According to the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, a world that has lost sight of beauty is a world riddled with skepticism, moral and aesthetic relativism, conflicting religious worldviews, and escalating ecological crises. In The Eclipse and Recovery of Beauty, John D. Dadosky uses Kierkegaard and Nietzsche's negative aesthetics to outline the context of that loss, and presents an argument for reclaiming beauty as a metaphysical property of being. Inspired by Bernard Lonergan's philosophy of consciousness, Dadosky presents a (...) philosophy of beauty that is grounded in contemporary Thomistic thought. Responding to Balthasar, he argues for a concept of beauty that can be experienced, understood, judged, created, contemplated, and even loved. Deeply engaged with the work of Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Kant, among others, The Eclipse and Recovery of Beauty will be essential reading for those interested in contemporary philosophy and theology. (shrink)

Compatibilist libertarianism claims that alternate possibilities for action at the agential level are consistent with determinism at the physical level. Unlike traditional compatibilism about alternate possibilities, involving conditional or dispositional accounts of the ability to act, compatibilist libertarianism offers us unqualified modalities at the agential level, consistent with physical determinism, a potentially big advance. However, I argue that the account runs up against two problems. Firstly, the way in which the agential modalities are generated talks past the worries of the (...) incompatibilist in the traditional free will problem. As such, it fails to dispel the worries that determinism generates for the incompatibilist. Secondly, in spite of the ingenious use of the supervenience thesis and multiple realizability, the position still allows us to generate the old worry that determinism at the physical level would mean no alternate possibilities at the level of agency. In particular, I develop a new example, the ‘atomic slit case’ that demonstrates how physical level information is salient to what is possible at the agential level, motivating incompatibilism. (shrink)

Contributing Authors Are Harmon M. Chapman, Oliver Martin, Jesse De Boer, And Many Others.

Conceptualism is the thesis that, for any perceptual experience E, (i) E has a Fregean proposition as its content and (ii) a subject of E must possess a concept for each item represented by E. We advance a framework within which conceptualism may be defended against its most serious objections (e.g., Richard Heck's argument from nonveridical experience). The framework is of independent interest for the philosophy of mind and epistemology given its implications for debates regarding transparency, relationalism and representationalism, demonstrative (...) thought, phenomenal character, and the speckled hen objection to modest foundationalism. (shrink)

Heidegger, Sartre and the later existentialist philosophers inherited a world, it has been said, from which "God is absent". Contemporary philosophy begins in the momentous questioning of the Christian experience by such nineteenth-century figures as Nietzsche and Dosteyevsky. But if existentialism is in some respects a beginning-again, it is in other respects linked to the classical world out of which Christianity arose and to certain themes in the writings of ancient and medieval Christians. Renewal and innovation converge. Addressing themselves to (...) the general reader, the three author-philosophers consider both the contemporary and the perennial. [Book jacket]. (shrink)

This is a formal and systematic study of the logical foundations of speech act theory. The study of speech acts has been a flourishing branch of the philosophy of language and linguistics over the last two decades, and John Searle has of course himself made some of the most notable contributions to that study in the sequence of books Speech Acts, Expression and Meaning and Intentionality. In collaboration with Daniel Vanderveken he now presents the first formalised logic of a (...) general theory of speech acts, dealing with such things as the nature of an illocutionary force, the logical form of its components, and the conditions of success of elementary illocutionary acts. The central chapters present a systematic exposition of the axioms and general laws of illocutionary logic. (shrink)

This collection of essays explores the metaphysical thesis that the living world is not made up of substantial particles or things, as has often been assumed, but is rather constituted by processes. The biological domain is organised as an interdependent hierarchy of processes, which are stabilised and actively maintained at different timescales. Even entities that intuitively appear to be paradigms of things, such as organisms, are actually better understood as processes. Unlike previous attempts to articulate processual views of biology, which (...) have tended to use Alfred North Whitehead’s panpsychist metaphysics as a foundation, this book takes a naturalistic approach to metaphysics. It submits that the main motivations for replacing an ontology of substances with one of processes are to be found in the empirical findings of science. Biology provides compelling reasons for thinking that the living realm is fundamentally dynamic, and that the existence of things is always conditional on the existence of processes. The phenomenon of life cries out for theories that prioritise processes over things, and it suggests that the central explanandum of biology is not change but rather stability, or more precisely, stability attained through constant change. This edited volume brings together philosophers of science and metaphysicians interested in exploring the consequences of a processual philosophy of biology. The contributors draw on an extremely wide range of biological case studies, and employ a process perspective to cast new light on a number of traditional philosophical problems, such as identity, persistence, and individuality. (shrink)

This chapter argues that scientific and philosophical progress in our understanding of the living world requires that we abandon a metaphysics of things in favour of one centred on processes. We identify three main empirical motivations for adopting a process ontology in biology: metabolic turnover, life cycles, and ecological interdependence. We show how taking a processual stance in the philosophy of biology enables us to ground existing critiques of essentialism, reductionism, and mechanicism, all of which have traditionally been associated with (...) substance ontology. We illustrate the consequences of embracing an ontology of processes in biology by considering some of its implications for physiology, genetics, evolution, and medicine. And we attempt to locate the subsequent chapters of the book in relation to the position we defend. (shrink)

This paper responds to Sven Bernecker’s argument that agent reliabilism cannot accommodate internalist intuitions about clarvoyance cases. In section 1 we clarify a version of agent reliabilism and Bernecker’s objections against it. In section 2 we say more about how the notion of cognitive integration helps to adjudicate clairvoyance cases and other proposed counterexamples to reliabilism. The central idea is that cognitive integration underwrites a kind of belief ownership, which in turn underwrites the sort of responsibility for belief required for (...) subjective justification. In section 3 we say more about what cognitive integration amounts to, drawing on some recent accounts of desire ownership from the literature on autonomy and moral responsibility. (shrink)

It is tempting to posit an intimate relationship between belief and assertion. The speech act of assertion seems like a way of transferring the speaker’s belief to his or her audience. If this is right, then you might think that the evidential warrant required for asserting a proposition is just the same as the warrant for believing it. We call this thesis entitlement equality. We argue here that entitlement equality is false, because our everyday notion of belief is unambiguously a (...) weak one. Believing something is true, we argue, is compatible with having relatively little confidence in it. Asserting something requires something closer to complete confidence. Specifically, we argue that believing a proposition merely requires thinking it likely, but that thinking that a proposition is likely does not entitle one to assert it. This conclusion conflict with a standard view that ‘full belief’ is the central commonsense non-factive attitude. (shrink)

Intentionality is aboutness. Some things are about other things: a belief can be about icebergs, but an iceberg is not about anything; an idea can be about the number 7, but the number 7 is not about anything; a book or a film can be about Paris, but Paris is not about anything. Philosophers have long been concerned with the analysis of the phenomenon of intentionality, which has seemed to many to be a fundamental feature of mental states and events.

As is well known, Aristotelian natural philosophy, and many other systems of natural philosophy since, have relied heavily on teleology and teleological causation. Somehow, the purpose or end of an obj ect can be used to predict and explain what that object does: once you know that the end of an acorn is to become an oak, and a few things about what sorts of circumstances are conducive to the attainment of this end, you can predict a lot about the (...) sprouting of the acorn and the subsequent behaviour of the piece of vegetation that results. Once you know that a rock seeks to move towards the centre of the Earth, you gain some insight into why it falls when released, and why it deforms the carpet or foot that it lands on. Once you know that the rabbit seeks to preserve itself, you can predict it will run from the fox. And so on. There are at least three features of Aristotle’s teleology, and more generally of an Aristotelian frame of mind about teleology, that may induce suspicion. One is that an end can serve as a "cause": as well as the sort of causation we all recognize, efficient causation, there are other forms, one of which is teleological causation. However, this can look less odd if we think of causes as things that figure in "because" answers to "why" questions. Whether or not self-preservation, or the rabbit’s continued existence, or something similar, causes the rabbit to run, the reply "because it seeks to continue in existence" certainly makes sense as an answer, or part of an answer, to a question about why it ran from the fox. (At present we are only. (shrink)

The role of the facilitator within Communities of Philosophical Inquiry has often been allocated to structuring group interactions and/or affirming participants' contributions. In this paper, however, it will be argued that facilitators must take a far more active role in dialogue than has hereto been recognized. This is the case because, when left to its own devices, CPI dialogue often devolves into mere opinion tourism, becomes obscure, and/or is drowned by an excess of irrelevant content. It will be argued that (...) these effects, in turn, pose a serious threat to agent investment. That is, by muddying dialogue, these effects can sever the link between agents' motivational sets and the subject matter at hand and, consequently, may cause agents to internally disengage from the discussion underway. Given the danger that unchecked dialogue poses to agent investment, it will be argued that facilitators must be vigilant in attending to the health of the linguistic environment that both they themselves and participants occupy. That is, it will be argued that facilitators have a responsibility to care for participants by intervening in dialogue and pushing for rigour and clarity. This ecocentric model of care, interestingly, often directly contends with the more intuitive, or biocentric position, that a facilitator must directly care for participants affective or emotional welfare by celebrating their contributions for contribution's sake. Instead, it suggests that facilitators can indirectly care for participants by strategically prompting them to make their contributions logically sound, concise and clear. Moreover, this ecocentric perspective also conflicts with the often purported view that a facilitator is a temporary figure that should eventually become obsolete in a CPI. To the contrary, the ecocentric perspective suggests that a facilitator's role is indispensable to a CPI's success, insofar as it helps create and maintain the necessary conditions for agent investment, and helps ensure the continued health of the linguistic ecosystem, upon which everybody's welfare crucially depends. (shrink)

Conversation is supported by the beliefs that people have in common and the perceptual experience that they share. The visual context of a conversation has two aspects: the information that is available to each conversant, and their beliefs about what is present for each other. In our experiment, we separated these factors for the first time and examined their impact on a spontaneous conversation. We manipulated the fact that a visual scene was shared or not and the belief that a (...) visual scene was shared or not. Participants watched videos of actors talking about a controversial topic, then discussed their own views while looking at either a blank screen or the actors. Each believed (correctly or not) that their partner was either looking at a blank screen or the same images. We recorded conversants’ eye movements, quantified how they were coordinated, and analyzed their speech patterns. Gaze coordination has been shown to be causally related to the knowledge people share before a conversation, and the information they later recall. Here, we found that both the presence of the visual scene, and beliefs about its presence for another, influenced language use and gaze coordination. (shrink)

Integrating concepts of maintenance and of origins is essential to explaining biological diversity. The unified theory of evolution attempts to find a common theme linking production rules inherent in biological systems, explaining the origin of biological order as a manifestation of the flow of energy and the flow of information on various spatial and temporal scales, with the recognition that natural selection is an evolutionarily relevant process. Biological systems persist in space and time by transfor ming energy from one state (...) to another in a manner that generates structures which allows the system to continue to persist. Two classes of energetic transformations allow this; heat-generating transformations, resulting in a net loss of energy from the system, and conservative transformations, changing unusable energy into states that can be stored and used subsequently. All conservative transformations in biological systems are coupled with heat-generating transformations; hence, inherent biological production, or genealogical proesses, is positively entropic. There is a self-organizing phenomenology common to genealogical phenomena, which imparts an arrow of time to biological systems. Natural selection, which by itself is time-reversible, contributes to the organization of the self-organized genealogical trajectories. The interplay of genealogical (diversity-promoting) and selective (diversity-limiting) processes produces biological order to which the primary contribution is genealogical history. Dynamic changes occuring on times scales shorter than speciation rates are microevolutionary; those occuring on time scales longer than speciation rates are macroevolutionary. Macroevolutionary processes are neither redicible to, nor autonomous from, microevolutionary processes. (shrink)

In _Neuroscience and Philosophy_ three prominent philosophers and a leading neuroscientist clash over the conceptual presuppositions of cognitive neuroscience. The book begins with an excerpt from Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker's _Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience_, which questions the conceptual commitments of cognitive neuroscientists. Their position is then criticized by Daniel Dennett and John Searle, two philosophers who have written extensively on the subject, and Bennett and Hacker in turn respond. Their impassioned debate encompasses a wide range of central themes: (...) the nature of consciousness, the bearer and location of psychological attributes, the intelligibility of so-called brain maps and representations, the notion of qualia, the coherence of the notion of an intentional stance, and the relationships between mind, brain, and body. Clearly argued and thoroughly engaging, the authors present fundamentally different conceptions of philosophical method, cognitive-neuroscientific explanation, and human nature, and their exchange will appeal to anyone interested in the relation of mind to brain, of psychology to neuroscience, of causal to rational explanation, and of consciousness to self-consciousness. In his conclusion Daniel Robinson explains why this confrontation is so crucial to the understanding of neuroscientific research. The project of cognitive neuroscience, he asserts, depends on the incorporation of human nature into the framework of science itself. In Robinson's estimation, Dennett and Searle fail to support this undertaking; Bennett and Hacker suggest that the project itself might be based on a conceptual mistake. Exciting and challenging, _Neuroscience and Philosophy_ is an exceptional introduction to the philosophical problems raised by cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

Nocebo effects occur when an adverse effect on the patient arises from the patient's own negative expectations. In accordance with informed consent, providers often disclose information that results in unintended adverse outcomes for the patient. While this may adhere to the principle of autonomy, it violates the doctrine of “primum non nocere,” given that side-effect disclosure may cause those side effects. In this article we build off previous work, particularly by Wells and Kaptchuk and by Cohen :3–11.[Taylor & Francis Online], (...) [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]), to suggest ethical guidelines that permit nondisclosure in the case when a nocebo effect is likely to occur on of the basis of nonmaleficence. We accept that that autonomy vis-à-vis informed consent must be forestalled, but salvage much of its role by elaborating a practical clinical approach to postencounter follow-up. In doing so, we reconcile a clinically practicable process of determining conditions of disclosure with long-standing ethical commitments to patients. (shrink)

A productive way to think about imagistic mental models of physical systems is as though they were sources of quasi‐empirical evidence. People depict or imagine events at those points in time when they would experiment with the world if possible. Moreover, just as they would do when observing the world, people induce patterns of behavior from the results depicted in their imaginations. These resulting patterns of behavior can then be cast into symbolic rules to simplify thinking about future problems and (...) to reveal higher order relationships. Using simple gear problems, three experiments explored the occasions of use for, and the inductive transitions between, depictive models and number‐based rules. The first two experiments used the convergent evidence of problem‐solving latencies, hand motions, referential language and error data to document the initial use of a model, the induction of rules from the modeling results, and the fallback to a model when a rule fails. The third experiment explored the intermediate representations that facilitate the induction of rules from depictive models. The strengths and weaknesses of depictive modeling and more analytic systems of reasoning are delineated to motivate the reasons for these transitions. (shrink)

In current American medical practice, autonomy is assumed to be more valuable than human life: if a patient autonomously refuses lifesaving treatment, the doctors are supposed to let him die. In this paper we discuss two values that might be at stake in such clinical contexts. Usually, we hear only of autonomy and best interests. However, here, autonomy is ambiguous between two concepts—concepts that are tied to different values and to different philosophical traditions. In some cases, the two values (that (...) of agency and that of authenticity) entail different outcomes. We argue that the comparative value of these values needs to be assessed. (shrink)

The conjunction fallacy occurs whenever probability compounds are thought of as more likely than its component probabilities alone. In the experiment we present, subjects chose between simple and compound lotteries after some practice. Depending on the condition, they were given more or less information about the nature of probability compounds. The conjunction fallacy was surprisingly robust. There was, however, a puzzling dissociation between verbal and behavioral learning: verbal responses were sensitive, but actual choices entirely insensitive, to the amount of verbal (...) instructions being provided. This might reflect a dichotomy between implicit and explicit learning. Caution must be exercised in generalizing results from what people say to what people do. (shrink)

We have synthesized a 582,970-base pair Mycoplasma genitalium genome. This synthetic genome, named M. genitalium JCVI-1.0, contains all the genes of wild-type M. genitalium G37 except MG408, which was disrupted by an antibiotic marker to block pathogenicity and to allow for selection. To identify the genome as synthetic, we inserted "watermarks" at intergenic sites known to tolerate transposon insertions. Overlapping "cassettes" of 5 to 7 kilobases (kb), assembled from chemically synthesized oligonucleotides, were joined by in vitro recombination to produce intermediate (...) assemblies of approximately 24 kb, 72 kb ("1/8 genome"), and 144 kb ("1/4 genome"), which were all cloned as bacterial artificial chromosomes in Escherichia coli. Most of these intermediate clones were sequenced, and clones of all four 1/4 genomes with the correct sequence were identified. The complete synthetic genome was assembled by transformation-associated recombination cloning in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, then isolated and sequenced. A clone with the correct sequence was identified. The methods described here will be generally useful for constructing large DNA molecules from chemically synthesized pieces and also from combinations of natural and synthetic DNA segments. 10.1126/science.1151721. (shrink)

My dissertation has two main aims. The first is to show how some of the central parts of Bernard Williams' conception of ethics fit together. The second is to criticize and develop Williams' thought and, by doing so, to illustrate why it offers such an important and fruitful starting point for contemporary moral philosophy. ;Much of the importance of Williams' work stems from his rich and ambivalent engagement with moral skepticism. His work forcefully engages both with philosophical and wider cultural (...) concerns about the 'status' and authority of moral values and with questions over how to understand and sustain the deliberative priority traditionally accorded to moral concerns. His conception of reasons for action, which I consider in Chapter One, threatens the appealing view that moral judgements always give reasons for action to those to whom they apply. His exploration of what it is to have a deep commitment to a person or project suggests, as I explain in Chapter Two, that moral obligations do not necessarily have priority over other concerns. His doubts about moral objectivity, which I explore in Chapter Three and Chapter Four, lead him to a deeply problematic conception of the relationship between ethical reflection and ethical practice. ;All of these views of Williams' incorporate varying degrees of skepticism. But Williams does not aim to be an outright moral skeptic. Indeed, I reveal how his work can be read as containing a response to outright skepticism: what he shows is that ethics need neither be as exacting nor as saddled with metaphysical ambition as the skeptic thinks. However, the elements of Williams' work that tell against outright skepticism, I argue, give one reason to go further and to be less skeptical about morality than he is. (shrink)

The syllogistic mnemonic known by its first two words Barbara Celarent introduced a constellation of terminology still used today. This concatenation of nineteen words in four lines of verse made its stunning and almost unprecedented appearance around the beginning of the thirteenth century, before or during the lifetimes of the logicians William of Sherwood and Peter of Spain, both of whom owe it their lasting places of honor in the history of syllogistic. The mnemonic, including the theory or theories it (...) encoded, was prominent if not dominant in syllogistics for the next 700 years until a new paradigm was established in the 1950s by the great polymath Jan Łukasiewicz, a scholar equally at home in philosophy, classics, mathematics, and logic. Perhaps surprisingly, the then-prominent syllogistic mnemonic played no role in the Łukasiewicz work. His 1950 masterpiece does not even mention the mnemonic or its two earliest champions William and Peter. The syllogistic mnemonic is equally irrelevant to the post-Łukasiewicz paradigm established in the 1970s and 1980s by John Corcoran, Timothy Smiley, Robin Smith, and others. Robin Smith’s comprehensive 1989 treatment of syllogistic does not even quote the mnemonic’s four verses. Smith’s work devotes only 2 of its 262 pages to the mnemonic. The most recent translation of Prior Analytics by Gisela Striker in 2009 continues the post-Łukasiewicz paradigm and accordingly does not quote the mnemonic or even refer to the code—although it does use the terminology. Full mastery of modern understandings of syllogistic does not require and is not facilitated by ability to decode the mnemonic. Nevertheless, an understanding of the history of logic requires detailed mastery of the syllogistic mnemonic, of the logical theories it spawned, and of the conflicting interpretations of it that have been offered over the years by respected logicians such as De Morgan, Jevons, Keynes, and Peirce. More importantly, an understanding of the issues involved in decoding the mnemonic might lead to an enrichment of the current paradigm—an enrichment so profound as to constitute a new paradigm. After presenting useful expository, bibliographic, hermeneutic, historical, and logical background, this paper gives a critical exposition of Smith’s interpretation. (shrink)

Based on a conference held Apr. 4-5, 2008 at Amherst College.

Based on a conference held Apr. 4-5, 2008 at Amherst College.

Rachlin rightly highlights behavioural reinforcement, conditional cooperation, and framing. However, genes may explain part of the variance in altruistic behaviour. Framing cannot be used to support his theory of altruism. Reinforcement of acts is not identical to reinforcement of patterns of acts. Further, many patterns of acts could be reinforced, and Rachlin's altruism is not the most likely candidate.

Self-experimentation is uncommon in the decision sciences, but mental experiments are common; for example, intuition and introspection are often used by theoretical economists as justifications for their models. While introspection can be useful for the generation of ideas, it can also be overused and become a comfortable illusion for the theorist and an obstacle for science.

Stanovich & West's target article undervalues the power of implicit learning (particularly reinforcement learning). Implicit learning may allow the learning of more rational responses–and sometimes even generalisation of knowledge–in contexts where explicit, abstract knowledge proves only of limited value, such as for economic decision-making. Four other comments are made.

Hertwig and Ortmann (H&O) rightly criticize the usage of deception. However, stationary replication may often have no ecological validity. Many economic experiments are not interactive; when they are, there is not much specifically validating H&O's psychological views on script enactment. Incentives in specific market structures may scaffold even zero rational decision-making, but this says very little about individual psychology.

Whether or not trait affiliation correlates with human behaviour needs investigating. One should be careful generalizing neuropsychological mechanisms for affiliation, and generalizing an analysis based on one or two neuropsychological mechanisms and mostly studies on rodents, to complex human social interactions. Serotonin is an example of a neurotransmitter playing an important role in cooperation and interacting with the dopaminergic system.

The beliefs, preferences, and constraints framework provides a language that economists, and possibly others, may largely share. However, it has got so many levels of indeterminacy that it is otherwise almost meaningless: when no evidence can ever be a problem for scientific construct Z, then there is a problem for Z, for nothing can also be considered supportive of Z. (Published Online April 27 2007).

McFetridge (in Logical necessity and other essays . London: Blackwell, 1990 ) suggests that to treat a proposition as logically necessary—to believe a proposition logically necessary, and to manifest that belief—is a matter of preparedness to deploy that proposition as a premise in reasoning from any supposition. We consider whether a suggestion in that spirit can be generalized to cover all cases of absolute necessity, both logical and non-logical, and we conclude that it can. In Sect. 2, we explain the (...) significance that such an account of manifestation of belief in absolute necessity has for the prospects of a non-realist theory of modality. In Sect. 3, we offer a sympathetic articulation of the detail that underlies the McFetridge conception of belief in logical necessity. In Sects. 4 and 5, we show that the conception so articulated will not generalize to encompass all cases of belief in absolute necessity and proceed to offer a remedy. Our proposal is based upon a distinction between two kinds of suppositional act: A-supposing and C-supposing (Sect. 6). In Sect. 7, we then explain and defend our central thesis: (roughly) that (manifestation of) belief in absolute necessity is a matter of preparedness to deploy as a premise in reasoning under any C-supposition. Finally, we indicate that there is some promise in the parallel thesis that manifestation of the treatment of a proposition as a priori is a matter of preparedness to deploy as a premise in reasoning under any A-supposition (Sect. 8). (shrink)