The central mission of cognitive science is to reveal the real nature of the mind, however familiar or foreign that nature may be to naive preconceptions. The existence of naive conceptions is also important, however. Prescientific thought and language contain concepts of the mental, and these concepts deserve attention from cognitive science. Just as scientific psychology studies folk physics (McCloskey 1983, Hayes 1985), viz., the common understanding (or misunderstanding) of physical phenomena, so it must study folk psychology, the common understanding (...) of mental states. This subfield of scientific psychology is what I mean by the phrase 'the psychology of folk psychology'. (shrink)

Since it appeared in 1971, John Rawls's A Theory of Justice has become a classic. The author has now revised the original edition to clear up a number of difficulties he and others have found in the original book. Rawls aims to express an essential part of the common core of the democratic tradition--justice as fairness--and to provide an alternative to utilitarianism, which had dominated the Anglo-Saxon tradition of political thought since the nineteenth century. Rawls substitutes the ideal of the (...) social contract as a more satisfactory account of the basic rights and liberties of citizens as free and equal persons. "Each person," writes Rawls, "possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override." Advancing the ideas of Rousseau, Kant, Emerson, and Lincoln, Rawls's theory is as powerful today as it was when first published. (shrink)

Though the revised edition of A Theory of Justice, published in 1999, is the definitive statement of Rawls's view, so much of the extensive literature on Rawls's theory refers to the first edition. This reissue makes the first edition once again available for scholars and serious students of Rawls's work.

This paper defends a global principle of equality of opportunity, which states that it is unfair if some have worse opportunities because of their national or civic identity. It begins by outlining the reasoning underpinning this principle. It then considers three objections to global equality of opportunity. The first argues that global equality of opportunity is an inappropriate ideal given the great cultural diversity that exists in the world. The second maintains that equality of opportunity applies only to people who (...) are interconnected in some way and infers from this that it should not be implemented at the global level. The third, inspired by Rawls's The Law of Peoples, maintains that it is inappropriate to thrust liberal ideals (like global equality of opportunity) on nonliberal peoples. Each of these challenges, I argue, is unpersuasive. (shrink)

Bibliography of works in experimental philosophy.