In this bold, challenging book, D. S. Clarke outlines reasons for accepting panpsychism and defends the doctrine against its critics.

An anthology of readings in panpsychism, spanning two millennia.

This is a criticism of quine's treatment of mass terms such as "water", "gold", Etc. In word and object. Instead of becoming singular terms referring to a "scattered object", It is argued that they either become general terms as subjects of sentences or retain their unique status as ascribed to an indicated place.

This paper attempts to outline the logical structure of imperatives. It criticizes the prevailing view that this structure is isomorphic with that for indicatives. For "mixed" imperatives with constituents in both indicative and imperative moods (e.G., Conditional imperatives with indicative antecedents) there are features unique to imperatives. These features are specified, And consequences of them are traced. Finally, Formation rules for imperatives are stated.

This paper is an interpretation and defense of Putnam’s claim that reductionist sentences identifying experiences with physical events or processes are meaningless. Discourses are formulated within frameworks that are characterized by their methods of justification, types of term introduction, and vocabularies. Examples of both meaningful intra-framework and meaningless cross-framework identities are considered, along with examples of theoretical identities across sub-frameworks. In agreement with Putnam, mental/physical identities are classified as cross-framework. But I qualify Putnam’s thesis by arguing that they can be (...) meaningful to theextent they provide guides to beneficial social actions.’. (shrink)

Since the revolution in philosophic method that began about a century ago, the focus of philosophic attention has been on language as used both in daily conversation and in specialized institutional activities such as science, law, and the arts. But language is an extremely complex and varied means of communication, and the study of it has been increasingly incorporated into such empirical disciplines as linguistics, psycho linguistics, and cognitive psychology. It is becoming less clear what aspects of language remain as (...) proper subjects of philosophical study, what are to be "kicked upstairs" (J. L. Austin's phrase) to the sciences. This work is a study of those logical features of language that remain central to philosophy after completion of kicking up. It conducts this study by describing similarities and differences between signs at differing levels, starting with natural events as primitive signs in the environments of their interpreters, and proceeding to pre linguistic signaling systems, elementary forms of language, and finally to the forms of specialized discourse used within social institutions. The investiga tion of comparative features requires isolating basic mental capacities that are present in the most primitive forms of organisms capable of sign interpretation. The problem then becomes one of tracing the emergence from these capacities of such categories as substance, attribute or quality, and quantity that we apply to natural languages. The study of sign levels is thus the construction of a genealogy of logical categories marking the develop ment of natural languages. (shrink)

This Tractatus-style sequence of propositions describes logical features of natural language discourse, pre-linguistic levels of signs interpreted in associative learning and animal communication, and the specialized discourses of the institutions of science, religion, law, politics, and the arts. Its comprehensive scope is designed to help overcome the compartmentalization of philosophy into its branches of epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics. The general perspective is that of pragmatic naturalism as developed by the classical pragmatists Peirce, James, Schiller, and Dewey. Central to (...) pragmatism is its emphasis on the use of practical inferences combining descriptive and expressive premisses with prescriptive “ought” conclusions guiding conduct. I argue that by making such inferences its focus, pragmatism enables contemporary philosophy to offset the effects of social specialization. (shrink)

The term 'consciousness' has not been consistently used in the history of philosophy and psychology. It has been taken to stand for the mental activity in which all of us are engaged during our waking lives, whether absorbed in the solving of a task or in calm moments of contemplation. It has also been allied with the term 'introspection' to stand for a self-monitoring activity, one in which we are not simply engaged, but in which we aware of the succession (...) of mental items that constitute our experiences. In Consciousness and the Computational Mind, Ray Jackendoff opts for this second sense and exploits it to criticize the "central processing" theory of consciousness. The background assumption for all such theories is that the human mind is to be conceived on the model of a computer whose central processor controls in accordance with programmed instructions the reception of inputs, delegation of tasks to secondary processors carrying out sub-routines, storage and retrieval of information, and finally the production of outputs. The central processing theory identifies consciousness with the activities of those areas of the brain which function as central processor as defined by this model. Jackendoff's alternative theory correlates consciousness with intermediate-level informational structures operated on by secondary processors. Of the higher-level structures and the processes operating on them, the level we refer to with such terms as 'conceptualization' and 'understanding,' we are, he contends, unconscious. (shrink)

High-spin states in the odd-odd N = Z nucleus Co-54 have been investigated by the fusion-evaporation reaction Si-28(S-32,1 alpha 1p1n)Co-54. Gamma-ray information gathered with the Ge detector array Gammasphere was correlated with evaporated particles detected in the charged particle detector system Microball and a 1 pi neutron detector array. A significantly extended excitation scheme of Co-54 is presented, which includes a candidate for the isospin T = 1, 6(+) state of the 1f(7/2)(-2) multiplet. The results are compared to large-scale shell-model (...) calculations in the fp shell. Effective interactions with and without isospin-breaking terms have been used to probe isospin symmetry and isospin mixing. A quest for deformed high-spin rotational cascades proved negative. This feature is discussed by means of cranking calculations. (shrink)