Online research in philosophy

Scholars have a history of crossing intellectual borders (Abbott, 2001). In particular, educators draw from a diversity of intellectuals upon which to base our understanding of, for example, schools and society, curriculum content, teaching, and learning. In addition to icons such as Marx, James, Freud, and Dewey, the works of the Frankfurt School (e.g., Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse), Foucault, Gilligan, Derrida, Gramsci, West, Arendt, and Fraser, just to name a few, have been used to guide our scholarship and practice. However, with (...) the exception of few scholars (e.g., Peters & Ghiraldelli, 2001), one of America's most controversial scholars,1 Richard Rorty, has been largely ignored. This situation is unfortunate .. (shrink)

The present article examines the theology of John Zizioulas with a view to understanding its coherence and viability for ecclesiology. Instead of treating his trinitarian theology, or his historical claims, I focus upon the basic themes of his personalistic ontology, especially the relationship between the ‘hypostasis’ and its ‘nature.’ I argue that Zizioulas's central concept of freedom rests upon an equivocation: he affirms both that freedom and being are identical, and that they are mutually exclusive. In conversation with the philosophy (...) of Levinas, I further argue that Zizioulas's proposal, as an ontology of communion, falls prey to the same reduction of being to thought that forms the central tenet of Western conceptions of subjectivity. In conclusion, I argue that both of these problems trade on a basic inability to account for grace as the fundamental reality of communion. Throughout my basic concern is to inquire into just what function the category of ‘being’ has in Zizioulas's theology, and to point out its surprising obscurity. (shrink)

Liberals and Marxists alike have had a stake in making Marx non?liberal in theory and anti?liberal in practice. My re?reading of his work and life emphasizes the considerable overlaps and continuity between his views and activities and the liberalism of his day and ours. Marx?s critique of liberalism thus becomes subtler and less easily dismissed by liberals, who would do well to confront the violence and class struggle inherent in the success of the liberal project, rather than to erase this (...) in favour of an idealized doctrine and sanitized history. I identify an irony in that Marx politicized reason and reasonableness long before anti?foundational ?post?Marxists? developed their ?political? critique of traditional Marxist conceptions of truth and science. (shrink)

Evolutionary applications of game theory present one of the most pedagogically accessible varieties of genuine, contemporary theoretical biology. We present here Oyun (OY-oon, http://charlespence.net/oyun), a program designed to run iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments, competitions between prisoner’s dilemma strategies developed by the students themselves. Using this software, students are able to readily design and tweak their own strategies, and to see how they fare both in round-robin tournaments and in “evolutionary” tournaments, where the scores in a given “generation” directly determine contribution (...) to the population in the next generation. Oyun is freely available, runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, and the process of creating new prisoner’s dilemma strategies is both easy to teach and easy for students to grasp. We illustrate with two interesting examples taken from actual use of Oyun in the classroom. (shrink)

According to the so-called “Folk Theorem” for repeated games, stable cooperative relations can be sustained in a Prisoner’s Dilemma if the game is repeated an indefinite number of times. This result depends on the possibility of applying strategies that are based on reciprocity, i.e., strategies that reward cooperation with subsequent cooperation and punish defectionwith subsequent defection. If future interactions are sufficiently important, i.e., if the discount rate is relatively small, each agent may be motivated to cooperate by fear of retaliation (...) in the future. For finite games, however, where the number of plays is known beforehand, there is a backward induction argument showing that rational agents will not be able to achieve cooperation. On behalf of the Hobbesian “Foole”, who cannot see any advantage in cooperation, Gregory Kavka (1983, 1986) has presented an argument that significantly extends the range of the backward induction argument. He shows that, for the backward induction argument to be effective, it is not necessary that the precise number of future interactions be known. It is sufficient that there is a known definite upper bound on the number of interactions. A similar argument is developed by John W. Carroll (1987). We will here question the assumption of a known upper bound. When the assumption is made precise in the way needed for the argument to go through, its apparent plausibility evaporates. We then offer a reformulation of the argument, based on weaker, and more plausible, assumptions. (shrink)

Gordon Baker and I had been colleagues at St John’s for almost ten years when we resolved, in 1976, to undertake the task of writing a commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. We had been talking about Wittgenstein since 1969, and when we cooperated in writing a long critical notice on the Philosophical Grammar in 1975 (much of which we were later to repudiate1), we found that working together was mutually instructive, intellectually stimulating and great fun. We thought that we (...) still had much to say about Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and it seemed to us that misinterpretations of passages in the Investigations were so extensive that it would be worth trying to write a detailed analytical commentary. It is difficult to recapture the excitement of those early days in being among the first to work on the microfilms and, subsequently, on the photocopies of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. We spent many hundreds of hours poring over the typescripts and the often only semi-legible manuscripts, fascinated and privileged to be able to try to follow the development of the thoughts of a great philosophical genius. We talked endlessly about what we had found in Wittgenstein’s manuscripts and typescripts, and debated how it should be understood. The first fruit of our labours was Wittgenstein – Understanding and Meaning (1980). Its guiding idea was to draw attention to the manner in which Wittgenstein linked the concepts of meaning, understanding and explanation, and so to bypass the connections between meaning, truth and truth-conditions that so fascinated philosophers of the 1970s, and to abandon the red-herring of assertion-conditions and anti-realism. After a hiatus of four years, during which time we wrote a controversial book entitled Frege – Logical Excavations and a polemical book on contemporary philosophy of language – Language, Sense.. (shrink)

This paper considers Peirce's striking remarks about mathematics in a little-known review of Spinoza's Ethics within the larger context of his philosophy of mathematics. It argues that, for Peirce, true mathematical reasoning is always at the vanguard of thought, and resists logical demonstration. Through diagrammatic thought and her pre-theoretical innate faculty of logica utens, the great mathematician is able to see a theorem as true long before the logical apparatus necessary to demonstrate its truth exists. For Peirce, true (theoremic) mathematical (...) thought is in some sense pre-logical, and thus, the logical demonstration of this thought in the form of mathematical proofs is in fact "merely a veil over the living thought.". (shrink)

Hans Joas has called the German reception of pragmatism “a history of misunderstandings.” This is certainly true of the Frankfurt School’s reception of John Dewey’s work. Even as early as Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness, which exercised such an influence on the western Marxism of the Frankfurt School, pragmatism is taken as a willful abandonment of reason’s highest purpose. Pragmatism is equated with relativism and is only able to conceive of freedom within the gaps of a reified society (1971: 194– (...) 195). Adorno, seemingly the most receptive to Dewey’s thought, believed pragmatism to be the a priori exclusion of metaphysics (1973: 373). Marcuse, the subject of this introduction, reviewed Dewey’s Theory of .. (shrink)

Chris Renwick’s recent research into the fate of William Beveridge’s attempt to establish social biology as the foundational social science at the London School of Economics is history at its best by uncovering a moment in the past when decisions were taken comparable to ones being taken today. In this case, the issues concern the political and scientific foundations of the welfare state. By connecting Beveridge’s original reasoning to recruit Lancelot Hogben for the Rockefeller-sponsored social biology chair with his later (...) formative role in the design of the British welfare state, we are able to witness an alternative vision of the left, one associated with the Fabian movement, which proceeded independently of its Marxist cousin. The Fabian focus on taxing “inheritance” in the broadest sense remains relevant to how we think about the human condition in an era when capitalism has come to encompass the ownership of genetic material. (shrink)

A t first glance you might not noorder, which afflicts about 0.5 percent of tice anything odd on meeting a American children. Neither researcher young boy with autism. But if had any knowledge of the other’s work, you try to talk to him, it will and yet by an uncanny coincidence each quickly become obvious that gave the syndrome the same name: autism, something is seriously wrong. He may not which derives from the Greek word autos, make eye contact with (...) you; instead he may meaning “self.” The name is apt, because avoid your gaze and fidget, rock his body the most conspicuous feature of the disorto and fro, or bang his head against the der is a withdrawal from social interacwall. More disconcerting, he may not be tion. More recently, doctors have adopted able to conduct anything remotely resemthe term “autism spectrum disorder” to bling a normal conversation. Even though make it clear that the illness has many rehe can experience emotions such as fear, lated variants that range widely in severity rage and pleasure, he may lack genuine but share some characteristic symptoms. empathy for other people and be oblivious Ever since autism was identified, reto subtle social cues that most children searchers have struggled to determine would pick up effortlessly. what causes it. Scientists know that sus- In the 1940s two physicians—Americeptibility to autism is inherited, although.. (shrink)

Abstract: My aim is to reconstruct Kant's argument for the principle of the synthetic unity of apperception. I reconstruct Kant's argument in stages, first showing why thinking should be conceived as an activity of synthesis (as opposed to attention), and then showing why the unity or coherence of a subject's representations should depend upon an a priori synthesis. The guiding thread of my account is Kant's conception of enlightenment: as I suggest, the philosophy of mind advanced in the Deduction belongs (...) to an enlightenment epistemology. Kant's conception of enlightenment turns on the requirement that a subject be able to recognize herself as the source of her cognitions. The argument for the apperception principle is reconstructed under the guidance of this conception of the ideal of enlightenment. (shrink)

The debate about the levels of selection has been one of the most controversial both in evolutionary biology and in philosophy of science. Okasha’s book makes the sort of contribution that simply will not be able to be ignored by anyone interested in this field for many years to come. However, my interest here is in highlighting some examples of how Okasha goes about discussing his material to suggest that his book is part of an increasingly interesting trend that sees (...) scientists and philosophers coming together to build a broadened concept of “theory” through a combination of standard mathematical treatments and conceptual analyses. Given the often contentious history of the relationship between philosophy and science, such trend cannot but be welcome. (shrink)

Within much contemporary epistemology, Kant’s response to skepticism has come to be epitomized by an appeal to transcendental arguments. This form of argument is said to provide a distinctively Kantian way of dealing with the skeptic, by showing that what the skeptic questions is in fact a condition for her being able to raise that question in the first place, if she is to have language, thoughts, or experiences at all. In this way, it is hoped, the game played by (...) the skeptic can be turned against herself.1 At the same time, however, this appeal to transcendental arguments is also widely felt to show what is wrong with Kant’s response to skepticism: for, it is suggested, such arguments can only be made to work against the background of his transcendental idealism. As we shall see, what this doctrine amounts to is much disputed; but as with any form of idealism, the worry is that it means compromising the very realism and objectivity we want to defend against skepticism in the first place, so that the price for adopting this Kantian strategy appears too high—the cure of using transcendental arguments in conjunction with transcendental idealism is almost as bad as the disease.2 Faced with this difficulty, two kinds of response have been canvassed. On the first, it is accepted that transcendental arguments do require a commitment to the wider philosophical framework of transcendental idealism, but it is claimed that this framework can and should be defended against the suggestion that it is itself ‘‘quasi-skeptical.’’ On the second, transcendental idealism is indeed abandoned as wrongheaded, but it is held that Kant’s transcendental arguments can be made to.. (shrink)

In this paper we offer an exegesis of Hilary Putnam’s classic argument against the brain-in-avat hypothesis offered in his Reason, truth and history (1981). In it, Putnam argues that we cannot be brains in a vat because the semantics of the situation make it incoherent for anyone to wonder whether they are a brain a vat. Putnam’s argument is that in order for ‘I am a brain in a vat’ to be true, the person uttering it would have to be (...) able to refer successfully to those things: the vat, and the envatted brain. Putnam thinks that reference can’t be secured without relevant kinds of causal relations, which, if envatted, the brain would lack, and so, it fails to be able to meaningfully utter ‘I am a brain in a vat’. We consider the implications of Putnam’s arguments for the traditional sceptic. In conclusion, we discuss the role of Putnam’s arguments against the brain in a vat hypothesis in his larger defense of his own internal realism against metaphysical realism. (shrink)

This article examines Gadamer's claim that language is fundamentally metaphorical from the perspective of Ricoeur's complementary analysis of metaphor. I argue that Gadamer's claim can only be understood in relation to a broader understanding of metaphor in which metaphor is not regarded as secondary to literal meaning. From this context one is better able to understand the connection Gadamer makes between language and ontology, which is found in his statement "Being that can be understood is language.".

Early in the Preface to Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant claims that “morality leads ineluctably to religion”. This thesis is hardly an innovation of the Religion. Again and again throughout the critical corpus, Kant argues that religious belief is ethically significant, that it makes a morally meaningful difference whether an agent believes or disbelieves. And yet these claims are surely among the most doubted of Kant's positions – and they are often especially doubted by readers who consider (...) themselves Kantians. That Kant of all people should have so cherished religion is perhaps surprising: his moral view enshrines the notion that moral worth arises solely form the “good will”, that is, from a will determined by the moral law. Kant claims to be able to deduce this law and to account for how it motivates without ever relying on religious propositions. Rather, he grounds morality in the conception of autonomy, in the absolutely free self-legislation of the moral principle. So why, after effecting this dramatic Copernican revolution in ethics, does Kant appear to backslide, insisting on the moral necessity of religious belief? (shrink)

In chapter 7 of The Varieties of Reference, Gareth Evans claimed to have an argument that would present "an antidote" to the Cartesian conception of the self as a purely mental entity. On the basis of considerations drawn from philosophy of language and thought, Evans claimed to be able to show that bodily awareness is a form of self-awareness. The apparent basis for this claim is the datum that sometimes judgements about one’s position based on body sense are immune to (...) errors of misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun 'I'. However, Evans’s argument suffers from a crucial ambiguity. 'I' sometimes refers to the subject's mind, sometimes to the person, and sometimes to the subject's body. Once disambiguated, it turns out that Evans’s argument either begs the question against the Cartesian or fails to be plausible at all. Nonetheless, the argument is important for drawing our attention to the idea that bodily modes of awareness should be taken seriously as possible forms of self-awareness. (shrink)

The article considers Jürgen Habermas's views on the relationship between postmetaphysical philosophy and religion. It outlines Habermas's shift from his earlier, apparently dismissive attitude towards religion to his presently more receptive stance. This more receptive stance is evident in his recent emphasis on critical engagement with the semantic contents of religion and may be characterized by two interrelated theses: (a) the view that religious contributions should be included in political deliberations in the informally organized public spheres of contemporary democracies, though (...) translated into a secular language for the purposes of legislation and formal decision making and (b) the view that postmetaphysical philosophy should seek to salvage the semantic contents of religious traditions in order to supply the evocative images, exemplary figures, and inspirational narratives it needs for its social and political projects. With regard to (a), it argues that the translation requirement impairs the political autonomy of religious believers and other metaphysically inclined citizens, suggesting that this difficulty could be alleviated by making a distinction between epistemologically authoritarian and non-authoritarian religious beliefs. With regard to (b), it argues that the salvaging operation is not as straightforward as Habermas seems to suppose and that social and political philosophy may not be able to tap the semantic power of religious traditions without relying on metaphysical assumptions; it concludes that, here, too, a distinction between authoritarian and non-authoritarian approaches to knowledge and validity may be useful. (shrink)

Theories of children's developing understanding of mind tend to emphasize either individualistic processes of theory formation, maturation, or introspection, or the process of enculturation. However, such theories must be able to account for the accumulating evidence of the role of social interaction in the development of social understanding. We propose an alternative account, according to which the development of children's social understanding occurs within triadic interaction involving the child's experience of the world as well as communicative interaction with others about (...) their experience and beliefs (Chapman 1991; 1999). It is through such triadic interaction that children gradually construct knowledge of the world as well as knowledge of other people. We contend that the extent and nature of the social interaction children experience will influence the development of children's social understanding. Increased opportunity to engage in cooperative social interaction and exposure to talk about mental states should facilitate the development of social understanding. We review evidence suggesting that children's understanding of mind develops gradually in the context of social interaction. Therefore, we need a theory of development in this area that accords a fundamental role to social interaction, yet does not assume that children simply adopt socially available knowledge but rather that children construct an understanding of mind within social interaction. Key Words: language; Piaget; social interaction; theories of mind; Vygotsky; Wittgenstein. (shrink)

One of the outstanding achievements of recent cosmology has been to offer some prospect of a unified explanation of temporal asymmetry. The explanation is in two main parts, and runs something like this. First, the various asymmetries we observe are all thermodynamic in origin – all products of the fact that we live in an epoch in which the universe is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Second, this thermodynamic disequilibrium is associated with the condition of the universe very soon after the (...) Big Bang – the essential point being that in the rapidly expanding universe of the time, gravity is able to create organisation much faster than other processes can destroy it. The stars, galaxies and other forms of organisation we find in the present universe are all products of this early period. Such concentrated energy sources themselves make possible the kinds of asymmetric phenomena with which we are most familiar, such as life itself. If this explanation proves to be right it will surely rank as one of the most impressive achievements in the whole of natural philosophy. Where else do we find this breathtaking scale, this extraordinary conjunction of fundamental physics, the first moments of Creation, the possibility of life and the basic character of human experience? And it is very much a contemporary achievement: even if its roots go back on one side to the investigation of time asymmetry in nineteenth century statistical mechanics, and on the other to Hubble's discovery in the 1920's of the expansion of the universe, the body of the picture has only begun to be filled in in the last twenty or thirty years. This fascinating story has recently been given some well-deserved publicity in Stephen Hawking's bestseller, A Brief History of Time (Bantam, 1988) – well-deserved, not least, because Hawking himself is responsible for a considerable part of the story as it presently stands. (shrink)

Among philosophers in the period of change between the late 18th and early 19th centuries it was a widespread conviction that, because the status of a demonstrative theory made up of axioms and proofs was neither available nor desirable for philosophy, philosophical critique would also not be external to the business of philosophy. Rather it was to belong to the essence of philosophy itself. Against this background Hegel occupied himself almost from the beginning of his philosophical thinking with the question (...) of how a critique that is also able to convince an adherent of a theory differing from one’s own should proceed. Initially it must provide him with a description of his standpoint that he himself can accept. Moreover, the critique must tie up with a method of examination that is part of this standpoint itself, because its adherent would not otherwise have to agree to the procedure. Hegel is interested in this matter not only as a description of the hermeneutic situation in which the adherents of two particular, opposing positions find themselves. Rather, he asks himself whether an idea for the procedure of philosophical critique that commits itself to such considerations can also be generalized. This would require giving a minimalist description of the starting point in a way that allows as large a spectrum as possible of positions that are to be the object of the critique to recognize themselves within it. And the procedure of the critique must be able to be developed from this description itself. (shrink)

This paper draws attention to the Symposium's concern with epideictic rhetoric. It argues that in the Symposium, as in the Gorgias and the Phaedrus, a contrast is drawn between true and false rhetoric. The paper also discusses the dialogue's relationship to drama. Whereas both epideictic rhetoric and drama were directed to a mass audience, the speeches in the Symposium are delivered to a small, select group. The discussion focuses on the style of the speeches delivered by Aristophanes, Agathon, Socrates and (...) Alcibiades. Aristophanes speaks in the simple style of comedy, fable and folktale, also used by Protagoras in Plato's Protagoras. Agathon speaks in the high-flown style of Gorgias. Socrates' speech is a miniature Platonic dialogue, and both Alcibiades' speech and Socrates' speech may be compared to satyr play. The paper concludes with a suggestion that the claim at 223D, that the same person should be able to write both comedy and tragedy, refers to style as well as subject-matter. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Nietzsche’s rejection of egalitarianism depends on equivocation between distinct conceptions of power and equality. When these distinct views are disentangled, Nietzsche’s arguments succeed only against a narrow sense of equality as qualitative similarity (die Gleichheit as die Ähnlichkeit), and not against quantitative forms that promote equality not as similarity but as multiple, proportional resistances (die Gleichheit as die Veilheit and der Widerstand). I begin by distinguishing the two conceptions of power at play in Nietzsche’s (...) arguments, power as quantitative superiority of ability and as qualitative feeling of power (das Gefühl der Macht), an affective state that does not directly correlate with quantitative ability and, because based in resistance (der Widerstand), requires relative equality as its condition. Nietzsche presents four principal arguments against egalitarianism, each concluding that equality harms the flourishing of humanity’s highest individuals. First, equality directly promotes qualitative similarity (die Ähnlichkeit) at the expense of multiplicity (die Vielheit). Second, because material inequalities ground the “pathos of distance” (the recognition of spiritual inequality), equality indirectly undermines the desire for self-development. Third, because it opposes aristocratic conditions, egalitarianism promotes a form of liberalism that removes conditions of constraint necessary to human development. Finally, equality is a less efficient means to human enhancement, which is best promoted through unequal distribution of resources to the most able individuals. I argue that in each case Nietzsche’s argument succeeds only if interpreted according to the quantitative conception of power as superiority, but fails when we also consider the qualitative conception of power as feeling. For the promotion of an individual’s qualitative power is compatible with quantitative power equality. Moreover, because power is felt only in resistance, the feeling of power requires relative equality as its precondition—an alternate sense of equality construed, not as qualitative similarity, but as quantitative resistance from proportional counter-powers. I conclude that Nietzsche’s commitment to the promotion of humanity’s highest individuals does not entail the rejection of moral egalitarianism in every form and even supports certain forms. (shrink)

Karl Popper famously opposed Marxism in general and its philosophical core – the Marxist dialectic – in particular. As a progressive thinker, Popper saw in dialectic a source of dogmatism damaging to philosophy and political theory. Popper had summarized his views on dialectic in an article that was first delivered in 1937 and subsequently republished as a chapter of his book (2002, pp. 419-451), where he accuses Marxist dialecticians of not tolerating criticism. Ironically, Popper’s view that all Marxist dialecticians dogmatically (...) dismiss any criticism of dialectic by claiming that their opponents do not understand dialectic makes his position no less dogmatic. Indeed, any attempt to criticise Popper’s views on dialectics would be seen only as an additional example of responses by “dogmatic dialecticians”, making his theory essentially immune. This completely prevents dialecticians from being able to criticise Popper’s views. This is exactly the opposite of what the great philosopher wanted. Therefore, for the sake of “anti-dogmatic science” it is desirable and even necessary to defend dialectic. In this work I address several central points about Popper’s criticism of Marxist (materialist) dialectic. In particular, I (a) analyse Popper’s definition of dialectic as the dialectic triad (thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis) and contrast it with a notion of dialectic as a much more complex concept which occurs in dialectical materialism today, where the triad represents only one of the aspects; (b) compare dialectic with the trial and error method; (c) discuss the place of dialectic amongst valid scientific methods: Does dialectic accept logical contradictions; (e) discuss lessons dialecticians should learn from Popper’s criticism. I will test my arguments as to their constructiveness and will demonstrate explicitly the nature of my disagreement with Popper - thereby trying to avoid the “dogmatic dialecticians” response as much as possible. (shrink)

The notion of similarity plays a central role in Quine’s theory of Universals and it is with the help of this notion that Quine intends to define the concept of kind which also plays a central role in the theory. But as Quine has admitted, his attempts to define kinds in terms of similarities were unsuccessful and it is mainly because of this shortcoming that Quine’s theory has been ignored by several philosophers (see, e.g., Armstrong, D. M. (1978a). Nominalism and (...) realism: Universals and Scientific realism (Vol. I). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). In the present paper, I propose an alternative framework that accounts for the phenomena that Quine intends to explain with his resemblance theory. The framework agrees with Quine’s austere ontology; in particular, it does not assume the existence of properties and of possible worlds. (I will mention below Quine’s reason for rejecting properties and possible worlds. For a theory of Universals that assumes possible worlds, see, e.g., Rodriguez-Pereyra, G. (2002). Resemblance nominalism: A solution to the problem of Universals. Oxford: Clarendon Press.) Moreover, the framework is extensionalist since the abstract entities it assumes are classes and these can be individuated extensionally, for classes are identical if their members are identical. Finally, I will refute some of the objections to Quine’s approach that have been raised by Armstrong and Oliver [(1996). The metaphysics of properties. Mind, 105, 1–80.] and I will argue that, contrary to what has been claimed by Oliver in a comment on Lewis [(1986). On the plurality of worlds. Oxford: Blackwell.], Quine is able to specify an important set of sparse properties. (shrink)

Reid’s discussion of Molyneux’s question has been neglected. The Inquiry discusses the question twice, offering opposing answers. The first discussion treats the underlying issue as concerning common perceptibles of touch and vision, and in particular whether in vision we originally perceive depth. Although it is tempting to treat the second discussion as doing the same, this would render pointless various novel features Reid introduces in reformulating Molyneux’s question. Rather, the issue now is whether the blind can form a reasonable conception (...) of visual appearances, a conception that would allow them to perform Molyneux’s task. In explaining why Reid thought they can, I draw on his account of primary quality concepts as independent of sensation; of concept possession as ability, not acquaintance with sensation; and of visual appearance itself as in key part a matter of the perception of a primary quality, visible figure. Thus the issue does not concern cross-modality, what vision has in common with touch; but how even what is central in vision is amodal, able to be grasped independently of any sensory mode. Reid’s second Molyneux discussion thereby forms a focus for the Inquiry’s central claims, and the rejection of the Ideal Theory they entail. (shrink)

Boghossian’s (2003) proposal to conditionalize concepts as a way to secure their legitimacy in disputable cases applies well, not just to pejoratives – on whose account Boghossian first proposed it – but also to thick ethical concepts. It actually has important advantages when dealing with some worries raised by the application of thick ethical terms, and the truth and facticity of corresponding statements. In this paper, I will try to show, however, that thick ethical concepts present a specific case, whose (...) analysis requires a somewhat different reconstruction from that which Boghossian offers. A proper account of thick ethical concepts should be able to explain how ‘evaluated’ and ‘evaluation’ are connected. (shrink)

Putting it very crudely, it might be said that in the much discussed opening three chapters that make up the section “Consciousness” of his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel sketches and “test-drives” various models for a consciousness able to experience and know the world.1 Kant had thought of objects of experience as necessarily having conceptual (as well as spatio-temporal) form, but non-conceptual (“intuitional”) content. But for Hegel, that objects show themselves to have a conceptual form emerges as one the first lessons (...) of experience as tracked in Chapter 1. Moreover, in contrast to Kant’s focus on the unity and stability of such form, Hegel wants to display a series in which successive “shapes of consciousness” emerge from the resolution of contradictions affecting their predecessors.2 We might say that while Kant had famously asserted the identity of “the conditions of the possibility of experience in general” and the “conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience”,3 Hegel points to the ever-present tension between them, examining the fate of particular conceptions of the constitution of objects in the light of the “experience” based upon those conceptions, and with this transforms philosophy’s task, as Kant conceives it. Thus in the place of the reconfigured metaphysical project signalled by Kant which gives a definitive map of “what reason brings forth entirely out of itself” via the discovery of “reason’s common principle”,4 Hegel radically historicizes reason into a series of particular finite forms, each driven to selfovercoming because of the constitutive contradictions at its centre. (shrink)

The question of freedom in the modern German tradition is not just a metaphysical question. It concerns the status of a free life as a value, indeed, as they took to saying, the “absolute” value. A free life is of unconditional and incomparable and inestimable value, and it is the basis of the unique, and again, absolute, unqualifiable respect owed to any human person just as such. This certainly increases the pressure on anyone who espouses such a view to tell (...) us what a free life consists in. Kant’s famous answer is “autonomy,” where this means first or minimally freedom from external constraint, coercion and intimidation (“thinking for yourself”), but even more importantly, being in a certain specific sort of self-relation. I can only be said truly to be “ruling myself” when the considerations that determine what I do are reasons. But if, finally, in exercising reason I am merely rationally responsive to inclinations and desires and aversions, I am letting such contingent impulses “rule” my life, however strategically rational or hierarchically ordered my plans for satisfaction turn out to be. So, Kant concludes, I am only truly autonomous, self-ruling, when the one consideration of importance (that is, normatively authoritative) in what I do is, as he says so frequently if still mysteriously, the “ form of rationality” as such. The more familiar name for such a necessary condition of autonomy is the Categorical Imperative. To make clear that this subjection to the “form” of rationality counts as autonomy, Kant also insists that this moral law be understood as “self-legislated,” that we must be able to regard ourselves as its “author,” and that we are bound to such a law because we bind ourselves to it. (shrink)

Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection unifies the world of physics with the world of meaning and purpose by proposing a deeply counterintuitive ‘‘inversion of reasoning’’ (according to a 19th century critic): ‘‘to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it’’ [MacKenzie RB (1868) (Nisbet & Co., London)]. Turing proposed a similar inversion: to be a perfect and beautiful computing machine, it is not requisite to know what arithmetic is. Together, these (...) ideas help to explain how we human intelligences came to be able to discern the reasons for all of the adaptations of life, including our own. (shrink)

Like Mises before him, Hayek challenges the validity of socialism as a centrally planned economic regime typically characterized by state ownership of all means of production. What is typical of Hayek's challenge is that he holds that this question is fully theoretical in nature and that it has consequently to be raised and decided as a scientific question. Sketching the historical background of the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s, I first show how this debate is linked with (...) the Menger-Wieser Zurechnungsproblem, which indeed constitutes the very topic of Hayek’s 1923 Ph. D. dissertation. I recall that the Pareto-Barone approach based on General Equilibrium Theory (GET) has determined the conceptual framework of this controversy. I then go on to explore Hayek's impracticability argument against market socialism and try to show how it is related to, but different from, Mises’s logical impossibility argument. I argue that the contexts of discussion were completely different in both cases: if Mises was criticizing the possibility of rational economic decisions in a moneyless economy, Hayek was debating against the Lange-Dickinson-Lerner model of market socialism where the prices of first order goods were supposedly fixed following a GET simulation of the competetive market process. The core of Hayek’s line of reasoning is shown to be related to a clever analysis of the notion of ‘data’: the data on which a Central Planification Board is suppose to work out a production and distribution schema for the whole economy are simply unavailable to him because this kind of economic knowledge (which Michael Polanyi calls “tacit knowledge”) cannot be accumulated and stored up anywhere in society, as if the global economy could be directed by a super-brain possessing complete knowledge of every particular situation and able to compute a perfect solution to any economic problem whatsoever.. (shrink)

What are experts? Are there only experts in a subjective sense or are there also experts in an objective sense? And how, if at all, may non-experts recognize experts in an objective sense? In this paper, I approach these important questions by discussing Alvin I. Goldman's thoughts about how to define objective epistemic authority and about how non-experts are able to identify experts. I argue that a multiple epistemic desiderata approach is superior to Goldman's purely veritistic approach.

Our Book Review Editor, James Keller, invited William Hasker to write a review of the Book by D.Z. Phillips, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God and then in consultation with the Editor-in-Chief invited Phillips to respond. Aware of both their respect for each other and their philosophical differences we planned that Hasker’s review and Phillips’ response would appear in the same issue of the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion. Unfortunately that was not to be. Dewi, as (...) he was known to his many friends throughout the world, collapsed at his desk on 25 July, 2006 in the library of his beloved University of Wales, Swansea. Although we were not able to have the review and response appear in the same issue as we had all planned, we are now printing his response to Hasker’s review, “D.Z. Phillips’s Problems with Evil and with God,” which appeared in IJPR, Vol. 61,3. Dewi had completed the review and thanks to the efforts of Helen Baldwin who prepared the manuscript and Dewi’s wife, Monica, and family we are able to print it here. Since Dewi was responding to an earlier version of Hasker’s review, a few minor editorial changes have been made. Dewi’s death is a great loss to the philosophical community and a deep personal loss to his family and friends, but I am confident that he would be pleased to have this response appear. He might even have a story to tell, a comment that those who knew him well will fully understand. Eugene Thomas Long. (shrink)

In these comments I briefly discuss three aspects of the empiricist account of the epistemic role of experience that Anil Gupta develops in his Empiricism and Experience. First, I discuss the motivations Gupta offers for the claim that the given in experience should be regarded as reliable. Second, I discuss two different ways of conceiving of the epistemic significance of the phenomenology of experience. And third, I discuss whether Gupta’s account is able to deliver the anti-skeptical results he intends it (...) to. I close by suggesting that, once fully fleshed out, Gupta’s account is best understood in terms of the fusion of certain core ideas within both the empiricist and the rationalist traditions. (shrink)

Morgan Luck raises a potentially troubling problem for gamers who enjoy video games that allow the player to commit acts of virtual murder. The problem simply is that the arguments typically advanced to defend virtual murder in video games would appear to also support video games that allowed gamers to commit acts of virtual paedophilia. Luck’s arguments are persuasive, however, there is one line of argument that he does not consider, which may provide the relevant distinction: as virtual paedophilia involves (...) the depiction of sexual acts involving children, it is therefore an instance of child pornography. I argue that virtual paedophilia involves the depiction of sexual acts involving children, which amounts to child pornography. I then draw on arguments to show that child pornography is morally objectionable. Finally, depictions of virtual murder are not instances of pornography, and so are not morally objectionable for this reason. So, there is a relevant moral distinction to draw between virtual murder and virtual paedophilia that is able to justify the former but not the latter. (shrink)

In Knowledge and the State of Nature Edward Craig defends the thesis that the function of the concept of knowledge is to flag good informants. This paper aims to show that Craig’s thesis (CT) is false. In order to establish this, I will point to some data that CT fails to explain in a satisfactory manner. I will then introduce an alternative thesis that is not only able to secure the acclaimed benefits of CT, but also provides a neat explanation (...) of the recalcitrant data. (shrink)

One of the attractions of the Humean instrumentalist theory of practical rationality is that it appears to offer a special connection between an agent's reasons and her motivation. The assumption that Humeanism is able to assert a strong connection between reason and motivation has been challenged, most notably by Christine Korsgaard. She argues that Humeanism is not special in the connection it allows to motivation. On the contrary, Humean theories of practical rationality do connect reasons and motivation in a unique (...) and attractive way, though the nature of this connection has sometimes been misunderstood by both defenders and detractors of the theory. (shrink)

This paper defends the communitarian account of meaning against Boghossian’s (Wittgensteinian) arguments. Boghossian argues that whilst such an account might be able to accommodate the infinitary characteristic of meaning, it cannot account for its normativity: he claims that, since the dispositions of a group must mirror those of its members, the former cannot be used to evaluate the latter. However, as this paper aims to make clear, this reasoning is fallacious. Modelling the issue with four (justifiable) assumptions, it shows that (...) Condorcet’s ‘Jury Theorem’ can be used to prove that the dispositions of the majority of the members of a group can differ from those of any individual member in a way that makes it possible to use communal dispositions as a standard with which individual dispositions can be assessed. Moreover, the argument of the paper is also shown to have general implications for the use of formal methods in the explanation of the nature of certain fallacious inferences. (shrink)

Although the notion of logical object plays a key role in Frege's foundational project, it has hardly been analyzed in depth so far. I argue that Marco Ruffino's attempt to fill this gap by establishing a close link between Frege's treatment of expressions of the form ‘the concept F’ and the privileged status Frege assigns to extensions of concepts as logical objects is bound to fail. I argue, in particular, that Frege's principal motive for introducing extensions into his logical theory (...) is not to be able to make in-direct statements about concepts, but rather to define all numbers as logical objects of a fundamental kind in order to ensure that we have the right cognitive access to them qua logical objects via Axiom V. Contrary to what Ruffino claims, reducibility to extensions cannot be the ‘ultimate criterion’ for Frege of what is to be regarded as a logical object. (shrink)

It is argued that the moral theory undergirding J.S. Mill''s argumentin On Liberty is a species of perfectionism rather than any kind of utilitarianism. The conception of human flourishing that itinvokes is one in which the goods of personal autonomy and individualityare central. If this conception is to be more than the expression ofa particular cultural ideal it needs the support of an empiricallyplausible view of human nature and a defensible interpretation ofhistory. Neither of these can be found in Mill. (...) Six traditionalcriticisms of Mill''s argument are assessed. It is concluded thatin addition to depending on implausible claims about human natureand history Mill''s conception of the good contains disablingincommensurabilities. It is argued that these difficulties andincommensurabilities plague later liberal thinkers such as IsaiahBerlin and Joseph Raz who have sought to ground liberalism in avalue-pluralist ethical theory. No thinker in Mill''s liberal posterity has been able to demonstrate the universal authority of liberal ideals. (shrink)

Hartry Field's revised logic for the theory of truth in his new book, Saving Truth from Paradox , seeking to preserve Tarski's T-scheme, does not admit a full theory of negation. In response, Crispin Wright proposed that the negation of a proposition is the proposition saying that some proposition inconsistent with the first is true. For this to work, we have to show that this proposition is entailed by any proposition incompatible with the first, that is, that it is the (...) weakest proposition incompatible with the proposition whose negation it should be. To show that his proposal gave a full intuitionist theory of negation, Wright appealed to two principles, about incompatibility and entailment, and using them Field formulated a paradox of validity (or more precisely, of inconsistency). The medieval mathematician, theologian and logician, Thomas Bradwardine, writing in the fourteenth century, proposed a solution to the paradoxes of truth which does not require any revision of logic. The key principle behind Bradwardine's solution is a pluralist doctrine of meaning, or signification, that propositions can mean more than they explicitly say. In particular, he proposed that signification is closed under entailment. In light of this, Bradwardine revised the truth-rules, in particular, refining the T-scheme, so that a proposition is true only if everything that it signifies obtains. Thereby, he was able to show that any proposition which signifies that it itself is false, also signifies that it is true, and consequently is false and not true. I show that Bradwardine's solution is also able to deal with Field's paradox and others of a similar nature. Hence Field's logical revisions are unnecessary to save truth from paradox. (shrink)

In this paper I will first consider Bird's cases against the conditional analysis of dispositions and defend them from Gundersen's objection. This does not mean that I believe that Bird's cases are successful. To the contrary, I take it that we can save the conditional analysis from Bird's cases by taking Lewis's two-step approach to dispositions. However, I will go on to argue that if Bird's cases are supplemented with the assumption that dispositions are intrinsic matter, they are able to (...) do what they are intended to do. (shrink)

For Plato, the crucial function of human cognition is to grasp truths. Explaining how we are able to do this is fundamental to understanding our cognitive powers. Plato addresses this topic from several different angles. In the Cratylus and Theaetetus, he attempts to identify the elemental cognitions that are the foundations of language and knowledge. He considers several candidates for this role, most notably, perception and simple meaning-bearing concepts. In the first section, we will look at Plato’s worries about semantic (...) instability and its epistemic consequences. The central role of basic cognitions in Plato’s account of knowledge in the Theaetetus will be explored in the second section. In the final section, the relevance of Plato’s conception of cognition to modern discussions in the philosophy of language and epistemology will be noted. (shrink)

My aim in this study is not to praise Fischer's fine theory of moral responsibility, but to (try to) bury the "semi" in "semicompatibilism". I think Fischer gives the Consequence Argument (CA) too much credit, and gives himself too little credit. In his book, The Metaphysics of Free Will, Fischer gave the CA as good a statement as it will ever get, and put his finger on what is wrong with it. Then he declared stalemate rather than victory. In my (...) view, Fischer's view amounts to sophisticated compatibilism. It would be nice to be able to call it by its right name. In The Metaphysics of Free Will, Fischer develops his own version of Consequence Argument, which turns on two principles, one of which is the fixity of the past. FP: For any action K, agent S and time i, if it is true that is S were to do Y at t, some fact about that past relative to t would not have been a fact, then S cannot at t do Fat 1. 1 argue that the equipment needed to reject FP (and thereby defend the most plausible version of compatibilism) is needed to deal with the problem of fatalism. In addition, I argue that the rejection of FP is compatible with Fischer's approach to Frankfurt cases and with his account of transfer principles. (shrink)

One of the most significant moments in the development of German idealism is Schelling's break from his mentor Fichte. On account of its significance, there have been numerous studies examining the origin and meaning of this transition in Schelling's thought. Not one study, however, considers Goethe's influence on Schelling's development. This is surprising given the fact that in the fall of 1799 Goethe and Schelling meet every day for a week, to go through and edit what came to be Schelling's (...) most path-breaking work. This paper considers Goethe's influence on the development of Schelling's thought, and argues that it was by appropriating Goethe's idea of metamorphosis that Schelling was able to put forth a conception of nature as independent from the mind. (shrink)

And in general it is a sign of the man who knows and of the man who does not know that the former can teach, and therefore we think art more truly knowledge than experience is; for the artist can teach, and men of experience cannot. When pragmatism first gained favor in the early twentieth century, some British philosophers like Russell regarded it as evidencing their perception of America’s crude and enterprising spirit.1 The Imperial jab lay in this: that just (...) as business indicates the exchange of products and services to meet basic needs as well as others, for the pragmatist, knowledge is tied to social practices and instrumentality (that is, being able to effect changes in the world). The slight lies .. (shrink)

Among the various attempts that have been undertaken today to reformulate critically the idea of European modernism, Alessandro Ferrara’s book certainly represents one of the most radical. In contrast to other approaches, which rather depart from a competition of various sources of ideas, Ferrara sets forth a single principle that should be able to provide us with an appropriate and future-regarding self-under-standing of the intellectual situation of present modernity. Its key concept is authenticity that, in opposition to all other principles (...) of validity so far, possesses a priority since it brings most clearly to expression ‘who we actually want to be’ (p. 162ff.). Before I briefly discuss a few questions that are connected with this thesis, I want first to try to understand the claims underpinning the project as a whole. Only then will I thereby be in a position to lay out those points of view that place doubt upon on the whole project. (shrink)

In Darwin's Black Box: The BiochemicalChallenge to Evolution I argued thatpurposeful intelligent design, rather thanDarwinian natural selection, better explainssome aspects of the complexity that modernscience has discovered at the molecularfoundation of life. In the five years since itspublication the book has been widely discussedand has received considerable criticism. Here Irespond to what I deem to be the mostfundamental objections. In the first part ofthe article I address empirical criticismsbased on experimental studies alleging eitherthat biochemical systems I discussed are notirreducibly complex (...) or that similar systemshave been demonstrated to be able to evolve byDarwinian processes. In the remainder of thearticle I address methodological concerns,including whether a claim of intelligent designis falsifiable and whether intelligent designis a permissible scientific conclusion. (shrink)

This book offers an original new account of one of Aristotle's central doctrines. Freudenthal He recreates from Aristotle's writings a more complete theory of material substance which is able to explain the problematical areas of the way matter organizes itself and the persistence of matter, to show that the hitherto ignored concept of vital heat is as central in explaining material substance as soul or form.

Arthur Danto’s recent book, Andy Warhol, leads the reader through the story of the iconic American’s artistic life highlighted by a philosophical commentary, a commentary that merges Danto’s aesthetic theory with the artist himself. Inspired by Warhol’s Brillo Box installation, art that in Danto’s eyes was indiscernible from the everyday boxes it represented, Danto developed a theory that is able to differentiate art from non-art by employing the body of conceptual art theory manifest in what he termed the ‘artworld’. The (...) strength of Danto’s theory is found in its ability to explain the art of the post-modern era. His body of work weaves philosophy, art history and art criticism together, merging his aesthetic philosophy with his extensive knowledge of the world of art. Danto’s essentialist theory of embodied meaning provides him with a critical tool that succeeds in explaining the currents of contemporary art, a task that many great thinkers of art history were unable to do. If Warhol inspired Danto to create a philosophy of art, it is appropriate that Danto write a tribute to Warhol that traces how Warhol brought philosophy into art. Danto’s account of ‘Warhol as philosopher’ positions him as a pivotal figure in the history of twentieth-century art, effecting a sea change in how art was made and viewed. Warhol achieved this by conceiving of works that embodied the answers to a series of philosophical puzzles surrounding the nature of art. Warhol, as Danto describes him, manifests himself in his art because he had transformed himself, in a way, into an icon of the times. This pragmatist notion that art should undermine the dichotomies that exist between art and life would, by some accounts, position Warhol to be the philosopher that Danto claims him to be, for he dissolved the philosophical questions posted by late modern aesthetic thinkers by creating art that imploded the accepted notions of art at the time. One of Danto’s greatest contributions to aesthetics is his theory’s ability to distinguish art from non-art, recognizing that it is the artist’s intention that levels the sublimity of art into the commonplace, thereby transfiguring the everyday. However, acknowledging this achievement, I argue that Warhol’s philosophical contribution actually manifests itself in a manner different from that proposed by Danto. Danto maintains that the internal drive of art leads to the unfolding of art theoretical concepts that ineluctably shift the terrain of world of art. I would agree with Danto that Warhol, almost as Hegel viewed Napoleon as Geist on a horse, pushed forward the boundaries of art through the actualization of art’s internal drive. But I would disagree that the conceptual nature of art is one that unfolds merely as a relation of concepts that artists trace through a connection to the meaning of history they forge using their unmediated grasp of style. Rather, I would argue that the artist’s style is not bound so narrowly to the meanings they express. Through their aesthetic articulations, artists initiate a process of social interaction. This process employs the philosophical logic which Danto attributes to Warhol indirectly, and through it, it is able to transfigure the vocabulary of art—the concepts of the artworld—by superseding the language of modernism. Warhol’s philosophical contribution is seen in his mastery of both the medium of art and the underlying logic of the medium’s expression and reception. (shrink)

Descartes’s First Meditation employs a series of arguments designed to generate the worry that the senses might not provide sufficient evidence to justify one’staking as certain one’s beliefs about the way the world is. As the meditator considers what principle describes the conditions under which it is possible to attain certain knowledge, one after another doubt-generating device is ushered in, until at last he finds himself like someone caught in a whirlpool, able neither to stand firm nor to swim out. (...) In this paper, I examine one of those devices, namely, what is often referred to as the Madness Argument. In particular, I want to discuss its relation to the Dream Argument and its function in the Meditations as a whole. My position stands in contrast to the interpretations of Anthony Kenny, Margaret Wilson, Michael Williams, and, more recently, Janet Broughton and Catherine Wilson. (shrink)

Private information about individuals contained in computerized data bases is readily available to journalists, who have a moral obligation to inform the masses as a means of redistributing power in society. The journalist's duty to inform, however, conflicts with the duty to respect the privacy of individuals. Because legislation is largely ineffective in protecting individual privacy, the journalist's moral responsibility assumes additional weight. However, the journalist should not allow the claim of privacy to keep him or her from investigating matters (...) in which the public has a legitimate interest. To determine the extent of legitimate interest, the journalist must be able to distinguish between a right to knowledge and a curious interest in knowing. The journalist is offered a 5-point test to assist in determining when an invasion of privacy via data-base research and subsequent publication is warranted. (shrink)

I show that the two most devastating objections to Shogenji's formal account of coherence necessarily involve information sets of cardinality . Given this, I surmise that the problem with Shogenji's measure has more to do with his means of generalizing the measure than with the measure itself. I defend this claim by offering an alternative generalization of Shogenji's measure. This alternative retains the intuitive merits of the original measure while avoiding both of the relevant problems that befall it. In the (...) light of all of this, I suggest that there is new hope for Shogenji's analysis: Shogenji's early and influential attempt at measuring coherence, when generalized in a subset-sensitive way, is able to clear its most troubling objections. (shrink)

From the AI point of view, consciousness must be regarded as a collection of interacting processes rather than the unitary object of much philosophical speculation. We ask what kinds of propositions and other entities need to be designed for consciousness to be useful to an animal or a machine. We thereby assert that human consciousness is useful to human functioning and not just and epiphenomenon. Zombies in the sense of Todd Moody's article are merely the victims of Moody's prejudices. To (...) behave like humans, zombies will need what Moody might call pseudo-consciousness, but useful pseudo-consciousness will share all the observable qualities of human consciousness including what the zombie will be able to report. Robots will require a pseudo-consciousness with many of the intellectual qualities of human consciousness but will function successfully with few if any human emotional conscious qualities if that is how we choose to build them. (shrink)

Professor Grünbaum's much-discussed refutation of Zeno's metrical paradox turns out to be ad hoc upon close examination of the relevant portion of measure theory. Although the modern theory of measure is able to defuse Zeno's reasoning, it is not capable of refuting Zeno in the sense of showing his error. I explain why the paradox is not refutable and argue that it is consequently more than a mere sophism.

Most scholars who presently deal with the Mind-Body problem consider themselves monist materialists. Nevertheless, many of them also assume that there exist (in some sense of existence) mental entities. But since these two positions do not harmonize quite well, the literature is full of discussions about how to reconcile the positions. In this paper, I will defend a materialist theory that avoids all these problems by completely rejecting the existence of mental entities. This is Quine's repudiation theory. According to the (...) theory, there are no mental entities, and the behavioral or physiological phenomena that have been attributed to mental entities, or that point to the existence of these entities, are exclusively caused by physiological factors. To be sure, several objections have been raised to materialist theories that do not assign some role to mental entities. But we will see that Quine is able to give convincing replies to these objections. (shrink)

Despite his well‐known deductivism, in his early (unpublished) writings, Popper held an inductivist position. Up to 1929 epistemology entered Popper's reflections only as far as the problem was that of the justification of the scientific character of these fields of research. However, in that year, while surveying the history of non‐Euclidean geometries, Popper explicitly discussed the cognitive status of geometry without referring to psycho‐pedagogical aspects, thus turning from cognitive psychology to the logic and methodology of science. As a consequence of (...) his reflections on the problematic relationship between geometrical‐mathematical constructions and physical reality Popper was able to get over a too direct notion of such a relationship, cast doubts on inductive inference and started conceiving in a new (strictly non‐inductivist) manner the relationship between theoretical and observational propositions. (shrink)

Discussions of the intersection of general relativity and thephilosophy of religion rarely take place on the technical levelthat involves the details of the mathematical physics of generalrelativity. John Earman's discussion of theism and generalrelativity in his recent book on spacetime singularities is anexception to this tendency. By virtue of his technical expertise,Earman is able to introduce novel arguments into the debatebetween theists and atheists. In this paper, I state and examineEarman's arguments that it is rationally acceptable to believethat theism and (...) general relativity form a mutually consistent oreven mutually supportive pair. I conclude that each of hisarguments is unsound. (shrink)

Augustine tells us in the Confessions that his reading of Cicero's Hortensius at the age of nineteen aroused in him a burning 'passion for the wisdom of eternal truth'. He was inspired 'to love wisdom itself, whatever it might be, and to search for it, pursue it, hold it, and embrace it firmly'. And thus he embarked on his arduous journey to the truth, which was at the same time a conversion to Catholic Christianity, and which culminated twelve years later (...) in his experience in the garden in Milan. In the first part of this paper I will trace Augustine's search for intellectual knowledge and truth -- the pathway from Manicheeism to Catholicism by which he achieves what he takes to be a true conception of God. Consideration will be given to the way in which his intellectual progress affects and is affected by the conative side of his nature -- his desires, habits and affections. I will then ask whether the insight into God's nature that Augustine achieves suffices to give him the wisdom that he seeks, and will consider his novel suggestion that it does not. We will see that Augustine attempts to set out additional, non-intellectual criteria for attaining knowledge of God -- where 'knowledge' has a richer sense that involves 'holding' the truth, and 'embracing it fully'. Augustine's conversion to the truth essentially involves a reorienting of the will, a radical change in attitude and motive. My second concern is with Augustine's conception of how his own will functions in his conversion. Clearly he thinks of his conversion as a process of change within the whole self, but one that culminates in a final act of will. His highly dramatized and metaphorical description of the struggle that goes on within him leading to his final decision is a repository of insight into human willing. I will attempt to elicit from the text of the Confessions Augustine's conception of the will -- whether it functions as liberum arbitrium, capable of choosing between presented alternatives, or simply as the executive organ of reason or desire. Secondly, I will consider the extent to which Augustine views himself as contributing by his overall process of conversion and to the final moment of decision. Consideration of Augustine's participation in the process must take into account his explicit recognition that he is in St Paul's predicament of not being able to do what he wants to do. The relevant questions are : What does Augustine do to bring about his conversion and Is his final decision something that he accomplishes by his own effort and striving? (shrink)

The subject I intend to discuss deals with a problem which is central in the debate of ancient greek philosophy: the quest for happiness as the final end, the highest good for a human being. Fixing in the achievement of a life worth living the strategic aim of actions, ancient philosophers tried to define as well what a man should desire for himself to fully develop all the capabilities which lie inside human nature. On the one side they proposed major (...) normative models of wisdom, on the other side they gave an important practical indication: the “care of the self”, as a self-control discipline that aims to build a virtuous form of subjectivity, that is able to design and deserve the eudaimonia. In this context, my analysis will focus on the issue of pleasure. The hedone surely represents the critical point of all happiness models of Socratic origin, centred in different ways on the practice of the “care of the self”. While this practical proposal appears to be a complex and demanding alternative in the search for a life worth living, the hedonistic way seems to be much easier and simpler, as far as pleasure is intended as an unequivocal sign of goodness and wellness, immediately recognisable in the experience of happiness. The hedonism of the many appears to the philosophers as a serious menace to society and to the individual, because it conveys unlimited desires and interior disharmony, though, on the other hand, it not possible to deny the value of pleasure without making philosophical happiness unattractive. In the field of the important contemporary re-evaluation of bios models of ancient philosophers (Hadot, Foucault, Nussbaum, Annas) to test their strength and operative capabilities in human subject’s condition in the present days, I would like to outline a comparison between Plato’s and Aristotle’s views on the dilemmas set by pleasure in the enterprise of self-construction: their positions appear, as usual, close and at the same time opposite in the well-known “gigantomachy”. (shrink)

Aspects of an example of simulated shared subjectivity can be used both to support Steven Lehar's remarks on embodied percipients and to triangulate in a novel way the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness which Lehar wishes to “sidestep,” but which, given his other contentions regarding emergent holism, raises questions about whether he has been able or willing to do so.

This essay offers a critical assessment of environmental virtue ethics (EVE). Finding an environmental ethical analogy with Hume’s critique of the sensible knave, I argue that EVE is limited in much the same way as morality is on the Humean view. Advocates of nonanthropocentrism will find it difficult to engage those whose virtues comport them to anthropocentrism. Nonetheless, EVE is able to ground confidence in nonanthropocentric virtues by explicating specific key virtues, thereby holding open the possibility of bridging the motivational (...) gap between anthropocentrism and nonanthropocentrism. (shrink)

For the purposes of analytical clarity it is possible to distinguish two ways in which Nancy's ontology of sense appeals to art. First, he uses 'art' as a metaphorical operator to give features to his ontology (such as surprise and wonder); second, the practice of the contemporary arts instruct the terms of his ontological project because, in his view, this practice catches up with the fragmentation of existence and thus informs ontology about the structure of existence today. These two different (...) roles—in which 'art' is both a general category able to stage the features of sense in general and a particularly striking example of the alteration sense undergoes in our times—make available for Nancy different perspectives on the question of sense. On the one hand, the general category of 'art' allows Nancy to construct a characterology of sense around terms such as surprise and novelty; on the other, the appeal to the fractal practice of the 'contemporary arts' supports the project of giving an account of sense.This paper analyses the effects on Nancy's conception of sense of these different appeals to 'art' and the practice of 'the contemporary arts.' Are the locales from which these different perspectives on sense take shape compatible? In what ways do they inflect each other or, alternatively, undermine the perspectives of the other on the question of sense? Finally, what do these two strands tell us about what Nancy expects of 'art' and what would happen to his ontology of sense without the different appeals he makes to it? (shrink)

It has become standard for commentators to note sadly how little impact Frege’s work had amongst his contemporaries, but then to temper this observation by claiming an enormous indirect influence for his ideas through the work of those few who did pay serious attention to them, perhaps most notably Russell, Wittgenstein, and Carnap. How effective or transparent those conduits were is still a matter of scholarly debate.1 For myself, I am increasingly persuaded that much of what we would now judge (...) to be most centrally important in Frege was at best imperfectly transmitted. That we can now attempt judgement on what is thus central is owed, in the first place, to the re‐publication and translation of Frege’s work that effectively began with Austin’s version of Grundlagen in 1950. Austin had translated the work so as to be able to set if for an Oxford finals paper. Michael Dummett took the course, and was, he reports, “bowled over by the Grundlagen”, so much so that during the following year he “settled down to read everything that Frege had written” (2007: 9‐ 10). Soon, though not at first, Geach and Black’s Translations (1952) would help in this, but before long the work would take Dummett to Munster to examine Frege unpublished work: the first result of this study is the 1956 “Postscript” to his 1955 “Frege on Functions”, itself an important early step in dispelling bizarre misconceptions of Frege’s doctrines which seem then to have been prevalent.2 Dummett began to form plans for a comprehensive book on Frege. This required further sustained study of the Nachlass, including a visit in 1957 when, its editors acknowledge, Dummett provided an important stimulus and essential “spadework” (PW xii) towards its publication. Frege: Philosophy of Language, a rather different book from that first planned, eventually appeared in 1973. Dummett modestly remarks of it, “I believe that the book helped to revive interest in Frege” (2007: 24). Peter Geach,�.. (shrink)

Psychological research into children’s sensitivity to testimony has primarily focused on their ability to judge the likely reliability of speakers. However, verbal testimony is only one means by which children learn from others. We review recent research exploring children’s early social referencing and imitation, as well as their sensitivity to speakers’ knowledge, beliefs, and biases, to argue that children treat information and informants with reasonable scepticism. As children’s understanding of mental states develops, they become ever more able to critically evaluate (...) whether to believe new information. (shrink)

This paper investigates the implications of Pierre Bourdieu’s recent reformulation of his social theory as a critique of ‘scholarly reason’. This reformulation is said to point towards a definition of social theory as a sociologically informed version of the Kantian concept of ‘critique’. It is argued that, by this means, Bourdieu is able to extend and develop the critique of ‘intellectualism’ in the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty and, furthermore, to ground this critique by showing how the intellectualist error arises (...) from a failure to reflect on the ‘social conditions of possibility’ of reason. The three forms of the critique of scholarly reason (pertaining to the theoretical, the moral-practical and the aesthetic forms of reason) are then briefly presented. In the final section, the critique of scholarly reason is shown to provide the basis for a convincing response to critiques of Bourdieu’s work from critical theorists drawing on Habermas’s conception of discursive rationality. In particular, it is argued that critical theorists influenced by Habermas typically confuse ‘practical reflexivity’ with ‘intellectual reflection’ - the standpoint of ‘scholarly reason’. Finally, it is shown that Bourdieu’s own account of the unity of theory and practice is nonetheless deficient, and must be supplanted with an account centred on the idea of existential clarification. Key Words: Bourdieu • critical theory • Habermas • intellectualism • reflexivity. (shrink)

This paper highlights the philosophical and educational significance of expression in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. When the role of expression is highlighted, we will be better able to appreciate Stanley Cavell's insistence that: (i) Wittgenstein offers ways of responding to, though not a refutation of, the problem of skepticism concerning other minds, and (ii) Wittgenstein's writing style is an important aspect of his philosophy. The educational implications of this appreciation will be explored with reference to the lives of adolescences.

This book offers a fresh and up-to-date account of the ethical thought of Karl Barth, one of the twentieth century's greatest theologians. In it, the author seeks to recover Barth's ethics from some widespread misunderstandings, and also presents a picture of it as a whole. Drawing on recently published sources, Biggar construes the ethics of the Church Dogmatics as it might have been had Barth lived to complete it. However, The Hastening that Waits is more than apology and description. For (...) it recommends to contemporary Christian ethics the theological rigor with which Barth expounds the good life in terms of the living presence of God-in-Christ to his creatures; his conception of right human action as that which is able to hasten in the service of humanity precisely by waiting prayerfully upon God; and his discriminate openness to moral wisdom outside the Christian church. Among particular topics treated are: the concepts of human freedom and of created moral order; moral norms and their relation to individual vocation; the relative ethical roles of the Bible, the Church, philosophy, and empirical science; moral character and its formation; and the problem of war. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the reading of Mill that D.G. Brown presents in ‘Mill’s Moral Theory: Ongoing Revisionism’ is inconsistent with several key passages in Mill’s writings. I also show that a rule-utilitarian interpretation that is very close to the one developed by David Lyons is able to account for these passages without difficulty.

The Kohlberg Gilligan Controversy has received intermittent but inconclusive attention for many years, perhaps reflecting the difficulty of bridging the two positions. This article explores the published evidence for Gilligan’s claims of gender difference, gender identity difference, and role of caring in people’s ethics. It seems that the evidence for pronounced gender differences in ethical attitudes within business is weak, even if gender identity is used instead of physical gender. The main propositions of Care Theory and recent advances in its (...) thinking are discussed. Special focus emerges on the notion of Attachment which seems to be the Care Theory ingredient both most able to survive critical scrutiny and most promising for bridging the divide between the Kohlberg and Gilligan paradigms. The Social Bonding Model and other possible bridge building conceptual structures are introduced. Finally, Max Weber’s division between ethics of conviction and ethics of responsibility provides an overarching perspective both of the gap still to be bridged and the need to keep trying to bridge it. (shrink)

Geach’s rich paper ‘A Program for Syntax’ introduced many ideas into the arena of categorial grammar, not all of which have been given the attention they warrant in the thirty years since its first publication. Rather surprisingly, one of our findings (Section 3 below) is that the paper not only does not contain a statement of what has widely come to be known as “Geach’s Rule”, but in fact presents considerations which are inimical to the adoption of the rule in (...) question. With regard to at least some amongst the numerous other points extracted here from Geach’s discussion, we shall not be able to reach so definitive a conclusion, and content ourselves with giving the issues an airing. (shrink)

Hilbert's program attempts to show that our mathematical knowledge can be certain because we are able to know for certain the truths of elementary arithmetic. I argue that, in the absence of a theory of mathematical truth, Hilbert does not have a complete theory of our arithmetical knowledge. Further, while his deployment of a Kantian notion of intuition seems to promise an answer to scepticism, there is no way to complete Hilbert's epistemology which would answer to his avowed aims.

TGiulio Preti, born in Pavia (Italy) in 1911 and dead in Djerba (Tunisia) in 1972, represents one of the most subtle Italian thinkers of the latter half of the twentieth century. After graduating in 1933 discussing a thesis about The Husserl’s historical significance, he connected more and more to the Antonio Banfi’s lesson of critical rationalism and he elected him as his master. Starting from Banfi’s The principles of a reason theory (1927), Preti studied in depth the program of historization (...) of the Kantian transcendental both in books such as Idealism and positivism (1942), and in Praxis and empiricism (1957), in Rhetoric and logic (1968), and then in his numerous essay studies, later collected in fundamental posthumous volumes, Philosophical essays (1976, 2 vol.). Preti’s decisive problem is the following question: how is it possible to historicize human knowledge without a relativization? According to Preti, in order to answer this question, it is necessary to acknowledge the objectivity of scientific knowledge. The objective knowledge mustn’t be confused with an absolute knowledge or, least of all, with a subjective, or toutcourt relative, knowledge. Therefore it is necessary to avoid either opposite poles, but specular, in which the different epistemologicaltraditions of the last century are, on the contrary, stopped. In Preti’s opinion, the objectivity of knowledge arises from the eidetic, linguistic and operative structures, within the limits of which develops a determinate form of human scientific knowledge. In other words: every scientific knowledge, structured into a particularscientific theory and relating to a particular technological heritage, consists of a precise theoretical-practical horizon, that determines, with Husserl’s words, a specific “ontological region”, or, with Bachelard’s words, a specific “ontogenesis”. So Preti recovers the heuristic rule of the Kant’s transcendental reason. Nevertheless, unlike Kant, Preti believes the aprioristic structures of our ideas always have a conventional and historical foundation. In this way, the Kantian a priori changes into an historical and relativistic a priori. Certainly in Kant’s opinion an historical and relativistic a priori would have looked like a “round-square”, an authentic contradiction, a pure logical impossibility. According to Preti, on the contrary, this paradoxical aspect is the true distinctive feature of scientificknowledge objectivity, which has no more any eternal or absolute value, but is always built by men born to die and is always bound to determinate historical forms of civilization. Starting from these assumptions, Preti builds, in this way, a research programme on the possibility to individualize a form of “critic ontologism”, which hasn’t any more connection with the claims and the traditional metaphysical structures of the “Being qua Being”. On the contrary, Preti thinks the only “being” we can rationally talk about is the one constituted within the different cognitive ambits. Philosophy then must be able to develop a “meta-reflection” on different knowledge elaborated by single sciences. According to Preti, in fact, philosophy is the formality of human culture, it is, in other words, a form of self-reflection by the human culture about itself. Therefore philosophy has no more any privileged subject, but it must be always able to reflect, with great theoretical humility, on the different cognitive forms, in order to study languages, structures, methods, extension and limits of the human knowledge. In this way Preti’s “critic ontologism” is a kind of historical-objective transcendentalism, able to study the different configurations of the technical-scientific heritage produced by mankind during his history. (shrink)

Democracy requires a rather large tolerance for confusion and a secret relish for dissent. I am delighted to respond to Daniel Dombrowski’s book Rawls and Religion. Dombrowski and I share a number of what he would call comprehensive doctrine, such as the ethical treatment of animals, the relational worldview of process thought, and the idiosyncratic love of pacifism. So, immediately I was drawn in and claimed Dombrowski as a kindred spirit. With so many commonalities, including an interest in political philosophy (...) and religion, I approached this book with a built-in desire to engage with and respect his thinking. To be honest, I wondered if I would be able to critically engage Dombrowski’s book given our .. (shrink)

"The difficulty of piercing the screen, sometimes very opaque, which is the Aristotelianism of so many centuries, based substantially on the thinking of a thousand and one more or less faithful "disciples," is doubled by a difficulty probably unique in its kind: the impossibility of always being able to determine exactly the sort of things the writings of the authentic Aristotelian Corpus are. For we suspect that scholars often have to deal with texts whose definitive form owes something to the (...) work of Aristotle's disciples. We remain, on the other hand, powerless to determine always with precision the extent to which the products of their work continue to conform to the master's thinking or proceed, on the contrary, from a new idea. At least I can state very generally that the organization of the Corpus Aristotelicum, such as scholars after Andronicus of Rhodes have understood it, depends for them on the firmer and firmer conviction that Aristotle elaborated a philosophical system whose constituent parts are reflected in the arrangement of the different preserved treatises, as if their author had effectively "programmed" them from the perspective of systematic expression. Now, this is the one intention that we may hardly attribute to our philosopher. The project of expounding a genuine system is in fact, as I. During has written,(4) "typically Hellenistic but very un- Aristotelian." Such a claim will perhaps seem today the unavoidable result of Jaeger's explicit attempt to combat "scholastic idolatry,"(5) which regarded the work of the "master of those who know" as a genuine "summa," firmly articulated. But, independently of Jaeger, K. Praechter, for example, assures us that "a secure division of the philosophical disciplines according to a determinate principle does not occur in Aristotle"! (6) And it is obvious that Aristotle was not as concerned as his disciples were to propose a rigid system of sciences and to organize his writings systematically according to it. This indeterminateness is obviously quite irksome for the interpreter who asks about the occasion for the project of Aristotle to which the texts catalogued under the titles Ethics and Politics correspond, and who finds himself dealing with a Corpus established by people who indeed thought that they could abolish such indeterminateness by recourse to the hypothesis that the philosopher conceived his project as formally expounding a genuine system. Moreover -- and this is a prime consideration whose significance I shall examine at great length -- the originality of Aristotle's project risks being masked by the interpretation or the importance given since antiquity to certain interpretive categories (human philosophy, practical science, ethics, etc.) in accounting for the approach of a series of texts integrated in the Corpus, itself conceived as a philosophical summa.. (shrink)

Since the 1990s, numerous studies on the relationship between parents and their children have been reported on in the literature and implemented as a philosophy of care in most paediatric units. The purpose of this article is to understand the process of nurses' care for children in a paediatric setting by using Noddings's caring ethics theory. Noddings's theory is in part described from a theoretical perspective outlining the basic idea of the theory followed by a critique of her work. Important (...) conceptions in her theory are natural caring (reception, relation, engrossment, motivational displacement, reciprocity) and ethical caring (physical self, ethical self, and ethical ideal). As a nurse one holds a duty of care to patients and, in exercising this duty, the nurse must be able to develop a relationship with the patient including giving the patient total authenticity in a 'feeling with' the patient. Noddings's theory is analysed and described in three examples from the paediatrics. In the first example, the nurse cared for the patient in natural caring while in the second situation, the nurse strived for the ethical caring of the patient. In the third example, the nurse rejected the impulse to care and deliberately turned her back to ethics and abandoned her ethical caring. According to the Noddings's theory, caring for the patient enables the nurse to obtain ethical insights from the specific type of nursing care which forms an important contribution to an overall increase of an ethical consciousness in the nurse. (shrink)

Recent non-representationalists and metaphysical anti-realists (such as Goodman, Putnam, Rorty, etc.) have argued that the “Enlightenment notion” of a “God’s eye” point of view of the world is unsustainable. Deployment of conceptual schemes and/or intersubjective assent both constitute the world and fix the truth value of our statements about it. Many theists, on the contrary, hold an equally extreme realist position according to which God has a view of the world as it is “in itself" which provides (...) an exhaustive description of the world. Furthermore, on this view, God has access to this exhaustive picture because the world exists and is what it is in virtue of its being the object of divine creative intentions. For these theistic realists, truths about the world must ultimately be able to be cashed out in terms of an ontology consisting only of simple and composite substances—substances which exist in virtue of the ontological structure set out in the world via God's creative activity. As a result, on this view, the world is constituted in a way that is independent of the activity of created cognizers and their conceptualizing activity. The truth of our assertions must ultimately find its grounding in this independently constituted world. (shrink)

Causal conditional reasoning means reasoning from a conditional statement that refers to causal content. We argue that data from causal conditional reasoning tasks tell us something not only about how people interpret conditionals, but also about how they interpret causal relations. In particular, three basic principles of people's causal understanding emerge from previous studies: the modal principle, the exhaustive principle, and the equivalence principle. Restricted to the four classic conditional inferences—Modus Ponens, Modus Tollens, Denial of the Antecedent, and Affirmation of (...) the Consequent—causal conditional reasoning data are only partially able to support these principles. We present three experiments that use concrete and abstract causal scenarios and combine inference tasks with a new type of task in which people reformulate a given causal situation. The results provide evidence for the proposed representational principles. Implications for theories of the na ve understanding of causality are discussed. (shrink)

I know that those of you who know my mind know that I think I know that we can't know Gödel's mind through computation: ``The Impact : Failing to Know " If computationalism is false, observant philosophers willing to get their hands dirty should be able to find tell-tale signs today: automated theorem proving tomorrow (Eastern APA): robots as zombanimals But let's start with little 'ol me, and literary, not mathematical, creativity: Selmer (samples) vs. Brutus1 (samples again).

Neil Tennant and Joseph Salerno have recently attempted to rigorously formalize Michael Dummett's argument for logical revision. Surprisingly, both conclude that Dummett commits elementary logical errors, and hence fails to offer an argument that is even prima facie valid. After explicating the arguments Salerno and Tennant attribute to Dummett, I show how broader attention to Dummett's writings on the theory of meaning allows one to discern, and formalize, a valid argument for logical revision. Then, after correctly providing a rigorous statement (...) of the argument, I am able to delineate four possible anti-Dummettian responses. Following recent work by Stewart Shapiro and Crispin Wright, I conclude that progress in the anti-realist's dialectic requires greater clarity about the key modal notions used in Dummett's proof. (shrink)

In this article I argue that Rorty has three separatearguments for liberalism. The pragmatic-ethnocentric argument for liberalism,as a system which works for `us liberals'', is rejectedfor entailing relativism. The social contract argument results in an extreme formof individualism. This renders politics redundantbecause there is no need for the (liberal) state toprotect poetic individuals, who are capable ofdefending themselves. Even if the less able areharmed, the state could not prevent this, givenRorty''s arguments about discursive enrichment withina language game. Finally, the positivistic-conservative (...) argument legitimisesliberal politics by fiat, and makes normativediscussion about the status quo illegitimate. Herethe argument is that politics is a matter of reactivetechnical piecemeal problem-solving, to restore theharmony of the status quo. As politics deals with`facts'', normative `problematisations'' of thefunctional status quo are illegitimate (in the public/political sphere). So, either anything goes, andpolitics is redundant, or discussion of politics isdepoliticised and confined to the private sphere.Consequently, Rorty has no way to explore issues ofpower, or normative contestation. Therefore he isunable to address issues of social justice withinliberal democracies, such as feminist arguments aboutan ascribed gender status limiting equalityof opportunity. (shrink)

John Venn and Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) created systems of logic diagrams capable of representing classes (sets) and their relations in the form of propositions. Each is a proof method for syllogisms, and Carroll's is a sound and complete system. For a large number of sets, Carroll diagrams are easier to draw because of their self-similarity and algorithmic construction. This regularity makes it easier to locate and thereby to erase cells corresponding with classes destroyed by the premises of an (...) argument, a particularly difficult task in Venn diagrams for more than four sets. Carroll diagrams can represent existential propositions easily, so they are capable of clearly representing more complex problems than Venn's system can. Finally, both Carroll and Venn diagrams are maximal, in the sense that no additional logic information like inclusive disjunctions is able to be represented by them. Carroll's logic diagrams and logic trees constitute his visual logic system. (shrink)

After the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, conservatives in this country were almost unanimous in their conviction that it was time for Canada to throw in the towel as an independent nation. Historian Michael Bliss was first out of the blocks, arguing that “although we may still chant the camp songs of Canadian sovereignty, there is probably no turning back. We are heading toward some kind of greater North American union.”1 Others were quick to chime (...) in, barely able to conceal their satisfaction at the thought that Canada would finally get its comeuppance for having, on so many occasions, defied the regional hegemon.2 Yet less than two years later, with Canada-U.S. relations at an all-time low, not only did the prospects for regional integration seem dimmer than ever, but existing arrangements like NAFTA even began to show signs of strain in the face of renewed American unilateralism. (shrink)

Stage theorists invoke the idea of counterpart relations to make sense of how objects are able to persist despite their claim that an object is identical with a single instantaneous stage. According to stage theorists, an object persists if and only if it has a later counterpart that bears the appropriate counterpart relation of identity to it. Whilst objects can and do persist, stages cannot and do not. This seems to amount to a refutation of Leibniz’s law. Stage theorists think (...) that the nature of the counterpart relation invoked depends on how it is that the object is referred to. In this paper, I argue that the context sensitivity that they invoke here gives stage theorists a response to the Leibniz’s Law Problem. (shrink)

Philosophical anthropology is a broad-gauged study of man drawing on the findings of empirical sciences and the humanities. The paper is intended as a tribute to one of the pioneers in this field. The first part outlines central features of Plessner's conception, focusing on man's instinctual deficiency and his 'eccentric position' in the world; man from this perspective is an 'embodied' creature in the dual sense of experiencing the world through his bodily organs and of 'having' a body and being (...) able to reflect on his mundane situation. In social terms the perspective implies that man can find himself only through embodiment in institutional settings and role patterns - settings which, however, remain open to reinterpretation and revision. Subsequently Plessner's outlook is compared and contrasted with alternative views of the human condition. According to Gehlen, man's instinctual deficiency an openness need to be corrected through institutional stability and the standardization of role structures. Reviewing leading writings of the 'counter-culture', a final section explores contemporary anti-institutional trends which see man as a fugitive from social constraints and his search for self-fulfilment as antithetical to role patterns. (shrink)

A question that has been largely overlooked by philosophers of religion is how God would be able to effect a rational choice between two worlds of unsurpassable goodness. To answer this question, I draw a parallel with the paradigm cases of indifferent choice, including Buridan's ass, and argue that such cases can be satisfactorily resolved provided that the protagonists employ what Otto Neurath calls an ‘auxiliary motive’. I supply rational grounds for the employment of such a motive, and then argue (...) against the views of Leibniz and Nicholas Rescher to show that this solution would also work for God. (Published Online April 7 2006). (shrink)

The doctrine of abstract ideas contains Locke’s views on the nature of generality and how we think in general terms-the nature of universals, of general concepts, and how we classify. While Reid rejects abstract ideas, he accepts Locke’s insight that we have an ability to abstract. In this paper, I show how Reid preserves Locke’s insight, while providing a more versatile and forward-looking account of universals and concepts than Locke was able to give.Reid replaces abstract ideas with what he calls (...) “general conceptions.” But general conceptions are really three different things. First, they are universals---non-mental intrinsically general objects of acts of abstraction and conception. I show how Reid is able to make the claim that there are universals without being committed to holding that universals really exist. This claim, together with his type/token distinction, enables Reid to better explain how we have knowledge of attributes and use general terms meaningfully. The general features of our experience are not ideas and are not produced by the faculty of abstraction---but that faculty enables us to distinguish them.In the second sense, a general conception is an act of mind which takes universals as objects. Thinking in general tenns is not the manipulation of abstract ideas---it is engaging in acts of conceiving. Such acts are made possible by general conceptions in the third sense, namely, general concepts. While Reid does not distinguish this sense explicitly, I argue that he takes general concepts to be dispositions or abilities to distinguish general features of objects and to use the general terms of language as other users do. So rather than producing mental entities---abstract ideas---that act as standards to help us classify, abstraction makes possible the development of abilities to use general terms and classify objects. (shrink)

So far as philosophizing is concerned with another's thoughts, it is criticizing. No true philosopher, as such, merely accepts or merely reproduces, another's thoughts. The true philosopher starts anew — independently, solitarily. But his understanding of the work done by others can make his own philosophizing surer and quicker. He must see for himself. But sometimes he can more easily avoid the pitfalls that others have discovered and marked. Thus, in the social history of philosophizing there can be not only (...) mere repetition and mere novelty, but also progress. Even the less able philosopher may improve on the results of a more able predecessor. (shrink)

This article seeks a new way to conceptualise the 'classic' work in the history of science, and suggests that the use of publishing history might help avoid the antagonism which surrounded the literary canon wars. It concentrates on the widely acknowledged concept that the key to the classic work is the fact of its being read over a prolonged period of time. Continued reading implies that a work is able to remain relevant to later generations of readers, and, although some (...) of this depends upon the openness of the original text, much more depends on the actions of subsequent publishers and editors in repackaging the work for later audiences.This is illustrated through an examination of the long publishing history of William Paley's Natural theology (1802). Over the course of the century, Natural theology was read as a work of gentlemanly natural theology, as a work which could be used in a formal or informal education in science, and as a work of Christian apologetic. These transformations occurred because of the actions of the later publishers and editors who had to make the work suit the current interests of the literary marketplace. Comparisons are made to Constitution of man, Vestiges of the natural history of creation and Origin of species. (shrink)

This paper revisits Herbert Kliebard's figure of John Dewey in Kliebard's The Struggle for the American Curriculum . The paper argues that, while there are indeed reasons for the disembodied picture of Dewey that emerges from Struggle , such figuration ultimately has an effect that is overly reproductive: It ignores Dewey's efforts to live within and across institutional boundaries so as to reconstruct the practices and interests of the society in which he lived. Using the work of Bakhtin and Dewey, (...) I argue that it is only by such a Deweyan engagement that our own voices will ultimately be able to "ring" or "sound" in novel and potentially radical ways. (shrink)

Kortum summarizes his own argument as follows: (1) Without thought, one cannot intentionally create anything. (2) Without language, one cannot have higher-order thoughts. (3) Without others, one cannot have a language. (4) Before the physical universe existed, God was alone and without others. (5) Therefore (by steps 3 and 4), God could not have had a language. Thus (by steps 2, 3 and 4), God could not have had any higher-order thoughts. And so, ultimately (by steps 1, 2, 3, and (...) 4), God could not have intentionally created the physical universe. In this essay, I challenge Kortum’s conclusion. Although I have little doubt that other responses are readily available to those who believe in intelligent design, in what follows I argue that the traditional Christian doctrine of the Trinity (or at least one version of it) provides the resources to block his argument. His argument might work against other versions of monotheism; by it he might be able to show that the notion of a solitary and. (shrink)

In its reaction on the terroristic attacks of September 9th, 2001, the US-government threatened Afghanistan's Taleban with war in order to force them to extradite terrorist leader Bin Laden; the Taleban said that they would not surrender to this kind of blackmail – and so, they were removed from Kabul by means of military force. The rivalling versions of this story depend crucially on notions such as "terrorism" and "blackmail". Obviously you'll gain public support for your preferrend version of the (...) story if you are able to determine how those notions are to be used. So we had better reflect about their very meaning and about the moral implications of their proper usage. To gain a deeper understanding of our notions of "blackmail" and "terrorism" I shall propose an extreme thought experiment: Cassandra's plan. Cassandra foresees that sooner or later one of the nuclear powers might take the liberty to use atomic bombs. From fright she founds an NGO for blackmailing the statesmen who are in charge of nuclear weapons; she announces in public that all ministers and leaders of any government shall be hunted down, and executed, whose soldiers drop but one atomic bomb. (Cassandra's NGO keeps killer teams in constant training so as to increase the effect of the threat; this is being financiated from private donations). In my paper I shall raise two questions (without claiming to provide definite answers). First, would we have to say that Cassandra's NGO was a terrorist organisation? Second, would it be morally wrong if Cassandra blackmailed statesmen in the way indicated? (shrink)

In this article we shall attempt to show that despite the originality of Sartre's writings and the original philosophical views they contain, his reliance on Goethe's Faust in The Devil and the Good Lord proves that he was quite familiar with the components of the former and made intensive use of them in his own play. A comparative analysis of the two texts will show that Sartre exploited any ethical problem, human act, historical name and fact which he was able (...) to fit into his own philosophical and social positions and which could contribute to his dramatic art. (shrink)