Honderich claims that for a person to be perceptually conscious is for a world to exist. I decide what this means, and whether it could be true, in the opening section Consciousness and Existence. In Honderich's Phenomenology, I show that Honderich's theory is essentially anticipated in the ideas and Ideas of Husserl. In the third section, Radical Interiority, I argue that although phenomenology putatively eschews ontology of mind, and Honderich construes his position as near- physicalism, Honderich's insights are only truths (...) because we are spiritual substances. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty's Existential Phenomenology is used to address problems of consciousness, perception, the body, space-time, being, and the limits of science. Arguments are deployed for and against Merleau-Ponty's claims.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is known and celebrated as a renowned phenomenologist and is considered a key figure in the existentialist movement. In this wide-ranging and penetrative study, Stephen Priest engages Merleau-Ponty across the full range of his philosophical thought. He considers Merleau-Ponty's writings on the problems of the body, perception, space, time, subjectivity, freedom, language, other minds, physical objects, art and being. Priest addresses Merleau-Ponty's thought in connection with Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. He uses clear and direct (...) language to explain the thoughts of and the ensuing importance of one of the greatest contemporary thinkers. Philosophy students and scholars alike will find great pleasure in this fascinating exploration of the writings and ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss the notion of merely confused supposition as it arose in the medieval theory of suppositio personalis. The context of our analysis is our formalization of William of Ockham's theory of supposition sketched in Mind 86 (1977), 109-13. The present paper is, however, self-contained, although we assume a basic acquaintance with supposition theory. The detailed aims of the paper are: to look at the tasks that supposition theory took on itself and to use our formalization to (...) relate them to more modern ideas; to explain the notion of merely confused supposition and to defend it against certain criticisms; and to discuss two issues closely related to the idea of merely confused supposition which we could not broach in a shorter article: the mode of supposition of terms in intensional contexts, and the possible existence of a fourth mode, often called suppositio copulatim. (shrink)

Discusses the philosophical question concerning the exact relationship between the body and the mind and provides analysis of conflicting theories.

The Empiricists represent the central tradition in British philosophy as well as some of the most important and influential thinkers in human history. Their ideas paved the way for modern thought from politics to science, ethics to religion. _The British Empiricists_ is a wonderfully clear and concise introduction to the lives, careers and views of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Russell, and Ayer. Stephen Priest examines each philosopher and their views on a wide range of topics including mind (...) and matter, ethics and emotions, freedom and the physical world, language, truth and logic. The book is usefully arranged so that it can be read by thinker or by topic, or as a history of key philosophical problems and equips the reader to: recognize and practice philosophical thinking understand the methods of solving philosophical problems used by the British Empiricists appreciate the role of empiricism in the history of Western philosophy. For any student new to philosophy, Western philosophy or the British Empiricists, this masterly survey offers an accessible engaging introduction. (shrink)

Despite the rapid growth of interest in Hegel among English-speaking philosophers, surprisingly little has been directed at Hegel's relationship toward Kant. This collection of essays by eleven eminent philosophers meets this deficiency by critically examining Hegel's attitude to Kant over a wide range of issues: the nature of space and time; the possibility of metaphysics, categories, and things-in-themselves; dialectic and the self; moral and political philosophy; aesthetics; the philosophy of history, and teleology. All the essays provide channels to a fuller (...) understanding of the forks of theoretical deviation between Hegel and Kant. (shrink)

_The Subject in Question_ provides a fascinating insight into a debate between two of the twentieth century's most famous philosophers - Jean-Paul Sartre and Edmund Husserl - over the key notions of conscious experience and the self. Sartre's _The Transcendence of the Ego_, published in 1937, is a major text in the phenomenological tradition and sets the course for much of his later work. _The Subject in Question_ is the first full-length study of this famous work and its influence on (...) twentieth-century philosophy. It also investigates the relationship between Sartre's ideas and the earlier work of Descartes and Kant. (shrink)

Some problems are too subjective, too intimate, too proximal, to admit in principle of any scientific solution: Why is anything you? Is there free will? Is death the end? Other problems are too objective, too macroscopic: Why is there a universe? Why is there anything? What is it to be? Why does mathematics exist? Why does anything happen? Scientific explanation is therefore essentially subject to at least two types of limit, subjective and objective, even though other problems prima facie straddle (...) the subjective/objective divide: What is consciousness? Why is there such a time as the present? Why is there any distinction between right and wrong? Classical (Newtonian-Einsteinian) science largely brackets these problems, but the interpretations of quantum physics variously force them upon us. They only admit of solutions if God exists, there is free-will, and, if some existence is your existence, then you are an immortal soul. (shrink)

Joshua Farris usefully applies my distinction between conditioned and de-conditioned philosophy to some limits of science, and the disclosure of the soul. It is argued that further de-conditioning is conducive to answering the profound philosophical questions: What is it to be now?, and What is it to be? but these answers are only adequate when they entail the existence of God. It follows that physicalism, determinism, and naturalism are false, and that science (knowingly or unknowingly) presupposes theology.

Descartes maintained the doctrine attacked by hume and kant that the self is substance. Consciousness does not entail self-Consciousness for kant. The "i think" must be "capable" of accompanying my thoughts but does not constantly do so. What is necessarily true is that if I have an experience then it is mine, Not that I am conscious of it as mine. Pure apperception is a formal condition for experience, Not as a sort of introspection.

Intentional verbs create three different problems: problems of non-existence, of indeterminacy, and of failure of substitutivity. Meinongians tackle the first problem by recognizing non-existent objects; so too did many medieval logicians. Meinongians and the medievals approach the problem of indeterminacy differently, the former diagnosing an ellipsis for a propositional complement, the latter applying their theory directly to non-propositional complements. The evidence seems to favour the Meinongian approach. Faced with the third problem, Ockham argued bluntly for substitutivity when the intentional complement (...) is non-propositional; Buridan developed a novel way of resisting substitutivity. Ockham's approach is closer to the Meinongian analysis of these cases; Buridan's seems to raise difficulties for a referential semantics. The comparision between the Meinongian and medieval approaches helps to bring out merits and potential pitfalls of each. (shrink)

In _De Spiritualitate et Immortalitate Animae Humanae Scotus distinguishes three senses of 'immaterial': x is immaterial if x depends upon nothing material, x is immaterial if x is unextended, x is immaterial if x is abstract. Pace Scotus: depending on nothing material is neither necessary nor sufficient for being immaterial, being unextended is not necessary but is sufficient for being immaterial, and being abstract is not necessary but is sufficient for being immaterial. The idea of immaterial existence is not incoherent. (...) God, the soul, numbers and universals can exist without a physical universe. (shrink)

Western philosophy since Kant has been essentially operating within a Kantian anti-metaphysical paradigm. German-language philosophy, and a fortiori Husserl's phenomenology, is no exception to this. Here I argue that despite his putative eschewal of metaphysics in the phenomenological reduction or epoché Husserl deploys an ontological, even fundamental ontological, vocabulary and may be read as a metaphysician malgre lui. To the extent to which this interpretation is viable, one escape route from the critical paradigm would seem to be opened up.

It is a premise of a widely endorsed putative refutation of Anselm's ontological argument that ‘exists’ is not a predicate. This Note argues that although ‘exists’ has the superficial grammatical appearance of a predicate in the Proslogion, Anselm does not in fact rely on the premise that ‘exists’ is a logical predicate in his putative proof. It follows that even if some argument for the conclusion that ‘exists’ is not a predicate is sound, that argument is not a refutation of (...) Anselm's argument. (shrink)

It is a premise of a widely endorsed putative refutation of Anselm's ontological argument that ‘exists’ is not a predicate. This Note argues that although ‘exists’ has the superficial grammatical appearance of a predicate in the Proslogion, Anselm does not in fact rely on the premise that ‘exists’ is a logical predicate (or that existing is a property) in his putative proof. It follows that even if some argument for the conclusion that ‘exists’ is not a predicate is sound, that (...) argument is not a refutation of Anselm's argument. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze results from 114 face-to-face qualitative interviews of people who had evacuated from the New Orleans area in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, interviews that were completed within weeks of the 2005 storm in most cases. Our goal was to understand the role information and knowledge played in people's decisions to leave the area. Contrary to the conventional wisdom underlying many disaster communication studies, we found that our interviewees almost always had extensive storm-related information from a (...) variety of sources, including media reports and (in many cases) other background knowledge gleaned from experiences with previous storms, often from interpersonal sources. However, consistent with a theme in communication research that has been identifiable since at least the 1940s, interpersonal communication networks were most often what ultimately caused these individuals to act on this information, and therefore those with “weak ties” (a concept borrowed from sociology) to the broader “mainstream” community may have been disadvantaged, slower to leave, and thus more vulnerable to the storm's main effects. From our evidence, the end result was less a function of discrimination as it was one of differential activation of a relevant social network. These results argue for the rejection of a “deficit model” that assumes varied reactions to natural disaster result from some kind of an information deficiency, and remind us that behavior under such circumstances is the result of a process of collective behavior, not only individual cognition. (shrink)

The Empiricists represent the central tradition in British philosophy as well as some of the most important and influential thinkers in human history. Their ideas paved the way for modern thought from politics to science, ethics to religion. The British Empiricists is a wonderfully clear and concise introduction to the lives, careers and views of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Russell, and Ayer. Stephen Priest examines each philosopher and their views on a wide range of topics including mind (...) and matter, ethics and emotions, freedom and the physical world, language, truth and logic. The book is usefully arranged so that it can be read by thinker or by topic, or as a history of key philosophical problems and equips the reader to: recognize and practice philosophical thinking understand the methods of solving philosophical problems used by the British Empiricists appreciate the role of empiricism in the history of Western philosophy. For any student new to philosophy, Western philosophy or the British Empiricists, this masterly survey offers an accessible engaging introduction. (shrink)

In this paper we analyze results from 114 face-to-face qualitative interviews of people who had evacuated from the New Orleans area in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, interviews that were completed within weeks of the 2005 storm in most cases. Our goal was to understand the role information and knowledge played in people's decisions to leave the area. Contrary to the conventional wisdom underlying many disaster communication studies, we found that our interviewees almost always had extensive storm-related information from a (...) variety of sources, including media reports and other background knowledge gleaned from experiences with previous storms, often from interpersonal sources. However, consistent with a theme in communication research that has been identifiable since at least the 1940s, interpersonal communication networks were most often what ultimately caused these individuals to act on this information, and therefore those with “weak ties” to the broader “mainstream” community may have been disadvantaged, slower to leave, and thus more vulnerable to the storm's main effects. From our evidence, the end result was less a function of discrimination as it was one of differential activation of a relevant social network. These results argue for the rejection of a “deficit model” that assumes varied reactions to natural disaster result from some kind of an information deficiency, and remind us that behavior under such circumstances is the result of a process of collective behavior, not only individual cognition. (shrink)

ncongruous places often inspire anomalous stories. In early 1984, I spent several nights at the Vatican housed in a hotel built for itinerant priests. While pondering over such puzzling issues as the intended function of the bidets in each bathroom, and hungering for something other than plum jam on my breakfast rolls (why did the basket only contain hundreds of identical plum packets and not a one of, say, strawberry?), I encountered yet another among the innumerable issues of contrasting cultures (...) that can make life so interesting. Our crowd (present in Rome for a meeting on nuclear winter sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences) shared the hotel with a group of French and Italian Jesuit priests who were also professional scientists. (shrink)

Central to this essay is the understanding that varied communities may have an inherent and unrecognised culture of their own and this culture may be detrimental to their core. Bioethics constitutes one such community and is embedded in norms and values comprising its own culture. I use exclusion of religion or simply ‘irreligion’ as an example of a cultural element that may be established and so shape the culture of bioethics. Irreligious bioethics includes both overt religious preclusion and the more (...) pervasive form of religious marginalisation. This norm is narrated into the culture of bioethics with justifications sustaining it. Irreligious bioethics is inadmissible as it claims illegitimate neutrality, is a misuse of expertise and results in a variety of harms. As bioethics is influential in society, those engaged should be critically reflective and aware of harmful cultural elements whilst also possessing the honesty, courage and capacity to change them. (shrink)

Religious Evolution and the Axial Age describes and explains the evolution of religion over the past ten millennia. It shows that an overall evolutionary sequence can be observed, running from the spirit and shaman dominated religions of small-scale societies, to the archaic religions of the ancient civilizations, and then to the salvation religions of the Axial Age. Stephen K. Sanderson draws on ideas from new cognitive and evolutionary psychological theories, as well as comparative religion, anthropology, history, and sociology. He (...) argues that religion is a biological adaptation that evolved in order to solve a number of human problems, especially those concerned with existential anxiety and ontological insecurity. Much of the focus of the book is on the Axial Age, the period in the second half of the first millennium BCE that marked the greatest religious transformation in world history. The book demonstrates that, as a result of massive increases in the scale and scope of war and large-scale urbanization, the problems of existential anxiety and ontological insecurity became particularly acute. These changes evoked new religious needs, especially for salvation and release from suffering. As a result entirely new religions-Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism-arose to help people cope with the demands of the new historical era. (shrink)

In line with the Principle of Uniform Solution, Graham Priest has challenged advocates like myself of the “multiple-meanings” solution to the paradoxes of truth and knowledge, due to the medieval logician Thomas Bradwardine, to extend this account to a similar solution to the paradoxes of denotation, such as Berry’s, König’s and Richard’s. I here rise to this challenge by showing how to adapt Bradwardine’s principles of truth and signification for propositions to corresponding principles of denotation and signification for descriptive (...) phrases, applying them to give a “multiple-meanings” solution to the denotational paradoxes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“The Whole Internal World His Own”: Locke and Metaphor ReconsideredS. H. ClarkWhy need I name thy Boyle, whose pious search, Amid the dark recesses of his works, The great Creator sought? And why thy Locke, Who made the whole internal world his own?Oh decus! Anglicae certe oh lux altera gentis!... Tu caecas rerum causas, fontemque severum Pande, Pater; tibi enim, tibi, veri magne Sacerdos, Corda patent hominum, atque altae (...) penetralia Mentis.Fourfold Annihilation & at the clangor of the Arrows of Intellect The innumerable Chariots of the Almighty appeard in Heaven And Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakespear & Chaucer1Two features of these encomia to John Locke, composed by James Thomson, Thomas Gray, and William Blake, are immediately striking. Firstly, they are delivered by poets in a tradition customarily seen as a reaction to the intellectual climate induced by Locke’s Essay, a book which Blake famously claimed to regard with “Contempt and Abhorrence.” 2 Secondly, the familiar and somewhat hackneyed characterizations of Locke as philosopher of common-sense, [End Page 241] empiricism, and liberal ideology are refreshingly absent. For Gray he is “veri magne Sacerdos,” great priest of truth; Thomson places him in a pantheon including Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, and Chaucer; and this ranking is explicitly endorsed in Blake’s “Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer.” Comparable praise of Locke’s imaginative power is conspicuously absent from even the most generous tributes of recent commentators. 3Even if Locke’s philosophical contribution to a variety of debates is fully acknowledged, the question remains of why his major work, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, was held in such high popular esteem—veneration is not too strong a word—during the subsequent century. The text itself appears an improbable candidate for such canonization: George Saintsbury accused its prose of being “positively mean in every point of style,” 4 and certainly in comparison with the poised and lucid ironies of Berkeley and Hume, it cannot but appear prolix, diffuse, and repetitive. The chief (and frequently only) merit grudgingly accorded to it is of disarming informality. Rosalie Colie’s emphasis on the “exploitation of the generic and rhetorical possibilities in the essay form itself “ highlights the conscious manipulation of authorial distance through which Locke creates the effect of sprawling inclusiveness and incom-pletion, but at the expense of conceding that “in exchange for the frankness with which the essayist appeared to present his thinking self, he was allowed certain liberties from logical rigour.” 5 Though the suggestion that a major philosophical text seeks to evade “logical rigour” might seem damning enough, there is a still more insidious equation of Locke’s “middle-style,” his desire “to make, what I have to say, as easie and intelligible to all sort of Readers as I can,” with a complicity with the expectations of his audience. 6 Other critics, notably John Richetti, have put a more positive gloss on the “simple and fortuitously concocted circle of friends” to whom the Essay is addressed, but even these accounts have been obliged to stress the representative and consensual nature of Locke’s thought. 7 This view is perhaps most elegantly expressed by Leslie Stephen: “Locke ruled the thought of his own and the coming period [End Page 242] because he interpreted so completely the fundamental beliefs which had been worked out at this time. He ruled, that is, by obeying.” 8William Walker correctly observes that “identifying and interpreting metaphors of mind” in the Essay are “standard practices of mainstream philosophical commentary from Leibniz to Rorty,” but also notes that these analyses are usually concerned with the degree to which Locke’s reliance on figuration was at variance with and compromised his epistemological doctrine. 9 I would argue that the poetic tributes previously quoted offer a more suggestive and adequate guide to the original impact of his work. In order to substantiate this claim, I shall begin by examining Locke’s apparent renunciation of, yet paradoxical dependence upon metaphor; go on to look at the connection of the “Horizon” to the elegiac presentation of memory and the ethic of mental “Labour”; and conclude by analyzing the complex interdependence of candle and sun within the light imagery employed in the... (shrink)

The essay discusses the March 5, 1944 "Discussion on Sin," an event that was held between French intellectual Georges Bataille and the Jesuit priest and patristics scholar Jean Daniélou, along with other important Christian and non-Christian intellectuals. I argue that the event is the best recorded wartime intellectual encounter between the founders of contestation (subsequently so important in deconstructive thought) and serious practitioners of Christianity. Aspects of the thought of French thinker Maurice Blanchot and Swiss theologian Hans Urs Von (...) Balthasar are also profiled. (shrink)