My topic is a long-standing tension in the interpretation of religion. On the one hand, it seems undeniable — seems almost to go without saying — that liturgical and sacrificial practices, sacred dance, divination, procession and pilgrimage are intentional actions undertaken by persons. Yet there is a distinguished tradition in the study of religion according to which religious activity is typically caused by forces over which the agent has little or no control. Visible, latter-day members of this tradition include Hume, (...) Nietzsche, Marx, Durkheim, Freud, and, in some moods, Wittgenstein, but its roster is by no means limited to the religiously unmusical. (shrink)

As we enter the twenty-first century, a new set of unexamined assumptions that may be labelled managerialism is coming to dominate university life. In spite of the changes that have been taking place, semantics have largely remained stable. As a result, there has been little recognition of a need to examine the transformation carefully and critically. This paper seeks to explicate the changes, show how they express a common managerialist philosophy and critically analyze them. It does so by dividing the (...) topics to be discussed into two sections: People and Program. The first section shows how conceptual assumptions in regard to central components of the university have changed. Students are now thought of as consumers, administrators as managers, trustees as directors and faculty as employee stakeholders. These conceptual renderings are consistent with and support a managerialist philosophy. The second section shows how a previously accepted bright line between education and training has broken down so that what we thought of as education has become little more than ornamentation for what are basically training programs. In addition, the training programs have achieved a semantic victory by persuading us to refer to them as education. The program change is fully consonant with the people changes. The academy has become one more instance of the general management philosophy that dominates our societies. We have lost our role as autonomous critics and uncritically become a component of the larger arrangement. (shrink)

Current debates about liberal education have distracted us from responding intelligently to the growth and dominance of professional preparation programs. In 1828, the Yale faculty, confronted with similar circumstances, developed what may be the last widely influential philosophy of liberal education. It gives us a starting point, as does Plato's Republic. Democracy and the knowledge-based economy require us to articulate a new philosophy of liberal education. Using Kantian terminology, I argue that, whereas the basic purpose of professional preparation is to (...) produce heteronomous behavior, the purpose of liberal education should be the development of autonomous individuals. (shrink)

Studying human beings as physicists have studied the world for so many years has been the aim of a substantial number of social scientists at least since the time of Comte. Basing their claim upon a certain metaphysics and anthropology, such thinkers have insisted over and over again that such a program is at least theoretically possible. But can a program, which cannot be put into practice on even a very rudimentary level, really be theoretically possible in the first place? (...) Physicists have known that space travel was theoretically possible ever since the seventeenth century and have made steady progress towards its implementation up until its recent fulfillment. Instead of making progress, however, the social scientists are still talking about what they are going to do some day when they acquire the tools for doing it. Even this would not be so bad, provided they knew exactly what kind of tools they needed and how to manufacture them. Today, though, even this pre-preliminary stage has not been brought to a successful conclusion. Some thinkers among the ranks of social scientists, however, are beginning to see their way clear to a better understanding of their collective predicament. H M Blalock Jr., professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, appears to be one of these thinkers. (shrink)

This paper relates intentionality, a central feature of human consciousness, with brain functions controlling adaptive action. Mental intentionality, understood as the “aboutness” of mental states, includes two modalities: semantic intentionality, the attribution of meaning to mental states, and projective intentionality, the projection of conscious content into the world. We claim that both modalities are the evolutionary product of self-organized action, and discuss examples of animal behavior that illustrate some stages of this evolution. The adaptive advantages of self-organized action impacted on (...) brain organization, leading to the formation of mammalian brain circuits that incorporate semantic intentionality in their modus operandi. Following the same line of reasoning, we suggest that projective intentionality could be explained as a result of habituation processes referenced to the dynamical interface of the body with the environment. (shrink)

Proceedings of the eighth trans-disciplinary symposium on philosophy and medicine held at Farmington, Connecticut, November 9-11,1978.

in a scientific way, and takes the patient and his family into his confidence. Thus he learns something from the sufferer, and at the same time instructs the invalid to the best of his power. He does not give his prescriptions until he has won the patient's support, and when he has done so, he steadilY aims at producing complete restoration to health by persuading the sufferer in to compliance (Laws 4. 720 b-e, [28]). This passage shows the perennial nature (...) of the problems of treating the patient as a person. It shows as well the historical'depth of philosophical interest in medicine. The history of philosophy includes more reflections upon medical ethics than the casual reader might suspect. Many of these reflections are pertinent to contemporary issues such as abortion and population control. Plato, for example, recommends abortion in cases of incest (Republic 5. 461c); and Aristotle argues for letting seriously deformed children die, while forbidding infanticide as a means of popUlation control, suggesting instead the use of early abortions. 'As to the exposure in rearing of children, let there be a law that no deformed child shall live, but that on the ground of an excess in the number of children... let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what mayor may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation' (Politics VII, 16,335 b20-26, [4]). (shrink)

Willard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, "Language is asocial art.

First published in 1978. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

We develop a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religions and apply it to resolve two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: (1) the rise of large-scale cooperation among strangers and, simultaneously, (2) the spread of prosocial religions in the last 10–12 millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutually energizing. We explain how a package of culturally evolved religious beliefs and practices characterized by increasingly potent, moralizing, supernatural agents, credible displays of faith, (...) and other psychologically active elements conducive to social solidarity promoted high fertility rates and large-scale cooperation with co-religionists, often contributing to success in intergroup competition and conflict. In turn, prosocial religious beliefs and practices spread and aggregated as these successful groups expanded, or were copied by less successful groups. This synthesis is grounded in the idea that although religious beliefs and practices originally arose as nonadaptive by-products of innate cognitive functions, particular cultural variants were then selected for their prosocial effects in a long-term, cultural evolutionary process. This framework (1) reconciles key aspects of the adaptationist and by-product approaches to the origins of religion, (2) explains a variety of empirical observations that have not received adequate attention, and (3) generates novel predictions. Converging lines of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines provide empirical support while at the same time encouraging new research directions and opening up new questions for exploration and debate. (shrink)

This collection of essays examines the ways in which disputes and controversies about the application of scientific knowledge are resolved. Four concrete examples of public controversy are considered in detail: the efficacy of Laetrile, the classification of homosexuality as a disease, the setting of safety standards in the workplace, and the utility of nuclear energy as a source of power. The essays in this volume show that debates about these cases are not confined to matters of empirical fact. Rather, as (...) is seen with most scientific and technical controversies, they focus on and are structured by complex ethical, economic, and political interests. Drs. Engelhardt and Caplan have brought together a distinguished group of scholars from the sciences and humanities, who sketch a theory of scientific controversy and attempt to provide recommendations about the ways in which both scientists and the public ought to seek more informed resolutions of highly contentious issues in science and technology. Scientific Controversies is offered as a contribution to the better understanding of the roles of both science and nonscientific interests in disputes and controversies pertaining to science and technology. (shrink)

Proceedings of the second trans-disciplinary symposium on philosophy and medicine held at Farmington, Connecticut, May 15-17, 1975.

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article ““Black Box” Theatre: Second-Order Cybernetics and Naturalism in Rehearsal and Performance” by Tom Scholte. Upshot: What von Foerster accomplished in raising the specter of second-order cybernetics now requires experimental design and the heavy lifting of theory to complete his quest for new ways of thinking. Scholte’s “black box theatre” points to research into non-trivial systems as a formal means of grasping living systems.