"Anton Wilhelm Amo is the first modern African philosopher to study and teach in a European university and write in the European philosophical tradition. We give an extensive historical and philosophical introduction to Amo's life and work, and provide Latin texts, with facing translations and explanatory notes, of Amo's two philosophical dissertations, On the Impassivity of the Human Mind and the Philosophical Disputation containing a Distinct Idea of those Things that Pertain either to the Mind or to our Living and (...) Organic Body, both published in 1734. The Impassivity is an extended argument that the mind cannot be acted on, that sensation is a being-acted-on by the sensed object, and therefore that sensation does not belong to the mind, and must belong instead to the body The Distinct Idea works out the implications for the mind's actions, and tries to show how the mind understands, wills, and effects things through the body by 'intentions' which direct motions in our body intentionally toward external things. Both dissertations try to show how far each type of human act belongs to the mind, how far to the body, and expose and resolve earlier philosophers' self-contradictions on these questions"--. (shrink)

Scientific pluralism is an issue at the forefront of philosophy of science. This landmark work addresses the question, Can pluralism be advanced as a general, philosophical interpretation of science?

This essay introduces the volume Scientific Pluralism (Volume 19 of Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science). Varieties of recent pluralisms are surveyed, the difference between monism and pluralism vis a vis the sciences is clarified, and the authors’ notion of scientific pluralism is advanced.

We present three experiments using a novel problem in which participants update their estimates of propensities when faced with an uncertain new instance. We examine this using two different causal structures (common cause/common effect) and two different scenarios (agent‐based/mechanical). In the first, participants must update their estimate of the propensity for two warring nations to successfully explode missiles after being told of a new explosion on the border between both nations. In the second, participants must update their estimate of the (...) accuracy of two early warning tests for cancer when they produce conflicting reports about a patient. Across both experiments, we find two modal responses, representing around one‐third of participants each. In the first, “Categorical” response, participants update propensity estimates as if they were certain about the single event, for example, certain that one of the nations was responsible for the latest explosion, or certain about which of the two tests is correct. In the second, “No change” response, participants make no update to their propensity estimates at all. Across the three experiments, the theory is developed and tested that these two responses in fact have a single representation of the problem: because the actual outcome is binary (only one of the nations could have launched the missile; the patient either has cancer or not), these participants believe it is incorrect to update propensities in a graded manner. They therefore operate on a “certainty threshold” basis, whereby, if they are certain enough about the single event, they will make the “Categorical” response, and if they are below this threshold, they will make the “No change” response. Ramifications are considered for the “categorical” response in particular, as this approach produces a positive‐feedback dynamic similar to that seen in the belief polarization/confirmation bias literature. (shrink)

Instead of interpreting Berkeley in terms of the standard way of relating him to Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke, I suggest we consider relating him to other figures (e.g., Stoics, Ramists, Suarez, Spinoza, Leibniz). This allows us to integrate his published and unpublished work, and reveals how his philosophic and non-philosophic work are much more aligned with one another. I indicate how his (1) theory of powers, (2) "bundle theory" of the mind, and (3) doctrine of "innate ideas" are understood in (...) a way significantly different from that found in the standard account. (shrink)

Considerable controversy has recently arisen regarding the patenting of medical and surgical processes in the United States. One such patent, viz. for a "chevron" incision used in ophthalmologic surgery, has especially occasioned heated response including a major, condemnatory ethics policy statement from the American Medical Association as well as federal legislation denying patent protection for most uses of a patented medical or surgical procedure. This article identifies and discusses the major legal, ethical and public policy considerations offered by proponents and (...) opponents of such patents. The existing literature divides up into those who favor such patents essentially without qualification, and those who condemn and wish to outlaw them. We advance a compromise position where administrative and legislative action is called for to provide more specific guidelines regarding the patentability of such processes by the Patent and Trademark Office. Our position, in sum, will be that too much is at stake in this complicated area for either the blanket prohibition, or wholesale, uncritical acceptance, of the patenting of medical and surgical processes or techniques. (shrink)

The important question is how people process probabilistic information, not whether they process it in accordance with a normative model that we never should have expected them to be capable of following. Experience is not the cure, as widely thought, to problems with utilizing base rate information.

Twenty papers from a conference in Villanova, Pennsylvania discuss the politics, psychoanalysis and feminist theory, aesthetics, and ethics of phenomenology and existentialism in North America, from its beginnings in the 1940s to its ...

Berkeley's doctrines about mind, the language of nature, substance, minima sensibilia, notions, abstract ideas, inference, and freedom appropriate principles developed by the 16th-century logician Peter Ramus and his 17th-century followers (e.g., Alexander Richardson, William Ames, John Milton). Even though Berkeley expresses himself in Cartesian or Lockean terms, he relies on a Ramist way of thinking that is not a form of mere rhetoric or pedagogy but a logic and ontology grounded in Stoicism. This article summarizes the central features of Ramism, (...) indicates how Berkeley adapts Ramist concepts and strategies, and chronicles Ramism's pervasiveness in Berkeley's education, especially at Trinity College Dublin. (shrink)

Berkeley argues that claims about divine predication (e.g., God is wise or exists) should be understood literally rather than analogically, because like all spirits (i.e., causes), God is intelligible only in terms of the extent of his effects. By focusing on the harmony and order of nature, Berkeley thus unites his view of God with his doctrines of mind, force, grace, and power, and avoids challenges to religious claims that are raised by appeals to analogy. The essay concludes by showing (...) how a letter, supposedly by Berkeley, to Peter Browne ("discovered" in 1969 by Berman and Pittion) is, in fact, by John Jackson (1686-1763), controversial theologian and friend of Samuel Clarke. (shrink)

Berkeley's immaterialism has more in common with views developed by Henry More, the mathematician Joseph Raphson, John Toland, and Jonathan Edwards than those of thinkers with whom he is commonly associated (e.g., Malebranche and Locke). The key for recognizing their similarities lies in appreciating how they understand St. Paul's remark that in God "we live and move and have our being" as an invitation to think to God as the space of discourse in which minds and ideas are identified. This (...) way of speaking about God, adapted by Karl Barth and Paul Tillich, opens up new ways to think about the relation between God and finite minds. (shrink)

Since nothing about God is passive, and the perception of pain is inherently passive, then it seems that God does not know what it is like to experience pain. Nor would he be able to cause us to experience pain, for his experience would then be a sensation (which would require God to have senses, which he does not). My suggestion is that Berkeley avoids this situation by describing how God knows about pain “among other things” (i.e. as something whose (...) identity is intelligible in terms of the integrated network of things). This avoids having to assume that God has ideas (including pain) apart from his willing that there be perceivers who have specific ideas that are in harmony or not in harmony with one another. (shrink)

This collection examines the relationship between phenomenology, interpretation, and community, considering the issues from several viewpoints including German idealism, the discourses of the Frankfurt School, and post-structuralist thought.

Previous long-term memory research found that angry faces were more poorly recognised when encoded with averted vs. direct gaze, while memory for happy faces was unaffected by gaze. Contrasti...

Scientific pluralism is an issue at the forefront of philosophy of science. This landmark work addresses the question, Can pluralism be advanced as a general, philosophical interpretation of science? Scientific Pluralism demonstrates the viability of the view that some phenomena require multiple accounts. Pluralists observe that scientists present various—sometimes even incompatible—models of the world and argue that this is due to the complexity of the world and representational limitations. Including investigations in biology, physics, economics, psychology, and mathematics, this work provides (...) an empirical basis for a consistent stance on pluralism and makes the case that it should change the ways that philosophers, historians, and social scientists analyze scientific knowledge. Contributors: John Bell, U of Western Ontario; Michael Dickson, U of South Carolina; Carla Fehr, Iowa State U; Ronald N. Giere, U of Minnesota; Geoffrey Hellman, U of Minnesota; Alan Richardson, U of British Columbia; C. Wade Savage, U of Minnesota; Esther-Mirjam Sent, U of Nijmegen. Stephen H. Kellert is professor of philosophy at Hamline University and a fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. Helen E. Longino is professor of philosophy at Stanford University. C. Kenneth Waters is associate professor of philosophy and director of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. (shrink)

Jonathan Edwards' marginalization in modern philosophy stems from his refusal to endorse the predicational logic and substantialist ontology of the rationalist-empiricist debate. Instead, he appeals to a communicative, semiotic logic of propositions grounded in Stoic thought and thematized by Peter Ramus and his Puritan followers. That alternative logic displays an "ontology of supposition" that guarantees God's existence, justifies typological, magical, and even astrological inferences, undermines modernist dichotomies (e.g., between mind and matter), and invalidates efforts to speak of Edwards' thought in (...) terms of idealism or immaterialism. (shrink)

In several essays I have argued that Berkeley maintains the same basic notion of spiritual substance throughout his life. Because that notion is not the traditional (Aristotelian, Cartesian, or Lockean) doctrine of substance, critics (e.g., John Roberts, Tom Stoneham, Talia Mae Bettcher, Margaret Atherton, Walter Ott, Marc Hight) claim that on my reading Berkeley either endorses a Humean notion of substance or has no recognizable theory of substance at all. In this essay I point out how my interpretation does not (...) assume that Berkeley adopts a bundle theory of mind, but instead redefines what it means for a simple substance to be the principle by which ideas are perceived. (shrink)

Commentators have not said much regarding Berkeley and Stoicism. Even when they do, they generally limit their remarks to Berkeley’s Siris (1744) where he invokes characteristically Stoic themes about the World Soul, “seminal reasons,” and the animating fire of the universe. The Stoic heritage of other Berkeleian doctrines (e.g., about mind or the semiotic character of nature) is seldom recognized, and when it is, little is made of it in explaining his other doctrines (e.g., immaterialism). None of this is surprising, (...) considering how Stoics are considered arch-materialists and determinists. My aim is to suggest that our understanding of Berkeley’s philosophy is improved significantly by acknowledging its underlying Stoic character. I argue that Berkeley proposes not only a semantic ontology based on assumptions of Stoic logic but also a doctrine in which perceptions or ideas are intelligible precisely because they are always embedded in the propositions of a discourse or language. (shrink)

(Original French text followed by English version.) For Berkeley, mathematical and scientific issues and concepts are always conditioned by epistemological, metaphysical, and theological considerations. For Berkeley to think of any thing--whether it be a geometrical figure or a visible or tangible object--is to think of it in terms of how its limits make it intelligible. Especially in De Motu, he highlights the ways in which limit concepts (e.g., cause) mark the boundaries of science, metaphysics, theology, and morality.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:There's Nothing Wrong with Raw Perception:A Response to Chakrabarti's Attack on Nyāya's Nirvikalpaka PratyakṣaStephen H. PhillipsIn the lead article of the fiftieth anniversary issue of Philosophy East and West (January 2000), Arindam Chakrabarti elaborates seven reasons why Nyāya should jettison "indeterminate perception" and view all perception as determinate, that is to say, as having an entity (a) as qualified by a qualifier (F) as object (Fa). In his notes, (...) Chakrabarti invites a reply "so that," as he says, "I may know why immaculate perception is needed by Nyāya after all." The following is a response that shows not so much why indeterminate perception is needed by Nyāya but why it is identified as a causal factor necessary to the arising of some (not all) determinate perception defined as "perception of an entity as qualified." Here I follow Gaṅgeśa Upādhyāya, the fourteenth-century founder (with the help of a few less well known predecessors and contemporaries) of "New Logic," Navya Nyāya. Gaṅgeśa devotes an entire section (about one eighteenth) of the perception chapter of his monumental Tattvacintāmaṇi (Jewel of Reflection about Epistemology) to nirvikalpaka pratyaksṣa,1 and he is a chief target of Chakrabarti's chastisement.2Now, first of all, I want to follow Gaṅgeśa's ground rules. The Naiyāyika is not concerned with strategies about how to look good in debates (with Buddhists or anyone else). His attitude is truth-seeking, not eristic, and thus no reply will be given to Chakrabarti's agonizing about how best to show ourselves in controversies with (in particular, Buddhist) adversaries (and Wilfrid Sellars). Gaṅgeśa's reflections are vāda—and the section is rightly titled nirvikalpaka-vāda, vāda being "inquiries among friends"—directed to uncovering real causal factors, not to winning a debate or countering sophisms. Deception, or counter-deception, is sometimes appropriate—for instance, to protect a student or other judge from fallacies advanced by people of bad character. But not here. So I will lay out Gaṅgeśa's argument for identifying nirvikalpaka pratyaksṣa, and then run through Chakrabarti's list of reasons for rejecting it with an eye to the objection's salience to Gaṅgeśa's project. In other words, Chakrabarti's objections will be taken up with an eye to the truth as it appears to a Naiyāyika, not with an eye to how our team should best present itself to outsiders. I have little to say about Chakrabarti's complaints about appearances—in fact, I find them delightful. Don't let him fool you. There's no greater Naiyāyika enthusiast than Chakrabarti himself, and he knows how to distill a controversy to show the wisdom [End Page 104] of Nyāya in contrast to revealing a deficiency, as he appears to be doing here. He does this to make us think broadly about Nyāya in a contemporary context. And at the end I join him in making some very general comments about Nyāya's realism. First, Gaṅgeśa's argument and a rebuttal of Chakrabarti's seven reasons from Gaṅgeśa's point of view.There is no direct, apperceptive evidence for nirvikalpaka pratyaksṣa; rather, it is posited by force of the following inference as the first step of a two-step argument. "The perceptual cognition, 'A cow' (for example), is generated by a cognition of the qualifier, since it is a cognition of an entity as qualified (by that qualifier appearing), like an inference." The second step takes a person's first perception of an individual (Bessie, let us say) as a cow (i.e., as having some such property) as the perceptual cognition figuring as the inference's subject (or pakṣa) such that the cognizer's memory not informed by previous cow experience could not possibly provide the qualifier, cowhood. The qualifier has to be available, and the best candidate seems to be its perception in the raw, a qualifier (cowhood), that is to say, not (as some are wont to misinterpret the point... (shrink)

We report on the deliberations of an interdisciplinary group of experts in science, law, and philosophy who convened to discuss novel ethical and policy challenges in stem cell research. In this report we discuss the ethical and policy implications of safety concerns in the transition from basic laboratory research to clinical applications of cell-based therapies derived from stem cells. Although many features of this transition from lab to clinic are common to other therapies, three aspects of stem cell biology pose (...) unique challenges. First, tension regarding the use of human embryos may complicate the scientific development of safe and effective cell lines. Second, because human stem cells were not developed in the laboratory until 1998, few safety questions relating to human applications have been addressed in animal research. Third, preclinical and clinical testing of biologic agents, particularly those as inherently complex as mammalian cells, present formidable challenges, such as the need to develop suitable standardized assays and the difficulty of selecting appropriate patient populations for early phase trials. We recommend that scientists, policy makers, and the public discuss these issues responsibly, and further, that a national advisory committee to oversee human trials of cell therapies be established. **NB we did not reccommend a NAC, we think it might be appropriate**. (shrink)

Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James Phelan, (...) and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)

This paper investigates the role of literature and, in particular, Proust in Merleau-Ponty’s late works’ rehabilitation of the ontology of the sensible. First, I trace Proust’s role in Phenomenology of Percpetion, contrasting it with the somewhat more paradigmatic status as a model it plays in the late works. Second, I compare this with the role of the novel as partial myth in Schelling, who also played an essential role in Merleau-Ponty’s refiguration of the sensible. I briefly trace his examination of (...) the historical or “sociological meaning” of literature through works of the fifties, beginning with his Collège de France candidacy proposal and continuing through his examination of the rationality of modern disenchantment or dépoétization in the Adventures of the Dialectic. Finally, discussing the late analysis of Proust against this backdrop, I conclude with considerations concerning the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s overall analysis of Proust both in his thought and contemporary literary criticism and philosophy more generally. Cet article examine le rôle de la littérature et, en particulier, celui de Proust, dans la réhabilitation ontologique du sensible qui se trame dans les derniers écrits de Merleau-Ponty. En premier lieu, je retracerai le rôle de Proust dans la Phénoménologie de la perception, en l’opposant au statut quelque peu plus paradigmatique, comme s’il s’agissait d’un modèle, qu’il joue dans le dernier Merleau-Ponty. Deuxièmement, je comparerai cela avec la fonction du roman conçu comme un mythe incomplet chez Schelling, qui a aussi joué un rôle essentiel dans la reconfiguration du sensible chez Merleau-Ponty. Je décrirai brièvement son analyse de la « signification sociologique » ou historique de la littérature à travers des oeuvres des années ’50, en me penchant, d’abord, sur sa candidature au Collège de France, et, ensuite, sur son étude de la rationalité du désenchantement moderne ou dépoétisation dans les Aventures de la dialectique. Finalement, en examinant les dernières analyses de Proust à partir de ces prémisses, je conclurai avec des considérations sur l’intérêt de l’ensemble de l’analyse que Merleau-Ponty fait de Proust à la fois pour sa pensée, pour la critique littéraire contemporaine et, plus généralement, pour la philosophie.Il presente articolo indaga il ruolo della letteratura e, in particolare, di Proust nella riabilitazione ontologica del sensibile negli ultimi scritti di Merleau-Ponty. In primo luogo, si delinea il ruolo di Proust nella Fenomenologia della percezione, contrapponendolo, in qualche modo, allo statuto paradigmatico di modello che l’autore riveste nei lavori dell’ultimo Merleau-Ponty. In secondo luogo, si confronta questo con il ruolo del romanzo come mito parziale in Schelling, che pure ha giocato una parte essenziale nella rifigurazione del sensibile in Merleau-Ponty. Si articolerà brevemente il significato storico o sociologico della letteratura attraverso gli scritti degli anni Cinquanta, a partire dalla proposta di candidatura di Merleau-Ponty al Collège de France e proseguendo mediante il suo esame della razionalità del disincanto moderno o depoetizzazione ne Le avventure della dialettica. Infine, esaminando l’ultima lettura di Proust a partire da queste analisi, propongo una considerazione riguardo alla rilevanza complessiva dell’autore della Recherche nella riflessione di Merleau-Ponty e, più in generale, nella critica letteraria e nella filosofia contemporanee. (shrink)