Part 1. Introduction -- Introduction: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm in Light of a Thirty-Five Year Debate -- Thirty-Five Year Climate Change Policy Debate -- Part 2. Priority Ethical Issues -- Ethical Problems with Cost Arguments -- Ethics and Scientific Uncertainty Arguments -- Atmospheric Targets -- Allocating National Emissions Targets -- Climate Change Damages and Adaptation Costs -- Obligations of Sub-national Governments, Organizations, Businesses, and Individuals -- Independent Responsibility to Act -- Part 3. The Crucial Role of Ethics in Climate (...) Change Policy Making -- Why Has Ethics Failed to Achieve Traction? -- Conclusion: Navigating the Perfect Moral Storm. (shrink)

The Twentieth Century has seen a dramatic rise in the use of probability and statistics in almost all fields of research. This has stimulated many new philosophical ideas on probability. _Philosophical Theories of Probability_ is the first book to present a clear, comprehensive and systematic account of these various theories and to explain how they relate to one another. Gillies also offers a distinctive version of the propensity theory of probability, and the intersubjective interpretation, which develops the subjective theory.

Religious naturalism and three scientific revolutions: Introduction -- The cosmological revolution -- The evolutionary revolution -- The ecological revolution -- Inwardness and awareness in nature: Introduction -- Inwardness of life and inwardness of mind -- Mind and consciousness in nature -- The range of conscious awareness on earth -- Presumptive rights and conflicts of rights: Introduction -- Rs of the thou of nature -- A scheme of presumptive natural rights -- A fourth R of the thou of nature -- Conflicts (...) of rights -- Hunting and fishing : Introduction -- Hunting -- Fishing -- Responses to the charge of impractical idealism -- Eating and wearing: Introduction -- Using animals for food -- The vegetarian response -- Using animals for apparel and other purposes -- Other areas of responsibility and concern: Introduction -- Experimenting on animals -- Rodeos, circuses, zoos, and aquariums -- Endangered species and despoliations of natural environments -- The human population explosion -- The threat of global climate change -- A new moral and religious consciousness: Introduction -- Empowerment in religion of nature -- Objections and replies -- Principles and prescriptions. (shrink)

Music as an Imitation of Harmonious Balance.

This book questions the idea that the boundary between truth and falsity must always be absolute, and thus that there is no possible bridge between the two. The author argues that searching for liminal bridges between opposing claims is an essential part of finding absolute truths.

Develops and defends a philosophical account of meaning, purpose, and value in human life and experience that is naturalistic without being reductionistic or scientistic.

Engages the work and career of a central figure in contemporary philosophy. Hugh J. Silverman was an inspiring scholar and teacher, known for his work engaging and shaping phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. As Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University, State University of New York, Silverman’s work was marked by “the between,” a concept he developed to think the postmodern in the space between philosophy and non-philosophy. In this volume, leading scholars (...) explore and extend Silverman’s philosophical contributions, from reflections on the notions of care, time, and responsibility, to presentations of the practices and possibilities of deconstruction itself. They provide an assessment of Silverman’s life and work at the intersection of philosophy, ethics, and politics. (shrink)

Technological change is often seen as something that follows its own logic -- something we may welcome, or about which we may protest, but which we are unable to alter fundamentally. This reader challenges that assumption and its distinguished contributors demonstrate that technology is affected at a fundamental level by the social context in which it develops. General arguments are introduced about the relation of technology to society and different types of technology are examined: the technology of production: domestic and (...) reproductive technology; and military technology. The book draws on authors from Karl Marx to Cynthia Cockburn to show that production technology is shaped by social relations in the workplace. It moves on to the technologies of the household and biological reproduction, which are topics that male-dominated social science has tended to ignore or trivialise -- though these are actually of crucial significance where powerful shaping factors are at work, normally unnoticed. The final section asks what shapes the most frightening technology of all -- the technology of weaponry, especially nuclear weapons. The editors argue that social scientists have devoted disproportionate attention to the effects of technology on society, and tended to ignore the more fundamental question of what shapes technology in the first place. They have drawn both on established work in the history and sociology of technology and on newer feminist perspectives to show just how important and fruitful it is to try to answer that deeper question. The first edition of this reader, published in 1985, had a considerable influence on thinking about the relationship between technology andsociety. This second edition has been thoroughly revised and expanded to take into account new research and the emergence of new theoretical perspectives. (shrink)

I am struck by how little is known about so much of cognition. One goal of this paper is to argue for the need to consider a rich set of interlocking issues in the study of cognition. Mainstream work in cognition—including my own—ignores many critical aspects of animate cognitive systems. Perhaps one reason that existing theories say so little relevant to real world activities is the neglect of social and cultural factors, of emotion, and of the major points that distinguish (...) an animate cognitive system from an artificial one: the need to survive, to regulate its own operation, to maintain itself, to exist in the environment, to change from a small, uneducated, immature system to an adult, developed, knowledgeable one.Human cognition is not the same as artificial cognition, if only because the human organism must also be concerned with the problems of life, of development, of survival. There must be a regulatory system that interacts with the cognitive component. And it may well be that it is the cognitive component that is subservient, evolved primarily for the benefit of the regulatory system, working through the emotions, through affect.I argue that several concepts must become fundamental parts of the study of cognition, including the roles of culture, of social interaction, of emotions, and of motivation. I argue that there are at least 12 issues that should comprise the study of cognition, and thereby, the field of Cognitive Science. We need to study a wide variety of behavior before we can hope to understand a single class. Cognitive scientists as a whole ought to make more use of evidence from the neurosciences, from brain damage and mental illness, from cognitive sociology and anthropology, and from clinical studies of the human. These must be accompanied, of course, with the study of language, of the psychological aspects of human processing structures, and of artificially intelligent mechanisms. The study of Cognitive Science requires a complex interaction among different issues of concern, an interaction that will not be properly understood until all parts are understood, with no part independent of the others, the whole requiring the parts, and the parts the whole. (shrink)

Winner of the 2014 Edward Goodwin Ballard Award for an Outstanding Book in Phenomenology, awarded by the Center for Advance Research in Phenomenology. -/- Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression offers a comprehensive reading of the philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a central figure in 20th-century continental philosophy. -/- By establishing that the paradoxical logic of expression is Merleau-Ponty's fundamental philosophical gesture, this book ties together his diverse work on perception, language, aesthetics, politics and history in order to establish the (...) ontological position he was developing at the time of his sudden death in 1961. Donald A. Landes explores the paradoxical logic of expression as it appears in both Merleau-Ponty’s explicit reflections on expression and his non-explicit uses of this logic in his philosophical reflection on other topics, and thus establishes a continuity and a trajectory of his thought that allows for his work to be placed into conversation with contemporary developments in continental philosophy. The book offers the reader a key to understanding Merleau-Ponty's subtle methodology and highlights the urgency and relevance of his research into the ontological significance of expression for today's work in art and cultural theory. (shrink)

I am struck by how little is known about so much of cognition. One goal of this paper is to argue for the need to consider a rich set of interlocking issues in the study of cognition. Mainstream work in cognition—including my own—ignores many critical aspects of animate cognitive systems. Perhaps one reason that existing theories say so little relevant to real world activities is the neglect of social and cultural factors, of emotion, and of the major points that distinguish (...) an animate cognitive system from an artificial one: the need to survive, to regulate its own operation, to maintain itself, to exist in the environment, to change from a small, uneducated, immature system to an adult, developed, knowledgeable one.Human cognition is not the same as artificial cognition, if only because the human organism must also be concerned with the problems of life, of development, of survival. There must be a regulatory system that interacts with the cognitive component. And it may well be that it is the cognitive component that is subservient, evolved primarily for the benefit of the regulatory system, working through the emotions, through affect.I argue that several concepts must become fundamental parts of the study of cognition, including the roles of culture, of social interaction, of emotions, and of motivation. I argue that there are at least 12 issues that should comprise the study of cognition, and thereby, the field of Cognitive Science. We need to study a wide variety of behavior before we can hope to understand a single class. Cognitive scientists as a whole ought to make more use of evidence from the neurosciences, from brain damage and mental illness, from cognitive sociology and anthropology, and from clinical studies of the human. These must be accompanied, of course, with the study of language, of the psychological aspects of human processing structures, and of artificially intelligent mechanisms. The study of Cognitive Science requires a complex interaction among different issues of concern, an interaction that will not be properly understood until all parts are understood, with no part independent of the others, the whole requiring the parts, and the parts the whole. (shrink)

Kurt Gödel is almost as famous—one might say “notorious”—for his extreme platonist views as he is famous for his mathematical theorems. Moreover his platonism is not a myth; it is well-documented in his writings. Here are two platonist declarations about set theory, the first from his paper about Bertrand Russell and the second from the revised version of his paper on the Continuum Hypotheses.Classes and concepts may, however, also be conceived as real objects, namely classes as “pluralities of things” or (...) as structures consisting of a plurality of things and concepts as the properties and relations of things existing independently of our definitions and constructions.It seems to me that the assumption of such objects is quite as legitimate as the assumption of physical bodies and there is quite as much reason to believe in their existence.But, despite their remoteness from sense experience, we do have something like a perception also of the objects of set theory, as is seen from the fact that the axioms force themselves upon us as being true. I don't see any reason why we should have less confidence in this kind of perception, i.e., in mathematical intuition, than in sense perception.The first statement is a platonist declaration of a fairly standard sort concerning set theory. What is unusual in it is the inclusion of concepts among the objects of mathematics. This I will explain below. The second statement expresses what looks like a rather wild thesis. (shrink)

In American Heat, Donald Brown critically analyzes the U.S. response to global warming, inviting readers to examine the implicit morality of the U.S position, and ultimately to help lead the world toward an equitable sharing of the burdens and benefits of protecting the global environment. In short, Brown argues that an ethical focus on global environmental matters is the key to achieving a globally acceptable solution.

We prove the determinacy of all Δ 1 1 games on arbitrary trees, and we use this result and the assumption that a measurable cardinal exists to demonstrate the determinacy of all games on ω ω that belong both to – Π 1 1 and to its dual.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) is one of the central figures of 20th-century Continental philosophy, and his work has been hugely influential in a wide range of fields. His writings engage in the study of perception, language, politics, aesthetics, history and ontology, and represent a rich and complex network of exciting ideas. -/- The Merleau-Ponty Dictionary provides the reader and student of Merleau-Ponty with all the tools necessary to engage with this key thinker: a comprehensive A to Z that provides summaries of (...) all his major texts and articles, clear and straightforward explanations of his terminology and innovative concepts, and detailed discussions of the figures and philosophies that influenced his work. The book also includes a philosophical introduction, a chronology of Merleau-Ponty's life and works, and suggestions for further reading. This dictionary is the ideal reading and research companion for students at all levels. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Whether explicitly or implicitly, Kant's critical project weighs heavily upon Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. This article argues that we can understand Merleau-Ponty's text as a phenomenological rewriting of the Critique of Pure Reason from within the paradoxical structures of lived experience, effectively merging Kant's Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic. Although he was influenced by Husserl's and Heidegger's interpretations of Kant's first version of the Transcendental Deduction, Merleau-Ponty develops a unique position between Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger via an embodied and (...) lived synthesis that collapses Kant's distinction between sensibility and the understanding, and that makes sense of temporality and subjectivity as a paradoxical trajectory. (shrink)

I will discuss Fields Outline of a Theory of Truth. I will point out important properties of Kripkeleast fixed points constructions and theory. I do this not to demean Field’s superb work on truth but rather to suggest that there may be no really satisfactory conditional connective for languages containing their own truth predicates.

Two key themes structure the work of French philosopher of science Gilbert Simondon: the processes of individuation and the nature of technical objects. Moreover, these two themes are also at the heart of contemporary debates within Ethics and Bioethics. Indeed, the question of the individual is a key concern in both Virtue Ethics and Feminist Ethics of Care, while the hyper-technical reality of the present stage of medical technology is a key reason for both the urgency for and the success (...) of the field of Bioethics. And yet, despite its potential for thinking about these issues, Simondon’s philosophy remains largely unknown. Rather than exploring Simondon’s complex ontology for itself, the aim of this paper is to establish what contribution his work can make in Ethics and Bioethics on two essential questions: the relational structure of the self and the nature of the human-technology relation. I argue that Simondon’s re-conceptualization of the individual harmonizes with perspectives in Feminist Bioethics and points toward what I call an “open” Virtue Ethics that takes relations to be essential. In order to establish this connection, I explore at length the relational approach to Feminist Bioethics offered by Susan Sherwin’s work. I argue that a Simondonian account of technology and of the individual furthers the relational understanding of the self, offers a characterization of Virtue Ethics that is in harmony with the Ethics of Care, and clarifies a notion of responsibility that is implicated in the complex reality of the modern technological milieu. (shrink)

Much controversy has surrounded the use of animals in research. Empirically, much of the research has focused on how ethical individuals believe animal research to be, but it has not systematically examined the specific beliefs or reasons why individuals do or do not believe animal research to be ethical. Study 1 investigated the thematic foundations for the decision that animal research is or is not ethical by examining the content of essays written by participants explaining why they do or do (...) not support the use of animals in research. Results indicated that individuals who believed animal research was ethical most often referenced beliefs that animal research furthered human well-being, provided mechanisms to cure disease, and was well-regulated. Individuals who believed animal research was not ethical most often referenced beliefs that animal research was inhumane, unnecessary, and nonconsensual. Study 2 used the themes to create a scale to assess animal research attitudes. (shrink)

In this article we propose a theoretical framework of distributed representations and a methodology of representational analysis for the study of distributed cognitive tasks—tasks that require the processing of information distributed across the internal mind and the external environment. The basic principle of distributed representations Is that the representational system of a distributed cognitive task is a set of internal and external representations, which together represent the abstract structure of the task. The basic strategy of representational analysis is to decompose (...) the representation of a hierarchical task into its component levels so that the representational properties at each level can be independently examined. The theoretical framework and the methodology are used to analyze the hierarchical structure of the Tower of Hanoi problem. Based on this analysis, four experiments are designed to examine the representational properties of the Tower of Hanoi. Finally, the nature of external representations is discussed. (shrink)

This book argues that the subjective and the objective are crucially dependent on one another and neither is intelligible apart from the other. There is no such thing as a purely external, in-itself world. This book is not intended as a defense of epistemological relativism but as a strong recommendation for modest fallibilism and pluralism.