The most successful theory in all of science--and the basis of one third of our economy--says the strangest things about the world and about us. Can you believe that physical reality is created by our observation of it? Physicists were forced to this conclusion, the quantum enigma, by what they observed in their laboratories. Trying to understand the atom, physicists built quantum mechanics and found, to their embarrassment, that their theory intimately connects consciousness with the physical world. Quantum Enigma explores (...) what that implies and why some founders of the theory became the foremost objectors to it. Schrodinger showed that it "absurdly" allowed a cat to be in a "superposition" simultaneously dead and alive. Einstein derided the theory's "spooky interactions." With Bell's Theorem, we now know Schrodinger's superpositions and Einstein's spooky interactions indeed exist. Authors Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner explain all of this in non-technical terms with help from some fanciful stories and bits about the theory's developers. They present the quantum mystery honestly, with an emphasis on what is and what is not speculation. Physics' encounter with consciousness is its skeleton in the closet. Because the authors open the closet and examine the skeleton, theirs is a controversial book. Quantum Enigma's description of the experimental quantum facts, and the quantum theory explaining them, is undisputed. Interpreting what it all means, however, is controversial. Every interpretation of quantum physics encounters consciousness. Rosenblum and Kuttner therefore turn to exploring consciousness itself--and encounter quantum physics. Free will and anthropic principles become crucial issues, and the connection of consciousness with the cosmos suggested by some leading quantum cosmologists is mind-blowing. Readers are brought to a boundary where the particular expertise of physicists is no longer a sure guide. They will find, instead, the facts and hints provided by quantum mechanics and the ability to speculate for themselves. (shrink)

The text includes fragments of his work that have never before been translated.

Trait Selective Abortions (TSA) have come under critique as a medical practice that presents potential disabled infants as burdens and lacking the potential for meaningful lives. This paper, using the author’s background as a disabled person, contends that the philosophy underpinning TSAs reflects liberal society’s lack of a theory of needs. The author argues for a care ethics based approach informed by disability analyses to engage with TSAs.

This book explains how the _Cratylus_, Plato’s apparently meandering and comical dialogue on the correctness of names, makes serious philosophical progress by its notorious etymological digressions. While still a wild ride through a Heraclitean flood of etymologies which threatens to swamp language altogether, the _Cratylus_ emerges as an astonishingly organized evaluation of the power of words.

A frank and candid glimpse into the early life of the maturing poet.

Moving from a purely religious rebirth to works grounded in a personal philosophy or aesthetic vocation, the autobiographies considered in this book stand as episodes in a genealogy of conversion.

Abstract:Every doctoral thesis requires contextualization within its specific discipline's theoretical bases. For a visual arts practice-based thesis, the relevant bases include those of aesthetics and visual perception. This article reviews a Western history of the domain of visual aesthetic theory, addressing both the analytical philosophical efforts to define art and the continental approaches, which construe art as social construction. It then reviews a third, normative stance that foregrounds cognitive value before definition or sociological context—an aesthetic cognitivist position, art practice as (...) a means of acquiring and sharing experiential knowledge and understanding. Contemporary concerns about environmental aesthetics and somaesthetics are also addressed in the Introduction. Aesthetic theories are related to visual perception theories as an aid to fulfilling the scholarly requirements for a practice-based thesis. (shrink)

In an article published in Prolegomena 2006, Christoph Schmidt-Petri has defended his interpretation and attacked mine of Mill’s idea that higher kinds of pleasure are superior in quality to lower kinds, regardless of quantity. Millian qualitative superiorities as I understand them are infinite superiorities. In this paper, I clarify my interpretation and show how Schmidt-Petri has misrepresented it and ignored the obvious textual support for it. As a result, he fails to understand how genuine Millian qualitative superiorities determine the novel (...) structure of Mill’s pluralistic utilitarianism, in which a social code of justice that distributes equal rights and duties takes absolute priority over competing considerations. Schmidt-Petri’s own interpretation is a non-starter, because it does noteven recognize that Mill is talking about different kinds of pleasant feelings, such that the higher kinds are intrinsically more valuable than the lower. I conclude by outlining why my interpretation is free of any metaphysical commitment to the “essence” of pleasure. (shrink)

The second edition of The Great Psychotherapy Debate has been updated and revised to include a history of healing practices, medicine, and psychotherapy, an expanded theoretical presentation of the contextual model, an examination of therapist effects, and a thorough review of the research on common factors such as the alliance, expectations, and empathy.

Proposals to release genetically engineered organisms in the wild raise complex ethical issues related to their safe and equitable implementation. While there is broad agreement that community and public engagement is vital to decision‐making in this context, more discussion is needed about who should be engaged in such activities and in what ways. This article identifies Indigenous peoples as key stakeholders in decisions about gene‐editing in the wild and argues that engagement activities need not only include Indigenous peoples but also (...) be designed, conducted, and analyzed in ways that confront longstanding power imbalances that dismiss Indigenous expertise. We offer specific recommendations to guide deliberative activities to not only be inclusive of Indigenous peoples but also to empower their diverse, situated knowledges. We call on those committed to the inclusive design of broad public deliberation to pursue strategies that shift dominant power dynamics to include Indigenous communities in more meaningful ways. (shrink)

Do humans start life with the capacity to detect and mentally represent the objects around them? Or is our object knowledge instead derived only as the result of prolonged experience with the external world? Are we simply able to perceive objects by watching their actions in the world, or do we have to act on objects ourselves in order to learn about their behavior? Finally, do we come to know all aspects of objects in the same way, or are some (...) aspects of our object understanding more epistemologically privileged than others? -/- "The Origins of Object Knowledge" presents the most up-to-date survey of the research into how the developing human mind understands the world of objects and their properties. It presents some of the best findings from leading research groups in the field of object representation approached from the perspective of developmental and comparative psychology. Topics covered in the book all address some aspect of what objects are from a psychological perspective; how humans and animals conceive what they are made of; what properties they possess; how we count them and how we categorize them; even how the difference between animate and inanimate objects leads to different expectations. The chapters also cover the variety of methodologies and techniques that must be used to study infants, young children, and non-human primates and the value of combining approaches to discovering what each group knows. -/- Bringing together leading researchers, communicating the most contemporary and exciting findings within the field of object representation, this volume will be an important work in the cognitive sciences, and of interest to those across the fields of developmental and comparative psychology. (shrink)

Mass literacy, mass communication, and the Internet have all increased the amount of information available. But false knowledge still abounds. Taking cues from Sir Thomas Browne, the English Renaissance skeptic, this title examines a host of contemporary errors in thinking and offers a powerful explanation of why they occur.

An indispensable collection that re-examines what it means to belong in the world. "Where are you from?" The word cosmopolitan was first used as a way of evading exactly this question, when Diogenes the Cynic declared himself a “kosmo-polites,” or citizen of the world. Cosmopolitanism displays two impulses—on the one hand, a detachment from one’s place of origin, while on the other, an assertion of membership in some larger, more compelling collective. Cosmopolitanisms works from the premise that there is more (...) than one kind of cosmopolitanism, a plurality that insists cosmopolitanism can no longer stand as a single ideal against which all smaller loyalties and forms of belonging are judged. Rather, cosmopolitanism can be defined as one of many possible modes of life, thought, and sensibility that are produced when commitments and loyalties are multiple and overlapping. Featuring essays by major thinkers, including Homi Bhabha, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Thomas Bender, Leela Gandhi, Ato Quayson, and David Hollinger, among others, this collection asks what these plural cosmopolitanisms have in common, and how the cosmopolitanisms of the underprivileged might serve the ethical values and political causes that matter to their members. In addition to exploring the philosophy of Kant and the space of the city, this volume focuses on global justice, which asks what cosmopolitanism is good for, and on the global south, which has often been assumed to be an object of cosmopolitan scrutiny, not itself a source or origin of cosmopolitanism. This book gives a new meaning to belonging and its ground-breaking arguments call for deep and necessary discussion and discourse. (shrink)

Micheline Sauvage of the French National Scientific Research Centre traces for us the story of this great Athenian and great philosopher, as seen both by his contemporaries and by the European philosophers who followed after him.

It is a truism that where one starts from and the direction one goes determines where one ends up. This is no less true in philosophy than elsewhere, and certainly no less true in matters dealing with the relationship between God’s foreknowledge and human free actions. In what follows I will argue that the incompatibilist view that Fischer and others stalwartly defend results from the particular starting point they choose, and that if one adopts a different starting point about divine (...) knowledge the logical incompatibility they envision and philosophically anguish over evaporates. (shrink)

Ranging from Joseph Bellamy to Hilary Putnam, and from early New England Divinity Schools to contemporary university philosophy departments, historian Bruce Kuklick recounts the story of the growth of philosophical thinking in the United States. Readers will explore the thought of early American philosphers such as Jonathan Edwards and John Witherspoon and will see how the political ideas of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson influenced philosophy in colonial America. Kuklick discusses The Transcendental Club (members Henry David Thoreau, (...) Ralph Waldo Emerson) and describes the rise of pragmatism centered on Metaphysical Club of Cambridge (and members William James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Peirce). He examines the profound impact Darwinism had on American philosophy and looks at Idealists such as the Kantian Josiah Royce and the Hegelian John Dewey. The book shows how, in the twentieth century, the Nazi conquest of Europe unleashed a flood of European intellectuals onto these shores, including such major thinkers as Theodore Adorno, Erich Fromm, Rudolph Carnap, and Alfred Tarski. Finally, Kuklick examines the contributions of such contemporary philosophers as Sidney Hook and Willard Quine and such books as John Rawl's A Theory of Justice and Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man. Kuklick pulls no punches in portraying the state of American philosophy today and its contested role in the intellectual life of the nation and the world. The range of philosophical thought in our nation's history has been great, from Edwards's Religious Affections to Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and Bruce Kuklick has captured it all in a book that blends intricate details with sweeping vision. (shrink)

Human Dignity The mercurial concept of human dignity features in ethical, legal, and political discourse as a foundational commitment to human value or human status. The source of that value, or the nature of that status, are contested. The normative implications of the concept are also contested, and there are two partially, or even wholly, … Continue reading Human Dignity →.

The Great Psychotherapy Debate: Models, Methods, and Findings comprehensively reviews the research on psychotherapy to dispute the commonly held view that the benefits of psychotherapy are derived from the specific ingredients contained in a given treatment (medical model). The author reviews the literature related to the absolute efficacy of psychotherapy, the relative efficacy of various treatments, the specificity of ingredients contained in established therapies, effects due to common factors, such as the working alliance, adherence and allegiance to the therapeutic protocol, (...) and effects that are produced by different therapists. In each case, the evidence convincingly corroborates the contextual model and disconfirms the prevailing medical model. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Philosophy, Dissent, and Nonconformity, 1689–1920Bruce KuklickAlan P. F. Sell. Philosophy, Dissent, and Nonconformity, 1689–1920. Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 2004. Pp. 296. Cloth, £50.00This is a competent, clearly written, and authoritative exploration of its topic, in some respects a labor of love, for the author is both a pastor and a student of theology. Sell comprehensively examines the proliferation of dissenting academies and nonconformist colleges of England and (...) Wales, with some excursions into the Scottish scene, from the Toleration Act of 1689 through the early twentieth century. For the 230 years of this study, a great variety of schools, many of which had only a brief moment of existence, and most of which were barely funded, offered training for the ministers of over a dozen protestant denominations in Britain. Often one man provided instruction in subjects as diverse as mathematics, science, and literature—as well as religious fields.Sell does not focus on ministerial training or even theology, but the way in which the nonconforming religious élite expounded on and was taught philosophy. Thus, one sees how a diverse group that surely had sectarian needs in mind was also interested in grasping how thinkers outside its belief system approached basic problems of human existence. Over time Descartes and other continental rationalists, Locke and the Cambridge Platonists, Kant and Hegel, and the nineteenth-century British idealists were taught by the dissenting professoriate. In summarizing its interpretation, Sell presents a history of modern Anglo-European philosophy as it was refracted in the minds of (some) English-speaking Protestants. Their emphases are not unexpected: empiricism is somewhat devalued, and rationalistic and a priori modes of thinking perhaps inflated. The ethical implications of epistemology and metaphysics are most carefully explicated, and what is taken to be most strategic for [End Page 211] Reformed theology is underscored. Overall, if one is tempted to generalize (as Sell himself does not), the positions reached are credible and not out of line with the philosophical cutting edge of each era.For the most part the dissenters were not themselves creative philosophers of the first rank, but Sell rightly puts forward (206) a short list of thinkers at these schools who have genuine claims to merit, and my own very short list would include Richard Price, James Martineau, and Robert Mackintosh.The author uses diverse strategies to give readers a sense of the effort of these mostly forgotten men. To some extent the book is a biographical compendium, with brief sections on individual or paired thinkers. But Sell also offers coverage by denomination, and he adds a series of discussions by topics—on an assortment of recurring dilemmas in moral philosophy and on apologetics. A final and most useful feature of the book is a trio of indices, in addition to the very full notes and a complete bibliography, mainly of the writings of the many authors cited. Two of the indices are standard, but helpful, lists of persons and topics; the third one is a compendium of all the academies Sell treats, as well as their denominational affiliation, and the duration of their existences.Philosophy, Dissent, and Nonconformity has the defects of its virtues. It is encyclopedic in nature, available for reference but unlikely to be read as a synthetic book, except by devotees of a certain kind of historical philosophical theology. The author also presumes his readers are unlikely to tackle the volume unless they have a prior attraction. That is, the book is written without much contextual explication, and attention to the needs of the non-specialist certainly would have made the volume of wider interest. The work is still relatively brief, under 300 pages, and because of its character, I would have liked to have seen a series of maps that pinpointed the whereabouts of the dissenting schools, giving the reader a visual sense of when and where they arose and declined among particular denominations, and that informed us of what the relations were among the successive professors who defined the learning.Bruce KuklickUniversity of PennsylvaniaCopyright © 2005 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc.... (shrink)

Geoffrey Scarre has recently argued that the version of qualitative hedonism which I attribute to Mill is unsatisfactory for various reasons. In his view, even if it is formally compatible with value monism, involves non-hedonistic elements and offers an implausible account of the relationship between and pleasures. In this paper, I show that his objections, which are similar in spirit to those pressed earlier by Bradley, Moore and others against Mill, are unfounded where not confused. The Mill/Riley line does (...) not rely on non-hedonistic standards and has sufficient flexibility to account for many different kinds of pleasures and pleasing activities. It remains a coherent version of qualitative hedonism, worthy of further consideration and study. (shrink)

Presents an historical analysis of social contract theory by considering the works of prominent philosophers.

One of the reasons why Kantian contractualism has been seen as an appealing alternative to utilitarianism is that it seems to be able to avoid utilitarianism's extreme demandingness, while retaining a fully impartial moral point of view. I argue that in the current state of the world, contractualist obligations to help those in need are not significantly less demanding than utilitarian obligations. I also argue that while a plausible version of utilitarianism would be considerably less demanding if the state of (...) the world were different, a central aspect of contractualism means that it would remain exceedingly demanding in any practically realizable state of the world. (shrink)

There is an argument for the existence of God from the incompleteness of nature that is vaguely present in Plantinga’s recent work. This argument, which rests on the metaphysical implications of quantum physics and the philosophical deficiency of necessitarian conceptions of physical law, deserves to be given a clear formulation. The goal is to demonstrate, via a suitably articulated principle of sufficient reason, that divine action in an occasionalist mode is needed (and hence God’s existence is required) to bring causal (...) closure to nature and render it ontologically functional. The best explanation for quantum phenomena and the most adequate understanding of general providence turns out to rest on an ontic structural realism in physics that is grounded in the immaterialist metaphysics of theistic idealism. (shrink)

A study of Philo and Paul and the first-century sophistic movement.

In this paper we outline the activities of young girls in a Toba community of northern Argentina and examine the effect of girl helpers on time allocation of nursing women. Activity budgets were obtained for 41 girls aged 3 to 15 using spot observations. Girls spent substantial portions of observations engaged in helping behaviors. Individual values varied with age, anthropometric characteristics, and birth order. Activity budgets of 21 nursing women were obtained through focal observation sessions. Women living in households with (...) girls aged 7 to 15 allocated 17% less time to domestic work and 9% more time to socializing during afternoon observation sessions. For nursing women in this community, direct childcare (provided by the infant’s own mother) seemed to be a priority. Living with a girl helper did not have any measurable effect on the frequency or duration of nursing, or on the time that women spent caring for their infants. Based on these findings, hypotheses are outlined for future work on the effect of girl helpers on women’s fertility. (shrink)

How does a social enterprise pursue its ethical mandate of social impact growth while navigating the perils of the most vulnerable stage in a venture’s life—scaling up? We observe a small inclusivity social enterprise attempting to scale up rapidly to create equality for people with disabilities throughout the world. Our embedded, ethnographic study is terminated with the venture’s unfortunate demise after their dramatic effort to scale up failed. By examining scaling decision-making and conflicts around creation reasoning longitudinally, our study identifies (...) over-use of effectual logic—a creation reasoning type considered more ethical and more appropriate for high-innovativeness contexts than causal logic—as a major factor in the venture’s failure. From this insight, we extend the parameters of effectuation theory to scaling up and dimensionalize its ethical implications. Guidance for social entrepreneurs to scale up successfully while maintaining ethical integrity is also provided. (shrink)

John Gray, much influenced by Isaiah Berlin and building on work by the late John Rees and the late Fred Berger, has recently stated three ‘fatal’ objections which virtually all analysts seem to find persuasive against John Stuart Mill's classic doctrine of liberty. First, Gray thinks it ‘an obvious objection to Mill's project that conceptions of harm vary with competing moral outlooks, so that no Principle of Liberty whose application turns on judgements about harm can expect to resolve disputes between (...) exponents of opposed moral perspectives’. Even if we overlook Mill's strange silence in the matter and supply him with a reasonable definition of harm, it remains clear that the liberty principle ‘is not, and cannot be, the very simple principle Mill sought’. For ‘Mill's principle is in its very nature radically incomplete. It tells us what we may not do, but not what we ought to do.’ To know when liberty should in fact be restrained, ‘we must look to other principles—chiefly the Principle of Utility itself’. But if general utility alone can ‘tell us how much liberty may be given up for how much harm-prevention’, then ‘there can be no question of adherence to [an] exceptionless principle such as Mill's Principle of Liberty’. Thus, even if we believe that Mill's version of utilitarianism is coherent, his judgements about the regulation of conduct must depend on a highly complex and controversial moral doctrine. (shrink)

This thesis is about making decisions when we are uncertain about what will happen, how valuable it will be, and even how to make decisions. Even the most sure-footed amongst us are sometimes uncertain about all three, but surprisingly little attention has been given to the latter two. The three essays that constitute my thesis hope to do a small part in rectifying this problem. The first essay is about the value of finding out how to make decisions. Society spends (...) considerable resources funding people (like me) to research decision-making, so it is natural to wonder whether society is getting a good deal. This question is so shockingly underresearched that bedrock facts are readily discoverable, such as when this kind of information is valuable. My second essay concerns whether we can compare value when we are uncertain about value. Many people are in fact uncertain about value, and how we deal with this uncertainty hinges on these comparisons. I argue that value comparisons are only sometimes possible; I call this weak comparability. This essay is largely a synthesis of the literature, but I also present an argument which begins with a peculiar view of the self: it is as if each of us is a crowd of different people separated by time (but connected by continuity of experience). I’m not the first to endorse this peculiar view of the self, but I am the first to show how it supports the benign view that value is sometimes comparable. We may be uncertain of any decision rules, even those that would tell us how to act when we face uncertainty in decision rules. We may be uncertain of how to decide how to decide how to... And so on. If so, we might have to accept infinitely many decision rules just to make any mundane decision, such as whether to pick up a five-cent piece from the gutter. My third essay addresses this problem of regress. I think all of our decisions are forced: we must decide now or continue to deliberate. Surprisingly, this allows us to avoid the original problem. I call this solution “when forced, do your best”. (shrink)