In the summer of 1997 one could scarcely enter a bookstore in Beijing without encountering Wang Xiaobo's pensive and defiant look on the cover of dozens of books displayed at the entrance. Wang had suddenly died in the spring of that year at the age of forty-five. Born in Beijing in 1952 to a family of intellectuals, he remained attached to China's capital despite periods of separation, such as during the Cultural Revolution, when he was sent to Yunnan to "learn (...) from the peasants" and taught in a "people-run-school" in Shandong, and also during the 1980s, when he studied in the United States . Wang always returned to Beijing, in the late 1970s to study economy and business at the People's University and in the late 1980s to teach there. After retiring in 1993, he devoted his time to writing: poetry, novels, essays, non-fiction, and a movie script. (shrink)

Sense-perception—the awareness or apprehension of things by sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste—has long been a preoccupation of philosophers. One pervasive and traditional problem, sometimes called “the problem of perception”, is created by the phenomena of perceptual illusion and hallucination: if these kinds of error are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? The present entry is about how these possibilities of error challenge the intelligibility of the phenomenon of (...) perception, and how the major theories of perception in the last century are best understood as responses to this challenge. (shrink)

Detlef Dürr was a remarkable figure in many different ways. I recall some adventures we had with him in Abu Dhabi.

The paper explores the main competing interpretations of Aristotle's view of the relation between happiness and external goods in the Nicomachean Ethics. On the basis of a careful analysis of what Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics (and other works such as the Eudemian Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, etc.) it is argued that it is likely that Aristotle takes at least some external goods to be actual constituents of happiness provided that (1) they are accompanied by virtuous activity and (2) the (...) agent enjoying and using those external goods does so in ways compatible with the continuous aim of acting virtuously. (shrink)

Explanation does not exist in a metaphysical vacuum. Conceptions of the structure of a phenomenon play an important role in guiding attempts to explain it, and erroneous conceptions of a phenomenon may direct investigation in misleading directions. I believe that there is a case to be made for thinking that much work on the neural underpinnings of consciousness—what is often called the neural correlates of consciousness—is driven by an erroneous conception of the structure of consciousness. The aim of this paper (...) is lay bare some connections between the explanation of consciousness and the structure of consciousness, and to argue for a conception of the structure of consciousness that is more adequate than that which currently drives much research into the neural correlates of consciousness. (shrink)

The man and his times -- Early epistemology -- The new scientific mind -- Fragmentation and the temptation of ontology -- Fire, water, and the material imagination -- Air, earth, and the dynamic imagination -- A phenomenology of the creative imagination.

Here is a template for introducing mathematical objects: “Objects are found in stages. For every stage S: (1) for any things found before S, you find at S the bland set whose members are exactly those things; (2) for anything, x, which was found before S, you find at S the result of tapping x with any magic wand (provided that the result is not itself a bland set); you find nothing else at S.” -/- This Template has rich applications, (...) it realizes John Conway’s (1976) Mathematicians’ Liberation Movement, and it generalizes a lovely idea due to Alonzo Church (1974). -/- Some parts of this Template are familiar: the bit about bland sets is just the ordinary story we tell about the cumulative iterative conception of set. But this talk of “magic wands” is new and different. Moreover, parts of the Template are left unspecified. -/- This under-specification is deliberate: we want to be able to flesh out the Template in umpteen different ways. The Main Theorem of the paper is that any loosely constructive way of fleshing out the Template is synonymous with a ZF-like theory. (shrink)

John McDowell's contribution to philosophy has ranged across Greek philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and ethics. His writings have drawn on the works of, amongst others, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Sellars, and Davidson. His contributions have made him one of the most widely read, discussed and challenging philosophers writing today. This book provides a careful account of the main claims that McDowell advances in a number of different areas of philosophy. The interconnections between the different (...) arguments are highlighted and Tim Thornton shows how these individual projects are unified in a post-Kantian framework that articulates the preconditions of thought and language. Thornton sets out the differing strands of McDowell's work prior to, and leading up to, their combination in the broader philosophical vision revealed in "Mind and World" and provides an interpretative and critical framework that will help shape ongoing debates surrounding McDowell's work. An underlying theme of the book is whether McDowell's therapeutic approach to philosophy, which owes much to the later Wittgenstein, is consistent with the substance of McDowell's discussion of nature that uses the vocabulary of other philosophers including, centrally, Kant. (shrink)

What does imagination do for our perception of the world? Why should reality be broken off from our imagining of it? It was not always thus, and in these essays, Tim Ingold sets out to heal the break between reality and imagination at the heart of modern thought and science. Imagining for Real joins with a lifeworld ever in creation, attending to its formative processes, corresponding with the lives of its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Building on his two previous essay (...) collections, The Perception of the Environment and Being Alive, this book rounds off the extraordinary intellectual project of one of the world's most renowned anthropologists. Offering hope in troubled times, these essays speak to coming generations in a language that surpasses disciplinary divisions. They will be essential reading not only to for anthropologists but also for students in fields ranging from art, aesthetics, architecture and archaeology to philosophy, psychology, human geography, comparative literature and theology. (shrink)

In this paper, we consider recent attempts to metaphysically explain agentive modality in terms of conditionals. We suggest that the best recent accounts face counterexamples, and more worryingly, they take some agentive modality for granted. In particular, the ability to perform basic actions features as a primitive in these theories. While it is perfectly acceptable for a semantics of agentive modal claims to take some modality for granted in getting the extension of action claims correct, a metaphysical explanation of agentive (...) modality cannot, at least not in the way that conditional approaches to agentive modality do. We argue that this problem was present even in the classical conditional analysis. By a pessimistic induction, we suggest that, probably, no conditional approach to agentive modality will succeed. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Chemical Revelations? The Veil of Maya and the Reducing Valve The Insane Root The Peacock in the Mirror.

Neural organoids are laboratory-generated entities that replicate certain structural and functional features of the human brain. Most neural organoids are disembodied—completely decoupled from sensory input and motor output. As such, questions about their potential capacity for consciousness are exceptionally difficult to answer. While not disputing the need for caution regarding certain neural organoid types, this paper appeals to two broad constraints on any adequate theory of consciousness—the first involving the dependence of consciousness on embodiment; the second involving the dependence of (...) consciousness on representations—to argue that disembodied neural organoids are not plausible candidates for consciousness. (shrink)

Hilary Putnam once suggested that “the actual existence of sets as ‘intangible objects’ suffers… from a generalization of a problem first pointed out by Paul Benacerraf… are sets a kind of function or are functions a sort of set?” Sadly, he did not elaborate; my aim, here, is to do so on his behalf. There are well-known methods for treating sets as functions and functions as sets. But these do not raise any obvious philosophical or foundational puzzles. For that, we (...) first need to provide a full-fledged function theory. I supply such a theory: it axiomatizes the iterative notion of function in exactly the same sense that ZF axiomatizes the iterative notion of set. Indeed, this function theory is synonymous with ZF. It might seem that set theory and function theory present us with rival foundations for mathematics, since they postulate different ontologies. But appearances are deceptive. Set theory and function theory provide the very same judicial foundation for mathematics. They do not supply rival metaphysical foundations; indeed, if they supply metaphysical foundations at all, then they supply the very same metaphysical foundations. (shrink)

Dretske’s theory of self-knowledge is interesting but peculiar and can seem implausible. He denies that we can know by introspection that we have thoughts, feelings, and experiences. But he allows that we can know by introspection what we think, feel, and experience. We consider two puzzles. The first puzzle, PUZZLE 1, is interpretive. Is there a way of understanding Dretske’s theory on which the knowledge affirmed by its positive side is different than the knowledge denied by its negative side? The (...) second puzzle, PUZZLE 2, is substantive. Each of the following theses has some prima facie plausibility: there is introspective knowledge of thoughts, knowledge requires evidence, and there are no experiences of thoughts. It is unclear, though, that these claims form a consistent set. These puzzles are not unrelated. Dretske’s theory of self-knowledge is a potential solution to PUZZLE 2 in that Dretske’s theory is meant to show how,, and can all be true. We provide a solution to PUZZLE 1 by appeal to Dretske’s early work in the philosophy of language on contrastive focus. We then distinguish between “Closure” and “Transmissibility”, and raise and answer a worry to the effect that Dretske’s theory of self-knowledge runs counter to Transmissibility. These results help to secure Dretske’s theory as a viable solution to PUZZLE 2. (shrink)

Against transmission -- For attention -- Education in the minor key -- Anthropology, art and the university.

Workplace AI is transforming labor but decisions on which AI applications are developed or implemented are made with little to no input from workers themselves. In this piece for AI & Society, I argue for nationalization as a strategy for democratizing AI.

"Roger Garaudy was for many years at the centre of the French Communist Party but was eventually expelled for his liberal views. In the Seventies he developed a project to bring Marxism and Christianity together, to include all humanity in a project to set all people free. What emerges from Garaudy's project is a very modern Marxism, with its emphasis on the individual, its ecological politics, and in its insistence on religion as central to human emancipation. Although Garaudy himself became (...) frustrated by the West and converted to Islam in 1982, ending his life discredited in the West, it is certainly possible that Garaudy's project represents a good, perhaps even the best, starting point for Marxism in today's world"--. (shrink)

We argued that explanatoriness is evidentially irrelevant in the following sense: Let H be a hypothesis, O an observation, and E the proposition that H would explain O if H and O were true. Then our claim is that Pr = Pr. We defended this screening-off thesis by discussing an example concerning smoking and cancer. Climenhaga argues that SOT is mistaken because it delivers the wrong verdict about a slightly different smoking-and-cancer case. He also considers a variant of SOT, called (...) “SOT*”, and contends that it too gives the wrong result. We here reply to Climenhaga’s arguments and suggest that SOT provides a criticism of the widely held theory of inference called “inference to the best explanation”. (shrink)

I argue elsewhere (Roche 2014) that evidence of evidence is evidence under screening-off. Tal and Comesaña (2017) argue that my appeal to screening-off is subject to two objections. They then propose an evidence of evidence thesis involving the notion of a defeater. There is much to learn from their very careful discussion. I argue, though, that their objections fail and that their evidence of evidence thesis is open to counterexample.

Adventures in cutting-edge ideas about consciousness, from bestselling non-fiction writer Tim Parks. Hardly a day goes by without some discussion about whether computers can be conscious, whether our universe is some kind of simulation, whether mind is a unique quality of human beings or spread out across the universe like butter on bread. Most philosophers believe that our experience is locked inside our skulls, an unreliable representation of a quite different reality outside. Colour, smell and sound, they tell us, occur (...) only in our heads. Yet when neuroscientists look inside our brains to see what's going on, they find only billions of neurons exchanging electrical impulses and releasing chemical substances. Five years ago, in a chance conversation, Tim Parks came across a radical new theory of consciousness that undercut this interpretation. This set him off on a quest to discover more about this fascinating topic and also led him to observe his own experience with immense attention. Out of My Head tells the gripping, highly personal, often surprisingly funny, story of Tim Parks' quest to discover more about this fascinating topic. It frames complex metaphysical considerations and technical laboratory experiments in terms we can all understand. Above all, it invites us to see space, time, colour and smell, sounds and sensations in an entirely new way. The world will feel more real after reading it. (shrink)

It is common to distinguish between conscious mental episodes and standing mental states — those mental features like beliefs, desires or intentions, which a subject can have even if she is not conscious, or when her consciousness is occupied with something else. This paper presents a view of standing mental states according to which these states are less real than episodes of consciousness. It starts from the usual view that states like beliefs and desires are not directly present to the (...) mind, but are posited to explain thought and behaviour. Ascriptions of these states are attempts to model a subject’s “Worldview”: the totality of their cognitive, conative and affective dispositions. When ascribing standing states, we often significantly simplify the complexity of the Worldview. This simplification is a feature of models in general. The Worldview is also distinguished from the “Habitus” — the totality of dispositions that are associated with character traits. As with the Worldview, modelling the Habitus should be treated as a useful simplification of a very complex reality. It is argued that although these models have some similarities with fictions, these similarities are outweighed by the dissimilarities. (shrink)

This essay highlights a methodological weakness in Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism often mistaken for a biographical shift in his philosophy. Naissance de la biopolitique is sometimes interpreted as evidence for Foucault’s conversion to neoliberalism, whereas its lack of critical acuity stems rather from its methodological limitations. Through a discussion of the “neoliberal conversion”-thesis, I highlight those limitations. Though Foucault’s appreciative tone in his neoliberalism lectures is surprising, his aim is mainly to defamiliarize readers from the dominant mode of neoliberal rationality (...) so that they can affirm the creative potential to foster new conducts, new identities, and new rationalities. Foucault did not convert to neoliberalism, but sought to destabilise it by revealing its historical contingency. However, as Foucault’s surprisingly positive tone shows, this strategy is insufficient for combatting neoliberalism. There is an elective affinity between Foucault’s own politics of creative self-reinvention and neoliberalism’s promise of a non-invasive, post-disciplinary government by indirect economic incentives alone. Foucault’s libertine stance toward subjectivity hence seems easily integrated into a neoliberal conduct of conducts. I propose to supplement Foucault’s genealogical method as he deploys it in Naissance de la biopolitique with an immanent critique of neoliberalism from the perspective of the governed. Rather than investigating neoliberal rationality as a promising endeavour for the future, we can study the real-life implementations of neoliberalism and their effects on subjective conducts. Neoliberal rationality is involved in a permanent struggle to shape the conduct of conducts along entrepreneurial and competitive lines, but subjects are refractory living beings whose conducts are not so simply transformed. Neoliberalism has had to give up its post-disciplinary aspirations and turn to the power of discipline and abandonment to enforce neoliberal norms of conduct. Neoliberalism has transformed into a negative biopolitics that sacrifices the lives of unproductive subjects as collateral damage to the overall welfare of the population. Immanent critique thereby reveals how subjects are pushed beyond their limits until neoliberal norms of conduct become unbearable. This intolerability of neoliberalism cannot be directly deduced from the writings of Becker, Friedman, or Hayek.111 It becomes manifest in the confrontation between neoliberal rationality and the material living bodies of finite human beings unable to be stretched in the ways neoliberalism requires. (shrink)

John McDowell is one of the most widely read philosophers in recent years. His engagement with a philosophy of language, mind and ethics and with philosophers ranging from Aristotle and Wittgenstein to Hegel and Gadamer make him one of the most original and outstanding philosophical thinkers of the post-war period. In this clear and engaging book Tim Thornton introduces and examines the full range of McDowell's thought. After a helpful introduction setting out McDowell's general view of philosophy Thornton introduces and (...) explains the following topics: • Wittgenstein on philosophy, normativity and understanding • value judgements • theories of meaning and sense • singular thought and Cartesianism • experience, knowledge and openness to the world • Mind and World and idealism • action and the debate with Hubert Dreyfus on conceptual content and skilled coping. This second edition has been significantly revised and expanded to include new sections on: McDowell's work on disjunctivism and criticisms of it; a new chapter on McDowell's modification of his account of perceptual experience and conceptual content and criticisms by Charles Travis; and a new chapter on action and McDowell's engagement with Hubert Dreyfus and the debate concerning skilled coping and mindedness. The addition of a glossary makes John McDowell, second edition essential reading for those studying McDowell, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, ethics and epistemology, as well as for students of the recent history of analytical philosophy generally. Tim Thornton is Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health at University of Central Lancashire, UK. He is author of Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry (2007), Wittgenstein on Language and Thought (1998), co-author of the Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (2006), and Tacit Knowledge (2013) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry (2013). (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Limits for Uncommunicative Partners How Much Does a Particle Need to Know? Evaluation of Results Simulators Does Nature Simulate?

Philosophy and model theory frequently meet one another. Philosophy and Model Theory aims to understand their interactions -/- Model theory is used in every ‘theoretical’ branch of analytic philosophy: in philosophy of mathematics, in philosophy of science, in philosophy of language, in philosophical logic, and in metaphysics. But these wide-ranging appeals to model theory have created a highly fragmented literature. On the one hand, many philosophically significant mathematical results are found only in mathematics textbooks: these are aimed squarely at mathematicians; (...) they typically presuppose that the reader has a significant background in mathematics; and little clue is given as to their philosophical significance. On the other hand, the philosophical applications of these results are then scattered across disconnected pockets of papers, separated by decades or more. -/- The first aim of Philosophy and Model Theory, then, is to consider the philosophical uses of model theory. On a technical level, we try to show how philosophically significant results connect to one another, and also to state the best version of a result for philosophical purposes. On a philosophical level, we show how similar dialectical situations arise repeatedly, across fragmented debates in varied philosophical areas. -/- The second aim of Philosophy and Model Theory, though, is to consider the philosophy of model theory. Model theory itself is rarely taken as the subject matter of philosophising (contrast this, say, with the philosophy of biology, or the philosophy of set theory). But model theory is a beautiful part of pure mathematics, and worthy of philosophical study in its own right. (shrink)

A renowned anthropologist's profound and personal correspondences with the world we live in.

Maine de Biran passe à raison pour avoir rénové l'empirisme. Mais il semble qu'on n'ait pas toujours aperçu à quelle distance il a porté de son origine la méthode issue de Locke et de Condillac. Nous voudrions montrer ici comment il a pu infléchir la tradition empiriste dans un sens complètement opposé aux doctrines de ses fondateurs, comment il en a pu tirer une anthropologie tout à fait nouvelle, où l'homme n'apparaissait plus comme un élément de la nature, non plus (...) d'ailleurs que de la pensée, mais comme le principe absolu de tout ce qui est susceptible d'exister pour lui. Nous laisserons de côté le problème purement historique qu'a pu poser l'évolution personnelle de l'auteur par rapport à sa propre philosophic, et qui s'est notamment manifesté par l'abandon de la morale stoïcienne dans la dernière période de sa vie, de même que par la conversion tardive à certaines thèses, platoniciennes et substantialistes, sur la nature du moi. Ce qui sera examiné, c'est le biranisme tel qu'il fut, tel qu'il commença de se constituer, aux alentours de 1799, avec le premier Mémoire sur l'habitude. (shrink)

The premise of The Diversity of Darkness and Shameful Behaviors is to emphasize the need for enlightened, rational thinking as a paradigm of thought as the culture of shamelessness continues to grow and cast its repulsive dark shadow over those who embrace enlightened reason and basic human rights for all. This unique book utilizes evidence-based approaches in the examination of human behaviors in society that have become increasingly shameful and tolerated among a growing number of enablers. Key features include a (...) combination of academic analysis that draws on numerous and specific examples of the diversity of darkness that encompasses the world along with a balanced practical, everyday-life approach to the study of the socio-political world we live in through the use of contemporary culture references and featured popular culture boxes. Social scientists, social thinkers and the general audience alike will be intrigued and perhaps dismayed by the diversity of shamefully hateful and shamefully deadly topics covered. We should realize that humanity has the intellect to accomplish great feats but heed the growing culture of shamelessness, irrationality and the diversity of darkness. (shrink)

Philosophical commentaries on the difficult task of forming a deep, respectful relationship with the land.

Les savants de langue syriaque - une branche de l'arameen - ont joue un role aujourd'hui reconnu dans la transmission du patrimoine philosophique et scientifique grec aux auteurs de langue arabe, et cela grace aux nombreuses traductions qu ...

This chapter contains sections titled: A Slightly Technical Interlude3 Bell's Theorem Again What Does Factorization Signify? Relativity and Signals Signaling Paradoxes Appendix B: Bohmian Mechanics.

This chapter contains sections titled: Galilean Transformations and Galilean Invariants A Brief Preliminary: Why Worry? Lorentz Invariance: Collapse Theories Lorentz Invariance: Hyperplane Dependence Lorentz Invariance: Non‐Collapse Theories Choose Your Poison.

A new theory of aesthetics and music, grounded in the collision between language and the body. In this book, Tim Hodgkinson proposes a theory of aesthetics and music grounded in the boundary between nature and culture within the human being. His analysis discards the conventional idea of the human being as an integrated whole in favor of a rich and complex field in which incompatible kinds of information—biological and cultural—collide. It is only when we acknowledge the clash of body and (...) language within human identity that we can understand how art brings forth the special form of subjectivity potentially present in aesthetic experiences. As a young musician, Hodgkinson realized that music was, in some mysterious way, “of itself”—not isolated from life, but not entirely continuous with it, either. Drawing on his experiences as a musician, composer, and anthropologist, Hodgkinson shows how when we listen to music a new subjectivity comes to life in ourselves. The normal mode of agency is suspended, and the subjectivity inscribed in the music comes toward us as a formative “other” to engage with. But this is not our reproduction of the composer's own subjectivation; when we perform our listening of the music, we are sharing the formative risks taken by its maker. To examine this in practice, Hodgkinson looks at the work of three composers who have each claimed to stimulate a new way of listening: Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, and Helmut Lachenmann. (shrink)

Shadow pictures radically changed the modern understanding of pictorial concepts. Tim Otto Roth’s broadly based cultural history traces the consequences of this revolution of methods of vision and image production in the sciences and the arts. By means of abundant image and text sources he develops a picture theory based on physics and projective geometry. This definitive book comprising 500 pages provides a generally understandable and vivid insight in the history of shadowgraphs from the 19th century until the present age. (...) A crucial role play scientific processes as the X-ray technique, but also the artistic examination of space and body. (shrink)