible as artful devices of a didactic approach. Ultimately, Pangle’s close and careful analysis shows that to understand the _Politics_, one must first appreciate how Aristotle’s rhetorical strategy is inextricably entwined with the subject of his work. (shrink)

Thomas Pangle continues his exploration of the work of Xenophon, a student of Socrates and an historian, who wrote about Socrates, the man, his ideas, and their reception in Athens. In a sequel to his earlier account of Xenophon's Memorabilia, this book takes up the three remaining works of Xenophon, which were devoted to memorializing his teacher Socrates: the Oeconomicus, the Symposium, and the Apology of Socrates to the Jury. As Pangle puts it, the question that is the theme (...) of these works is which of the two distinct ways of life and human character types-that of the Socratic political philosopher with his philosophic virtues, or that of the gentleman with his civic and moral virtues-is superior, standing as the highest standard for all human existence. (shrink)

The dissertation entitled Jacques Maritain and the Centrality of Intuition is a study in the influence of Henri Bergson's notion of intuition in the thought of Jacques Maritain. It is argued that Maritain used tenets from Thomistic philosophy to transform Bergsonian intuition, first by putting intuition back into the intellect from which Bergson in fact severed it. It is also argued that, although Bergson in fact put a wedge between intellect and intuition, that was not his intention. Because Bergson in (...) fact separated intuition from the intellect, however, Maritain accused him of being anti-intellectual. Contrary to Maritain's criticism, it is argued that Bergson was anti-intellectual only in the sense of criticizing a bad use of intelligence, but not in the sense of criticizing intelligence as such. Maritain then interprets Bergson's intuition as an immediate knowledge of reality in two ways: first, as the intellectual metaphysical intuition of being yielding a concept of being as being in its analogical amplitude and as not intrinsically linked to matter; second, as various and analogous modes of intuition by way of affective connaturality, i.e., an obscure, but deep and penetrating knowledge of the very subsistence of a thing by bypassing the concept. Various modes of affective connaturality are described, namely, the connatural knowledge of the virtuous person, of the prudent person, of the natural law itself, of the mystic, the lover, and the poet. In connatural knowledge, intuition is seen to be both intellectual and emotion-laden. Given the various modes of intuition explored by Maritain, it is argued that intuition is central to Maritain's thought. It is further argued that the content of one's experience of the self and being known in the various modes of connatural knowledge is stored in the depths of the spiritual preconscious of the soul and acts as an indirect cause that disposes one to have an intuition of being should one be so gifted. In addition, connatural knowledge of being is also an indirect cause of creative insights in science, mathematics, and in all other kinds of knowledge. A kind of poetic intuition is at work everywhere, even when subordinated to the ends of some other kind of knowledge. Consequently, it is necessary to be a contemplative, especially for the philosopher who needs to be attuned and receptive to the mystery of being if he/she is to be gifted with the metaphysical intuition, without which one cannot be an authentic metaphysician of existence. The thought of Henri Bergson, Pierre Rousselot and the Maritain Thomist, Joseph Sikora, S. J. is heavily relied on in the exposition of the thesis. (shrink)

The most serious threat currently facing people all over the world is that of a global nuclear war, in which hundreds of millions of people would be killed by the immediate effects of nuclear explosions, and over a billion others would later die of cold and starvation in the ensuing nuclear winter. Physicians and other health professionals have an ethical responsibility to educate themselves, their patients, and the public to the need for major political changes to achieve multilateral disarmament and (...) thus prevent nuclear war. Scientists ought to oppose all research and government expenditures preparing for war, and should participate only in work designed to improve health and living standards for all the world's inhabitants. (shrink)

This text provides an introduction to conceptions of international justice, spanning 2500 years of intellectual history from Thucydides and Plato to Morgenthau and Waltz. It shows how older traditions of political philosophy remain relevant to contemporary debates in international relations.