Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility is an edited collection of new essays by an internationally recognized line-up of contributors. It is aimed at readers who wish to explore the philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism and their implications.

Inspired by Rick Grush's emulation theory, we reinterpreted a series of our neuroimaging experiments which were intended to examine the representations of complex movement, modality-specific imagery, and supramodal imagery. The emulation theory can explain motor and cognitive activities observed in cortical motor areas, through the speculation that caudal areas relate to motor-specific imagery and rostral areas embrace an emulator for amodal imagery.

Charting a "middle way" between the extremes represented by Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, Garth Hallett explores the thesis that if belief in other minds is rational and true (as it surely is), so too is belief in God. He makes a strong case that when this parity claim is appropriately restricted to a single, sound other-minds belief, belief in God and belief in other minds do prove epistemically comparable. This result, and the distinctive path that leads to it, (...) will interest students and scholars in philosophy of religion and theology. (shrink)

Hume's Reception in Early America: Expanded Edition brings together the original American responses to one of Britain's greatest men of letters, David Hume. Now available as a single volume paperback, this new edition includes updated further readings suggestions and dozens of additional primary sources gathered together in a completely new concluding section. From complete pamphlets and booklets, to poems, reviews, and letters, to extracts from newspapers, religious magazines and literary and political journals, this book's contents come from a wide variety (...) of sources published in colonial America and the early United States between 1758 and 1850. As well as classics by Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, it contains scores of unknown and hard-to-locate items, many of which have not been reprinted since their original publication. These responses are divided into four parts covering Hume's Essays; his Philosophical Writings; his History of England; and his Character and Death. Each of those parts has a separate introductory essay, and every selection is introduced by a short headnote that sets the piece in its historical context and provides bibliographical references. Packed with new insights into Hume and American thought and culture, Hume's Reception in Early America reveals the relevance and impact of Hume on American political, philosophical, historical, religious, and aesthetic debates. (shrink)

Charting a "middle way" between the extremes represented by Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne, Garth Hallett explores the thesis that if belief in other minds is rational and true, so too is belief in God. He makes a strong case that when this parity claim is appropriately restricted to a single, sound other-minds belief, belief in God and belief in other minds do prove epistemically comparable. This result, and the distinctive path that leads to it, will interest students and (...) scholars in philosophy of religion and theology. (shrink)

Prologue, invitation to thinking about God In the Hebrew Bible? -- Part I, questions about God? -- Why does God in the Bible have a body? -- What do God's body parts in the Bible mean? -- Why is God angry in the Bible? -- Does God in the Bible have gender or sexuality? -- Part II, questions about God in the world? -- What can creation tell us about God? -- Who-or what-is the Satan? -- Why do people suffer (...) according to the Hebrew Bible? -- Epilogue, God in the Bible and beyond. (shrink)

The Philosopher at the End of the Universe demonstrates how anyone can grasp the basic concepts of philosophy while still holding a bucket of popcorn. Mark Rowlands makes philosophy utterly relevant to our everyday lives and reveals its most potent messages using nothing more than a little humor and the plotlines of some of the most spectacular, expensive, high-octane films on the planet. Learn about: The Nature of Reality from The Matrix, Good and Evil from Star Wars, Morality from (...) Aliens, Personal Identity from Total Recall, The Mind-Body dilemma from Terminator, Free Will from Minority Report, Death and the Meaning of Life from Blade Runner, and much more. A search for knowledge about ourselves and the world around us with a star-studded cast that includes: Tom Cruise, Plato, Harrison Ford, Immanuel Kant, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigourney Weaver, René Descartes, and Keanu Reeves. Rowlands anchors his discussions in easily understood everyday terms and relates them in a manner easy to identify with. Interspersed with a ready joke or two, he wonderfully explains why those SciFi movies we love so much are much deeper than they appear to be on the surface. Mark Rowlands's entertaining and stimulating guide is perfect for anyone searching for knowledge of the world around us. If Keanu can understand Descartes surely everyone can. (shrink)

This paper offers a new way to make sense of disagreement expansion from a polylogical perspective by incorporating various places in addition to players and positions into the analysis. The concepts build on prior implicit ideas about disagreement space by suggesting how to more fully account for argumentative context, and its construction, in large-scale complex controversies. As a basis for our polylogical analysis, we use a New York Times news story reporting on an oil train explosion—a significant point in the (...) broader controversy over producing oil and gas via hydraulic fracturing. (shrink)

We would like to thank […] for their thoughtful engagement with our paper. In the end, we do not think that they have demonstrated substantive tensions in our view, but explaining why this is so gi...

A specific issue for argumentation theory is whether information and communication technologies play any role in governing argument — that is, as parties engage in practical activities across space and time via ICTs, does technology matter for the interplay of argumentative content and process in managing disagreement? The case made here is that technologies do matter because they are not merely conduits of communication but have a role in the pragmatics of communication and argumentation. In particular, ICTs should be recognized (...) as communication-information services that are delegated degrees of responsibility for managing disagreements arising from practical activities. These services are organized around practical theories for designing disagreement space. However, recognizing this relationship between argument and technology requires accounting for procedures, techniques, or rules and speech acts that are not argumentative propositions in any strict sense but that are consequential for what becomes argumentation in any setting. An account about designing disagreement space, grounded in Jackson and Jacobs’s theory of Disagreement Management, is put forward to address these issues while more generally contributing to understanding argument in context. (shrink)

It is time to bring the rich resources of these traditions into the contemporary debate about the nature of self. This volume is the first of its kind.

Gyenis and Rédei (G&R) have shown that any prior _p_ on a finite algebra _A_, however chosen, significantly restricts the set of posteriors derivable from _p_ by Jeffrey conditioning (JC) on a nontrivial measurable partition (i.e., a partition consisting of members of _A_, at least one of which is not an atom of _A_). They support this claim by proving that the set of potential posteriors _not derivable_ from _p_ in this way, which they call the _Bayes blind spot of (...) p_, is large, having cardinality _c_ and normalized Lebesgue measure 1, as well as being of second Baire category for a natural metrizable topology. In the present paper, we establish results analogous to those of G&R for probability measures on any infinite sigma algebra of subsets of a countably infinite set (which requires distinctly different treatments of the topological and measure-theoretic cases). We also show, in both the finite and infinite cases, that all of the limitative results for a single prior _p_ continue to hold for the intersection of the Bayes blind spots of countably many priors. This leads us to reject the claim of G&R that the large size of blind spots in the single prior case is attributable to the limitations imposed by priors. We argue instead that it is the so-called _rigidity property_ of JC that accounts for the large size of Bayes blind spots. G&R also prove that _any_ potential posterior _q_ can be derived from a prior _p_ by at most two applications of JC on nontrivial partitions. But they remark that their particular two-stage derivation of an \(r \in BS(p)\) from _p_ is barely distinguishable from a single, complete reassessment on a trivial partition. We show, however, that there are two-stage derivations of _r_ from _p_ that require no direct assessment of the probability of any atom at either stage. Finally, in order to situate the aforementioned limitative results in the proper context, we demonstrate that a probability revision that would amount to complete reassessment within a Jeffrey evidentiary framework may arise, in a different evidentiary framework, in a way that involves no direct assessment of the probability of any atom, as, for example, in a generalization of Jeffrey’s solution to the problem of old evidence and new explanation. (shrink)

Socrates provides an argument at the end of the Apology that he believes gives hope that death is a blessing. This argument, grounded on the claim that death is one of two things, has been the subject of much derision and some recent defense. In this essay, I build on the work of other sympathetic commentators to show that Socrates' argument, when taken in context, not only makes good sense, but unifies Socrates' speech into a cohesive exhortation toward virtue.

Fitting Attitudes accounts of value analogize or equate being good with being desirable, on the premise that ‘desirable’ means not, ‘able to be desired’, as Mill has been accused of mistakenly assuming, but ‘ought to be desired’, or something similar. The appeal of this idea is visible in the critical reaction to Mill, which generally goes along with his equation of ‘good’ with ‘desirable’ and only balks at the second step, and it crosses broad boundaries in terms of philosophers’ other (...) commitments. For example, Fitting Attitudes accounts play a central role both in T.M. Scanlon’s [1998] case against teleology, and in Michael Smith [2003], [unpublished] and Doug Portmore’s [2007] cases for it. And of course they have a long and distinguished history. (shrink)

Since its first publication in 1961 E.H. Carr's What is History? has established itself as the classic introduction to the subject. Ranging across topics such as historical objectivity, society and the individual, the nature of causation, and the possibility of progress, Carr delivered an incisive text that still has power to provoke debate today. For this fortieth anniversary reissue, Richard J. Evans has written an extensive new introduction that discusses the origins and the impact of the book, and assesses its (...) relevance in the age of the 21st century postmodernism and epistemological anxiety. (shrink)

Since the 1960s, many artists have incorporated ecological concerns into their work, an endeavor that has required new strategies in art-making. To explore recent American manifestations of these interests, the David and Alfred Smart Museum commissioned new projects from artists Mark Dion, Peter Fend, and Dan Peterman, each focusing on interrelationships between particular organisms—human beings-and a specific group of sites—a museum building, a river landscape, and a university campus. The results, exhibited at the Smart Museum during the summer of (...) 2000, evoke the varied scales, from the microscopic to the global, at which human actions affect the environment. This catalog documents each of the artists' projects through an array of images and words: Smart Museum Associate Curator Stephanie Smith provides an introduction and brief overviews of the three projects, each of the artists contribute statements, and photographers Susan Anderson and Tom van Eynde document—in over 100 images—the processes and projects that comprise the exhibition. (shrink)

A revelatory new theory of consciousness that returns emotions to the center of mental life. For Mark Solms, one of the boldest thinkers in contemporary neuroscience, discovering how consciousness comes about has been a lifetime's quest. Scientists consider it the "hard problem" because it seems an impossible task to understand why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain. Venturing into the elementary physics of life, Solms has now arrived at an astonishing answer. (...) In The Hidden Spring, he brings forward his discovery in accessible language and graspable analogies. Solms is a frank and fearless guide on an extraordinary voyage from the dawn of neuropsychology and psychoanalysis to the cutting edge of contemporary neuroscience, adhering to the medically provable. But he goes beyond other neuroscientists by paying close attention to the subjective experiences of hundreds of neurological patients, many of whom he treated, whose uncanny conversations expose much about the brain's obscure reaches. Most importantly, you will be able to recognize the workings of your own mind for what they really are, including every stray thought, pulse of emotion, and shift of attention. The Hidden Spring will profoundly alter your understanding of your own subjective experience. (shrink)

This paper treats some of the issues raised by Putnam's discussion of, and claims for, quantum logic, specifically: that its proposal is a response to experimental difficulties; that it is a reasonable replacement for classical logic because its connectives retain their classical meanings, and because it can be derived as a logic of tests. We argue that the first claim is wrong (1), and that while conjunction and disjunction can be considered to retain their classical meanings, negation crucially does not. (...) The argument is conducted via a thorough analysis of how the meet, join and complementation operations are defined in the relevant logical structures, respectively Boolean- and ortholattices (3). Since Putnam wishes to reinstate a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics, we ask how quantum logic can be a logic of realism. We show that it certainly cannot be a logic of bivalence realism (i.e., of truth and falsity), although it is consistent with some form of ontological realism (4). Finally, we show that while a reasonable explication of the idealized notion of test yields interesting mathematical structure, it by no means yields the rich ortholattice structure which Putnam (following Finkelstein) seeks. (shrink)

It is argued here that large-scale organization and networked computing enable new divisions of communicative work aimed at shaping the content, direction, and outcomes of societal conversations. The challenge for argumentation theory and practice lies in attending to these new divisions of communicative work in constituting contemporary argumentative realities. Goffman’s conceptualization of participation frameworks and production formats are applied to articulate the communicative work of organizations afforded by networked computing that invents and innovates argument in all of its senses—as product, (...) process, and procedure. Communicative work, however, may be scaffolding argumentative contexts and practices that are quite different than what has constituted past argumentative realities. The computerization of argument happens as organizations invent and innovate argument practice relative to the demands and opportunities of interorganizational communication. The cases and examples examined here suggest that argument practice is evolving around the logic of conversation and the principle of personalization. The analysis challenges argumentation theory to seriously engage with the construction of communicative contexts and the realization of ideas about disagreement management in organizational practice and information infrastructures. Directions for integrating insights from a design perspective on argument with insights from organizational and information systems theory are proposed for coming to terms with an era of large-scale organization and computerization, in particular the evolution of argument practice, the inscription of argument in the built environment, and the absorption of socio-cultural argument practices by organizations and computation. (shrink)

In a very famous analysis and panegyric of the philosopher, Plato claimed that he is a man magnificent in mind and the spectator of all time and all existence. These are great words, and words made venerable by ancient repute and centuries of citation. Unfortunately, however, like many such utterances they can only be regarded as hyperbolic and rhetorical; and in an age that, failing in inspiration and fecundity of intuition, seeks at least to be precise, thay must suffer limitation. (...) For the lumen siccum of reason shows that the phrase “all time” involves a contradiction, and that the human mind, by nature limited both in amplitude and in profundity. (shrink)

The subject on which I am to address you this evening is one which, though it is of fundamental importance both for philosophy and for practice, cannot but present the gravest difficulties for such treatment as falls within the limits of this occasion. Philosophical problems are always difficult, but those of ultimate metaphysics are in this respect egregious. For the simplifications that are open to the scientific phenomenologist who can rest content with a spatiotemporal world, or to the analyst who (...) concentrates on the objective content with which the human understanding most conspicuously concerns itself, are not open to the metaphysician. He must meet the full complexity of things: not limiting himself to their appearances as objects within human experience, nor to a reflective analysis of their objective content, but taking them as they must be in themselves in order that they may appear as they empirically and reflectively do appear for the special cognitive faculties of man. I ask, therefore, for your patience and attention as I try first of all to lead you into, and then, as I hope, out of, the metaphysical labyrinth. For what I have to describe is something of a metaphysical adventure, or, if you like, a metaphysical ghoststory, in which the ghosts assume such reality as to make the solid things “give up the ghost”—which is just as it should be in a good ghost-story! (shrink)

Prima facie knowledge is an ineradicable monster. Conceived as a relation of a mind to objects extrinsic to it, it is chimerical: for knowledge, as such, is of the real , i.e. of things as they are in se ; but the prima facie form of knowledge precludes this. Its object is a thing apprehended ab extra , i.e. as referred to a subject to which it is extrinsic. To seek to escape this impasse either by making the object intrinsic (...) to the subject, or the subject a function of the object, is to reject the prima facie character of knowledge as a relation of compresent terms. The incoherence of prima facie knowledge is that its object must be both extrinsic and intrinsic to mind—extrinsic as independently real, intrinsic as known—yet can be neither : not extrinsic since thus its inseitas is occulted, not intrinsic since thus truth is mere appearance. And this chimaera becomes a monster because knowledge is also ineradicable. We cannot know that knowledge is impossible; and, though we may be in doubt about its extancy, that very doubt is epistemic in form. It is our acceptance of the demands of knowledge that lies at the basis of our doubt; and this applies not only to legitimate doubt about the extancy of knowledge, but also to chimerical doubt about its possibility. Doubt is an inchoation of knowledge, which is thus ineradicable. (shrink)

We usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and dispensable, an activity for specialists: poets, prophets, lunatics, and babysitters. Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, for example, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday (...) thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom is wrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thought makes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking. In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination in parable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the role of parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind. Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers to classic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and invention. (shrink)

Batterman and Rice ([2014]) argue that minimal models possess explanatory power that cannot be captured by what they call ‘common features’ approaches to explanation. Minimal models are explanatory, according to Batterman and Rice, not in virtue of accurately representing relevant features, but in virtue of answering three questions that provide a ‘story about why large classes of features are irrelevant to the explanandum phenomenon’ ([2014], p. 356). In this article, I argue, first, that a method (the renormalization group) they propose (...) to answer the three questions cannot answer them, at least not by itself. Second, I argue that answers to the three questions are unnecessary to account for the explanatoriness of their minimal models. Finally, I argue that a common features account, what I call the ‘generalized ontic conception of explanation’, can capture the explanatoriness of minimal models. (shrink)