Karl Popper and Friedrich von Hayek became close friends soon after they first met in the early 1930s. Ever since, they discussed their ideas intensively on many occasions. But even though an analysis of the origins and contents of their ideas and correspondence reveals a number of important and fundamental differences, they rarely criticize each other in their published work. The article analyzes in particular the different ideas they have on the role of reason in society and on rationalism and (...) the roots of these differences. Popper’s “Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition” of 1948 contains a criticism of Hayek’s idea—published, for instance, in “Individualism: True and False” of 1945—that we must accept tradition without trying to change it. An analysis of the differences between the two authors touches on topics such as the possibility of public intervention in society, the role of social science in this, the methodology of social science, and the differences between liberalism and social democracy. The article concludes with some possible explanations for Popper and Hayek downplaying their differences in public. The fact remains that they never resolved the tension between Popper’s critical rationalism and Hayek’s conservative rationalism. (shrink)

I first met Hans Albert in 1974, when together with two friends, Rob de Vries and Berry van Berkel, I participated in the European Forum Alpbach for the first time. We attended the seminar that was led by John Watkins and Walter Kaufmann and, of course, went to as many of the plenary meetings as possible. At the time, the seminar week and the bulk of the plenary events were still organized during the same period and were included in the (...) fee, neither of which is unfortunately the case any longer. (shrink)

F. A. Hayek’s The Sensory Order (1952) is often considered to be a theory of cognitive psychology. While it contains a theory on the psychology of perception, it has the function of illustrating Hayek’s solution to the mind–body problem. The solution, which has been strongly influenced by Moritz Schlick’s epistemology, takes the form of a physicalist identity theory. An attempt is made to trace Schlick’s influence on Hayek to the latter’s stay in Zürich, which resulted in a manuscript (1920) that (...) contains the main features of the 1952 book. One of the consequences of Hayek’s theory is that we cannot describe the functioning of our mind completely without using expressions that refer to subjective experiences. For Hayek this is not a fundamental problem but a practical one that does not jeopardize his physicalist identity theory. Unlike the manuscript, The Sensory Order contains a rudimentary sketch of an evolutionary research program. When Hayek elaborated that program later, though, he focused on cultural evolution rather than on the evolution of the mind. (shrink)

This thought-provoking book discusses the concept of progress in economics and investigates whether any advance has been made in its different spheres of research. The authors look back at the history, successes and failures of their respective fields and thoroughly examine the notion of progress from an epistemological and methodological perspective. The idea of progress is particularly significant as the authors regard it as an essentially contested concept which can be defined in many ways – theoretically or empirically; locally or (...) globally; or as encouraging or impeding the existence of other research traditions. The authors discuss the idea that for progress to make any sense there must be an accumulation of knowledge built up over time rather than the replacement of ideas by each successive generation. Accordingly, they are not concerned with estimating the price of progress, reminiscing in the past, or assessing what has been lost. Instead they apply the complex mechanisms and machinery of the discipline to sub-fields such as normative economics, monetary economics, trade and location theory, Austrian economics and classical economics to critically assess whether progress has been made in these areas of research. -/- Bringing together authoritative and wide-ranging contributions by leading scholars, this book will challenge and engage those interested in philosophy, economic methodology and the history of economic thought. It will also appeal to economists in general who are interested in the advancement of their profession. (shrink)

This is an opinionated overview of the Frege-Geach problem, in both its historical and contemporary guises. Covers Higher-order Attitude approaches, Tree-tying, Gibbard-style solutions, and Schroeder's recent A-type expressivist solution.

This paper develops the account of our experience and knowledge of time put forward by Russell in his Theory of Knowledge manuscript. While Russell ultimately abandons the project after it receives severe criticism from Wittgenstein (though several chapters derived from it appear as articles in The Monist), in producing this manuscript time, and particularly the notion of the present time, play a central role in Russell’s account of experience. In the present discussion, I propose to focus largely on Russell’s writing (...) in 1912–3, comparing this with some of the remarks made about memory by Moore in 1910–11. My motivation is twofold. First as a matter of scholarship, to reveal an original interpretation of Russell’s notion of immediate memory and of his view of our experience and knowledge of time over this period. Second as a matter of philosophical curiosity. There has been an increase in interest in temporal experience in contemporary discussions of the philosophy of mind, from memory and the imagination to the temporal aspects of perceptual experience. Russell’s writing in 1912–3 provides us with a philosophically interesting account of temporal experience which has points of contact with contemporary debates. (shrink)

This book explores a value-based research methodology, Living Educational Theory Research (LETR), which aligns a values-based approach with key tenets of professional development to inform and inspire future educators' practice. Written by the world-leading scholars in the field of LETR, chapters are global in reach and promote the evolving and dynamic nature of the methodology and its application with real-world professional training within higher education. Through discussion and dialogue on the evolution of Living Educational Theory Research, chapters explore topics such (...) as professional development and community-based contexts, supporting academics wishing to improve their practice by placing the theory within a scholarly paradigm to legitimise its use for scholarly learning. Demonstrating how insights from disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, and psychology are integrated within the generation of living-educational-theories, this outwardly looking volume will appeal to postgraduate students, scholars, and researchers involved with educational theory, action research and other forms of practitioner research, and education research methods more broadly. (shrink)

Phenomenology has been described as a “non-argumentocentric” way of doing philosophy, reflecting that the philosophical focus is on generating adequate descriptions of experience. But it should not be described as an argument-free zone, regardless of whether this is intended as a descriptive claim about the work of the “usual suspects” or a normative claim about how phenomenology ought to be properly practiced. If phenomenology is always at least partly in the business of arguments, then it is worth giving further attention (...) to the role and form of phenomenological argumentation, how it interacts with its more strictly descriptive component, and the status of phenomenological claims regarding conditions for various kinds of experience. I contend that different versions of phenomenological reasoning encroach upon argument forms that are commonly thought to be antithetical to phenomenology, notably abductive reasoning, understood in terms of its role in both hypothesis generation and in terms of justification. This paper identifies two main steps to making this case. The first step takes seriously the consequences of the intrinsically dialectical aspect of phenomenology in intersection with other modes of philosophy, the natural attitude, and non-philosophy. The second step focuses on transcendental reflection and arguments about the conditions/structures they contain. Together, these two steps aim to rescue phenomenology from the objection that it has an “ostrich epistemology” with regard to the ostensible purity of description, the intuition of essences, or the “conditions” ascertained through transcendental reflection. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider a challenge that naturalism poses for embodied cognition and enactivism, as well as for work on phenomenology of the body that has an argumentative or explanatory dimension. It concerns the connection between embodiment and emergence. In the commitment to explanatory holism, and the irreducibility of embodiment to any mechanistic and/or neurocentric construal of the interactions of the component parts, I argue there is (often, if not always) an unavowed dependence on an epistemic and metaphysical role (...) for emergence, especially concerning certain embodied capacities (motor-intentionality, know-how, skilful habits, affordances, etc.). While the problem of emergence is standardly dismissed as a problem for phenomenology, which brackets away the kind of materialist (and scientific) picture from which reflection on emergence derives, I argue that once a phenomenologist takes a fully-fledged embodied turn, they also have a genuine dilemma of emergence to confront, and I evaluate the relevant options. (shrink)

In the debates on phenomenal consciousness that occurred over the last 20 years, Sartre’s analysis of pre-reflective consciousness has often been quoted in defence of a distinction between first- and third-personal modes of givenness that naturalists reject. This distinction aims both at determining the specificity of the access one has to their own thoughts, beliefs, intentions, or desires, and at justifying the particular privilege that one enjoys while making epistemic claims about their own mental states. This chapter defends an interpretation (...) of Sartre’s theory of pre-reflective consciousness that does not put him completely at odds with the naturalist critique and stresses that one’s pre-reflective experience should not be understood in terms of first-/third-person differentiation. This pre-reflective dimension of experience nevertheless allows a peculiar access to oneself, which grants no infallible epistemic privilege to the first-person, but lays the ground for a transformative process that makes self-knowledge possible. (shrink)

The subdiscipline of public philosophy is in its adolescence. The mark of maturity in philosophy is the introduction of a metatheoretical discourse. The niche subfield “experimental philosophy” tries to incorporate social scientific methods, but like public philosophy, it too is in its adolescence, often falling back on haphazard and poorly defined methodologies. The definition of public philosophy distinguishes between professional philosophers and what would best be termed amateurs, where professional philosophers are analogous to professional athletes – credentialed individuals who do (...) philosophy full time, are paid for their work, and are usually affiliated with education or research‐focused institutions. Public philosophy must contend with the problems of expertise and wisdom, in so far as disciplinary specialization presume a certain level of each. Academic philosophy condemns public philosophy for failing to meet a set of imagined idealized standards that professors romanticize but also fail to meet. (shrink)

In the late 1980s, the American economist Jeremy Rifkin claimed that “a battle is brewing over the politics of time” because he felt that the pivotal issue of the twenty first century would be the question of time and who controlled it. I argue in this chapter that a battle over the politics of time (and the metaphysics of time) is also a major part of what is at stake in the differences between analytic and continental philosophy. Very different philosophies (...) of time, and associated methodological techniques, serve to define representatives of each of these groups and also to guard against their potential interlocutors. To begin to illustrate this, I offer a patchy history of philosophy of time in the early twentieth century, the period in which the idea of a ‘divide’ between two ways of doing philosophy began to be entrenched. (shrink)

Introduction.--Illustrations of manuscripts and printed books.--Pettas, W. Notes on English translations of Phaedrus.--Lee, P. On the wings of Thymós.--Blaisdell, G. A nobler seduction.--Appendix: The Parmenides fragments.

In this paper, I argue that the negative injunctions against certain ways of conceiving of the ethico-political that we can draw explicitly from the methodological strictures of phenomenology are also consistent with some of the core more positive dimensions of contemporary virtue ethics (especially at the more anti-theoretical end of the virtue ethical spectrum), and that central aspects of virtue ethics are consistent with most of the explicit reflections on ethical matters proffered by canonical phenomenologists.

This chapter examines the nature of legislative deliberation and the political sources of legislative majorities as dominant themes of American constitutional thinking. Drawing on James Madison's insights based on his memorandum ‘Vices of the Political System of the U. States’, it considers how the American conception of the rule of law developed amid the republican innovations of the late eighteenth century. It looks at the constitutional crisis of the late 1780s and the underlying aspects of governance in the colonies-becoming-commonwealths of (...) Anglophone North America, with reference to Madison's arguments regarding the ‘impotence of the laws of the states’ and ‘perspicuity’ in the realms of law and politics. It also discusses Madison's innovative approach to republican constitutionalism as well as his conception of the effect of popular opinion and interest on the pursuit of public good and private rights. (shrink)

The circle blueprint -- Enlarging and balancing your circle blueprint -- Four critical developmental tasks -- Balancing the circle blueprint -- Distress and vision in the expanding circle blueprint -- Driving your circle blueprintexpansion: brakes and gas pedals -- Creating a road map -- Impact on others -- Assessing your circle blueprint -- Independence -- Power -- Humility -- Purpose -- Balancing purpose within the circle blueprint -- Achieving greatness -- Conclusion.

We know, more intimately than anything else, what it's like to undergo a rich world of experiences: agonizing pains, dizzying pleasures, heady rage and existential doubts. But, despite the incredible advances of physical science, it seems that we're no closer to an explanation of how this inner world of experiences comes about. No matter how detailed our description of the physical brain, perhaps we'll always be left with this same question: how and why does the brain produce consciousness? This book (...) is a short, accessible and engaging guide to the mystery of consciousness. Featuring remastered interviews and original essays from the world's leading thinkers, Philosophers on Consciousness sheds new light on the most promising theories in philosophy and science. Beyond understanding the mind, this is a journey into personal identity, the origin of meaning, the nature of morality and the fundamental structure of reality. (shrink)

The study of highly imagistic representations of Spinoza's philosophy found in popular, extra‐academic literature is essential for building a rational view on Spinoza's philosophy. Popular literature on Spinoza is an ineliminable condition of academic literature on Spinoza. The cementing of Spinoza's popularity belongs to a larger history of Spinoza's reception. This chapter examines two late‐nineteenth and early‐twentieth century works on Spinoza. Jules Prat's idiosyncratic blend of Spinozism and left‐wing French Republicanism stands out as a historically and philosophically rich approach to (...) Spinoza that has hardly been studied thus far. The chapter also examines the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Bernard Malamud. One common feature to Singer and Malamud is the way that they root their Spinozists in a Jewish world. In this, they are forerunners of the ongoing popular preoccupation with Spinoza's own relation to Judaism. (shrink)

Digital tools may help to study socioeconomic aspects of agricultural development that are difficult to measure such as the effects of new policies and technologies on the intra-household allocation of time. As farm technologies target different crops and tasks, they can affect the time-use of men, women, boys, and girls differently. Development strategies that overlook such effects can have negative consequences for vulnerable household members. In this paper, the time-use patterns associated with different levels of agricultural mechanization during land preparation (...) in smallholder farming households in Zambia were investigated. A novel data collection method was used: a pictorial smartphone application that allows real-time recording of time-use, which eliminates recall bias. Existing studies analyzing the intra-household allocation of resources often focus on adult males and females. This study paid particular attention to boys and girls as well as adults. The study addressed seasonal variations. Compositional data analysis was used to account for the co-dependence and sum constraint of time-use data. The study suggests a strong gender differentiation for land preparation activities among mechanized households; for households using manual labor, such differentiation was not found. There is some evidence that the surplus time associated with mechanization is used for off-farm and domestic work. The study cannot confirm concerns about negative second-round effects: mechanized land preparation is not associated with a higher workload for women and children during weeding and harvesting/processing. The study provides a proof-of-concept that smartphone applications can be used to collect socioeconomic data that are difficult to measure but of high relevance. (shrink)

In order to better understand the topic of hope, this paper argues that two separate theories are needed: One for hoping, and the other for hopefulness. This bifurcated approach is warranted by the observation that the word ‘hope’ is polysemous: It is sometimes used to refer to hoping and sometimes, to feeling or being hopeful. Moreover, these two senses of 'hope' are distinct, as a person can hope for some outcome yet not simultaneously feel hopeful about it. I argue that (...) this distinction between hoping and hopefulness is not always observed or fully appreciated in the literature and has consequently caused much confusion. This paper then sketches what theorizing about hope looks like in light of this clarification and discusses some of its implications. (shrink)

Philosophical debates about the metaphysics of time typically revolve around two contrasting views of time. On the A-theory, time is something that itself undergoes change, as captured by the idea of the passage of time; on the B-theory, all there is to time is events standing in before/after or simultaneity relations to each other, and these temporal relations are unchanging. Philosophers typically regard the A-theory as being supported by our experience of time, and they take it that the B-theory clashes (...) with how we experience time and therefore faces the burden of having to explain away that clash. In this paper, we investigate empirically whether these intuitions about the experience of time are shared by the general public. We asked directly for people’s subjective reports of their experience of time—in particular, whether they believe themselves to have a phenomenology as of time’s passing—and we probed their understanding of what time’s passage in fact is. We find that a majority of participants do share the aforementioned intuitions, but interestingly a minority do not. (shrink)

What is the phenomenology of hope? A common view is that hope has a generally positive and pleasant affective tone. This rosy depiction, however, has recently been challenged. Certain hopes, it has been objected, are such that they are either entirely negative in valence or neutral in tone. In this paper, I argue that this challenge has only limited success. In particular, I show that it only applies to one sense of hope but leaves another sense—one that is implicitly but (...) widely employed in the hope literature—untouched. Moreover, I argue that hope construed in this latter sense is inherently positively valenced. The paper concludes by discussing some of the implications of this defense of hope's positive phenomenology, including the ontological question of whether hope is an emotion. (shrink)

According to the standard account, to hope for an outcome is to desire it and to believe that its realization is possible, though not inevitable. This account, however, faces certain difficulties: It cannot explain how people can display differing strengths in hope; it cannot distinguish hope from despair; and it cannot explain substantial hopes. This paper proposes an account of hope that can meet these deficiencies. Briefly, it argues that in addition to possessing the relevant belief–desire structure as allowed in (...) the standard account, a hopeful person must also be able to see a way in which the desired outcome can come about and to see such a way to the outcome as a genuine possibility. (shrink)

In this insightful set of essays, the concept of the psychological humanities is defined and explored. A clear rationale is provided for its necessity in the study and understanding of the individual and identity in a discipline that is largely occupied by empirical studies that report aggregated data and its analysis. Contributors to this volume are leading scholars in theoretical psychology who believe that psychology must be about persons and their lives. In these essays, they draw from a variety of (...) disciplines that include art, literature, life writing, and history to make a case for the psychological humanities. A final chapter provides a critical commentary on the value of the psychological humanities. It is argued that psychology must draw on the knowledge and practices of the humanities, as well as the sciences and social sciences, in order to attain a greater understanding of personhood. This book is aimed at upper level undergraduate and postgraduate students and scholars of psychology, particularly theoretical psychology, philosophy of the mind, and those from a humanities background interested in exploring the concept of the psychological humanities. (shrink)

Bioregionalists have championed the utility of the concept of the watershed as an organizing framework for thought and action directed to understanding and implementing appropriate and respectful human interaction with particular pieces of land. In a creative analogue to the watershed, permaculturist Arthur Getz has recently introduced the term “foodshed” to facilitate critical thought about where our food is coming from and how it is getting to us. We find the “foodshed” to be a particularly rich and evocative metaphor; but (...) it is much more than metaphor. Like its analogue the watershed, the foodshed can serve us as a conceptual and methodological unit of analysis that provides a frame for action as well as thought. Food comes to most of us now through a global food system that is destructive of both natural and social communities. In this article we explore a variety of routes for the conceptual and practical elaboration of the foodshed. While corporations that are the principal beneficiaries of a global food system now dominate the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food, alternatives are emerging that together could form the basis for foodshed development. Just as many farmers are recognizing the social and environmental advantages to sustainable agriculture, so are many consumers coming to appreciate the benefits of fresh and sustainably produced food. Such producers and consumers are being linked through such innovative arrangements as community supported agriculture and farmers markets. Alternative producers, alternative consumers, and alternative small entrepreneurs are rediscovering community and finding common ground in municipal and community food councils. Recognition of one's residence within a foodshed can confer a sense of connection and responsibility to a particular locality. The foodshed can provide a place for us to ground ourselves in the biological and social realities of living on the land and from the land in a place that we can call home, a place to which we are or can become native. (shrink)

According to a widely held principle—the poss-ability principle—an agent, S, is able to only if it is metaphysically possible for S to. I argue against the poss-ability principle by developing a novel class of counterexamples. I then argue that the consequences of rejecting the poss-ability principle are interesting and far-reaching.

Open-mindedness is generally regarded as an intellectual virtue because its exercise reliably leads to truth. However, some theorists have argued that open-mindedness’s truth-conduciveness is highly contingent, pointing out that it is either not truth-conducive at all under certain scenarios or no better than dogmatism or credulity in others. Given such shaky ties to truth, it would appear that the status of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue is in jeopardy. In this paper, I propose to defend open-mindedness against these challenges. In (...) particular, I show that the challenges are ill-founded because they misconstrue the nature of open-mindedness and fail to consider the requisite conditions of its application. With a proper understanding of open-mindedness and of its requirements, it is clear that recourse to it is indeed truth-conducive. (shrink)

This paper proposes a new framework for thinking about hope, with certain unexpected consequences. Specifically, I argue that a shift in focus from locutions like “x hopes that” and “x is hoping that” to “x is hopeful that” and “x has hope that” can improve our understanding of hope. This approach, which emphasizes hopefulness as the central concept, turns out to be more revealing and fruitful in tackling some of the issues that philosophers have raised about hope, such as the (...) question of how hope can be distinguished from despair or how people can have differing strengths in hope. It also allows us to see that many current accounts of hope, far from being rivals, are actually compatible with one another. (shrink)

The crucial premise of the standard argument for two-boxing in Newcomb's problem, a causal dominance principle, is false. We present some counterexamples. We then offer a metaethical explanation for why the counterexamples arise. Our explanation reveals a new and superior argument for two-boxing, one that eschews the causal dominance principle in favor of a principle linking rational choice to guidance and actual value maximization.

Anti-realism about the foundations of logic are curiously absent from the literature. This is especially striking given natural analogies with moral anti-realis.