Examined the role of philosophical beliefs in psychotherapy approach preference. It was hypothesized that trainees would prefer approaches that most closely correspond to their personal philosophical beliefs. 59 students were given audiotaped presentations. Three dimensions of the Ss' philosophical commitments were examined in relation to their relative preferences for 3 therapy approaches: rationalist, constructivist and behavioral. Results show that Ss tended to prefer a specific approach that most corresponded to their own ontological, epistemological and causal commitments. This suggests a role (...) for philosophical beliefs in therapists' preferences for different theoretical orientations. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Although genocide—a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves—remains a sickeningly frequent phenomenon in the twenty‐first century, it is not an immutable aspect of the human condition. Genocide is a choice, and the civilized world must choose its demise. The unique experience of American Indians—a group subjected to genocide in the process of the creation and expansion of the United States—presents a (...) logical heuristic through which to assess more broadly the requirements of redress for historical episodes of genocide and, even more important, the means to prevent its recurrence. (shrink)

For the peoples who have inhabited, since time immemorial, the lands within the external borders of the U.S., remediation of genocide, land theft, and ethnocide is a pressing issue. However, monetary reparations would frustrate the reacquisition of the American Indian capacity to self-determine on ancestral lands. Because the injustice at the core of U.S. history is neither broadly acknowledged nor deeply understood, Part I provides historical foundation and sketches the factual predicate to the American Indian claim for redress. Part II (...) presents and evaluates theories of justice with respect to this claim. Part III counters the shortcomings of these theories with a theory, Justice as Indigenism, that propounds a program of land restoration and legislative reform that will accord the full measure of relief to American Indians consistent with the requirements of justice for all peoples. (shrink)

Health care reforms, in particular the expansion of public and/or private health care benefit coverage to some or all population groups, is becoming an increasingly hot topic for discussion—and in some cases for action—at all levels of government. With almost 16% of Americans estimated to be uninsured for at least part of the year, opinion polls show health care near the top of the general public’s list of concerns. Little wonder that presidential candidates for the 2008 election are incorporating ‘‘universal (...) health care coverage’’ proposals in their campaign platforms. Will ‘‘cradle-to-grave’’ coverage for all become a reality or will they just experience cradle-to-grave debates over this issue? That is essentially one of the questions posed in the following discussion on the role of nonprofit health care organizations in promoting, and operating under, universal health care coverage. (shrink)

This article uses Public Use Microsample data drawn from the 1990 census to explore the relationship between military presence, defined as the percentage of the local labor force in the active-duty armed forces, and women's employment and earnings across local labor market areas in the United States. Comparisons of local rates of unemployment and mean women's earnings are made between those LMAs in which the military plays a disproportionate role in the local labor market and those in which military presence (...) is low. Results suggest that women who live in labor market areas with a substantial military presence have, on average, lower annual earnings and higher rates of unemployment than their counterparts who live in nonmilitary LMAs. The argument is made that through the interaction of several socially situated conditions—including gender, family, labor markets, human capital, and place—the military emerges as a source of inequality in labor market outcomes for women working on or around military installations. (shrink)

In recent years pluralism has emerged as a popular approach for overcoming the method wars in psychological research, with advocates of mixed-methods approaches arguing for the integration of qualitative and quantitative methods. They contend that a plurality of methods will allow researchers to draw upon the strengths of one method to overcome the weaknesses of another. In this article I argue that mixed-methods approaches fall short of a true methodological pluralism in the tradition of William James because they rely (...) on a single worldview rather than a plurality of worldviews. I describe how James’s pluralism, as outlined in his book A Pluralistic Universe , differs from mixedmethods approaches and I describe some basic features of a true Jamesian methodological pluralism. (shrink)

No one denies that time and space are different; and it is easy to catalog differences between them. I can point my finger toward the west, but I can’t point my finger toward the future. If I choose, I can now move to the left, but I cannot now choose to move toward the past. And (as D. C. Williams points out) for many of us, our attitudes toward time differ from our attitudes toward space. We want to maximize our (...) temporal extent and minimize our spatial extent: we want to live as long as possible but we want to be thin.1 But these differences are not very deep, and don’t get at the essence of the difference between time and space. That’s what I want to understand: I want to know what makes time different from space. I want to know which difference is the fundamental difference between them. (shrink)

I have before me a letter dated January 5, 2000 from Bradford Wilson, the executive director of the NAS. It begins, “I really enjoyed your contribution to the recent symposium in the January issue of First Things, so much so that I’ve also decided to invite you to join the NAS. Many of your fellow contributors including Robert George, Jeffrey Satinover, and Father Neuhaus are among our current members, and I think you’d find it well worth your while if (...) you joined ranks with us yourself.”. (shrink)

Consider Dretske's measles example (from page 74 in his Knowldege and the Flow of Information (MIT/Bradford: 1981) ): since the question of whether Alice's being one of Herman's children carries the information that she has the measles is a question about conditional probabilities, we must be careful about our specification of the condition, the antecedent. Although we are to suppose that it is a true generalization that all of Herman's children have the measles, since that is a coincidence, we (...) can just as well suppose that Alice is an only child with the measles. It is of course true that the conditional probability of Alice's having measles given that she has the measles is 1; but that is not relevant to the question Dretske raises. In Dretske's example, the question is whether Alice's being Herman's child carries the information that she has measles. And so the relevant condition in this example is simply Alice's being Herman's child. While it is in fact true that Alice has the measles, that isn't part of the condition: for the question is, "how probable is the one state of affairs given some other state of affairs,". (shrink)

I have before me a letter dated January 5, 2000 from Bradford Wilson, the executive director of the NAS. It begins, “I really enjoyed your contribution to the recent symposium in the January issue of First Things, so much so that I’ve also decided to invite you to join the NAS. Many of your fellow contributors including Robert George, Jeffrey Satinover, and Father Neuhaus are among our current members, and I think you’d find it well worth your while if (...) you joined ranks with us yourself.”. (shrink)

This is the first detailed study to explore the little-understood notions of "knowing who someone is," "knowing a person's identity," and related locutions. It locates these notions within the context of a general theory of believing and a semantical theory of belief- and knowledge-ascriptions.The books's main contention is that what one knows, when one knows who someone is, is not normally an identity in the numerical sense of "a = b," but rather a certain sort of predication to know who (...) someone is is just to know that that person is F, where "F" is a predicate that is "important," in a technical sense defined by the authors, for the purposes determined by context. Their book offers a rigorous formal semantics for ascriptions of knowing and of knowing-who in particular, solving such well-known problems and paradoxes as Kripke's Puzzle, and Quines difficulties with de re belief, along the way.The authors apply their analysis to each of several important issues in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and ethical theory in which the previously unexamined notion of "knowing who" has loomed large-the mechanics of linguistic referring, the foundations of epistemic logic, problems of self-knowledge and self-regarding belief, universalizability and "Golden Rule" arguments in ethics, and moral "personalism" versus "impartialism."Stephen Boër is Professor of Philosophy at the Ohio State University. William Lycan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina and author of Logical Form in Natural Language. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Quine (1960, "Word and object". Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ch. 2) claims that there are a variety of equally good schemes for translating or interpreting ordinary talk. 'Rabbit' might be taken to divide its reference over rabbits, over temporal slices of rabbits, or undetached parts of rabbits, without significantly affecting which sentences get classified as true and which as false. This is the basis of his famous 'argument from below' to the conclusion that there can be no fact of the (...) matter as to how reference is to be divided. Putative counterexamples to Quine's claim have been put forward in the past (see especially Evans (1975, "Journal of Philosophy", LXXII(13), 343-362. Reprinted in McDowell (Ed.), "Gareth Evans: Collected papers." Oxford: Clarendon Press.), Fodor (1993, "The elm and the expert: Mentalese and its semantics." Cambridge, MA: Bradford)), and various patches have been suggested (e. g. Wright (1997, The indeterminacy of translation. In C. Wright & B. Hale (Eds.), "A companion to the philosophy of language" (pp. 397-426). Oxford: Blackwell)). One lacuna in this literature is that one does not find any detailed presentation of what exactly these interpretations are supposed to be. Drawing on contemporary literature on persistence, the present paper sets out detailed semantic treatments for fragments of English, whereby predicates such as 'rabbit' divide their reference over four-dimensional continuants (Quine's rabbits), instantaneous temporal slices of those continuants (Quine's rabbitslices) and the simple elements which compose those slices (undetached rabbit parts) respectively. Once we have the systematic interpretations on the table, we can get to work evaluating them. (shrink)

The paper analyzes early colonial representations of the New World, connected with immigration of the first- and second-generation religious dissenters in what was to become America. Taking into account the well-documented influence of Puritans on American identity, the paper elaborates on the Puritans’ and Pilgrims’ mindsets as they arrived in the New World, connected not only with their religious beliefs but most of all with a practical need to organize themselves effectively. Be it in John Winthrop’s “A Modell of Christian (...) Charity,” William Bradford’s “Of Plymouth Plantation” or Samuel Danforth’s “New England’s Errand into the Wilderness,” the authors of these works clearly show how the Pilgrims and Puritans had to confront the experience of emigration/immigration and construct not only new ways of social organization but also new identity. The paper focuses on the immigrants’ perception of the New World, their own role and challenges they were faced with, and their thinking about the society they came from and were about to construct. It deals with their process of adjusting to the surroundings and discussing values they decided to promote for the sake of communal survival in the adverse conditions of the New World. (shrink)

By the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of his generation. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is not only widely acknowledged to be his most important book, but also hailed a contemporary classic of moral philosophy. Presenting a sustained critique of moral theory from Kant onwards, Williams reorients ethical theory towards ‘truth, truthfulness and the meaning of an individual life’. He explores and reflects upon the most difficult problems in contemporary philosophy (...) and identifies new ideas about central issues such as relativism, objectivity and the possibility of ethical knowledge. This edition also includes a new commentary on the text by A.W.Moore and a foreword by Jonathan Lear. (shrink)

By the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of his generation. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is not only widely acknowledged to be his most important book, but also hailed a contemporary classic of moral philosophy. Presenting a sustained critique of moral theory from Kant onwards, Williams reorients ethical theory towards ‘truth, truthfulness and the meaning of an individual life’. He explores and reflects upon the most difficult problems in contemporary philosophy (...) and identifies new ideas about central issues such as relativism, objectivity and the possibility of ethical knowledge. (shrink)

With a new foreword by Jonathan Lear 'Remarkably lively and enjoyable…It is a very rich book, containing excellent descriptions of a variety of moral theories, and innumerable and often witty observations on topics encountered on the way.' -_ Times Literary Supplement_ Bernard Williams was one of the greatest philosophers of his generation. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy is not only widely acknowledged to be his most important book, but also hailed a contemporary classic of moral philosophy. Drawing on the (...) ideas of the Greek philosophers, Williams reorients ethics away from a preoccupation with universal moral theories towards ‘truth, truthfulness and the meaning of an individual life’. He explores and reflects upon the most difficult problems in contemporary philosophy and identifies new ideas about central issues such as relativism, objectivity and the possibility of ethical knowledge. This edition also includes a commentary on the text by A.W.Moore. At the time of his death in 2003, Bernard Williams was hailed by the Times as 'the outstanding moral philosopher of his age.' He taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Berkeley and Oxford and is the author of many influential books, including _Morality; Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry_ and _Truth and Truthfulness_. (shrink)

An exploration of Immanuel Kant's account of war and the controversies that have arisen from its interpretation. This book brings the ideas of Kant's critical philosophy to bear on one of the leading political and legal questions of our age: under what circumstances, if any, is recourse to war legally and morally justifiable?

This book puts forward a revisionist view of Japanese wartime thinking. It seeks to explore why Japanese intellectuals, historians and philosophers of the time insisted that Japan had to turn its back on the West and attack the United States and the British Empire. Based on a close reading of the texts written by members of the highly influential Kyoto School, and revisiting the dialogue between the Kyoto School and the German philosopher Heidegger, it argues that the work of Kyoto (...) thinkers cannot be dismissed as mere fascist propaganda, and that this work, in which race is a key theme, constitutes a reasoned case for a post-White world. The author also argues that this theme is increasingly relevant at present, as demographic changes are set to transform the political and social landscape of North America and Western Europe over the next fifty years. (shrink)

This article examines how the historian deals with ‘information’ broadly conceived, especially its acquisition, retention and loss. Ammianus details a complex interplay between those who control information and those who must work with an information deficit. Just as this dialogue plays out within the text, however, so too does it with respect to the author's methodology, which dances between the poles of incomplete and complete information depending on circumstance. Ammianus thus becomes an author as hard to pin down as many (...) of his characters, by turns the omniscient narrator and the dumbfounded participant. (shrink)

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients (...) than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. _Shame and Necessity_ gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world. (shrink)

Acknowledged as perhaps _the_ masterpiece of materialist criticism in the English language, this omnibus ranges over British literary history from George Eliot to George Orwell to inquire about the complex ways economic reality shapes the imagination.

Former Google advertising strategist, now Oxford-trained philosopher James Williams launches a plea to society and to the tech industry to help ensure that the technology we all carry with us every day does not distract us from pursuing our true goals in life. As information becomes ever more plentiful, the resource that is becoming more scarce is our attention. In this 'attention economy', we need to recognise the fundamental impacts of our new information environment on our lives in order to (...) take back control. Drawing on insights ranging from Diogenes to contemporary tech leaders, Williams's thoughtful and impassioned analysis is sure to provoke discussion and debate. Williams is the inaugural winner of the Nine Dots Prize, a new Prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary social issues. This title is also available as Open Access. (shrink)

As humans, we want to live meaningfully, yet we are often driven by impulse. In Religion and the Meaning of Life, Williams investigates this paradox – one with profound implications. Delving into felt realities pertinent to meaning, such as boredom, trauma, suicide, denial of death, and indifference, Williams describes ways to acquire meaning and potential obstacles to its acquisition. This book is unique in its willingness to transcend a more secular stance and explore how one's belief in God may be (...) relevant to life's meaning. Religion and the Meaning of Life's interdisciplinary approach makes it useful to philosophers, religious studies scholars, psychologists, students, and general readers alike. The insights from this book have profound real-world applications – they can transform how readers search for meaning and, consequently, how readers see and exist in the world. (shrink)

This is the first critical study of The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze's most important work on language and ethics, as well as the main source of his vital philosophy of the event.James Williams explains the originality of Deleuze's work with careful definitions of all his innovative terms and a detailed description of the complex structure he constructs. This reading makes connections to his ground-breaking work on literature, to his critical but also progressive relation to the sciences, and to his (...) controversial denial of the priority of standard logics, human values and 'meaning' in thinking.This book will open new debates and develop current ones around Deleuze's work in philosophy, politics, literature, linguistics, cultural studies and sociology. (shrink)

Introduction: the advance of governmentality -- Foucault, power, and governmentality: introduction; what is governmentality?; beyond the microphysics of power?; from theory of the state to genealogy of the state; history of the art of government; pastoral power; raison d'état; liberal governmentality; five propositions on foucault and governmentality -- Governmentality 3.4.7.: introduction; governmentality after Foucault; governmentality and the political sciences; some problems in governmentality -- Foucault effect redux? some notes on international governmentality studies: constellation; a few preliminary observations; problems and debates (...) in international governmentality studies -- Reconnecting governmentality and genealogy: introduction; genealogy and governmentality; pluralizing genealogy; practicing genealogy; lines of descent: the family tree of power?; counter-memory and re-serialization; the retrieval of forgotten struggles and subjugated knowledges -- Conclusion: encountering governmentality: governmentality as a new cartography of power; from mapping to encountering; governmentality and politics. (shrink)