Feyerabend has recently argued that the best way to deal with philosophical problems is through drama rather than through intellectual debate. This paper criticises his view and corrects it.

In this paper, I will defend Paul Feyerabend's claim--that there are some scientific theories that cannot be refuted unless one of their rivals is first confirmed--by criticizing Ronald Laymon's well-known attack on Feyerabend's claim. In particular, I will argue both that the Second Law of Thermodynamics was not refuted before the Kinetic Theory's predictions were confirmed, and that it could not have been refuted without the confirmation of the remarkable predictions of some rival theory.

This thesis argues that: there are no indubitable or highly probable empirical statements that can serve as a foundation for scientific knowledge; the progress of science is not necessarily or generally cumulative; the widespread belief that certain scientific theories are founded in experience had had bad consequences because it has retarded the progress of science and led to the development of totalitarian institutions; hypotheses which are rivals to entrenched scientific theories are helpful and sometimes even necessary for bringing the fundamental (...) presuppositions of those theories into question and for showing up the inadequacies of those theories; the widespread adoption of a scientific methodology which encourages the development of rival hypotheses will help science to progress and lead to the development of institutions and educational practices which encourage greater freedom of thought and action; there are no secure foundations that the dramatist can use to learn truths about human nature or to construct plays, or that the audience can use to decide whether what it sees is a correct representation of human nature and human social relations; plays constructed and presented according to the prescriptions of foundationalist dramatists will give the audience the misleading impressions that well-founded truths are being presented to them and render them incapable of criticising the views presented through those plays; plays constructed and produced according to Brecht's methodological prescriptions are preferable to plays constructed according to the prescription of foundationalist dramatists because they make the audience bring into question fundamental assumptions about the nature of human beings while not rendering them incapable of criticising the views presented by those plays; the fragmentation of knowledge into highly specialised disciplines with their own methodologies and narrow set of problems which has been the consequence of a widespread belief in foundationalism is both unjustified and dangerous; and educational programs in which specialists learn to use other methodologies and to carefully consider the ethical aspects of their work should replace the educational programs that are currently used. (shrink)

Aristotle explains existence through postulating essences that are intrinsic and perception independent. I argue that his theory is more plausible than Hume’s and Russell’s theories of existence. Russell modifies Hume’s theory because he wants to allow for the existence of mathematical objects. However, Russell’s theory facilitates a problematic collapse of ontology into epistemology, which has become a feature of much analytic philosophy. This collapse obscures the nature of truth. Aristotle is to be praised for starting with a clear account of (...) ordinary objects rather than immediately reifying mathematical objects. He thus allows us to have a coherent account of existence and truth, and to easily resist collapsing ontology into epistemology. (shrink)

This comprehensive textbook provides a clear nontechnical introduction to the philosophy of science. Through asking whether science can provide us with objective knowledge of the world, the book provides a thorough and accessible guide to the key thinkers and debates that define the field. George Couvalis surveys traditional themes around theory and observation, induction, probability, falsification and rationality as well as more recent challenges to objectivity including relativistic, feminist and sociological readings. This provides a helpful framework in which (...) to locate the key intellectual contributions to these debates, ranging from those of Mill and Hume, through Popper and Kuhn to Laudan, Bloor and Garfinkel among. (shrink)

Aristotle explains existence through postulating essences that are intrinsic and percep- tion independent. I argue that his theory is more plausible than Hume’s and Russell’s theories of existence. Russell modifies Hume’s theory because he wants to allow for the existence of mathematical objects. However, Russell’s theory facilitates a problematic collapse of ontology into epistemology, which has become a feature of much analytic philosophy. This collapse obscures the nature of truth. Aristotle is to be praised for starting with a clear account (...) of ordinary objects rather than immediately reifying mathematical objects. He thus allows us to have a coherent account of existence and truth, and to easily resist collapsing ontology into epistemology. (shrink)

The eighteenth century philosopher David Hume was much influenced by Greek philosophy and literature. His favourite writer was the satirist Lucian. What is David Hume’s thanatotherapy (therapy of the fear of death)? Is he an Epicurean or Pyrrhonian thanatotherapist? I argue that, while he is in part an Epicurean who is sceptical about his Epicureanism, he is primarily a Lucianic thanatotherapist. A Lucianic thanatotherapist uses self and other deprecating irony as a form of therapy. He also ruthlessly satirises religious consolations. (...) I use Hume’s deathbed allusions to Lucian’s Kataplous (floating downwards) and the Dialogues of the Dead to explain my view. (shrink)

Aristotle and William of Ockham both argue that existence or being is a predicate, though not a distinguishing predicate. I place Ockham’s argument in an Aristotelian context and discuss its merits. I then turn to empiricist criticisms of the view that we can coherently predicate being of things. I argue that while Ockham’s argument is cogent, his account of how we come to have the concept of being is inadequate. Ockham’s view needs to be supplemented with Kantian insights.

Aristotle argues that provided we have moderate luck, we can attain eudaimonia through our own effort. He claims that it is crucial to attaining eudaimonia that we aim at an overall target in our lives to which all our actions are directed. He also claims that the proper target of a eudaimon human life is virtuous activity, which is a result of effort not chance. He criticises Theognis for saying that the most pleasant thing is to chance on love, arguing (...) instead that virtuous activity is the most pleasant thing. I argue that although Aristotle’s view is insightful and carefully worked out, he fails to show that Theognis is wrong. Effort is not necessarily the path to human eudaimonia and important things we attain by chance seem to have an irreplacable value. (shrink)

Most philosophers hold that the use of our deductive powers confers an especially strong warrant on some of our mathematical and logical beliefs. By contrast, many of the same philosophers hold that it is a matter of serious debate whether any inductive inferences are cogent. That is, they hold that we might well have no warrant for inductively licensed beliefs, such as generalizations. I argue that we cannot know that we know logical and mathemati- cal truths unless we use induction. (...) Our confidence in our logical and mathematical powers is not justified if we are inductive scep- tics. This means that inductive scepticism leads to a deductive scep- ticism. I conclude that we should either be philosophical sceptics about our knowledge of deduction and induction, or accept that some of our inductive inferences are cogent. (shrink)

With the emergence of service provisioning environments and new networking capabilities, antagonistic businesses have been able to collaborate securely by sharing information in order to have a beneficial result for all. This collaboration has sometimes been imposed by state legislation and sometimes been desirable by the firms themselves so as to resolve frequently occurring abnormalities. In any case, as information exchange takes place between antagonistic firms, security and privacy issues arise. In the context of this paper, a collaborative environment has (...) been analyzed for enterprises that set out in the banking sector. A Grid-based Anti-Money Laundering (AML) system has been developed in an effort to take advantage of the Grid infrastructure, supporting the secure and trustful exchange of information between financial institutions and ensuring the confidentiality of the data transferred and the authentication of the users to whom they are available. Special emphasis is put on security mechanisms for supporting identity and privacy management as well as in Service Level Agreements (SLA) enforcement for enabling a trust enforcement platform in a collaboration business model. (shrink)

Pour l’herméneutique philosophique de Hans-Georg Gadamer, la responsabilité est inséparable de l’expérience de la réalité vivante de la phronesis qui constitue le noyau de la vie éthique. À partir de la réhabilitation du concept de phronesis, Gadamer entend redonner à la philosophie pratique le contenu substantiel qui lui manque en raison de la domination de la raison technique dont l’idéal de la méthode fait l’économie de la responsabilité individuelle et sociale de l’homme. Néanmoins, comme le montre la critique convaincante de (...) Jürgen Habermas, la réhabilitation de la phronesis comme source de la responsabilité ne prend pas en compte la différenciation transcendantale entre idéalité et réalité. En tant qu’elle se trouve fondée sur la communauté de sens que représente la phronesis, la philosophie éthique que développe l’herméneutique ne laisse aucune chance à une reconstruction véritablement philosophique et critique des présuppositions universelles de la responsabilité et de la conscience morale. (shrink)

We very often grant that a person can gain knowledge on the basis of epistemic artifacts such as telescopes, microscopes and so on. However, this intuition threatens to undermine virtue reliabilism according to which one knows that p if and only if one’s believing the truth that p is the product of a reliable cognitive belief-forming process; in an obvious sense epistemic artifacts are not parts of one’s overall cognitive system. This is so, unless the extended cognition hypothesis (HEC) is (...) true. According to HEC when parts of the environment become properly coupled to the agent’s brain then they too can be considered constitutive parts of the overall cognitive mechanism—i.e. cognition potentially extends to the world surrounding the agent. Interestingly, HEC and the broader framework of virtue reliabilism share some intriguing similarities, which render these two views mutually supportive. Making these similarities explicit provides a principled account of the way in which our knowledge-conducive cognitive characters may extend beyond our natural cognitive capacities by incorporating epistemic artifacts. (shrink)

Interest in computerised central economic planning (CCEP) has seen a resurgence, as there is strong demand for an alternative vision to modern free (or not so free) market liberal capitalism. Given the close links of CCEP with what we would now broadly call artificial intelligence (AI)—e.g. optimisation, game theory, function approximation, machine learning, automated reasoning—it is reasonable to draw direct analogues and perform an analysis that would help identify what commodities and institutions we should see for a CCEP programme to (...) become successful. Following this analysis, we conclude that a CCEP economy would need to have a very different outlook from current market practices, with a focus on producing basic “interlinking” commodities (e.g. tools, processed materials, instruction videos) that consumers can use as a form of collective R &D. On an institutional level, CCEP should strive for the release of basic commodities that empower consumers by having as many alternative uses as possible, but also making sure that a baseline of basic necessities is widely available. (shrink)

Gegenstand dieser Untersuchung ist die Relevanz und Notwendigkeit eines prozesstheoretischen Verstandnisses des onto- und embryogenetischen Werdens von Organismen. Zuerst werden die Grenzen der modernen systemtheoretischen Reduktion des Organismus auf selbstorganisierte physikochemische Systeme aufgezeigt. Im zweiten Schritt werden, ausgehend von den Prozessontologien von A. N. Whitehead und H. Bergson, alternative Betrachtungen von Onto- und Embryogenese eingefuhrt. Abschliessend wird eine neue Prozessphilosophie skizziert, in welche Ontologien beider Denker integriert werden.

Cognitive integration is a defining yet overlooked feature of our intellect that may nevertheless have substantial effects on the process of knowledge-acquisition. To bring those effects to the fore, I explore the topic of cognitive integration both from the perspective of virtue reliabilism within externalist epistemology and the perspective of extended cognition within externalist philosophy of mind and cognitive science. On the basis of this interdisciplinary focus, I argue that cognitive integration can provide a minimalist yet adequate epistemic norm of (...) subjective justification: so long as the agent’s belief-forming process has been integrated in his cognitive character, the agent can be justified in holding the resulting beliefs merely by lacking any doubts there was something wrong in the way he arrived at them. Moreover, since both externalist philosophy of mind and externalist epistemology treat the process of cognitive integration in the same way, we can claim that epistemic cognitive characters may extend beyond our organismic cognitive capacities to the artifacts we employ or even to other agents we interact with. This move is not only necessary for accounting for advanced cases of knowledge that is the product of the operation of epistemic artifacts or the interactive activity of research teams, but it can further lead to interesting ramifications both for social epistemology and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Damascius’ discussion of the Platonic notions of the sudden (to exaiphnēs) and the now (to nun) occurs in the context of his Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides. His view is that the Platonic sudden should be identified not with the timeless essence of the individual human soul, as Proclus suggested, but with the cohesive element that holds the individual human soul together through the cycles of reincarnation. For Damascius, the human soul is so thoroughly intertwined with time, when it descends to (...) the realm of Becoming, that its very essence gets altered. Damascius also maintains that the Platonic now is not a dimensionless boundary or temporal limit but an indivisible stretch of extended time. For Damascius, time progresses by ‘leaps’, and those leaps, determined once for all by the Demiurgic Intellect, are the atomic nows. Behind the flowing atomic nows there lies a numerically identical non-flowing now that is their eternal origin and form. The paper addresses the issue of the relationship of the sudden as the cohesive element of the soul to the now as the cohesive element of time, in the context of Damascius’ views about timeless Being and ever-flowing Becoming. (shrink)

It has been recently suggested that if the Extended Mind thesis is true, mental privacy might be under serious threat. In this paper, I look into the details of this claim and propose that one way of dealing with this emerging threat requires that data ontology be enriched with an additional kind of data—viz., mental data. I explore how mental data relates to both data and metadata and suggest that, arguably, and by contrast with these existing categories of informational content, (...) mental data should not be merely legally protected. Rather, if we value mental privacy as we know it, technological measures should be employed to ensure that one’s mental data are practically—not just legally—impossible for others to obtain. (shrink)

Strong epistemic anti-individualism—i.e., the claim that knowledge can be irreducibly social—is increasingly debated within mainstream and social epistemology. Most existing approaches attempt to argue for the view on the basis of aggregative analyses, which focus on the way certain groups aggregate the epistemic attitudes of their members. Such approaches are well motivated, given that many groups to which we often ascribe group knowledge—such as juries and committees—operate in this way. Yet another way that group knowledge can be generated is on (...) the basis of epistemic collaborations, such as scientific research teams and Transactive Memory Systems. To produce knowledge, epistemic collaborations rely heavily on the mutual interactions of their group members. This is a distinctive feature of epistemic collaborations that renders them resistant to aggregative analyses. To accommodate this kind of group knowledge, the paper combines virtue reliabilism with the hypothesis of distributed cognition in order to introduce the hybrid approach of distributed virtue reliabilism. On this view, beliefs produced by epistemic collaborations entertain positive epistemic standing in virtue of the mutual interactions of their group members; this positive epistemic standing is a collective property; epistemic collaborations qualify as epistemic group agents; collaborative knowledge is a special kind of group knowledge, motivating strong epistemic anti-individualism in a distinctive way. (shrink)

Strong epistemic anti-individualism—i.e., the claim that knowledge can be irreducibly social—is increasingly debated within mainstream and social epistemology. Most existing approaches attempt to argue for the view on the basis of aggregative analyses, which focus on the way certain groups aggregate the epistemic attitudes of their members. Such approaches are well motivated, given that many groups to which we often ascribe group knowledge—such as juries and committees—operate in this way. Yet another way that group knowledge can be generated is on (...) the basis of epistemic collaborations, such as scientific research teams and Transactive Memory Systems. To produce knowledge, epistemic collaborations rely heavily on the mutual interactions of their group members. This is a distinctive feature of epistemic collaborations that renders them resistant to aggregative analyses. To accommodate this kind of group knowledge, the paper combines virtue reliabilism with the hypothesis of distributed cognition in order to introduce the hybrid approach of distributed virtue reliabilism. On this view, beliefs produced by epistemic collaborations entertain positive epistemic standing in virtue of the mutual interactions of their group members; this positive epistemic standing is a collective property; epistemic collaborations qualify as epistemic group agents; collaborative knowledge is a special kind of group knowledge, motivating strong epistemic anti-individualism in a distinctive way. (shrink)

Combining active externalism in the form of the extended and distributed cognition hypotheses with virtue reliabilism can provide the long sought after link between mainstream epistemology and philosophy of science. Specifically, by reading virtue reliabilism along the lines suggested by the hypothesis of extended cognition, we can account for scientific knowledge produced on the basis of both hardware and software scientific artifacts. Additionally, by bringing the distributed cognition hypothesis within the picture, we can introduce the notion of epistemic group agents, (...) in order to further account for collective knowledge produced on the basis of scientific research teams. (shrink)

This paper argues that the republican ideal of non-domination, central in Bergès’s paper, rests on affective conditions that often go unnoticed. In this context, I introduce the notion of affective independence to shed light on the affects akin to the spirit of socio-economic and political independence in between aristocratic pretentiousness and vanity on the one hand and servility towards superiors on the other. In the Letters on Sympathy, Sophie de Grouchy dismisses Adam Smith’s key notion of propriety and thoroughly rejects (...) deferential manners. Her critical gaze cuts even deeper. Anticipating critiques of democratic demagoguery, she reclaims the early modern notion of enthusiasm, linked to religious fanaticism, to account for uncritical admiration towards populist leaders. (shrink)

Mainstream epistemologists have recently made a few isolated attempts to demonstrate the particular ways, in which specific types of knowledge are partly social. Two promising cases in point are Lackey’s dualism in the epistemology of testimony and Goldberg’s process reliabilist treatment of testimonial and coverage-support justification. What seems to be missing from the literature, however, is a general approach to knowledge that could reveal the partly social nature of the latter anytime this may be the case. Indicatively, even though Lackey (...) :345–361, 2007) has recently launched an attack against the Credit Account of Knowledge on the basis of testimony, she has not classified her view of testimonial knowledge into any of the alternative, general approaches to knowledge. Similarly, even if Goldberg’s attempt to provide a process reliabilist explanation of the social nature of testimonial knowledge is deemed satisfactory, his attempt to do the same in the case of coverage-support justification does not deliver the requisite result. This paper demonstrates that CAK can in fact provide, pace Lackey’s renunciation of the view, a promising account of the social nature of both testimonial and coverage-supported knowledge. Additionally, however, it can display further explanatory power by also revealing the social nature of knowledge produced on the basis of epistemic artifacts. Despite their disparities, all these types of knowledge count as partly social in nature, because in all these cases, according to CAK, the epistemic credit for the individual agent’s true belief must spread between the individual agent and certain parts of her epistemic community. Accordingly, CAK is a promising candidate for providing a unified approach to several and, perhaps all possible, instances of what we may call ‘weak epistemic anti-individualism’ within mainstream epistemology: i.e., the claim that the nature of knowledge can occasionally be both social and individual at the same time. (shrink)

In Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee defines Social Machines as biotechnologically hybrid Web-processes on the basis of which, “high-level activities, which have occurred just within one human’s brain, will occur among even larger more interconnected groups of people acting as if the shared a larger intuitive brain”. The analysis and design of Social Machines has already started attracting considerable attention both within the industry and academia. Web science, however, is still missing a clear definition of what a Social Machine is, which (...) has in turn resulted in several calls for a “philosophical engineering” ; Halpin et al. 2010). This paper is a first attempt to respond to this call, by combining contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science with epistemology. The idea of philosophical engineering implies that a sufficiently good conception of Social Machines should be of both theoretical and practical advantage. To demonstrate how the present approach can satisfy both objectives it will be used in order to address one of Wikipedia’s most worrying concerns—i.e., the current and ongoing decline in the number of its active contributors. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to argue that robust virtue epistemology is correct. That is, a complete account of knowledge is not in need for an additional modal criterion in order to account for knowledge-undermining epistemic luck. I begin by presenting the problems facing robust virtue epistemology by examining two prominent counterexamples—the Barney and ‘epistemic twin earth’ cases. After proposing a way in which virtue epistemology can explain away these two problematic cases, thereby, implying that cognitive abilities are (...) also safe, I offer a naturalistic explanation in support of this last claim, inspired by evolutionary epistemology. Finally, I argue that naturalized epistemology should not be thought of as being exclusively descriptive. On the contrary, the evolutionary story I offer in support of the claim that reliability implies safety can provide us with a plausible epistemic norm. (shrink)

L'objet de cet article est d'examiner l'ensemble des entités qui sont appelées divines dans le poème philosophique d'Empédocle. Il s'agit de se demander si ces entités aboutissent à une vision consistante de la divinité. On examine aussi la dialectique de la mortalité et de l'immortalité présente dans la pensée d'Empédocle. Dans la mesure où la moindre chose, y compris les vivants les plus instables, sont issus des principes divins, il y a un sens à dire que, dans le cosmos d'Empédocle, (...) toutes les choses composées sont considérées comme étant divines. Mais en un autre sens, seules les structures hautement intégrées méritent d'être considérées en tant que dieux. On montre que souffrir comme un mortel revient à vivre une vie fragmentée continuellement menacée par le spectre de la mort. Au contraire, mener une vie de dieu revient à vivre au sens plein, sans être tourmenté par le terme éventuel d'une existence heureuse. En conclusion, on établit que deux orientations distinctes de la poésie grecque et de la philosophie semblent avoir rivalisé dans l'interprétation qu'Empédocle se faisait des dieux. The paper examines all the entities that are said to be divine in Empedocles' philosophical poetry, and raises the question of whether or not they form a rather consistent view of what it is for something to be a god. The paper also examines the dialectics of mortality and immortality in Empedocles' thought. Since everything whatsoever, including the most unstable living beings, stemmed from divine principles there is a sense in which all composite things were regarded as divine in Empedocles' cosmos. But there is another sense in which only highly integrated structures were considered to be gods. To suffer as a mortal, it is argued, was to live a fragmented life continuously threatened by the prospect of death. Contrariwise, to lead a divine life was to live in wholeness, not at all worried by the eventual termination of such a blessed existence. In conclusion it is argued that two distinct trends of early Greek poetry and philosophy seem to have vied for supremacy in Empedocles' understanding of godhead. (shrink)

Within analytic philosophy, the existence of collective knowledge has been motivated by means of two apparently distinct, and in direct competition with one another, theoretical approaches: (i) the commitment model and (ii) the distributed model. This paper agues, however, that to fully account for collaborative knowledge—i.e., a special kind of collective knowledge—both models are required. In other words, there is at least one kind of collective knowledge, the account of which requires treating the two models not as competitors but as (...) complementary to each other. If that’s correct, not only can we gain a deeper understanding of the specifics surrounding collaborative knowledge but also a clearer picture of the broader debate surrounding collective knowledge. (shrink)