Revelation tells of a creating and redeeming God, whose Son has come among us in our flesh, and enters into each individual's personal history and also into human history itself, becoming its Center. Therefore, Jesus Christ is the Lord of History, of concern to every Christian in all the Churches.

This paper offers a critical review of Edouard Machery's Doing Without Concepts, with a particular emphasis on an approach to concept individuation that is consistent with many of Machery's arguments but has the potential to avoid his eliminativist conclusion. The approach agrees with Machery's claims to the effect that prototypes, exemplars, theories (and so on) form a heterogeneous class, but construes these theoretical entities as implementing a unified, albeit coarse-grained, notion of a concept.

The anchoring focus of this paper is a cluster of complaints that have been raised against reference-based approaches to semantics, in particular against the view defended by Scott Soames (2002). I am going to lump the complaints that I have in mind under the heading of the Threat of Collapse (or the Threat, for short). At the heart of the Threat of Collapse is the accusation that various moves referentialists make in dealing with well-known problems end up undercutting the motivations (...) for a reference-based semantics in the first place. (shrink)

This paper identifies and criticizes a line of reasoning that has played a substantial role in the widespread rejection of the view that Fodor has dubbed “Concept Atomism”. The line of reasoning is not only fallacious, but its application in the present case rests on a misconception about the explanatory potential of Concept Atomism. This diagnosis suggests the possibility of a new polemical strategy in support of Concept Atomism. The new strategy is more comprehensive than that which defenders of the (...) view, namely Fodor, have employed. (shrink)

This paper defends a reference-based approach to concept individuation against the objection that such an approach is unable to make sense of concepts that fail to refer. The main line of thought pursued involves clarifying how the referentialist should construe the relationship between a concept's (referential) content and its role in mental processes. While the central goal of the paper is to defend a view aptly titled Concept Referentialism , broader morals are drawn regarding reference-based approaches in general. The paper (...) closes by calling for a shift in the current debate between referentialists and their opponents. (shrink)

This paper explores the psychological analogues of a cluster of arguments that have played an important role in motivating a now widespread, reference-based approach in philosophy of language. What I will call the psychological analogues of Kripke-style arguments provide a substantial motivation for a reference-based approach to concepts. Insofar as such an approach is rarely given serious consideration, the availability of these arguments suggests the need for a rethinking of some foundational assumptions in philosophy of mind and other branches of (...) the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the world of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, two of the most important and influential thinkers in twentieth-century European philosophy. Meticulously researched and extensively cross-referenced, this unique book covers all their major sole-authored and collaborative works, ideas and influences and provides a firm grounding in the central themes of Deleuze and Guattari's groundbreaking thought. Students and experts alike will discover a wealth of useful information, analysis and criticism. A-Z (...) entries include clear definitions of all the key terms used in Deleuze and Guattari's writings and detailed synopses of their key works. The Dictionary also includes entries on their major philosophical influences and key contemporaries, from Aristotle to Foucault. It covers everything that is essential to a sound understanding of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy, offering clear and accessible explanations of often complex terminology. The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary is the ideal resource for anyone reading or studying these seminal thinkers or Modern European Philosophy more generally. (shrink)

Body-environment (b-en) -- Functional cycle (fucy) -- An object -- The body and time -- Evolution, novelty, and stability -- Behavior -- Culture, symbol, and language -- Thinking with the implicit.

This commentary raises two concerns with Machery's approach in Doing without Concepts. The first concern is that it may be possible to preserve a unified theory of concepts by distinguishing facts about concept individuation from facts about cognitive structures and processes. The second concern questions the sharpness of the distinction Machery draws between psychological and philosophical conceptions of concepts.

A Thousand Plateaus is the engaging and influential second part of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the remarkable collaborative project written by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. This hugely important text is a work of staggering complexity that made a major contribution to contemporary Continental philosophy, yet remains distinctly challenging for readers in a number of disciplines. Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus': A Reader's Guide offers a concise and accessible introduction to this extremely important and yet challenging (...) work. Written specifically to meet the needs of students coming to Deleuze and Guattari for the first time, the book offers guidance on: - Philosophical and historical context - Key themes - Reading the text - Reception and influence - Further reading. (shrink)

Akratic belief, or belief one believes one should not have, has often been thought to be impossible. I argue that the possibility of akratic belief should be accepted as a pre-theoretical datum. I distinguish intuitive, defensive, systematic, and diagnostic ways of arguing for this view, and offer an argument that combines them. After offering intuitive examples of akratic belief, I defend those examples against a common argument against the possibility of akratic belief, which I call the Nullification Argument. I then (...) offer an Argument from Belief Attribution, using a discussion of the marks by which we typically attribute belief to defend attributions of akratic belief. I conclude by offering a way to explain what is puzzling about akratic belief, while allowing that it is possible. (shrink)

The broad topic of this paper is the relationship between the theoretical notion of a concept and familiar types of cognitive structures (prototypes, exemplars, causal models, etc.) The discussion is organized around different ways that theorists about concepts can attempt to accommodate what has been dubbed the Heterogeneity Hypothesis (roughly: the claim that various types of structures with which concepts have been identified co-exist and form a heterogeneous class). The most general goal of the paper is to clarify the dialectical (...) geography when it comes to different ways of construing the relationship between concepts and familiar cognitive structures. A more focussed and more polemical goal of the paper is to raise problems for so-called pluralist approaches to concepts. This paper will not offer a comprehensive defense of any particular view about the relationship between concepts and cognitive structures, but the discussion will be a convenient venue in which to highlight some virtues of what I will call Higher-Level Unity approaches to concepts. (shrink)

In the final analysis, sustainable agriculture must derive from applied ecology, especially the principle of the regulation of the abundance and distribution of species (and, secondarily, their activities) in space and time. Interspecific competition in natural ecosystems has its counterparts in agriculture, designed to divert greater amounts of energy, nutrients, and water into crops. Whereas natural ecosystems select for a diversity of species in communities, recent agriculture has minimized diversity in favour of vulnerable monocultures. Such systems show intrinsically less stability (...) and resilience to perturbations. Some kinds of crop rotation resemble ecological succession in that one crop prepares the land for successive crop production. Such rotations enhance soil organic processes such as decomposition and material cycling, build a nutrient capital to sustain later crop growth, and reduce the intensity of pest buildup. Species in natural communities occur at discrete points along the r-K continuum of reproductive maturity. Clearing forested land for agriculture, rotational burning practices, and replacing perennial grassland communities by cereal monocultures moves the agricultural community towards the r extreme. Plant breeders select for varieties which yield at an earlier age and lower plant biomass, effectively moving a variety towards the r type. Features of more natural landscapes, such as hedgerows, may act as physical and biological adjuncts to agricultural production. They should exist as networks in agricultural lands to be most effective. Soil is of major importance in agroecosystems, and maintaining, deliberately, its vitality and resilience to agricultural perturbations is the very basis of sustainable land use. (shrink)

T.M. Scanlon has recently offered an influential treatment of blame as a response to the impairment of a relationship. I argue, first, that Scanlon’s remarks about the nature of blame suggest several sharply diverging views, so different that they can reasonably be considered different theories: a judgment-centered theory, on which blame is the reaction the blamer judges appropriate; an appropriateness-centered theory, on which blame is any reaction that is actually appropriate; and a substantive list theory, on which blame is any (...) of a list of reactions, such as anger or loss of trust. Once distinguished, each theory faces a series of formidable challenges that neither Scanlon nor his commentators have addressed. I argue that the notion of directed attention, central in Scanlon’s earlier work, can be used to address these challenges, while preserving the spirit of Scanlon’s discussion of blame. (shrink)

Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Volume 0, Issue 0, Page 1-3, Ahead of Print.

This letter explores the intricate historical and contemporary links between large language models (LLMs) and cognitive science through the lens of information theory, statistical language models, and socioanthropological linguistic theories. The emergence of LLMs highlights the enduring significance of information‐based and statistical learning theories in understanding human communication. These theories, initially proposed in the mid‐20th century, offered a visionary framework for integrating computational science, social sciences, and humanities, which nonetheless was not fully fulfilled at that time. The subsequent development of (...) sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, especially since the 1970s, provided critical perspectives and empirical methods that both challenged and enriched this framework. This letter proposes that two pivotal concepts derived from this development, metapragmatic function and indexicality, offer a fruitful theoretical perspective for integrating the semantic, textual, and pragmatic, contextual dimensions of communication, an amalgamation that contemporary LLMs have yet to fully achieve. The author believes that contemporary cognitive science is at a crucial crossroads, where fostering interdisciplinary dialogues among computational linguistics, social linguistics and linguistic anthropology, and cognitive and social psychology is in particular imperative. Such collaboration is vital to bridge the computational, cognitive, and sociocultural aspects of human communication and human−AI interaction, especially in the era of large language and multimodal models and human‐centric Artificial Intelligence (AI). (shrink)

Pragmatism is the distinctive contribution of American thought to philosophy. It is a movement that attracted much attention in the early part of the twentieth-century, went into decline, and reemerged in the last part of the century. Part of the difficulty in defining pragmatism is that misconceptions of what pragmatism means have abounded since its beginning, and continue in today’s “neopragmatism.”.

Volume 11 of Eugen Fink’s ‘Collected Works’ brings together Fink's contributions on ancient philosophy since the 1940s: three main texts—the lecture on the ‘Basic Questions of Ancient Philosophy’ (winter semester 1947/48), the seminar on the ‘Principle of Contradiction’ (winter semester 1959/60) and the seminar on Heraclitus (winter semester 1966/67), which he held together with Heidegger—, two smaller works entitled ‘Time and the Concept of Time in Aristotle’ and ‘Asebeia and Techne in the 10th Book of the Nomoi’ (1963 and 1969), (...) and drafts in the context of several seminars on Heraclitus, Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle. The volume shows the important role played by Fink’s analysis of the ancient philosophers for the development of his phenomenological cosmology in the tension between Husserl and Heidegger: In the early thinkers, Fink finds traces of an original philosophy that has the world as a whole as its centre and guiding principle. (shrink)

Begrüssung und Einführung, von H. Gehrig.--Bewusstseinsanalytik und Weltproblem, von E. Fink.--Die Zeitanalyse in der Phänomenologie und in der klassischen Tradition, von L. Landgrebe.--Einige Reflexionen über den geschichtlichen Ort der Phänomenologie, von M. Müller.--Der gegenwärtige Stand der Arbeiten am Nachlass Edmund Husserls, von H. L. Van Breda.--Über das Zeitverständnis in der Phänomenologie und im Denken der Seinsfrage, von M. Heidegger.--Personalia.

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Logik und Wissenschaftstheorie ist ein unveranderter, hochwertiger Nachdruck der Originalausgabe aus dem Jahr 1878. Hansebooks ist Herausgeber von Literatur zu unterschiedlichen Themengebieten wie Forschung und Wissenschaft, Reisen und Expeditionen, Kochen und Ernahrung, Medizin und weiteren Genres.Der Schwerpunkt des Verlages liegt auf dem Erhalt historischer Literatur.Viele Werke historischer Schriftsteller und Wissenschaftler sind heute nur noch als Antiquitaten erhaltlich. Hansebooks verlegt diese Bucher neu und tragt damit zum Erhalt selten gewordener Literatur und historischem Wissen auch fur die Zukunft bei.".