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University of Nevada, Las Vegas E-mail: marion.ledwig@unlv.edu Back to the philosophy homepage
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This book opens up a new area of research by not only considering the rationality of such diverse phenomena as ordinary emotions, generalized anxiety disorder, social phobia, psychotic depression, major depressive disorder, and bipolar disorder, but also by evaluating the question whether the vagueness of these diverse disorders and emotions poses an obstacle to the rationality of these phenomena. As these emotional phenomena turn out to be vague on many different levels, an explanation is found for the millennia long dispute of which kind of phenomena fall under the emotions and whether such diverse phenomena as hope and alexithymia fall under the emotions. Since vagueness can be most easily identified in mixed feelings, the rationality of mixed feelings will also be dealt with.
This book stands in the tradition of philosophers who advance the rationality of faith. Yet this book goes beyond their accounts, for it not only defends the view that faith can be termed rational, but it also considers the different senses in which faith can be termed rational. While this book advances the idea that faith as a general category can be termed rational, it does not investigate in a detailed way whether there are arguments for the rationality of particular faiths which would go beyond the arguments for the rationality of faith as a general category. Besides discussing whether betting on God in Pascal’s wager and believing in miracles are forms of the rationality of faith, I will provide unique solutions to the problem of evil and the paradoxes of omnipotence and omniscience.
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This book stands in the tradition of past and current common sense philosophers, like Reid, Berkeley, Sidgwick, Moore, Conant, Slote, Bogdan, and Lemos, who defend common sense, yet it goes beyond their accounts by not only defending common sense but also considering what common sense means. Besides giving a historical exegesis of common sense in Thomas Reid and showing parallels in Austin, Searle, Moore, and Wittgenstein, common sense is also discovered in Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals and in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It is made clear how far common sense generalizes, whether proverbs are a form of common sense, and whether common sense can be found in the common knowledge assumption in game theory. Also, folk psychology as a common sense psychology is discussed. In its account of common sense, this book draws on research from history of philosophy, philosophy of mind, and science, linguistics, and game theory to substantiate its position. - reviewed in International Review of Biblical Studies 53, 2006/2007; reviewed by William Keenan in Implicit Religion 10, 2007, pp. 217-220; reviewed by Jan Wolenski in Polish Journal of Philosophy 2, 2008, pp. 181-182; reviewed by Roger Pouivet in Philosophy in Review 28, 2008, pp. 280-281. |
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Emotions: Their Rationality & Consistency stands in the tradition of current emotion theorists, such as Elster, Damasio, de Sousa, Greenspan, Nussbaum, and Solomon, who advance the rationality of the emotions. Yet this book goes beyond their accounts, for it not only defends the view that emotions can be termed rational, but also considers in which different senses emotions can be termed rational. Besides discussing whether emotional intelligence and emotional consistency are forms of emotional rationality, this book makes clear how far this view on the rationality of the emotions can be generalized: whether it can, for instance, be generalized to computers having rational emotions and whether emotional responses to art can be considered to be rational. This book draws not only on knowledge from neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind, but also on evolutionary theory and developmental psychology, to substantiate its position. |
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Thomas Reid's philosophy of psychology is remarkably up to date. Surprisingly, Reid's account of instincts doesn't diverge greatly from Tinbergen's more contemporary account. Reid's claims with regard to appetites and desires can be made relevant to current insights. Moreover, his theory of emotions can be related to current theories of the emotions, like Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis and Griffiths' distinction between basic and higher cognitive emotions. Reid's theory of causation has central features in common with Price's contemporary manipulability theory of causation. His rational principles of action seem to be rather out of date, yet, they can be made intelligible as part of a certain kind of protestant ethics. And Reid's account of freedom of action one could claim that it is common sense, which had its resurrection in Moore's philosophy. Chapters are: 1. Instincts, Habits, and Consciousness; 2. Appetites and Desires; 3. Emotions; 4. Rational Principles of Action; 5. Human Motivation; 6. Freedom of Action; 7. Causation. |
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This book is intended to give an overview of the state of the art in the philosophy of causation. It intends to represent all the aspects that are treated in the philosophy of causation: some contributions consider a specific framework for a metaphysics of causation (such as a probabilistic view in terms of causes raising chances for certain effects or a regularity theory); others treat the relevance of physics (especially quantum physics), and particular problems to which an adequate theory of causation has to pay attention. The contributors: Thomas Breuer, Phil Dowe, Michael Esfeld, Gerd Graßhoff, Marion Ledwig, Michael May, Hugh Mellor, Eberhard Müller, Gerhard Schulz, Wolfgang Spohn, Max Urchs. - reviewed by Peter Menzies in Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81, 2003, p. 302. |
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Last updated 06/02/2009