A course on the afterlife of Plato’s Symposium can accomplish two worthwhile objectives. It can afford students an opportunity to study a philosophical and literary masterpiece, and it can introduce them to some of the main currents in modern European culture. One recent iteration of such a course addressed six questions: (1) Why might Plato have chosen to write a dialogue about a ‘drinking party’? (2) Why did Plato present multiple speeches on the nature of Eros? (3) Why have some (...) philosophers found fault with Socrates’ view of Eros? (4) How was this view embraced by the Neoplatonic thinkers Proclus and Plotinus? (5) How did Ficino’s de Amore bring the notion of a ‘Platonic Love’ to a series of European poets and artists? and (6) How did the view of love put forward in the Symposium inspire English poets from Ben Johnson and Sir Philip Sidney to Keats and Shelley? -/- . (shrink)

This is a one page handout presenting R.R. Marrett's objections to Frazer from an article reviewing books by Frazer and also one by Malinowski (and others not referred to here).

This is a one page handout presenting some objections A.R. Radcliffe-Brown makes to Frazer on rites and Frazer's evolutionism.

Xenophanes of Colophon (fl. 530 BC) is widely regarded as the first skeptic in the history of Western philosophy, but the character of his skepticism as expressed in his fragment B 34 has long been a matter of debate. After reviewing the interpretations of B 34 defended by Hermann Fränkel, Bruno Snell, and Sir Karl Popper, I argue that B 34 is best understood in connection with a traditional view of the sources and limits of human understanding. If we hold (...) that mortal beings can achieve certain knowledge only with the assistance of divine powers, while rejecting any possibility of bridging the divine-human gap, a broad skepticism concerning the prospects for human knowledge becomes inevitable. It is therefore of some relevance that Xenophanes repudiated the practice of divination through signs (mantikê) and offered entirely naturalistic explanations of phenomena popularly regarded as indications of the divine will (thunder, lightning, eclipses, rainbows, etc.). (shrink)

This is a one page handout presenting objections from Gluckman's book Politics, Law, and Ritual in Tribal Society.

In this essay, I discuss in detail two of the earliest such documentaries: Death Mills (1945), directed by Billy Wilder; and Nazi Concentration Camps (1945), directed by George Stevens. Both film-makers were able to get direct footage of the newly-liberated concentration camps from the U.S. Army. Wilder served as a Colonel in the U.S. Army’s Psychological Warfare department in 1945 and was tasked with producing a documentary on the death camps as well as helping to restart Germany’s film industry. I (...) next review the great French Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (1955), directed by Alain Resnais. This was a widely acclaimed film, winning the Prix Jean Vigo in 1956. Resnais employed a camp survivor (Jean Cayrol) to write the dialogue, and it is powerful, indeed, truly lyrical in places. The last film I review in the essay is a generally overlooked British Thames Television documentary, Genocide: 1941-1945 (1974), directed by Michael Darlow (and narrated by Sir Laurence Oliver). It was the first of the major Holocaust documentaries to focus on the point that the Nazi genocide targeted first and foremost the Jewish people, and to explore the development of Nazi racial theory, and the rise of the SS. (shrink)

In the summer of 2016, the University of Dallas and the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México organized a conference to discuss the topic of the middle class and its continued decline—recognizing that, despite some historical, political and cultural differences, healthy democracies throughout the hemisphere depend upon a strong and prosperous middle class. This volume brings together contributions by nine scholars from both institutions. The chapters reflect diverse disciplinary perspectives that are historical, political, economic, anthropological, and philosophical. Despite this diversity, the (...) volume possesses a conceptual unity that stems from its foundation in Aristotle’s approach to the middle class. On this basis, the topic is given a rigorous study that is both theoretical and data-driven. The chapters include treatments of Aristotle, Montesquieu, Adam Smith and Sir James Steuart, Catholic social teaching, the problem of inequality in the US, the definition and measurement of the middle class in Mexico, as well as its values and political attitudes, the rise of middle-class politics in early-twentieth-century Latin America, and a comparative analysis of healthcare for the middle class in North America. (shrink)

Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough presents a puzzle regarding how primitive peoples believe they can control something which civilized people regard as beyond their control: the weather. I clarify the puzzle and consider Frazer’s solution to it, as well as other solutions.

This paper interprets Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough as presenting an objection to diffusionism: the diffusionist theory cannot account for the isolation of the rite Frazer focuses on, in the societies studied by classicists.

This paper examines the debate between Marilyn Strathern and I.C. Jarvie. Writing in 1987, Strathern argues that the time is ripe for reincorporating Sir James Frazer. Jarvie thinks Strathern does so in a way that treats revolutions in anthropology as not involving scientific progress. There is a familiar defence against this charge while pursuing the same, or much the same, line of argument.

Why is there a norm of reciprocity in certain societies – the recipient of a gift should give a gift in return? Or what is its function? Sir James Frazer provides an unobvious answer to the function of such a norm in one society: it serves to establish who is alive.

There are some further responses I have to Mary Beard on the relationship between Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and British colonialism: her claim that it provided an image of the empire as a whole. The paper contains two objections, very minor ones perhaps, and some highly speculatively defences. But I find the defences difficult to present in the traditional manner, so I have written the responses as a pastiche imitating a widely read European writer.

Probably the most famous story about the armchair anthropologist Sir James Frazer is about how, when asked by William James about doing fieldwork, he said, “But Heavens forbid!” I propose that it was rational for Frazer to avoid fieldwork given his theory of what is rational for so-called savages: to kill returning tribesmen and visitors, to protect against disease.

It is discerned what light can bring the recent historical reconstructions of maxwellian optics and electromagnetism unification on the following philosophical/methodological questions. I. Why should one believe that Nature is ultimately simple and that unified theories are more likely to be true? II. What does it mean to say that a theory is unified? III. Why theory unification should be an epistemic virtue? To answer the questions posed genesis and development of Maxwellian electrodynamics are elucidated. It is enunciated that the (...) Maxwellian Revolution is a far more complicated phenomenon than it may be seen in the light of Kuhnian and Lakatosian epistemological models. Correspondingly it is maintained that maxwellian electrodynamics was elaborated in the course of the old pre-maxwellian programmes’ reconciliation: the electrodynamics of Ampére-Weber, the wave theory of Young-Fresnel and Faraday’s programme. To compare the different theoretical schemes springing from the different language games James Maxwell had constructed a peculiar neutral language. Initially it had encompassed the incompressible fluid models; eventually – the vortices ones. The three programmes’ encounter engendered the construction of the hybrid theory at first with an irregular set of theoretical schemes. However, step by step, on revealing and gradual eliminating the contradictions between the programmes involved, the hybrid set is “put into order” (Maxwell’s term). A hierarchy of theoretical schemes starting from ingenious crossbreeds (the displacement current) and up to usual hybrids is set up. After the displacement current construction the interpenetration of the pre-maxwellian programmes begins that marks the commencement of theoretical schemes of optics, electricity and magnetism real unification. Maxwell’s programme surpassed that of Ampére-Weber because it did absorb the ideas of the Ampére-Weber programme, as well as the presuppositions of the programmes of Young-Fresnel and Faraday properly co-ordinating them with each other. But the opposite statement is not true. The Ampére-Weber programme did not assimilate the propositions of the Maxwellian programme. Maxwell’s victory over his rivals became possible because the gist of Maxwell’s unification strategy was formed by Kantian epistemology looked in the light of William Whewell and such representatives of Scottish Enlightenment as Thomas Reid and Sir William Hamilton. Maxwell did put forward as basic synthetic principles the ideas that radically differed from that of Ampére-Weber approach by their open, flexible and contra-ontological, genuinly epistemological, Kantian character. For Maxwell, ether was not the ultimate building block of physical reality, from which all the charges and fields should be constructed. “Action at a distance”, “incompressible fluid”, “molecular vortices”, etc. were contrived analogies for Maxwell, capable only to direct the researcher at the “right” mathematical relations. Key words: J.C. Maxwell, unification of optics and electromagnetism, I. Kant, T. Reid, W. Hamilton . (shrink)

Advances in neuroscience implicate reentrant signaling as the predominant form of communication between brain areas. This principle was used in a series of masking experiments that defy explanation by feed-forward theories. The masking occurs when a brief display of target plus mask is continued with the mask alone. Two masking processes were found: an early process affected by physical factors such as adapting luminance and a later process affected by attentional factors such as set size. This later process is called (...) masking by object substitution, because it occurs whenever there is a mismatch between the reentrant visual representation and the ongoing lower level activity. Iterative reentrant processing was formalized in a computational model that provides an excellent fit to the data. The model provides a more comprehensive account of all forms of visual masking than do the long-held feed-forward views based on inhibitory contour interactions. (shrink)

There is good reason to believe that scientific realism requires a commitment to the objective modal structure of the physical world. Causality, equilibrium, laws of nature, and probability all feature prominently in scientific theory and explanation, and each one is a modal notion. If we are committed to the content of our best scientific theories, we must accept the modal nature of the physical world. But what does the scientific realist’s commitment to physical modality require? We consider whether scientific realism (...) is compatible with Humeanism about the laws of nature, and we conclude that it is not. We specifically identify three major problems for the best-systems account of lawhood: its central concept of strength cannot be formulated non-circularly, it cannot offer a satisfactory account of the laws of the special sciences, and it can offer no explanation of the success of inductive inference. In addition, Humeanism fails to be naturalistically motivated. For these reasons, we conclude that the scientific realist must embrace natural necessity. (shrink)

In 1947 Donald Cary Williams claimed in The Ground of Induction to have solved the Humean problem of induction, by means of an adaptation of reasoning first advanced by Bernoulli in 1713. Later on David Stove defended and improved upon Williams’ argument in The Rational- ity of Induction (1986). We call this proposed solution of induction the ‘Williams-Stove sampling thesis’. There has been no lack of objections raised to the sampling thesis, and it has not been widely accepted. In our (...) opinion, though, none of these objections has the slightest force, and, moreover, the sampling thesis is undoubtedly true. What we will argue in this paper is that one particular objection that has been raised on numerous occasions is misguided. This concerns the randomness of the sample on which the inductive extrapolation is based. (shrink)

If the reliability of a source of testimony is open to question, it seems epistemically illegitimate to verify the source’s reliability by appealing to that source’s own testimony. Is this because it is illegitimate to trust a questionable source’s testimony on any matter whatsoever? Or is there a distinctive problem with appealing to the source’s testimony on the matter of that source’s own reliability? After distinguishing between two kinds of epistemically illegitimate circularity—bootstrapping and self-verification—I argue for a qualified version of (...) the claim that there is nothing especially illegitimate about using a questionable source to evaluate its own reliability. Instead, it is illegitimate to appeal to a questionable source’s testimony on any matter whatsoever, with the matter of the source’s own reliability serving only as a special case. (shrink)

There has been a general failure among mental health theorists and social psychologists to understand the etiology of work-engendered depression. Yet the condition is increasingly prevalent in highly industrialized societies, where an exclusionary focus upon work, money, and the things that money can buy has displaced values that traditionally exerted a liberating and humanizing influence. Social critics have called the result an impoverishment of the spirit, a state of cultural bankruptcy, and an incapacity for genuine leisure. From a clinical perspective, (...) the condition has been diagnosed as widespread narcissism and obsessive work. -/- Acedia, a concept developed by the Scholastics, throws clarifying light on the origin of this form of depression. (shrink)

Little is known with regard to the precise cognitive tools the self uses in acquiring and processing information about itself. In this article, we underline the possibility that inner speech might just represent one such cognitive process. Duval and Wicklund’s theory of self-awareness and the selfconsciousness, and self-knowledge body of work that was inspired by it are reviewed, and the suggestion is put forward that inner speech parallels the state of self-awareness, is more frequently used among highly self-conscious persons, and (...) represents an effective, if not indispensable, tool involved in the formation of the self-concept. The possibility is also raised that the extent to which one uses inner speech could partially explain individual differences in self-consciousness and self-knowledge. A selective review of the private and inner speech literature is presented, and some possible ways of testing the hypothesis by using pre-existing techniques are proposed in the hope of stimulating empirical investigations. Some implications are outlined in conclusion. (shrink)

A study of the psychology of demoralization affecting university faculty in the liberal arts. This form of demoralization is not adequately understood in terms of the concept of career burnout. Instead, demoralization that affects university faculty in the liberal arts requires a broadened understanding of the historical and psychological situation in which these professors find themselves today.

This article examines when deceptive withholding of information is ethically acceptable in research. The first half analyses the concept of deception. We argue that there are two types of accounts of deception: normative and non-normative, and argue that non-normative accounts are preferable. The second half of the article argues that the relevant ethical question which ethics committees should focus on is not whether the person from whom the information is withheld will be deceived, but rather on the reasonableness of withholding (...) the information from the person who is deceived. We further argue that the reasonableness of withholding information is dependent on the context. The last section examines how the context of research should shape our judgements about the circumstances in which withholding information from research participants is ethically acceptable. We argue that some important features of research make it more difficult to justify withholding information in the context of research than elsewhere. (shrink)

In a series of articles, Dan Lopez De Sa and Elia Zardini argue that several theorists have recently employed instances of paradoxical reasoning, while failing to see its problematic nature because it does not immediately (or obviously) yield inconsistency. In contrast, Lopez De Sa and Zardini claim that resultant inconsistency is not a necessary condition for paradoxicality. It is our contention that, even given their broader understanding of paradox, their arguments fail to undermine the instances of reasoning they attack, either (...) because they fail to see everything that is at work in that reasoning, or because they misunderstand what it is that the reasoning aims to show. (shrink)

This paper examines a largely unrecognized mental disorder that is essentially a disability of values. It is their daily contact with this pathology that leads many university liberal arts faculty to demoralization. The deeply rooted disparity between the world of the traditional liberal arts scholar and today’s college students is not simply a gulf across which communication is difficult, but rather involves a pathological impairment in the majority of students that stems from an exclusionary focus on work, money, and the (...) acquisition of things. It is argued that this state of mind constitutes a self-disabling mental illness, which for a society becomes pathological ideology, and for the individual takes the form of clinical narcissism. (shrink)

Each of the standard outlooks in the philosophy of perception --phenomenalism, direct realism, indirect realism, scepticism -- has thus been viewed as Hume's own considered position in the eyes of informed commentators. I argue that Hume does not ascribe univocally to any one of the traditional stances in the philosophy of perception, nor does he leave us only a schizophrenic or 'mood' scepticism. Hume attempted to resolve the traditional philosophical problem (or perhaps more accurately, to set it aside on principled (...) grounds) by transforming the issue from one of theoretical consistency to one of pragmatic coherence. Hume's moderate scepticism and his systematic naturalism entail a reflective 'return' to the vulgar (cp. T 223), a qualified normative endorsement of the directly realist beliefs of common life. The interpretive challenge is to understand the subtle nature of that endorsement, and to explain how it arises out of genuinely Humean doctrines. The account offered here attempts both to capture Hume's own considered position and to explain the attractions and shortcomings of each of the competing interpretations. After laying out the elements of Hume's account of perceptual belief (section I), I proceed to examine in some detail two recent attempts to interpret Hume as a realist (sections II-III). I contend that these revisionary accounts ascribe unHumean doctrines to Hume. The interpretation of Hume as an irreducible 'mood' sceptic or as a phenomenalist are in that respect both closer to the mark, but Hume's reflective return to the vulgar has recast the nature of the problem and leaves us with a position that is not reflected in the more traditional interpretations (section IV). (shrink)

In this review essay, I review in detail Abram de Swann's fine new book, The Killing Compartments. The book is a theoretical analysis of the varieties and causes of genocides and other mass asymmetrical killing campaigns. I then suggest several criticisms of his analysis.

The central hypothesis of the collaboration between Language and Computing (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is that the methodology and conceptual rigor of a philosophically inspired formal ontology greatly benefits application ontologies. To this end r®, L&C’s ontology, which is designed to integrate and reason across various external databases simultaneously, has been submitted to the conceptual demands of IFOMIS’s Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). With this project we aim to move beyond the level of (...) controlled vocabularies to yield an ontology with the ability to support reasoning applications. Our general procedure has been the implementation of a meta-ontological definition space in which the definitions of all the concepts and relations in LinKBase® are standardized in a framework of first-order logic. In this paper we describe how this standardization has already led to an improvement in the LinKBase® structure that allows for a greater degree of internal coherence than ever before possible. We then show the use of this philosophical standardization for the purpose of mapping external databases to one another, using LinKBase® as translation hub, with a greater degree of success than possible hitherto. We demonstrate how this offers a genuine advance over other application ontologies that have not submitted themselves to the demands of philosophical scrutiny. LinKBase® is one of the world’s largest applications-oriented medical domain ontologies, and BFO is one of the world’s first philosophically driven reference ontologies. The collaboration of the two thus initiates a new phase in the quest to solve the so-called “Tower of Babel”. (shrink)

A psychological and historical study of college students from the standpoint of the psychology and history of American higher education and of liberal arts values.

In this essay, I briefly review ten of the best bio flicks of artists. After laying out my criteria for assessing biographical films about artists, I review my ten choices. These films are: The Agony and the Ecstasy; Frida; Local Color; The Moon and Sixpence; Girl with the Pearl Earring; Pollock; Rembrandt; Moulin Rouge; Modigliani; and Lust for Life. For each film, I try to explain the ways in which the directors were able to show the artist’s creative processes and (...) personal challenges. (shrink)

In this essay, I review a French-American gem of a movie, The Artist. This movie was an homage to the silent film era and is itself almost all silent. I discuss both the artistic and financial success of silent movies, and I praise this film for successfully interesting modern theater-goers despite its almost total lack of sound. The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and—for its outstanding lead actor, Jean Dujardin—Best Actor. It is the only French-produced (...) movie to win Best Picture, and the only (almost entirely) silent movie to win Best Picture since the start of the Academy Awards in 1929. (shrink)

In this essay, I review an extraordinary bio flick, Temple Grandin. Temple Grandin is a professor of animal science, and to achieve her distinguished career she had to deal with her autism. The film explores what it is to suffer this disease, but it also explores her extraordinary work involving making slaughterhouses more humane.

In this paper, we show how an internal tension in Wilfrid Sellars’s understanding of truth, as well as an external tension in his account of meaning attribution, can be resolved while adhering to a Sellarsian spirit, by appealing to the particular fictionalist accounts of truth-talk and proposition-talk that we have developed elsewhere.

From Soul to Self takes us on a fascinating journey through philosophy, theology, religious studies and physiological sciences. The contributors explore the relationship between a variety of ideas that have arisen in philosophy, religion and science, each idea seeking to explain why we think we are somehow unique and distinct.

This essay is my review of economist Mark Skousen’s book, The Big Three in Economics. In it, he discusses the economic work of Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. He gives even-handed treatments of the major contributions of each, for example, Smith’s reputation refutation of mercantilist policies and Smith’s crucial insight into the role that division of labor plays in economic growth. My only complaint is that Skousen doesn’t adequately explain his choice of Marx as a great economist. (...) What enduring contributions did he make to the field? Why name him rather than (say) David Ricardo? (shrink)

This essay is my review of Olaf Gersemann’s book, Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality. Gersemann was a reporter for Germany’s largest business weekly magazine, and he came to America to write an expose of the weakness of the American economy. What he found instead—and argued in detail—is that the American economy was robust, for better off than commonly believed in Europe. I finish the review by pointing out some things he overlooked, such as the fact that the U.S. has (...) paid and continues to pay disproportionately more for joint American/European defense, and that no European nation has allowed in the vast number of poor immigrants that America has. (shrink)

This essay is my review of Randal Marlin’s fine book, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (2nd Ed.). Marlin’s book examines the concept of propaganda, rightly noting that the term has a neutral meaning of just promulgating a point of view and a pejorative meaning of using deceit to push a point of view. Marlin gives a concise history of propaganda techniques, and propaganda theory—from ancient Greece through WWII—and has a good discussion of the ethical issues involved in propaganda.