In The Varieties of Religious Experience William James openly resisted the intellectual standards of both absolute idealism and the science of his day. As a result the book has often been read as an interesting but naive exploration of religion, Reinhold Niehbuhr, for example, talks of "the dated quality" of James’s thought. James manages to come off as a not quite respectable philosopher and a not quite respectable scientist. However, the unrespectability he achieves is one he embraces. It is a function of his attempt to employ his radical empiricism in the spirit of revising both philosophy and science. In A Pluralistic Universe he remarked that inquiries into the meanings of human existence required more than thin conceptual analyses of experiences; they requited the use of a wider range of exploratory tools—the "wild beasts of the philosophical desert," among which are descriptive psychology, biography, and psychical research. James used the "wild beasts" in the Varieties to show the consequences of religious experiences in the world. The result, I suggest, is a pragmatic work with a practical and political edge that resists worlds dominated either by rationalist idealism or conventional scientism; as James examined both the beneficial and detrimental effects of religious experience, he hinted that a world in which religious experience is not taken seriously for what it can accomplish is a more barren world than one driven by a closed idealism or by a positivistic science. These are suggestions that seem to me still relevant.

Although the biological conception of race has been discredited, this has not dissovled the need for developing an existential account of race. So far efforts to do so have relied heavily on Sartre’s writings from the 1940s. It is argued here that his Critique of Dialectical Reason provides a much richer basis for such an attempt.

As we approach the hundredth anniversary of William James’s Gifford Lectures (1901-1902), it is worthwhile to attempt to re-evaluate the importance of the resultant volume. James recognized that his ideas were vulnerable to criticism both from the side of "religion" and from the side of "biology." Leaving the former sort of inquiry to others, I will take up the latter sort and ask questions about James’s presentation of such key issues as: the secondary role of rationality in life; the relationship of the subconscious and the "more" to conscious experience; the happy parallelism of insight and pathology; the interpretation of experiences to which we admit to having no access; the issue of truth, etc.

According to Duns Scotus, developing some standard insights in the Aristotelian tradition, natures common to many created particulars have in themselves a unity that is "less-than-numerical," such that a common nature as instantiated is numerically many — it is divided into its many particulars. The less-than-numerical unity is supposed to distinguish Soctis’s theory from any form of nominalism on the question of universals. The usual motivation for accepting the divisibility of common natures has to do with identity: the impossibility of numerically one and the same object existing in numerically distinct substances. Scotus does not share this motivation, since he believes that the doctrine of the Trinity provides a case in which a nature is a genuine one-of-many, numerically the same object exemplified by three different particluars. I discuss Scotus’s defence of these two different theories of universals.

Narrative theories of self-identity enjoy wide popularity at present—for instance, in the work of Charles Taylor, Alastair MacIntyre, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and David Carr. One result has been an unfortunate obscuring of the difference between historical and philosophical understanding. Heidegger’s philosophy has often been taken to support such a view of the self. As I argue in this paper, however, Heidegger’s account of authentic historicality (embedded in his concepts of "birth" and "death") offers an ontology of selfhood that is anti-narrative and anti-historicist. Unlike many critics of narrativism, Heidegger does not base his rejection of the idea that self-identity is a narrative unity "between birth and death" on the phenomenologically dubious, naturalistically motivated, picture of life as a series of events connected at most by causal, but not by conceptual, links. However, Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis shows that the concepts that give unity to what we do—teleological concepts that the narrativist borrows from the phenomenology of action—are not the concepts that give unity to who we are. I conclude by criticizing Heidegger’s attempt to extend his account of authentic historicality from the individual to the community, and I suggest one reason why the difference between historical and philosophical understanding should not be obscured.

Much current feminist theory treats male dominance largely, if not entirely, as a social construction. On this view, male dominance is not an "essential" or biologically determined aspect of human relationships. It is the product of social practices. Many critics of feminist theory challenge this social constructionist approach and argue that male dominance is largely the product of male (and female) biological natures. On this view, it is rooted in relatively greater male biological tendencies toward aggression and violence. Outside of academia, the biological account seems to predominate as people in general tend to give substantial weight to biological factors in their general explanations and understandings of gender differences.

Feminist theory, I believe, can accommodate a biological account of male dominance without sacrificing important feminist goals or values. The gendered effects of biology on personality would be, at most, matters of tendency, not matters of strict determination. Feminist egalitarian social commitments would therefore not depend on the social constructionist approach. A substantially biological approach may suggest, however, that important normative concepts need to be revised. This paper will explore the difference it would make to an ideal of personal autonomy, particularly for women, in case male dominance were substantially based in biological determinants. How would personal autonomy have to be reconceptualized for those sorts of people, such as women, who were biologically vulnerable to interpersonal domination and subordination by other sorts of people, such as men?

I focus on the general holistic epistemology of scientific knowledge Quine sketches in the latter two section of "Two Dogmas." I try to place this view in context against the background of the approach to scientific epistemology developed within the logical empiricist tradition, culminating in Carnap's Der logische Aufbau der Welt and Logical Syntax of Language. I argue that, although Quine's criticisms of the analytic/synthetic distinction has force versus Carnap's mature theory of analytic truth developed in Logical Syntax, these criticisms need not force us into Quine's radical form of epistemological holism, according to which there is nothing left of the a priori at all, so that all the various components of scientific knowledge—including mathematics and logic—equally face the tribunal of experience. I suggest, as an alternative, a conception of modern mathematical natural science as divided into three equally evolving yet asymmetrically functioning components, in which, in particular, there are still non-empirical or constitutively a priori components.

Much of what Spinoza says about "imagination"—which he construes broadly enough to include sense perception—is strikingly distinctive. For example, he seems to claim (i) that through the imagination every human being perceives everything that occurs in his or her body and (ii) that every other thing in the universe is like a human being this respect. He also seems to claim (iii) that imagination is the source of all falsity and yet also (iv) that whatever increases our capacity to imagine is good, while whatever decreases it is evil. In this paper, I appeal to Spinoza’s conceptions of consciousness, "power of thinking," and intellection in order to explain the nature, scope, and value of the imagination in Spinoza’s philosophy.

The view that psychology cannot be reduced to neurobiology has long been dominant in the philosophy of mind, and this anti-reductionism is supported in part by the complete lack of successful explanations of mental phenomena in neural terms. Cognitive neuroscience is the interdisciplinary research program that aspires to integrate psychology and neurobiology, and if it is to succeed, it will have to find a way to unify the two. In this paper I argue that the difficulty of unifying psychology and neurobiology is exacerbated by a natural tendency to find direct links between them. I suggest that we should model cognitive neuroscientific theories as nested functional explanations that make contact with neurobiology at some distance from psychology. This account explains the intuition that lies behind anti-reductionism in the philosophy of mind but shows that cognitive neuroscientific explanations of mental phenomena may still be possible.

Abstraction, idealization and appeal to a utopia or guiding ideal are three long-popular means of theorizing about justice. Despite this popularity, they recently have met with sharp criticism from many quarters. The most worrisome charges are: that abstract conceptions and principles are difficult to apply to concrete cases and inadequate to varying circumstances; that idealized models misrepresent reality and lead us into serious moral error; that utopias and guiding ideals offer unrealizable standards and often urge us toward the ideal heedless of the sacrifices this entails. The charges have merit. Nevertheless I argue, against critics, that abstraction, idealization and utopianism best are seen as strategies for addressing the difficulties human beings face in determining what justice requires and in realizing these demands in worldly circumstances. Properly employed, they aid us by encouraging efficacy and consistency, affording emphasis and clarity and fostering moral vision. Critics often miss these benefits by confusing one strategy with another. Blind to the distinct purposes to which each is suited, they also fail to see that, used in concert, the strategies provide safeguards against real but avoidable risks. Distinguishing the strategies from each other and highlighting the benefit each offers in itself, I emphasize the symbiotic relationship that allows each to augment the strengths and remedy the potential weaknesses of the others. Although my argument is applicable to political theories more generally, I appeal throughout to a set of basic Kantian convictions about citizenship in the just state. The example helps illustrate distinctions between and interrelations among the strategies.

In this paper, we discuss two questions of prime interest for understanding how to explain expressions of emotion.

Our primary purpose is to show that fruitful answers to these questions are provided by a conception of the emotions—at least, of certain basic emotions—as kinds of mental states which necessarily involve motivational bodily states. This conception derives support both from our commonsense practices of explaining emotional behavior, and from research in the behavioral and brain sciences. In particular, it is in keeping with a current theory of some emotions called the affect program theory.

The final section of "Two Dogmas" expresses a great vision of the system of relations between meaning, justification and the formation of beliefs. My contribution to the Symposium aims to consider the strengths and weakness of Quine’s conception, and to contrast it with an alternative which is fundamentally rationalist, truth-conditional, and also non-Carnapian. "Two Dogmas" presupposes that the meaning of a sentence, insofar as that notion is explicable at all, is to be explained in terms of the evidential relations of the sentence. After considering what is of permanent value in this idea, and what is not, I go on to outline the rival rationalist conception by formulating its three fundamental principles.

Professor Cartwright has brought to our attention many profoundly important methodological truths. The regularities discovered by science can only be applied for purposes of prediction and control in a limited domain of problem cases. This is true even of the foundational principles of physics. Applying the regularitities requires "modeling" the situations in the world to which the regularity is to be applied. And this requires deep scientific ingenuity. The world situations must be characterized in terms of the "capacities," the causal tendencies of their factors in order that the situation be appropriately modeled.

To all of this I agree. But I am skeptical of a number of consequences Professor Cartwright draws from these truths. I don’t see how they show that the foundational laws of physics might not "apply" universally, even where they are useless for prediction and control. Nor do I see any reason that derives from her arguments in The Dappled World to doubt the familiar empiricist claim that it is the notion of regularity that grounds that of causation, and not the other way around.

I concur with Professor Cartwright that issues of idealization are crucial in deriving metaphysical conclusions from the results of physical science. But I see no good grounds for her radical metaphysical pluralism and I find the place of idealization in scientifc metaphysics to reside quite elsewhere.

One of the most original aspects of Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy is at the same time a main reason for our difficulty in entering this book, namely, that it confronts us with a thinking in decision. What is thought in this book never lies there before us, already decided, ready to be grasped, but rather first arises in the enactment of thought. This means that what is thought can be properly understood only if the reader participates in the decsisions as which the thinking of Contributions occurs. In other words, the thinking of Contributions calls for an ethical engagement. This paper will attempt such an ethical engagement by thinking through and questioning how this thinking occurs in decisions and what is in decision in Contributions: thinking itself, being and not being, history, who we are, the encounter between humans and gods, and world and earth.

Prior to the early 1900’s, forces played leading roles in philosophical accounts of natural phenomena. Various arguments against forces since came to be accepted, and forces are now largely absent from philosophical discussion. While most arguments against forces are not compelling, one argument, according to which forces are redundant and hence eliminable, goes through. Bigelow, Ellis and Pargetter ("Forces," Philosophy of Science, 1988) attempt to defend forces against this argument. Their defense fails, however, and the redundancy argument looks to succeed against its intended target.

Nonetheless I maintain that forces, appropriately understood, exist. There are two very different notions associated with scientific uses of the term "force." The first corresponds to mediating forces: reified vectors, that mediate between causes and effects. The second corresponds to fundamental forces (paradigmatically, the gravitational, electromagnetic and nuclear forces): fundamental causal influences that unify and explain wide swathes of diverse natural phenomena. The redundancy argument is targeted at mediating forces, and does not, as usually presented, succeed against fundamental forces. Still, when the two notions of force are distinguished in the literature, fundamental forces tend to be understood as specific kinds of mediating forces (in which case the redundancy argument would succeed against fundamental forces, after all). I argue that we should not understand fundamental forces as specific kinds of mediating forces. Moreover we need not do so, for there is at least one reasonable alternative: fundamental forces are fields, and fields are particulars. Fundamental forces, so understood, escape the redundancy argument.

In the biological sciences, there have been four possible bases for social racial taxonomy: geography, phenotypes, transmission genetics and the genealogy of individuals and groups. Each one fails. The geographic basis can be traced only through non-protein coding DNA, so that the out-of-Africa consensus does not mean we are all one race, but merely have common Homo sapiens ancestors who lived in Africa 100,000-200,000 years ago. The hereditary phenotypes associated with social race, such as skin shade, blood type and bone structure, vary independently of each other and do not correspond to racial divisions in orderly ways. The genealogy of individuals, or family history, varies independently of their social race.

In this paper, I focus on transmissions genetics as a basis of race. I begin with broad facts about Mendelian heredity and show how now-falsified pre-Mendelian theories of general heredity linger on in folk discourse about race in particular. The final refuge of contemporary racialists is population genetics, but this model at best accounts for the heritability of some traits in historical groups and it fails to ground racial identities as relevant to individuals. Neither can the likelihood of genetic engineering or therapy, of genotypes associated with race, substantiate a genetic basis of race without committing part-to-whole or whole-to part fallacies in reasoning.

I conclude with general remarks about the importance of information from the physical sciences for revising ongoing social notions of race and I call upon liberatory humanistic scholars to refresh their basic scientific literacy and encourage the same in students.