This work discusses new research in semantics, theory of truth, philosophy of language and theory of communication from a trans-disciplinary perspective.

In epistemology and in philosophy of language there is fierce debate about the role of context in knowledge, understanding, and meaning. Many contemporary epistemologists take seriously the thesis that epistemic vocabulary is context-sensitive. This thesis is of course a semantic claim, so it has brought epistemologists into contact with work on context in semantics by philosophers of language. This volume brings together the debates, in a set of twelve specially written essays representing the latest work by leading figures in the (...) two fields. All future work on contextualism will start here. Contributors: Kent Bach, Herman Cappelen, Andy Egan, Michael Glanzberg, John Hawthorne, Ernest Lepore, Peter Ludlow, Peter Pagin, Georg Peter, Paul M. Pietroski, Gerhard Preyer, Jonathan Schaffer, Jason Stanley, Brian Weatherson, Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

Book Information Logical Form and Language. Edited by G. Preyer and G. Peter. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 2002. Pp. x + 512. Hardback, £55. Paperback, £19.99.

"My experience is what I agree to attend to," wrote William James (1890) nearly a century ago in his Principles of Psychology. Although certainly not the first to recognize the importance of attention in man's experience--poets and philosophers throughout history have touched upon the concept in one way or another-James deserves credit for having accorded attention a central role in the systematic study of the mind. With the advancement of psychology since that time, except during the behaviorist digression, the concept (...) of attention has been an integral part of many prominent theories dealing with learning, thinking, and other aspects of cognitive functioning. Indeed, attention is an important determinant of experience from birth throughout development. This has been an implicit assumption underlying our view of cognition since the writings of Charles Darwin (1897) and Wilhelm Preyer (1888) as well as James, all of whom offered provocative insights about the developing child's commerce with the environment. Al though systematic research on attention in children was slow to pick up during the early part of this century, interest in the developmental study of attention has expanded enormously in recent years. (shrink)

Die Sprachtheorie steht heute vor neuen Herausforderungen. Sie zeichnet sich durch die schnelle Dynamik ihrer Entwicklung und die Öffnung gegenüber anderen Wissenschaften und Forschungsbereichen aus. Ergebnisse der Sprachtheorie sind für die Philosophie, Linguistik und die Sozialwissenschaften, aber auch für andere Bereiche wie z. B. die Kommunikationswissenschaften, von Bedeutung. Von besonderer Relevanz sind daher Untersuchungen, die die neuesten Entwicklungen in einen breiten theoretischen Rahmen setzen und zu fruchtbaren Diskussionen zwischen Wissenschaftlern unterschiedlicher Fachrichtungen führen. Die in diesem Band versammelten Beiträge konzentrieren sich (...) auf folgende Schwerpunkte der Sprachtheorie: Intentionale Bedeutung, Sprecherbedeutung und Sprachbedeutung, Intentionalität, Kommunikation und kommunikative Intentionen, die Fortbildung und Kritik der von Grice entwickelten Bedeutungstheorie (Bedeutungsnominalismus) sowie ihre Anwendung auf die sogenannte Theorie der sprachlichen Kraft (illokutive Kraft), ein Neuanfang der Klassifikation von Sprechakten, Analyse der Gültigkeitsunterstellungen der Interpretation, Ergebnise der Dialogforschung, Modelle der Argumentationstheorie. Der Band dokumentiert die Aktualität, den interdisziplinären Charakter und die Breite der modernen Sprachtheorie. (shrink)

This collection addresses a post-WWII shift in the hierarchy of scientific explanations, where the highest goal moves from reductionism towards some ...

For the theorists of crisis, the revolutionary state comes into existence through violence, and due to its inability to provide an authoritative katechon (restrainer) against internal and external violence, it perpetuates violence until it self-destructs. Writing during extreme economic depression and growing social and political violence, the crisis theorists––Joseph de Maistre, Juan Donoso Cortés, and Carl Schmitt––each sought to blame the chaos of their time upon the Janus-faced postrevolutionary ideals of liberalism and socialism by urging a return to pre-revolutionary moral (...) and religious values. They are united by three counterrevolutionary principles, all of which are purported to remedy revolutionary violence: traditional constitutional fidelity, the philosophy of the decision, and opposition to bourgeois liberalism. This essay is followed by the first complete English translation and publication of Donoso’s letter of October 24, 1851, which contains Donoso’s only reference to the “discussing class,” a political entity later popularized by Schmitt in his 1922 work Political Theology. (shrink)

Terrorism, ethnocentrism, religious tension, competition over limited resources, war - these are just a few of the problems and challenges that have emerged in today's global economy. Globalization both implies and requires economic interdependence; and this should bring with it a heightened sense of the interconnectedness of the participating societies. But unfortunately, as recent events indicate, rather than our having formed a global community, today's society is more fragmented than ever. In light of this, education faces some formidable new challenges. (...) How do we prepare future citizens for the world they will live in? How do we teach future generations to embrace the paradox of accepting the value of multiculturalism despite the conflicts it has produced? How do we instill religious tolerance in a time when fundamentalism has become inextricably tied with terrorism? How do we promote economic growth in the face of overpopulation and its depletion of resources? The authors of this collection of essays explore these and related challenges, and they suggest some novel ways of dealing with them. (shrink)

Some theories of goodness are descriptively rich: they have much to say about what makes things good. Neo-Aristotelian accounts, for instance, detail the various features that make a human being, a dog, a bee good relative to facts about those forms of life. Famously, such theories of relative goodness tend to be comparatively poor: they have little or nothing to say about what makes one kind of being better than another kind. Other theories of goodness—those that take there to be (...) absolute goodness—are comparatively rich: they offer grounds for judging some types of things better than others because they have more absolute goodness. Moorean accounts, for example, can tell us that humans and human experiences are superior to bees and blades of grass. But such theories tend to be descriptively poor: they struggle to tell us in virtue of what this is so. In this essay we motivate and flesh out a view that splits the difference between accounts of goodness as relative and accounts of goodness as absolute. Such a view holds promise only if the mechanics of this kind of metaphysics of goodness can be worked out. Here we present a view on which the paradigm for absolute goodness is God and the paradigm for each kind of relative goodness is a divine idea. (shrink)

Pre-reflective Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind delves into the relations between the current debates on consciousness within analytical philosophy and the debates taking place in continental philosophy in the twentieth century and in particular within the work of Sartre. Examining the return of the problem of subjectivity in philosophy of mind and the idea that phenomenal consciousness could not be reduced to functional or cognitive properties this volume aims to rethink borders between what counts as ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ (...) when the nature of the mental is at stake. (shrink)

This book brings together analytically inspired philosophers working on the continent with English-speaking philosophers to address specific issues regarding subjectivity and consciousness.

This volume breaks new grounds by bringing together a great variety of innovative contributions on triangulation, epistemology, and mind. The notion of triangulation, developed by Donald Davidson during the last two decades of his life, has changed our understanding of the relationship between subjective, intersubjective, and objective, and shed new light on concepts such as externalism, internalism, communication, interpretation, and language. At the same time, however, it has been strongly criticized for several aspects. The papers collected in this volume written (...) by established contributors aim to provide new insights into the contemporary debate on triangulation. The upshot is not only a deeper understanding of Davidson s ideas but also a new appreciation of some central problems of epistemology and the philosophy of mind with regard to adjoining disciplines such as, for instance, cognitive sciences and the philosophy of language.". (shrink)

In much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form (...) of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as ‘conspiratorial explanation’—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory. (shrink)

"This book represents a continuation of the research project in philosophy of language and semantics represented in the journal "Protosociology" at the J. W. ...

The spiritual geography of Russian cosmism. General characteristics ; Recent definitions of cosmism -- Forerunners of Russian cosmism. Vasily Nazarovich Karazin (1773-1842) ; Alexander Nikolaevich Radishchev (1749-1802) ; Poets: Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov, (1711-1765) and Gavriila Romanovich Derzhavin (1743-1816) ; Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869) ; Aleksander Vasilyevich Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) -- The Russian philosophical context. Philosophy as a passion ; The destiny of Russia ; Thought as a call for action ; The totalitarian cast of mind -- The religious and spiritual (...) context. The kingdom of god on earth ; Hesychasm: two great Russian saints ; The Third Rome ; Pre-Christian antecedents -- The Russian esoteric context. Early searches for "deep wisdom" ; Popular magic ; Higher magic in the time of Peter the Great ; Esotericism after Peter the Great ; Theosophy and anthroposophy -- Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov (1829-1903), the philosopher of the common task ; The one idea ; The unacknowledged prince ; The village teacher ; First disciple: Dostoevsky and Tolstoy ; The Moscow librarian ; Last years: Askhabad: the only portrait -- The "common task" ; Esoteric dimensions of the "common task" ; Fedorov's legacy: projectivism, delo, regulation -- The religious cosmists. Vladimir Sergeevich Solovyov (1853-1900) ; Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (1871-1944) ; Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky (1882-1937) ; Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948) -- The scientific cosmists. Konstantin Edouardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) ; Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945) ; Alexander Leonidovich Chizhevsky (1897-1964) ; Vasily Feofilovich Kuprevich (1897-1969) -- Promethean theurgy. Life-creation ; Cultural immortalism ; God-building ; Re-aiming the arrows of Eros ; Technological utopianism ; Occultism -- Fedorov's twentieth century followers. Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson (1844-1919) and Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kozhevnikov (1852-1917) ; Svyatogor and the biocosmists ; New wine and the universal task ; Alexander Konstantinovich Gorsky (1886-1943) and Nikolai Alexandrovich Setnitsky (1888-1937) ; Valerian Nikolaevich Muravyov (1885-1932) ; Vasily Nikolaevich Chekrygin (1897-1922) -- Cosmism and its offshoots today. The N.F. Fedorov museum-library ; The Tsiolkovsky museum and Chizhevsky center ; ISRICA - Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology ; Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912-1992) and neo-eurasianism ; The hyperboreans ; Scientific immortalism: Igor Vishev, Danila Medvedev ; Conclusions about the Russian cosmists. (shrink)

Many of the things we do, we do together with other people. Think of carpooling and playing tennis. In the past two or three decades it has become increasingly popular to analyze such collective actions in terms of collective intentions. This volume brings together ten new philosophical essays that address issues such as how individuals succeed in maintaining coordination throughout the performance of a collective action, whether groups can actually believe propositions or whether they merely accept them, and what kind (...) of evidence, if any, disciplines such as cognitive science and semantics provide in support of irreducibly collective states.The theories of the Big Four of collective intentionality -- Michael Bratman, Raimo Tuomela, John Searle, and Margaret Gilbert -- and the Big Five of Social Ontology -- which in addition to the Big Four includes Philip Pettit -- play a central role in almost all of these essays. Drawing on insights from a wide range of disciplines including dynamical systems theory, economics, and psychology, the contributors develop existing theories, criticize them, or provide alternatives to them.Several essays challenge the idea that there is a straightforward dichotomy between individual and collective level rationality, and explore the interplay between these levels in order to shed new light on the alleged discontinuities between them. These contributions make abundantly clear that it is no longer an option simply to juxtapose analyses of individual and collective level phenomena and maintain that there is a discrepancy. Some go as far as arguing that on closer inspection the alleged discontinuities dissolve. (shrink)

The English version of the first chapter of Erwin Rogler and Gerhard Preyer: Materialismus, anomaler Monismus und mentale Kausalität. Zur gegenwärtigen Philosophie des Mentalen bei Donald Davidson und David Lewis »Anomaler Monismus und Mentale Kausalität. Ein Beitrag zur Debatte über Donald Davidsons Philosophie des Mentalen« is a contribution to the current debates on the philosophy of the mental and mental causality initiated from Donald Davidson's philosophy with his article »Mental Events«. It is the intent of the English version to (...) give a response to the controversy among American, British and Australian philosophers in the context of a global exchange of ideas on problems understanding the mental. Contents 1. Preliminary Remarks 2. The Critique of Property-Epiphenomenalism and Counterarguments The Enlargement of Nomological Reasoning The Counterfactual Analysis Supervenient Causality 3. Are Mental Properties real or unreal?Things and events are fundamental entities in Davidson's ontology. Less distinct is the ontological status of properties, especially of mental types. Despite of some eliminative allusions there are weighty reasons to understand Davidson's philosophy of mind as including intentional realism. With it, the question of mental causality arises. There are two striking solutions to this problem: the epiphenomenalism of mental properties and the downward causation of mental events. Davidson cannot accept either. He claims to justify the mental as supervenient causality in order to thus integrate it into physicalism. But his argument at best proves the explanatory, not the causal relevance of mental properties. For this and for other reasons, Davidson fails the aspired synthesis of a sufficiently strong physicalism and the autonomy of the mental; a project whose realization is anyhow hard to achieve. (shrink)

Seventeen specially written essays by eminent philosophers and linguists appear for the first time in this anthology, all with the central theme of logical form -- a fundamental issue in analytic philosophy and linguistic theory. Logical Form and Language brings together exciting new contributions from diverse points of view, which illuminate the lively current debate about this topic.

The topic of professionalism has dominated the content of major academic medicine publications during the past decade and continues to do so. The message of this current wave of professionalism is that medical educators need to be more attentive to the moral sensibilities of trainees, to their interpersonal and affective dimensions, and to their social conscience, all to the end of skilled, humanistic physicians. Urgent calls to address professionalism from such groups as the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American (...) Board of Internal Medicine, and the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, among others. In fact, at the 2004 annual meeting of the AAMC six separate presentations addressed professionalism with such titles as "Evaluating Humanism and Professionalism," Professionalism: Expectation, Education, Evaluation," or "Toward Assessing Professional Behaviors of Medical Students through Peer Observations". Professionalism, then, has become part of the current academic medicine parlance, used by administrators, clinical faculty, residency programs, and professional organizations with an expectation of shared meanings and goals. All of these stakeholders focus on what has become a consistent list of attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism, which usually include variations on altruism, duty, excellence, honor and integrity, accountability, and respect. In fact, most of the scholarly work to date has been listing, describing, decrying, and measuring/evaluating it. In this collection of essays, we don’t argue with these attributes. Instead, we ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or "professionalism." This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession’s beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse. In addition, we will scrutinize how the discourse is enacted in both the formal and hidden curriculum, and in the larger medical environment. (shrink)

From folk tales to movies, stories possess features which naturally suit them to contribute to the growth of virtue. In this article I show that the fictional exemplars help the learner to grasp the moral importance of internal states and resolves a tension between existing kinds of exemplars discussed by virtue ethicists. Stories also increase the information conveyed by virtue terms and aid the growth of prudence. Stories can provide virtuous exemplars, inform learners as to the nature of the virtues (...) and offer practice in developing situational judgement. As such they are a significant resource for virtue ethics and moral education. (shrink)

Bioethics has paid surprisingly little attention to the special problems faced by women and to feminist analyses of current health care issues other than ...