ABSTRACT The essay attacks the convention that a person should at any period in their life have not more than one sexual partner. The issues of the care of children and the desirability of a shared household are here bracketed out. The main argument proceeds by seeing conflicts between the requirement of exclusivity in sexual life, authenticity, and the principle that sexual communion should be an expression of love. A general social inertia, defined by the possessive introversion of couples, means (...) that individuals will inevitably sometimes have to choose between sexual solitude and cultivating a more or less artificial relationship. The ideal of a single, central relationship is criticised on the grounds that (i) in some respects it is not desirable and (ii) it is in any case unrealistic to suppose that we can choose to create such an ideal relationship at will. (shrink)

W. V. Quine was the most important naturalistic philosopher of the twentieth century and a major impetus for the recent resurgence of the view that empirical science is our best avenue to knowledge. His views, however, have not been well understood. Critics charge that Quine’s naturalized epistemology is circular and that it cannot be normative. Yet, such criticisms stem from a cluster of fundamental traditional assumptions regarding language, theory, and the knowing subject – the very presuppositions that Quine is at (...) pains to reject. Through investigation of Quine’s views regarding language, knowledge, and reality, the author offers a new interpretation of Quine’s naturalism. The naturalism/antinaturalism debate can be advanced only by acknowledging and critiquing the substantial theoretical commitments implicit in the traditional view. Gregory argues that the responses to the circularity and non-normativity objections do just that. His analysis further reveals that Quine’s departure from the tradition penetrates the conception of the knowing subject, and he thus offers a new and engaging defence of Quine’s naturalism. (shrink)

This book investigates the anti-Semitic foundations of Nazi curricula for elementary schools, with a focus on the subjects of biology, history, and literature. Gregory Paul Wegner argues that any study of Nazi society and its values must probe the education provided by the regime. Schools, according to Wegner, play a major role in advancing ideological justifications for mass murder, and in legitimizing a culture of ethnic and racial hatred. Using a variety of primary sources, Wegner provides a vivid (...) account of the development of Nazi education. (shrink)

The kind of love under consideration here is that between equal persons as it typically occurs within the context of a friendship. It is assumed that love opens the way to a sense of meaning or purpose for the individual, the difficulty addressed being that of how to pursue or recognise love. Is it primarily a form of action or of feeling? Can love be said to consist of giving? How does love relate to freedom and dependence? The consideration of (...) these questions leads to the argument that love necessarily involves the creation of needs and therefore of vulnerability. The essay closes with a conception of how the conflict between love as action and love as feeling may be resolved. (shrink)

In the fourth Immanuel Kant Lecture, Quine summons the specter of Kant’s Ding an sich, the thing in itself. Clearly antithetical to his naturalism, Quine quickly dismisses it as having feet of clay. Despite this short shrift, it is worth examining what he did say about the Ding an sich—in the Kant Lectures, in “Things and Their Place in Theories”, and in “Structure and Nature”. I offer a critical reading of these passages in the context of Quine’s proxy functions, ontological (...) relativity, and structure. I argue that Quine uses the Ding an sich as a foil for his anti-metaphysical, deflationary structuralism—a view that grounds objectivity in true statements, without any transcendental notion of objects, without the Ding an sich. (shrink)

Recent Carnap scholarship suggests that the received view of the Carnap-Quine analyticity debate is importantly mistaken. It has been suggested that Carnap’s analyticity distinction is immune from Quine’s criticisms. This is either because Quine did not understand Carnap’s use of analytic-ity, or because Quine did not appreciate that, rather than dispelling dog-mas, he was merely offering an alternate framework for philosophy. It has also been suggested that ultimately nothing of substance turns on this dis-pute. I am sympathetic to these reassessments (...) and their rejection of the re-ceived view, but argue that they fail to pay proper attention to Carnap’s metaphysical deflationism. For it is there that Quine’s arguments ultimately make contact with Carnap, undermining his metaphysical deflationism. Moreover, the viability of deflationism is directly related to the viability of Carnap’s view of philosophy as methodologically distinct from science. Hence, Quine’s criticisms make contact with the deepest aspects of Carnap’s views. (shrink)

Recently O'Grady argued that Quine's "Two Dogmas" misses its mark when Carnap's use of the analyticity distinction is understood in the light of his deflationism. While in substantial agreement with the stress on Carnap's deflationism, I argue that O'Grady is not sufficiently sensitive to the difference between using the analyticity distinction to support deflationism, and taking a deflationary attitude towards the distinction itself; the latter being much more controversial. Being sensitive to this difference, and viewing Quine as having reason to (...) insist on a nonarbitrary analyticity distinction, we see that "Two Dogmas" makes direct contact with Carnap's deflationism. We must look beyond "Two Dogmas" to Quine's other critiques of analyticity to understand why the arbitrariness of the distinction threatens to undermine or overextend Carnap's deflationism. (edited). (shrink)

_Formal Logic_ is an undergraduate text suitable for introductory, intermediate, and advanced courses in symbolic logic. The book’s nine chapters offer thorough coverage of truth-functional and quantificational logic, as well as the basics of more advanced topics such as set theory and modal logic. Complex ideas are explained in plain language that doesn’t presuppose any background in logic or mathematics, and derivation strategies are illustrated with numerous examples. Translations, tables, trees, natural deduction, and simple meta-proofs are taught through over 400 (...) exercises. A companion website offers supplemental practice software and tutorial videos. (shrink)

PHIL 102 - Problems of Philosophy (Fall) This course has two main goals: first, to cultivate students’ critical attitude towards reading, writing, and daily life; second, to engage students with primary philosophical texts. Plato, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Peirce, Russell, Paley, Perry, Sagan, Ayer, Chisholm, and Dennett are among the authors I have used. Each week students are responsible for readings and reading questions to be answered out of class or in small in-class groups. These assignments are designed to develop critical (...) writing and thinking skills, focus students’ reading, and prompt students to actively engage the text prior to lecture and open discussion. Essay exams or short papers are used for assessment. Sample syllabus. (shrink)

The natural epistemology of W. V. Quine has not been well understood. Critics argue that Quine's scientific approach to epistemology is circular and fails to be normative, yet these criticisms tend to be based on the very presuppositions concerning language, theory, and epistemology that Quine is at pains to reject or alter. ;Quine's views on the meaningfulness of language use imply a breakdown in the dichotomy between language as a theoretically neutral instrument and theory as the commitment to some subset (...) of the sentences allowed by a language. This breakdown, and the view of language which drives it, result in Quine's doctrine that speaking a language involves substantial theoretical commitments, and that inquiry must begin from within some ongoing theory of the world. That is, our epistemic practices, including epistemology itself, must be globally circular. The traditionally fundamental norm of linear propositional support, which drives the circularity objection, is thus seen as based in a misconception of language and theory. This not only explains Quine's lack of concern with the circularity of his view, but also illuminates the fundamental motivation for his general naturalism. ;Natural epistemology cannot be normative in the traditional sense of providing an independent ground for science. However, having accepted the "terminal parameter" of prediction as the test of theory, normativity becomes a matter of describing which procedures best promote predictively successful theory. Thus, epistemic norms emerge from science as hypotheses concerning the effectiveness of various methods in promoting predictively successful theory. Not only can natural epistemology prescribe and proscribe various epistemic practices, it offers the promise of an explanatory understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of those practices. Based on this understanding, natural epistemology further involves the improvement of current practices and the development of new ones. Crucial to this reconception of epistemology is the reconception of the knower as an adaptive organism employing the language/theory complex as an adaptive tool for interacting with the environment. ;The naturalism/anti-naturalism debate is advanced by acknowledging the substantial theoretical commitments implicit in the traditional view, and by examining Quine's reconception of language, theory, and the human knowing subject. (shrink)

Recently O’Grady argued that Quine’s “Two Dogmas” misses its mark when Carnap’s use of the analyticity distinction is understood in the light of his deflationism. While in substantial agreement with the stress on Carnap’s deflationism, I argue that O’Grady is not sufficiently sensitive to the difference between using the analyticity distinction to support deflationism, and taking a deflationary attitude towards the distinction itself; the latter being much more controversial. Being sensitive to this difference, and viewing Quine as having reason to (...) insist on a non-arbitrary analyticity distinction, we see that “Two Dogmas” makes direct contact with Carnap’s deflationism. We must look beyond “Two Dogmas” to Quine’s other critiques of analyticity to understand why the arbitrariness of the distinction threatens to undermine or overextend Carnap’s deflationism, collapsing it into a view much like Quine’s. Quine is then seen to achieve many of Carnap’s ends, with the important exception of deflationism. (shrink)

Over 200 health journals call on the United Nations, political leaders, and health professionals to recognize that climate change and biodiversity loss are one indivisible crisis and must be tackle...

The full extent of the anguish and death suffered by immature humans is scientifically and statistically documented for the first time. Probably hundreds of billions of human conceptions and at least fifty billion children have died, the great majority from nonhuman causes, before reaching the age of mature consent. Adults who have heard the word of Christ number in the lower billions. If immature deceased humans are allowed into heaven, then the latter is inhabited predominantly by automatons. Because the Holocaust (...) of the Children bars an enormous portion of humans from making a decision about their eternal fate while maximizing the suffering of children, the classic Christian “free will” and “best of all possible worlds” hypotheses are falsified. (shrink)

Psychologists and neuroscientists often struggle to integrate findings in their respective domains, a problem due partly to implicitly and explicitly held philosophical positions on issues of reduction and autonomy across these domains. The present article reviews how reduction and autonomy have been used in philosophical arguments regarding how macro-scale findings relate to micro-scale findings across various scientific disciplines. The present article demonstrates how macro findings are indispensable to explanations of phenomena of interest by (a) providing information regarding higher levels of (...) organization in mechanisms, (b) including information not contained within certain micro explanations that (c) provides more general and stable causal explanations relative to micro explanations in certain situations. The purpose of presenting these analyses and recommendations is to disabuse psychologists and neuroscientists of pervasive assumptions that psychology is reducible to biology and that lower level phenomena (molecular) should be prioritized as somehow more explanatory than higher level phenomena (behavioral). The article concludes with 3 hypothetical scenarios from clinical psychology and psychiatry illustrating this critique and providing a pragmatic approach to clarify the relative roles, and importance, of biological and psychological data in service of general and stable explanations that are tailored to the kind of intervention desired. (shrink)

The full extent of the anguish and death suffered by immature humans is scientifically and statistically documented for the first time. Probably hundreds of billions of human conceptions and at least fifty billion children have died, the great majority from nonhuman causes, before reaching the age of mature consent. Adults who have heard the word of Christ number in the lower billions. If immature deceased humans are allowed into heaven, then the latter is inhabited predominantly by automatons. Because the Holocaust (...) of the Children bars an enormous portion of humans from making a decision about their eternal fate while maximizing the suffering of children, the classic Christian “free will” and “best of all possible worlds” hypotheses are falsified. (shrink)

Intellectual humility, which entails openness to other views and a willingness to listen and engage with them, is crucial for facilitating civil dialogue and progress in debate between opposing sides. In the present research, we tested whether intellectual humility can be reliably detected in discourse and experimentally increased by a prior self-affirmation task. Three-hundred and three participants took part in 116 audio and video-recorded group discussions. Blind to condition, linguists coded participants’ discourse to create an intellectual humility score. As expected, (...) the self-affirmation task increased the coded intellectual humility, as well as participants’ self-rated prosocial affect (e.g., empathy). Unexpectedly, the effect on prosocial affect did not mediate the link between experimental condition and intellectual humility in debate. Self-reported intellectual humility and other personality variables were uncorrelated with expert-coded intellectual humility. Implications of these findings for understanding the social psychological mechanisms underpinning intellectual humility are considered. (shrink)

Over 200 health journals call on the United Nations, political leaders, and health professionals to recognise that climate change and biodiversity loss are one indivisible crisis and must be tackle...

This paper applies a new theory of explanatory coherence to the early history of the idea of continental drift. The new theory consists of seven principles that establish coherence and incoherence relations among propositions. It has been implemented in a connectionist computer program called ECHO. Analysis of the arguments of Alfred Wegener, the first major proponent of continental drift, provided input to ECHO which evaluated the explanatory coherence of his hypotheses. ECHO has also been used to analyze the coherence of (...) the views of Wegener 's critics. The paper concludes by contrasting our explanatory coherence account of Wegener and his opposition with a decision-theoretic account recently offered by Ron Giere. (shrink)

In the nineteen-sixties, plate tectonics became the accepted theoretical framework in the earth sciences. This framework revived the idea of continental drift that had been first proposed in 1912 by Alfred Wegener (1966). This paper offers an analysis of the arguments of Wegener and his opponents. We shall show that from Wegener’s perspective his hypotheses possessed a high degree of explanatory coherence, while from the opponents’ perspective his theory was incoherent with much that was generally known.Our analysis uses a new (...) theory of explanatory coherence that has already been applied to several important cases in the history of science: Lavoisier’s argument for his oxygen theory against the phlogiston theory, Darwin’s argument for the theory of evolution by natural selection, and current disputes about why dinosaurs became extinct (Thagard 1988b). This theory is implemented in a connectionist computer program called ECHO that takes statements of explanatory relations as input and creates a network of units, crudely analogous to neurons, with excitatory and inhibitory links among them. (shrink)

The hypothesis that high levels of religiosity are partly caused by high disease loads is in accord with studies showing that societal dysfunction promotes mass supernaturalism. However, some cultures suffering from high rates of disease and other socioeconomic dysfunction exhibit low levels of popular religiosity. At this point, it appears that religion is hard pressed to thrive in healthy societies, but poor conditions do not always make religion popular, either.

Historically, there has been widespread acceptance of the claim that religious belief – and, in particular, theistic belief – is essential to human flourishing, both for human individuals and for human societies. With the relatively recent rise of prosperous secular democracies, it is possible to put this claim to empirical test. When we do, we find no support for the claim that theistic belief is essential to human flourishing, and significant support for the claim that theistic belief impacts negatively on (...) human flourishing. (shrink)

Dilation occurs when an interval probability estimate of some event E is properly included in the interval probability estimate of E conditional on every event F of some partition, which means that one’s initial estimate of E becomes less precise no matter how an experiment turns out. Critics maintain that dilation is a pathological feature of imprecise probability models, while others have thought the problem is with Bayesian updating. However, two points are often overlooked: (1) knowing that E is stochastically (...) independent of F (for all F in a partition of the underlying state space) is sufficient to avoid dilation, but (2) stochastic independence is not the only independence concept at play within imprecise probability models. In this paper we give a simple characterization of dilation formulated in terms of deviation from stochastic independence, propose a measure of dilation, and distinguish between proper and improper dilation. Through this we revisit the most sensational examples of dilation, which play up independence between dilator and dilatee, and find the sensationalism undermined by either fallacious reasoning with imprecise probabilities or improperly constructed imprecise probability models. (shrink)

The use of contingent valuation methods for estimating the economic value of environmental improvements and damages has increased significantly. However, doubts exist regarding the validity of the usual willingness to pay CV methods. In this article, we examine the CV approach in light of recent findings from behavioral decision research regarding the constructive nature of human preferences. We argue that a principal source of problems with conventional CV methods is that they impose unrealistic cognitive demands upon respondents. We propose a (...) new CV approach, based on the value-structuring capabilities of multiattribute utility theory and decision analysis, and discuss its advantages and disadvantages. (shrink)

Through emotionally charged portraits and richly layered interior views, the photographs of Chicago-based artist Paul D Amato provide a genuine and complex perspective on life in some of the most challenging and troubled neighborhoods in the nation. This publication is supported in part by grants from the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation and the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.".

Konfuzius, Chinas grosser Weiser, ist 1974 wieder einmal von seinen modernen Landsleuten unter Beschuss geraten. In diesem Buch wird das radikal-kritische Bild, das man damals von Konfuzius aufstellte, anhand der Originalquellen uberpruft. Durch diese Methode der Gegenuberstellung versucht der Autor zu zeigen, dass die wahren Anliegen des Meisters und seiner Schule klarer und aktueller zutage treten. Insbesonde sollte deutlich werden, dass Konfuzius' tiefe Einsichten in das menschliche Wesen von einem unerschutterlichen, religios zu nennenden Glauben getragen wurden. In der Post-Mao-Ara sind (...) die Konfuziuskritiker bereits langst wieder selber kritisiert und der Meister teilweise positiver bewertet worden. Der Anhang gibt davon ein gutes Beispiel. Fur den nicht eingeweihten westlichen Leser aber ist die innerchinesische Konfuziusdiskussion nicht ohne weiteres verstandlich. Daher bemuht sich der Autor, die wichtigsten Daten uber Leben und Lehre des Meisters systematisch zu rekonstruieren. Manche Einzelheiten werden dabei neu uberpruft, und die vielen Zitate sind alle neu ubersetzt worden. Somit durfte diese Studie fur Fachleute wie auch fur Laien von Interesse sein. Konfuzius, Chinas immer wieder entthronter Heiliger, der ubrigens nie einen Thron innehatte, wird in seinem Lande noch lange Zeit aktuell bleiben. Daruberhinaus bleibt er eine der grossen Gestalten der Weltgeschichte, die der Menschheit in der Suche nach der wahren Menschlichkeit leuchtend vorangegangen sind.". (shrink)

This rich and varied collection of essays addresses some of the most fundamental human questions through the lenses of philosophy, literature, religion, politics, and theology. Peter Augustine Lawler and Dale McConkey have fashioned an interdisciplinary consideration of such perennial and enduring issues as the relationship between nature and history, nature and grace, reason and revelation, classical philosophy and Christianity, modernity and postmodernity, repentance and self-limitation, and philosophy and politics.

This monograph examines the domain of classical political economy using the methodologies developed in recent years both by the new discipline of econo-physics and by computing science. This approach is used to re-examine the classical subdivisions of political economy: production, exchange, distribution and finance. The book begins by examining the most basic feature of economic life – production – and asks what it is about physical laws that allows production to take place. How is it that human labour is able (...) to modify the world? It looks at the role that information has played in the process of mass production and the extent to which human labour still remains a key resource. The Ricardian labour theory of value is re-examined in the light of econophysics, presenting agent based models in which the Ricardian theory of value appears as an emergent property. The authors present models giving rise to the class distribution of income, and the long term evolution of profit rates in market economies. Money is analysed using tools drawn both from computer science and the recent Chartalist school of financial theory. Covering a combination of techniques drawn from three areas, classical political economy, theoretical computer science and econophysics, to produce models that deepen our understanding of economic reality, this new title will be of interest to higher level doctoral and research students, as well as scientists working in the field of econophysics. (shrink)

This monograph examines the domain of classical political economy using the methodologies developed in recent years both by the new discipline of econo-physics and by computing science. This approach is used to re-examine the classical subdivisions of political economy: production, exchange, distribution and finance. The book begins by examining the most basic feature of economic life – production – and asks what it is about physical laws that allows production to take place. How is it that human labour is able (...) to modify the world? It looks at the role that information has played in the process of mass production and the extent to which human labour still remains a key resource. The Ricardian labour theory of value is re-examined in the light of econophysics, presenting agent based models in which the Ricardian theory of value appears as an emergent property. The authors present models giving rise to the class distribution of income, and the long term evolution of profit rates in market economies. Money is analysed using tools drawn both from computer science and the recent Chartalist school of financial theory. Covering a combination of techniques drawn from three areas, classical political economy, theoretical computer science and econophysics, to produce models that deepen our understanding of economic reality, this new title will be of interest to higher level doctoral and research students, as well as scientists working in the field of econophysics. (shrink)

Both dilation and non-conglomerability have been alleged to conflict with a fundamental principle of Bayesian methodology that we call \textit{Good's Principle}: one should always delay making a terminal decision between alternative courses of action if given the opportunity to first learn, at zero cost, the outcome of an experiment relevant to the decision. In particular, both dilation and non-conglomerability have been alleged to permit or even mandate choosing to make a terminal decision in deliberate ignorance of relevant, cost-free information. Although (...) dilation and non-conglomerability share some similarities, some authors maintain that there are important differences between the two that warrant endorsing different normative positions regarding dilation and non-conglomerability. This article reassesses the grounds for treating dilation and non-conglomerability differently. Our analysis exploits a new and general characterization result for dilation to draw a closer connection between dilation and non-conglomerability. (shrink)

A characterization result of dilation in terms of positive and negative association admits an extremal counterexample, which we present together with a minor repair of the result. Dilation may be asymmetric whereas covariation itself is symmetric. Dilation is still characterized in terms of positive and negative covariation, however, once the event to be dilated has been specified.