scholarly journals William James and 18th-century anthropology

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jerome Carroll

This article discusses the common ground between William James and the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Recent commentators on this overlap have characterised philosophical anthropology as combining science (in particular biology and medicine) and Kantian teleology, for instance in Kant’s seminal definition of anthropology as being concerned with what the human being makes of itself, as distinct from what attributes it is given by nature. This article registers the tension between Kantian thinking, which reckons to ground experience in a priori categories, and William James’s psychology, which begins and ends with experience. It explores overlap between James’s approach and the characteristic holism of 18th-century philosophical anthropology, which centres on the idea of understanding and analysing the human as a whole, and presents the main anthropological elements of James’s position, namely his antipathy to separation, his concerns about the binomial terms of traditional philosophy, his preference for experience over substances, his sense that this holist doctrine of experience shows a way out of sterile impasses, a preference for description over causation, and scepticism. It then goes on to register the common ground with key ideas in the work of anthropologists from around 1800, along with some references to anthropologists who come in James’s wake, in particular Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, in order to reconceptualise the connection between James’s ideas and the tradition of anthropological thinking in German letters since the late 18th-century, beyond its characterisation as a combination of scientific positivism and teleology.

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-185
Author(s):  
Edyta Sokalska

The reception of common law in the United States was stimulated by a very popular and influential treatise Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone, published in the late 18th century. The work of Blackstone strengthened the continued reception of the common law from the American colonies into the constituent states. Because of the large measure of sovereignty of the states, common law had not exactly developed in the same way in every state. Despite the fact that a single common law was originally exported from England to America, a great variety of factors had led to the development of different common law rules in different states. Albert W. Alschuler from University of Chicago Law School is one of the contemporary American professors of law. The part of his works can be assumed as academic historical-legal narrations, especially those concerning Blackstone: Rediscovering Blackstone and Sir William Blackstone and the Shaping of American Law. Alschuler argues that Blackstone’s Commentaries inspired the evolution of American and British law. He introduces not only the profile of William Blackstone, but also examines to which extent the concepts of Blackstone have become the basis for the development of the American legal thought.


Author(s):  
Vanessa Dirksen ◽  
Bas Smit

A great deal of the literature on virtual communities evolves around classifying the phenomenon1 while much empirically constructive work on the topic has not been conducted yet. Therefore, the research discussed in this paper proposes to explore the actual field of the virtual community (VC). By means of a comparative ethnographic research, virtual communities are to be defined in terms of their inherent social activity, the interaction between the groups of people and the information and communication technology (ICT), and the meanings attached to it by its members. This chapter will report on the initial propositions, research questions and approach of the explorative research of working towards a “workable definition” of virtual communities. It will also present its “work to be done” which will ultimately form the basis of moving beyond defining virtual communities, i.e., actually designing and deploying one.


Author(s):  
Andreas Stokke

This chapter provides a detailed account of the notion of the common ground of conversations, which plays a central role in the Stalnakerian account of assertion that the book relies on for its characterization of lying. The chapter specifies that common ground information is defined in terms of acceptance, rather than belief, and shows how this feature allows that bald-faced lies are assertions. Moreover, the chapter demonstrates how the Stalnakerian conception of communication makes room for bald-faced implicatures. A number of objections to this picture of assertion and the common ground definition of lying are rebutted, including issues concerning the notion of proposing information for common ground uptake, as well as problems involving metaphor and malapropism.


Author(s):  
Francis Dunlop

Max Scheler, usually called a phenomenologist, was probably the best known German philosopher of the 1920s. Always an eclectic thinker, he was a pupil of the neo-idealist Rudolph Eucken, but was also strongly influenced by the life-philosophies of Dilthey and Bergson. While teaching at Jena he regularly met Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological movement, and his mature writings have a strongly phenomenological, as well as a Catholic, stamp. Later he turned towards metaphysics and the philosophical problems raised by modern science. Scheler’s interests were very wide. He tried to do justice to all aspects of experience – ethical, religious, personal, social, scientific, historical – without doing away with the specific nature of each. Above all, he took the emotional foundations of thought seriously. Many of his insights are striking and profound, and sometimes his arguments are very telling, but his power to organize his material consistently and to attend conscientiously to the business of justification is poorly developed. Scheler is best known for his anti-Kantian ethics, based on an a priori emotional grasp of a hierarchy of objective values, which precedes all choice of goods and purposes. He himself describes his ethics as ‘personalist’, and makes personal values supreme, sharply distinguishing the ‘person’ from the ‘ego’, and linking this with his analysis of different types of social interaction. In epistemology he defends a pragmatist approach to science and perception; thus philosophy, as the intuition of essences, requires a preparatory ascetic discipline. His philosophy of religion is an attempt to marry the Augustinian approach through love with the Thomist approach through reason. In his later work, to which his important work on sympathy provides the transition, he defends a dualist philosophical anthropology and metaphysics, interpreting the latter in activist terms as a resolution of the tensions between spiritual love and vital impulse.


2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-475
Author(s):  
Sepideh Yasrebi

Abstract This paper examines indirect reports from the lens of socio-cognitive approach (SCA) to pragmatics. Indirect reports have the capacity to re-mold the substance of the original utterance as a whole. In direct reporting, the original utterance is produced in an actual situational context, and then, it is being reported by a different speaker in a new situational context. So, the utterance which was initially produced is only interpretable in the light of the common ground A whereas the reported utterance is only interpretable in the light of common ground B. We have it from Kecskes (2013. Intercultural pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press: 159) that “common ground is both an a priori existing and a cooperatively constructed mental abstraction. Likewise, the main condition of reporting is the need of the hearer: there would be no need for reported speech if the audience were already aware of the content of the report. For that reason, the process of meaning making in reporting, that is, the transmission and simultaneously creation of meaning is inextricably bound with the question of context, salience, common ground, pragmatics, semantics and syntax, not to mention all those bodily gestures and expressions that can, or more importantly, cannot be registered in language.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 22
Author(s):  
Marcelo Saad ◽  
Roberta de Medeiros

The spiritual dimension of patients has progressively gained more relevance in healthcare in the last decades. However, the term “spiritual” is an open, fluid concept and, for health purposes, no definition of spirituality is universally accepted. Health professionals and researchers have the challenge to cover the entire spectrum of the spiritual level in their practice. This is particularly difficult because most healthcare courses do not prepare their graduates in this field. They also need to face acts of prejudice by their peers or their managers. Here, the authors aim to clarify some common grounds between secular and religious worlds in the realm of spirituality and healthcare. This is a conceptual manuscript based on the available scientific literature and on the authors’ experience. The text explores the secular and religious intersection involving spirituality and healthcare, together with the common ground shared by the two fields, and consequent clinical implications. Summarisations presented here can be a didactic beginning for practitioners or scholars involved in health or behavioural sciences. The authors think this construct can favour accepting the patient’s spiritual dimension importance by healthcare professionals, treatment institutes, and government policies.


Author(s):  
Ashley T. Rubin

Prisons are government-sanctioned facilities designed for the long-term confinement of adults as punishment for serious offenses. This definition of prisons, frequently belied by actual practice but an accurate representation of the prison as an ideal type, emerged relatively late in human history. For most of Western history, incarceration played a minor role in punishment and was often reserved for elites or political offenders; however, it was rarely considered a punishment in its own right for most offenders. The notion of the prison as a place of punishment emerged gradually, according to most accounts, over the 17th through 19th centuries. Although there were several precursors to penal incarceration, the most influential was the 17th-century Dutch workhouse, the first formal uses of penal incarceration in a prison as a distinct institution began with the American proto-prison in late 18th century and evolved into the modern prison in the early to mid-19th century. These modern prisons proved influential around the world. In late-19th-century America, however, the modern prison experienced a series of re-imaginings or iterations beginning with a proliferation of different forms, including distinctive forms of Southern punishment (convict leasing, chain gangs, and plantation-style prisons), specialized prisons across the country (women’s prisons, adult reformatories, and maximum-security prisons), and efforts to reduce reliance on prisons (drawing on innovations from Australia and Ireland). This flurry of activity was followed by a period of serial re-creation in the 20th century in the form of the big-house prison, the correctional institution, and the warehouse prison, including its subtype: the supermaximum-security prison. In this recent period, American prisons have once again become models copied by other countries.


Numen ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 258-286
Author(s):  
Arthur McCalla

AbstractThis article analyzes the histories of religions of Louis de Bonald, Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, Pierre-Simon Ballanche, and Ferdinand d'Eckstein. Rather than offer yet another definition of Romanticism, it seeks to establish a framework by which to render intelligible a set of early nineteenth-century French histories of religions that have been largely ignored in the history of the study of religion. It establishes their mutual affinity by demonstrating that they are built on the common structural elements of an essentialist ontology, an epistemology that eludes Kantian pessimism, and a philosophy of history that depicts development as the unfolding of a preexistent essence according to an a priori pattern. Consequent upon these structural elements we may identify five characteristics of French Romantic histories of religions: organic developmentalism; reductionism; hermeneutic of harmonies; apologetic intent; and reconceptualization of Christian doctrine. Romantic histories of religions, as syntheses of traditional faith and historical-mindedness, are at once a chapter in the history of the study of religion and in the history of religious thought.


Zootaxa ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4691 (3) ◽  
pp. 250-260
Author(s):  
ROLAND E. VAN DER VLIET ◽  
ALICE CIBOIS ◽  
ANITA GAMAUF ◽  
JUSTIN J.F.J. JANSEN

We re-examined the putative type specimen of Society Kingfisher Todiramphus veneratus (J. F. Gmelin, 1788) in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien (NMW 50.633) and conclude based on plumage that it represents the taxon from Moorea, T. veneratus youngi Sharpe, 1892, rather than nominate T. veneratus veneratus from Tahiti. X-rays reveal that it was prepared using techniques common in the late 18th century, and that its preparation style matches that of other specimens collected during Cook’s three voyages. NMW 50.633 has been assumed to be the one, or one of a number of, specimen(s) used by Latham to describe and illustrate his ‘Venerated Kingfisher’ (present-day Society Kingfisher), which was the basis of the later valid introduction of the name Alcedo venerata by J. F. Gmelin. However, whereas the description and an unpublished illustration in Latham’s archives agree closely with veneratus from Tahiti, NMW 50.633 appears to represent Moorea youngi. While this finding does not compromise the definition of Society Kingfisher veneratus, it leaves it without a safely identified type specimen. We also examined a Moorea specimen in the National Museums Liverpool (LIVCM D2366) that is almost as old as NMW 50.633, but which X-rays suggest had a different origin than NMW 50.633. 


2017 ◽  
Vol 58 ◽  
pp. 859-904 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Miller ◽  
Jens Pfau ◽  
Liz Sonenberg ◽  
Yoshihisa Kashima

According to Clark's seminal work on common ground and grounding, participants collaborating in a joint activity rely on their shared information, known as common ground, to perform that activity successfully, and continually align and augment this information during their collaboration. Similarly, teams of human and artificial agents require common ground to successfully participate in joint activities. Indeed, without appropriate information being shared, using agent autonomy to reduce the workload on humans may actually increase workload as the humans seek to understand why the agents are behaving as they are. While many researchers have identified the importance of common ground in artificial intelligence, there is no precise definition of common ground on which to build the foundational aspects of multi-agent collaboration. In this paper, building on previously-defined modal logics of belief, we present logic definitions for four different types of common ground. We define modal logics for three existing notions of common ground and introduce a new notion of common ground, called salient common ground. Salient common ground captures the common ground of a group participating in an activity and is based on the common ground that arises from that activity as well as on the common ground they shared prior to the activity. We show that the four definitions share some properties, and our analysis suggests possible refinements of the existing informal and semi-formal definitions.


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