The goal is to record most books written or edited by the Department of Philosophy faculty. We will start by entering the most recent publications first and work our way back to older books. There is a WMU Authors section in Waldo Library, where most of these books can be found.
With a few exceptions, we do not have the rights to put the full text of the book online, so there will be a link to a place where you can purchase the book.
If you are a faculty member and have a book you would like to include in the WMU book list, please contact wmu-scholarworks@wmich.edu/
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Nanoethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Nanotechnology
Fritz Allhoff
Nanotechnology will eventually impact every area of our world Nanoethics seeks to examine the potential risks and rewards of applications of nanotechnology. This up-to-date anthology gives the reader an introduction to and basic foundation in nanotechnology and nanoethics, and then delves into near-, mid-, and far-term issues. Comprehensive and authoritative, it: Goes beyond the usual environmental, health, and safety (EHS) concerns to explore such topics as privacy, nanomedicine, human enhancement, global regulation, military, humanitarianism, education, artificial intelligence, space exploration, life extension, and more Features contributions from forty preeminent experts from academia and industry worldwide, reflecting diverse perspectives Includes seminal works that influence nanoethics today Encourages an informed, proactive approach to nanoethics and advocates addressing new and emerging controversies before they impede progress or impact our welfare This resource is designed to promote further investigations and a broad and balanced dialogue in nanoethics, dealing with critical issues that will affect the industry as well as society. While this will be a definitive reference for students, scientists in academia and industry, policymakers, and regulators, it′s also a valuable resource for anyone who wants to understand the challenges, principles, and potential of nanotechnology.
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Food & Philosophy: Eat, Drink, and Be Merry
Fritz Allhoff and David Monroe
Food & Philosophy offers a collection of essays which explore a range of philosophical topics related to food; it joins Wine & Philosophy and Beer & Philosophy in in the "Epicurean Trilogy." Essays are organized thematically and written by philosophers, food writers, and professional chefs.
- Provides a critical reflection on what and how we eat can contribute to a robust enjoyment of gastronomic pleasures
- A thoughtful, yet playful collection which emphasizes the importance of food as a proper object of philosophical reflection in its own right
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Internalism and Epistemology: The Architecture of Reason
Timothy J. McGrew and Lydia McGrew
This book is a sustained defence of traditional internalist epistemology. The aim is threefold: to address some key criticisms of internalism and show that they do not hit their mark, to articulate a detailed version of a central objection to externalism, and to illustrate how a consistent internalism can meet the charge that it fares no better in the face of this objection than does externalism itself.
This original work will be recommended reading for scholars with an interest in epistemology.
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Universities and Corporations: A Selection of Papers Presented at the WMU Emeriti Council Forum
Joseph Ellin, Robert Kauffman, and Darci Doll
Applying a business model to the University / entrepreneurial university : rewards andrisks / Cultural contradictions and ethical dilemmas in the corporate-styled university / commodification of international education / Recent developments in international education at WMU / College of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the BTR - apartnership with purpose / Epilogue /
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Professional Integrity: Thinking Ethically
Michael Pritchard
Discussions of professional ethics tend to emphasize what not to do. Why, Michael Pritchard asks, should they not also consider the ethical heights to which professionals should aspire?
Pritchard, who has taught professional ethics for more than twenty-five years, here explores the interplay of virtues, ideals, and moral rules in everyday life and the professions. In elegant prose, he emphasizes the positive dimension of professional ethics-actions that thoughtful, conscientious people ought to perceive and pursue in their careers.
As Pritchard observes, problems of professional ethics originate in an increasingly specialized society where few people are able to evaluate, let alone discredit, the actions of any given expert; all too often, we trust experts because it's all we can do. Pritchard addresses this concern by focusing on different conceptions of the responsibilities of individual professionals, illustrating the best of what professional ethics might offer through true stories of people from various professions-engineering, business, architecture, the health sciences-who have felt ethically impelled to go beyond the call of duty.
Integrating moral theory with a wide range of practical concerns—good works, cooperation, trustworthiness—Pritchard shows how professionals might make conscious decisions for good, such as performing socially meaningful work for lower compensation or persevering to see a project through to a proper outcome. Extending the work of developmental psychologists to the realm of professional ethics, he shows how to foster character in responsible professionals through postsecondary education and professional guilds-and urges that even children should be encouraged to envision the greater good.
Professional Integrity offers valuable insights not only for philosophers interested in professional responsibility but also for general readers in a variety of settings, demonstrating that practical ethics and professional responsibility are rich and complex notions that require skills and character traits that ideally need to be cultivated at an early age. In an era of insider trading, kickbacks, and cooked books, it speaks to a long-felt need with a refreshingly positive approach. -
Business Ethics
Fritz H. Allhoff
Business Ethics is a three-volume collection which provides students and researchers with the historically most important of the classic articles in business ethics, as well as the best of the contemporary and trendsetting work in this burgeoning area. The collection will serve as a sourcebook for academics and researchers entering or already established in the area of business ethics. The editors bring together a breadth of articles across business ethics, with an orientation that is diverse as well as international. The three volumes are well organized to focus on the main topics in business ethics and are divided into corporate social responsibility , the employee-employer relationship, and distributive justice & dilemmas. Courses and research programmes in business ethics have multiplied in recent years alongside a growing concern with the ethical practices of business. This multi-volumed work provides a focused and well-balanced reference for academics and their students to acquire a thorough understanding of this now central topic. The SAGE Library in Business and Management is a first-class series of major works that brings together the most influential and field-defining articles, both classical and contemporary, in a number of key areas of research and inquiry in business and management. Each multi-volume set represents a collection of the essential published works collated from the foremost publications in the field by an Editor or Editorial Team of renowned international stature. They also include a full introduction, presenting a rationale for the selection and mapping out the discipline′s past, present and likely future. This series is designed to be a ′gold standard′ for university libraries throughout the world with a programme or interest in business and management studies.
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The Double Content of Art
John Dilworth
In this original work on aesthetics, philosopher John Dilworth offers an unusual theory of the nature of artworks. The Double Content (DC) view is the first comprehensive theory of art that is able to satisfactorily explain the nature of all kinds of artworks in a unified way — whether paintings, novels, or musical and theatrical performances. Dilworth’s basic thesis is that all such representational artworks involve two levels or kinds of representation: a first stage in which a concrete artifact represents an artwork, and a second stage in which that artwork in turn represents its subject matter. Thus Dilworth describes his approach as a double content (DC) theory, since arguably all content is the content of some representation or other.
This fresh, even revolutionary, approach to art meets strong initial opposition from other current theories of art — for example, those that treat paintings as physical objects, or novels and other works of fiction as "types" that have copies or performances as instances. Dilworth devotes a good deal of space to a series of absorbing confrontations between his DC theory and more conventional views of art.
An important additional strength of the book is that it provides a fundamental theoretical advance in our understanding of pictorial representation, showing that it involves two levels of representational content, as opposed to a simpler, single-stage kind of representation found in maps or diagrams. The final chapter develops a sophisticated general theory of representation based on these advances.
This important new work will be of great interest to philosophers, cognitive scientists, aestheticians, artists, and art educators. -
Desire and belief : introduction to some recent philosophical debates
Arthur E. Falk
Some call it folk psychology; others call it the perennial philosophy. According to Arthur Falk, author of Desire and Belief, it's the traditional account of the mind's features that make it unique in nature. This work examines the nature of what philosophers call de re mental attitudes, paying close attention to the controversies over the nature of these and allied mental states. Over the course of the book, a story emerges within the traditional account that ultimately appeals to Darwinian principles. The book concludes with two chapters on the contemporary project of naturalizing the mind.
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Philosophy & This Actual World: An Introduction to Practical Philosophical Inquiry
Martin Benjamin
Academic philosophy has become so technical and inbred that it often fails to connect with the questions and concerns of educated nonspecialists. Martin Benjamin aims to bridge this gap. Presupposing little or no formal background,Philosophy & This Actual World addresses general questions of knowledge, reality, mind, will, and ethics, as well as more specific questions about moral pluralism, assisted suicide, the nature of death, and life's meaning. At the same time, it incorporates the advances of academic philosophers like Wittgenstein, Rorty, Putnam, and Rawls, making it equally as valuable to the scholar as to the philosophically uninitiated.
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Darwinism and philosophical analysis
Arthur E. Falk
Analytic method, the naturalisation of the mind, and evolution -- Dennett's dangerous idea: design before mind -- Better idea: information prior to mind -- Update of the good idea underlying Descartes's idea of the pineal gland -- Perceiving temporal passage: an indicator of the nature of consciousness -- Beyond Wilfrid Sellars's jumblese: the invention of the verb -- Defence of a Quinean holism -- Rational basis for religion's attempt to gain extra-scientific information -- 'We immoralists ...': evolution and ethics -- Freedom: a matter of selfhood, not modality.
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Time, Tense, and Reference
Aleksandar Jokic and Quentin Smith
Among the many branches of philosophy, the philosophy of time and the philosophy of language are more intimately interconnected than most, yet their practitioners have long pursued independent paths. This book helps to bridge the gap between the two groups. As it makes clear, it is increasingly difficult to do philosophy of language without any metaphysical commitments as to the nature of time, and it is equally difficult to resolve the metaphysical question of whether time is tensed or tenseless independently of the philosophy of language. Indeed, one is tempted to see philosophy of language and metaphysics as a continuum with no sharp boundary.The essays, which were written expressly for this book by leading philosophers of language and philosophers of time, discuss the philosophy of language and its implications for the philosophy of time and vice versa. The intention is not only to further dialogue between philosophers of language and of time but also to present new theories to advance the state of knowledge in the two fields. The essays are organized in two sections--one on the philosophy of tensed language, the other on the metaphysics of time.
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Consciousness: New Philosophical Perspectives
Quentin Smith and Aleksandar Jokic
Consciousness is perhaps the most puzzling problem we humans face in trying to understand ourselves. Here, eighteen essays offer new angles on the subject. The contributors, who include many of the leading figures in philosophy of mind, discuss such central topics as intentionality, phenomenal content, and the relevance of quantum mechanics to the study of consciousness.
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Language and Time
Quentin Smith
This book offers a defense of the tensed theory of time, a critique of the New Theory of Reference, and an argument that simultaneity is absolute. Although Smith rejects ordinary language philosophy, he shows how it is possible to argue from the nature of language to the nature of reality. Specifically, he argues that semantic properties of tensed sentences are best explained by the hypothesis that they ascribe to events temporal properties of futurity, presentness, or pastness and do not merely ascribe relations of earlier than or simultaneity. He criticizes the New Theory of Reference, which holds that "now" refers directly to a time and does not ascribe the property of presentness. Smith does not adopt the old or Fregean theory of reference but develops a third alternative, based on his detailed theory of de re and de dicto propositions and a theory of cognitive significance. He concludes the book with a lengthy critique of Einstein's theory of time. Smith offers a positive argument for absolute simultaneity based on his theory that all propositions exist in time. He shows how Einstein's relativist temporal concepts are reducible to a conjunction of absolutist temporal concepts and relativist nontemporal concepts of the observable behavior of light rays, rigid bodies, and the like.
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Practicing Engineering Ethics
C. E. Harris, Michael Pritchard, and Michael J. Rabins
The authors of this text have taken a theoretical, philosophical approach to the topic of engineering ethics. Through inclusion of case-studies, it focuses on decisions faced by practitioners worldwide.
*description from amazon.com
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Responsible Communication: Ethical Issues in Business, Industry, and the Professions
James A. Jaska and Michael Pritchard
Technological developments often place people at risk, globally, internationally or locally. Exploring ethical concerns about communications in such risk areas, this volume considers to what extent international, ethical or moral standards can be formulated to deal with such risks.
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Reasonable Children
Michael Pritchard
The public outcry for a return to moral education in our schools has raised more dust than it's dispelled. Building upon his provocative ideas in On Becoming Responsible, Michael Pritchard clears the air with a sensible plan for promoting our children's moral education through the teaching of reasonableness.
Pritchard contends that children have a definite but frequently untapped capacity for reasonableness and that schools in a democratic society must make the nurturing of that capacity one of their primary aims, as fundamental to learning as the development of reading, writing, and math skills. Reasonableness itself, he shows, can be best cultivated through the practice of philosophical inquiry within a classroom community. In such an environment, children learn to work together, to listen to one another, to build on one another's ideas, to probe assumptions and different perspectives, and ultimately to think for themselves.
Advocating approaches to moral education that avoid mindless indoctrination and timid relativism, Pritchard neither preaches nor hides behind abstractions. He makes liberal use of actual classroom dialogues to illustrate children's remarkable capacity to engage in reasonable conversation about moral concepts involving fairness, cheating, loyalty, truthtelling, lying, making and keeping promises, obedience, character, and responsibility. He also links such discussions to fundamental concerns over law and moral authority, the roles of teachers and parents, and the relationship between church and state.
Pritchard draws broadly and deeply from the fields of philosophy and psychology, as well as from his own extensive personal experience working with children and teachers. The result is a rich and insightful work that provides real hope for the future of our children and their moral education.*description from amazon.com
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Language and Time
Quentin Smith
This book offers a defense of the tensed theory of time, a critique of the New Theory of Reference, and an argument that simultaneity is absolute. Although Smith rejects ordinary language philosophy, he shows how it is possible to argue from the nature of language to the nature of reality. Specifically, he argues that semantic properties of tensed sentences are best explained by the hypothesis that they ascribe to events temporal properties of futurity, presentness, or pastness and do not merely ascribe relations of earlier than or simultaneity. He criticizes the New Theory of Reference, which holds that "now" refers directly to a time and does not ascribe the property of presentness. Smith does not adopt the old or Fregean theory of reference but develops a third alternative, based on his detailed theory of de re and de dicto propositions and a theory of cognitive significance. He concludes the book with a lengthy critique of Einstein's theory of time. Smith offers a positive argument for absolute simultaneity based on his theory that all propositions exist in time. He shows how Einstein's relativist temporal concepts are reducible to a conjunction of absolutist temporal concepts and relativist nontemporal concepts of the observable behavior of light rays, rigid bodies, and the like.
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On Becoming Responsible
Michael Pritchard
Michael Pritchard's study of individual morality is set in the trenches, in the valley of life itself. The moral agent he describes is real, not one of the rarified, rational characters portrayed in most ethics texts. Thus the view of morality Pritchard presents in these eleven essays is pluralistic, complex, and down-to-earth. Pritchard rejects the premise that moral development begins in self-interest, citing evidence of empathy and moral connectedness in very young children. He provides a deliberate and convincing argument for a new starting point for the discussion of moral development, one in which self-interest and empathy are innate and equally essential groundings for individual morality. He then builds a comprehensive framework for tracing moral development that allows human morality to be grounded in both reason and emotion, and recognizes the importance to morality of justice and rights as well as caring and responsibility. Pritchard's work is both a product of and a contribution to the field of moral psychology that began in the 1960s as a blending of philosophical theories on morality and ethics with insights from psychological theory on human development and moral behavior. Through his essays run the common threads of moral education, the complexity of ingredients and influences in moral life, and the concept of personal integrity. "Pritchard displays a remarkable, and sometimes ingenious, sensitivity to the fabric of the moral life. Reading through this work is rather like being on a moral 'dig' where one precious gem after the other is turned up. . . . It deals with the moral life as it is actually lived. Virtually any person on the street could identify with Pritchard's moral agents, whereas the moral agents in the texts of most philosophers turn out to be rarified creatures that no one would ever supposed had walked the earth. . . . Pritchard's discussion of Kohlberg is masterful and extraordinarily subtle--a most important and very significant addition to the literature on this central figure in moral development. The chapter "Accountability, Understanding, and Sentiments" is a ground-breaking piece."--Laurence Thomas, author of Living Morally: A Psychology of Moral Character . "Offers a thoughtful, imaginative, and responsible consideration of a broad range of issues in ethics that have engaged contemporary philosophers and psychologists."--Gareth Matthews, author of Philosophy and the Young Child and Dialogues with Young Children.
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Profits and Professions: Essays in Business and Professional Ethics
Wade L. Robison, Michael Pritchard, and Joseph Ellin
Suppose an accountant discovers evidence of shady practices while ex amining the books of a client. What should he or she do? Accountants have a professional obligation to respect the confidentiality of their cli ents' accounts. But, as an ordinary citizen, our accountant may feel that the authorities ought to be informed. Suppose a physician discov ers that a patient, a bus driver, has a weak heart. If the patient contin ues bus driving even after being informed of the heart condition, should the physician inform the driver's company? Respect for patient confidentiality would say, no. But what if the driver should suffer a heart attack while on duty, causing an accident in which people are killed or seriously injured? Would the doctor bear some responsibility for these consequences? Special obligations, such as those of confidentiality, apply to any one in business or the professions. These obligations articulate, at least in part, what it is for someone to be, say, an accountant or a physician. Since these obligations are special, they raise a real possibility of con flict with the moral principles we usually accept outside of these spe cial relationships in business and the professions. These conflicts may become more accentuated for a professional who is also a corporate employee-a corporate attorney, an engineer working for a construction company, a nurse working as an employee of a hospital.
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Medical Responsibility: Paternalism, Informed Consent, and Euthanasia
Wade Robison and Michael Pritchard
As our powerful medical technology continues rapidly to develop, we seem to be confronted by fresh bioethical dilemmas at an ever increasing rate. This volume provides an introduction to modern thinking on these issues, concentrating particularly on paternalism, informed consent and euthanasia.
