The twelfth volume of The Correspondence of John Tyndall contains 326 letters and covers the fifteen months of Tyndall’s life from March 1871 through May 1872, a time when he was a central figure in the field and had a substantial reputation in both the UK and the US. It begins just before the publication of Fragments of Science in April and Hours of Exercise in May. It includes a number of small but public disputes about science. Tyndall had a number of visits from friends and dignitaries, and he traveled to Switzerland, Ireland, and the countryside for scrambles. He was dealing with family issues out of Ireland, which were troublesome for him. He was busy administering the Royal Institution and the Royal Society; he was also working as the scientific consultant to Trinity House, which was involved in overseeing lighthouses in the United Kingdom, of which Ireland was a part at this time. Unlike other volumes, this one is not defined as much by one or two major projects or events for Tyndall, but instead includes a number of smaller projects and issues for him personally and professionally. As a leading man of science, and preoccupied with the work required for Trinity House, he had little time for socializing or research and began to refuse both social and professional invitations. Although well established, he remained concerned with his image, which manifests in a number of ways throughout this period.

Aristotle was the first philosopher to divide the imagination—what he called phantasia—from other parts of the psyche, placing it between perception and intellect. A mathematician and philosopher of mathematical sciences, Aristotle was puzzled by the problem of geometrical cognition—which depends on the ability to “produce” and “see” a multitude of immaterial objects—and so he introduced the category of internal appearances produced by a new part of the psyche, the imagination. As Justin Humphreys argues, Aristotle developed his theory of imagination in part to explain certain functions of reason with a psychological rather than metaphysical framework. Investigating the background of this conceptual development, The Invention of Imagination reveals how imagery was introduced into systematic psychology in fifth-century Athens and ultimately made mathematical science possible. It offers new insights about major philosophers in the Greek tradition and significant events in the emergence of ancient mathematics while offering space for a critical reflection on how we understand ourselves as thinking beings.

Public education plays a crucial role in crafting a nation's future. In the United States, education reform policy, particularly the reliance on large-scale, standardized testing, is a growing topic of national conversation and concern. An Illusion of Equity: The Legacy of Eugenics in Today's Education demonstrates how centuries of propaganda have led us to accept the idea that test scores indicate something so valuable about human beings that they should be used to organize society.    Drawing on decades of experience as an educator, author Wendy Zagray Warren unpacks the origins of this practice, inviting us to probe the ideologies underlying testing procedures and score interpretation and to evaluate the rationale for using test scores as the sole markers for academic achievement. From the beginning, large-scale tests have produced scores divided by race and class. Initially, these results aligned with the eugenic ideology of its creators. Warren shows that while the rhetoric used to justify test-based policy has changed, the model used to produce test scores remains much the same. Therefore, so do the outcomes of test-based policies, which continue to reproduce and reinforce the existing social hierarchy of the United States.   The hope of equity lies in educators charting new paths and scholars around the world who are dreaming new educational paradigms into being. Ultimately, Warren invites policymakers, educators, and parents to explore the richness of possibility when education is designed around the belief that every child is worthy of the opportunity to thrive.

Eight essays on ethics, meta-ethics and normative ethics from John Rawls to David Gauthier, from Richard Rorty to Jonathan Dancy, from automatic concepts to Leibnizian ontology, from the end of work to cyber warfare

Professor Xu Xiaoyue, a top-notch scholar specializing in ancient Chinese philosophies and religions, displays essential constituents of Chinese humanism before readers. According to him, key concepts such as Confucian ten virtues, Daoist Way and Buddhist metaphysical voidness play quite a significant role in shaping the Chinese humanism, which not only is historically indispensable to the creation of traditional Chinese culture but it also realistically matters to present-day China’s cultural reconstruction in the world that is being remolded by the roots.

The author reviews the Confucian tradition through the two concepts, religion and humanities. Chinese scholars always adopt Zongjiao and Renwen from the ancient Chinese documents as the Chinese translation of religion and humanities. In respect of their own contexts of culture, the Chinese words and the English words share some similarities in meaning, but also have some vital differences. This book covers the major phases of the development of Confucianism, which have a wide historical span from the Pre-Qin period to the contemporary era with a focus on Confucianism in Song and Ming dynasties. Relevant ideas of modern Western disciplines such as philosophy of religion, religious studies and theology are employed by the author as references, not criteria, to illuminate key ideas in Confucian tradition and highlight the features of Confucianism as a religious or spiritual humanism. In some chapters, the author compares the eastern thinkers and theories with those western ones.

One of the fundamental aspects of the cultural landscape of the last century has been the revival of philosophical anthropology, in the form of a radical examination of the humanum: an examination that has attempted to meet the primary challenge of an era which, in an increasingly radical way, doubts the very possibility of a semantics of humanism. This book argues that MacIntyrean thought can provide an important contribution towards rethinking a new semantics of humanism, on the basis that MacIntyre's contribution stands up to dialogue with and rational competition from perspectives belonging to rival research traditions. The volume emerged from the 2021 conference at the University of Bergamo, in collaboration with the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry.

The current volume provides an interpretation of American pragmatism according to which pragmatism is not opposed to metaphysics but instead represents a vital, non-dismissive, non-deflationary attempt to respond to classical questions of philosophy concerning the nature of reality, truth, goodness, beauty, ideality, etc. American pragmatism has been often interpreted as a form of crass utilitarianism applied to all areas of philosophy – a precipitation of the “industrialist” spirit of the United States. This book demonstrates how such an interpretation is misguided. The chapters focus on different topics in the philosophies of Peirce and Dewey – what is ‘meaning,’ what is the human self, what is truth, what is consciousness, what ‘semiotics’ can add to realism – that articulate the unitary view that the ‘real’ is always inhabited by and open to the ‘ideal.’

What do we mean by moral freedom? What are the necessary conditions required for it? Do the exponential advances and pervasive applications of artificial intelligence (AI) promote it, or do they undermine it? Are we dealing with a new ethical challenge? If this is the case, how should we respond? These are a few of the compelling questions addressed in the current volume. These concerns are increasingly unavoidable in our contemporary computerized society, in which people increasingly depend on AI-based technology, inevitably exposed to its invisible but powerful algorithmic design. Providing a basis for the field of Ethics of AI, the volume helps us understand the new questions raised by AI systems, with particular attention to the challenge that machine-learning algorithms represents for moral freedom. Tiribelli provides both conceptual and practical tools to address these issues, producing a moral compass for navigating our complex world, increasingly structured and shaped by algorithmic technology.

In three volumes, historian Jole Shackelford delineates the history of the study of biological rhythms – now widely known as chronobiology – from antiquity into the twentieth century. Perhaps the most well-known biological rhythm is the circadian rhythm, tied to the cycles of day and night and often referred to as the “body clock.” But there are many other biological rhythms, and although scientists and the natural philosophers who preceded them have long known about them, only in the past thirty years have a handful of pioneering scientists begun to study such rhythms in plants and animals seriously. Tracing the intellectual and institutional development of biological rhythm studies, Shackelford offers a meaningful, evidence-based account of a field that today holds great promise for applications in agriculture, health care, and public health. Volume 1 follows early biological observations and research, chiefly on plants; volume 2 turns to animal and human rhythms and the disciplinary contexts for chronobiological investigation; and volume 3 focuses primarily on twentieth-century researchers who modeled biological clocks and sought them out, including three molecular biologists whose work in determining clock mechanisms earned them a Nobel Prize in 2017. 

Millions of scientific articles are published each year, making it difficult to stay abreast of advances within even the smallest subdisciplines. Traditional approaches to the study of science, such as the history and philosophy of science, involve closely reading a relatively small set of journal articles. And yet many questions benefit from casting a wider net: Is most scientific change gradual or revolutionary? What are the key sources of scientific novelty? Over the past several decades, a massive effort to digitize the academic literature and equip computers with algorithms that can distantly read and analyze a digital database has taken us one step closer to answering these questions. The Dynamics of Science brings together a diverse array of contributors to examine the largely unexplored computational frontiers of history and philosophy of science. Together, they reveal how tools and data from automated textual analysis, or machine “reading,” combined with methods and models from game theory and cultural evolutionary theory, can begin to answer fundamental questions about the nature and history of science.

This book is an inquiry into the mystical thought of Gregory Barhebraeus (1226-1286CE) and its contemporary relevance, to offer a reading of Barhebraeus’ mystical texts by bringing them into conversation with critical religious studies and the hermeneutical tradition of philosophy. The methodological focus of my thesis has led me to pay particular attention to the language used for the study of mysticism, and I lay emphasis on finding a new language that avoids the phenomenological assumptions concerning ‘mysticism’ to attend to the particularity of ‘mystic’ traditions, such as that of the Syriac mystic tradition inherited by Barhebraeus.

The volume considers the theories of the passions in Hobbes, Descartes and Spinoza. Particular attention is given to the passion of fear, highlighting how these three writers considered fear as both an individual and a collective affect. Cerrato underlines the characteristics, relevance and usefulness of these affects, together with the strategies of control used to prevent their transformation into passions that can inhibit rational action. He then demonstrates the divergence of views between Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza in terms of how they delineate these conditions. The second part of the volume focuses on analogies concerning rational strategies that a human being can assume in order to manage fear. Together Descartes e Spinoza, it is necessary to recall Hobbes’s Leviathan, since this work is a consistent and relevant source for Spinoza, as far as the conception of fear as a peculiar perception of past and present is concerned.

Although little known, Richard Price’s A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals (1758) is one of the most important texts of eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Hastings Rasdhall described it “as the best work published on Ethics till quite recent times” because it “contains the gist of the kantian doctrine without Kant’s confusions”; C. D. Broad pointed out in this regard that “until Ross published his book The Right and the Good in 1930” there existed “no statement and defence of what may be called the ‘rationalistic type’ of ethical theory comparable in merit to Price’s”; and W. D. Hudson considered A Review to be “probably the best statement of the case for rational intuitionism which has ever been written”. The current volume aims to demonstrate, through a rigorous analysis of the text itself, the full validity of these previous evaluations, highlighting in particular that in the Review it is possible to find many of the traits that characterize the ethical reflection of our own times, such as the need to focus attention on the meaning of terms in order to clarify and resolve disputes; the identification of different levels and types of investigation and the need to keep them separate; the thesis that moral judgments are not definable in non-moral terms; the criticism of all forms of normative monism; the non-absolute nature of ethical principles; the need to distinguish the moral properties of the agent from those of action.   Focusing on details, we owe to Price the distinction between meta-ethics and normative ethics, as well as the first systematic application of the open question argument, (the argument by which in the twentieth century all attempts to reduce moral concepts to non-moral concepts have been accused of failing into the “naturalistic fallacy”). But it also provides a model for critiquing utilitarianism that has found great fortune in contemporary moral philosophy; an early intuition of the status of prima facie or pro tanto duties of basic ethical principles; the distinction between what is subjectively right and what is objectively right. Despite being much less famous, Price’s Review can stand up to comparison with the greatest classics of eighteenthth-century Anglo-Saxon ethics, such as Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals or Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.

In the year 2020, everything we used to think about our habits has been profoundly disrupted. Lockdown still represents an unprecedented experience for all those who went through it, radically affecting our freedom of movement and all those social interactions that used to make up our daily lives. Some people believe that once the pandemic ends, nothing will be the same. Others believe that once the virus becomes weaker or a vaccine is at our disposal and the fear is diminished, everything will go back to normal because the mechanism of habit is in many ways similar to the mechanisms of nature, reiterating the uniformity of its functioning. Which is correct? Both positions, perhaps. When philosophers addressed the issue of customs, namely collective habits, they have generally emphasized that caution us required when it comes to changing them - and indeed, if we look back at history… Could pandemics affect shared habits in specific territories, habits that were ultimately generated in reaction to other natural risks and threats?

The current volume brings together a collection of essays from the conference "The Postmodern Condition: Forty Years Later" held at University of Genova on December 2019. Taking advantage of the fortieth anniversay of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard, a book that initiated the cultural explosion of postmodern philosophy, in order to relaunch and further investigate the ongoing debate around the essential meaning of postmodernity, the end of postmodernism and the advent of new aesthetics, philosophy and social "structure of feelings" that have (or tried to) overcome the postmodern paradigm. The book thus brings together two interwoven but often separated themes: on the one hand, the analysis of the vitality, legacy, topicality and historicizing process of postmodernity and postmodernism; on the other, the analysis of the debate around the crisis of the postmodern paradigm and of the advent of new conceptual frameworks, often born out of a direct refusal of postmodern critical discourse and philosophy. Through the filters of different philosophical and aesthetic paradigms, the book thus offers a complex description of contemporary society from the 1980s down to the present moment, dwelling on crucial topics such as the relationship between humanity and technology, the digital revolution, the social role of representations, the dialectics between image and reality, and the vitality of postmodern stylistic features (quotation, metafiction, appropriation etc.).