Philosophy and AI presents invited contributions that focus on the different perspectives and techniques that philosophy and AI bring to the theory of ...

The emergence of abstract art, first in the early part of the century with Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian, and then in the much more celebrated case of America in the fifties (Rothko, Pollock, and others) remains puzzling. Such a great shift in aesthetic standards and taste is not only unprecedented in its radicality. The fact that nonfigurative art, without identifiable content in any traditional sense, was produced, appreciated, and, finally, eagerly bought and, even, finally, triumphantly hung in the lobbies (...) of banks and insurance companies, provokes understandable questions about both social and cultural history, as well as about the history of art. The endlessly disputed category of modernism itself and its eventual fate seems at issue. (shrink)

_Toward a Grammar ofion_ takes as its point of departure three features of modern art reading: the practice of translating the visual into institutional language, the vocabulary of representation in relation to abstract art, and the prevalence of totality as a model of art-historical knowledge.

This collection covers the fundamental concepts and analytic tools of generative transformational syntax of the last half century, from Chomsky's Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew (1951) to the present day. It makes available, in one place, key published material on important areas such as phrase structure, transformations, and conditions on rules and representations. Presenting articles by leading contributors to the field such as Baltin, Bokovic, Bresnan, Chomsky, Cinque, Emonds, Freidin, Hale, Higginbotham, Huang, Kayne, Lasnik, McCawley, Pollock, Postal, Reinhart, Rizzi, Ross, (...) Stowell, Torrego, Travis, Vergnaud, and Williams, this fascinating collection also includes a general introduction by the editors and an index, thus providing a comprehensive single reference resource for students and researchers alike. (shrink)

This new edition of the classic Contemporary Theories of Knowledge has been significantly updated to include analyses of the recent literature in epistemology.

This book is addressed to readers who have laid the foundation of a liberal education & are beginning the special study of law.

The strategy of this paper is to throw light on rational cognition and epistemic justification by examining irrationality. Epistemic irrationality is possible because we are reflexive cognizers, able to reason about and redirect some aspects of our own cognition. One consequence of this is that one cannot give a theory of epistemic rationality or epistemic justification without simultaneously giving a theory of practical rationality. A further consequence is that practical irrationality can affect our epistemic cognition. I argue that practical irrationality (...) derives from a general difficulty we have in overriding built-in shortcut modules aimed at making cognition more efficient, and all epistemic irrationality can be traced to this same source. A consequence of this account is that a theory of rationality is a descriptive theory, describing contingent features of a cognitive architecture, and it forms the core of a general theory of “voluntary” cognition — those aspects of cognition that are under voluntary control. It also follows that most of the so-called “rules for rationality” that philosophers have proposed are really just rules describing default (non- reflexive) cognition. It can be perfectly rational for a reflexive cognizer to break these rules. The “normativity” of rationality is a reflection of a built-in feature of reflexive cognition — when we detect violations of rationality, we have a tendency to desire to correct them. This is just another part of the descriptive theory of rationality. Although theories of rationality are descriptive, the structure of reflexive cognition gives philosophers, as human cognizers, privileged access to certain aspects of rational cognition. Philosophical theories of rationality are really scientific theories, based on inference to the best explanation, that take contingent introspective data as the evidence to be explained. (shrink)

Princeton University Press, 984. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (3.9 MB).

Princeton University Press, 1982. This book is out of print, but can be downloaded as a pdf file (5 MB).