The view that ancient philosophers made no use of the notion of consciousness, and perhaps even the view that consciousness does not enter philosophical discourse before Descartes, may still have its adherents. However, anyone who reads the Enneads can hardly overlook the fact that consciousness plays an important role in Plotinus. D. M. Hutchinson’s study is thus …
Hugh LaFollette has offered an informative, compelling and readable contribution to the philosophical literature on America’s gun debate, which, as of yet, is still relatively small. He gives an overview of three major sets of arguments for and against gun control: armchair arguments, rights based arguments, and empirical arguments. He appraises each in turn, and …
William James famously writes: We must know the truth; and we must avoid error—these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commitment, they are two separable laws (James, 1896). The core insight in this passage is that as epistemic agents we face competing …
Published in Blackwell’s Contemporary Social Issues series, Taking Moral Action has as its goal, “to provide a first overview of the emerging but highly fragmented field of moral psychology. . .for both those beginning in the field and those deep in the weeds and thickets of theoretical controversy” (xiii). Chuck Huff, an American social psychologist, and Almut …
Nearly twenty years ago in West Nickel Creek, Pennsylvania, Charles Carl Roberts IV entered a one-room schoolhouse and gunned down ten schoolchildren. Six of the children died. In the aftermath, the Amish community whose children were the victims, did not respond with demands for retribution. Instead, they extended forgiveness. They not only posthumously forgave Roberts, …
In 1998 Andy Clark and David Chalmers published an article entitled “The Extended Mind” in which they argued that the mind extends beyond the skull. This was, and to many still is, a rather remarkable thesis. To be clear, they weren’t the first to challenge the boundaries of the mind. Others had argued that the …
This book is a collection of interesting papers edited by Walter Ott and Lydia Patton. It fills an oft-noted gap in the laws literature: namely, connecting familiar contemporary accounts to their early modern predecessors. Chapters one through six describe and evaluate several different notions of laws that appear in early modern history and explore how …
Stephen S. Bush takes on the difficult task of building an account of William James’s democratic political thought. As Bush notes, a number of scholars have dismissed the idea that James had anything to say politically, with the exception of a few condemnations of lynching. Bush clearly succeeds in rebutting those dismissive of James as …
This book gives a comprehensive account of morality, both its deontic part, about what we ought or have reason to do, and its evaluative part, about what’s desirable or good, and it does so in the general style of W.D. Ross. Garrett Cullity doesn’t give verdicts on particular acts or outcomes, nor state principles that …
Much human behavior is stimulus-free. While plants and many non-human animals respond reflexively to their present environment, our own actions are mediated by our ability to represent how the world has been and how it could be, and how we might alter it to achieve our goals. Philosophers who have explored the evolutionary pressures giving …
Efficient Cognition: The Evolution of Representational Decision Making Read More »