This volume, honoring the renowned historian of science, Allen G Debus, explores ideas of science - `experiences of nature' - from within a historiographical tradition that Debus has done much to define. As his work shows, the sciences do not develop exclusively as a result of a progressive and inexorable logic of discovery. A wide variety of extra-scientific factors, deriving from changing intellectual contexts and differing social millieus, play crucial roles in the overall development of scientific thought. These essays represent (...) case studies in a broad range of scientific settings - from sixteenth-century astronomy and medicine, through nineteenth-century biology and mathematics, to the social sciences in the twentieth-century - that show the impact of both social settings and the cross-fertilization of ideas on the formation of science. Aimed at a general audience interested in the history of science, this book closes with Debus's personal perspective on the development of the field. Audience: This book will appeal especially to historians of science, of chemistry, and of medicine. (shrink)
Introduction: "Know yourself" -- The revelation of God's wisdom -- Credo ut intellegam -- Intellego ut credam -- The relationship between faith and reason -- The interventions of the Magisterium in philosophical matters -- The interaction between philosophy and theology -- Current requirements and tasks -- Conclusion.
Søren Kierkegaard used his literary, philosophical, and theological voice to reintroduce Christianity to Christendom. In this effort, he repeatedly uses the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. Though some have noted the importance of 1 Corinthians for Kierkegaard, they have not explained this importance nor this letter’s role in Kierkegaard’s corpus. This essay seeks to fill this gap in Kierkegaard scholarship by explaining the role this letter plays in Kierkegaard’s Climacean authorship. Paul’s battle with the (...) Corinthian view of wisdom and Kierkegaard’s battle with Hegelian philosophy, which seeks to go beyond faith through speculative thinking, share similarities that engender both their works. In their battles with their respective foes, both develop a Christocentric epistemology that displaces the import of human understanding and cognitive content with the person Jesus who inverts their opponents’ epistemic values by salvifically redefining wisdom and knowledge. This epistemology of a different kind is an offense, foolishness, and absurd to their opponents because it cannot be intellectually grasped by human understanding, but rather in and through the passion of faith, which places the individual in relation with Jesus. For both authors, this relation is the essential point for the Christian life. (shrink)
My review of Boghossian's book, Fear of Knowledge, is generally sympathetic toward his rejection of epistemic relativism and turns toward an examination of "constructivist" themes in light of an anti-nominalist perspective. In general terms, this is a fine little book, tightly argued, and well worth considerable attention--especially from the friends of relativism and those supporting versions of constructivism. (Constructivism + radical nominalism = relativism.).
This stimulating collection is devoted to the life and work of the most flamboyant of twentieth-century philosophers, Paul Feyerabend. Feyerabend's radical epistemological claims, and his stunning argument that there is no such thing as scientific method, were highly influential during his life and have only gained attention since his death in 1994. The essays that make up this volume, written by some of today's most respected philosophers of science, many of whom knew Feyerabend as students and colleagues, cover the (...) diverse themes in his extensive body of work and present a personal account of this fascinating thinker. (shrink)
Jean-Paul Sartre is one of the most famous philosophers of the twentieth century. The principal founder of existentialism, a political thinker and famous novelist and dramatist, his work has exerted enormous influence in philosophy, literature, politics and cultural studies. Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings is the first collection of Sartre's key philosophical writings and provides an indispensable resource for readers of his work. Stephen Priest's clear and helpful introductions make the volume an ideal companion to those coming to Sartre's (...) writing for the first time. (shrink)
This collection of essays by philosophers and educationalists of international reputation, all published here for the first time, celebrates Paul Hirst's professional career. The introductory essay by Robin Barrow and Patricia White outlines Paul Hirst's career and maps the shifts in his thought about education, showing how his views on teacher education, the curriculum and educational aims are interrelated. Contributions from leading names in British and American philosophy of education cover themes ranging from the nature of good teaching (...) to Wittgensteinian aesthetics. The collection concludes with a paper in which Paul Hirst sets out his latest views on the nature of education and its aims. The book also includes a complete bibliography of works by Hirst and a substantial set of references to his writing. (shrink)
At his death in 1987, Paul W. Pruyser of the Menninger Foundation was widely recognized as one of America's foremost authorities on the psychology of religion. His book A Dynamic Psychology of Religion set the stage for creative dialogue on the subject. In this volume, two leading practitioners in the field present a compilation of Pruyser's seminal articles, providing an overview of the major themes in Pruyser's thought. Newton Malony and Bernard Spilka evaluate Pruyser's viewpoint and suggest (...) how his position continues to influence the psychology of religion. (shrink)
Erratum to: Book Symposium on Peter Paul Verbeek’s Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011 Content Type Journal Article Category Erratum Pages 1-27 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0058-z Authors Evan Selinger, Dept. Philosophy, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, USA Don Ihde, Dept. Philosophy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA Ibo van de Poel, Delft University of Technology, Delft, the Netherlands Martin Peterson, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, the Netherlands Peter-Paul Verbeek, (...) Dept. Philosophy, Twente University, Enschede, the Netherlands Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433. (shrink)
The purpose of Pope John Paul''s encyclicalCentesimus Annus (CA) is to propound the foundations of a just economic order and to sketch its essential characteristics. As such he essentially provides an orientation or moral compass for the political economy rather than a precise road map. This article first reviews the principal components of CA and then analyzes and evaluates its central contentions on both cultural and economic grounds.
This major volume assembles leading scholars to address and explain the significance of Paul Ricoeur's extraordinary body of work. Ricoeur's work is of seminal importance to the development of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and ideology critique in the human sciences. Opening with three key essays from Ricoeur himself--on Europe, fragility and responsibility, and love and justice--this fascinating volume offers a tour of his work ranging across topics such as the hermeneutics of action, narrative force, and the other and deconstruction, while discussing (...) his work in the context of such contemporary thinkers as Heidegger, Levinas, Arendt, and Gadamer. Offering a very useful overview of Paul Ricoeur's enormous contribution to modern thought, Paul Ricoeur will be invaluable for students and academics across the social and human sciences and philosophy. (shrink)
This volume is a collection of essays in appreciation, analysis and honor of Paul Ziff, one of the leading American philosophers of the post-World War II period. The essays address questions that loomed large in Ziff's own work. Essays by Zeno Vendler, Jay Rosenberg, and Tom Patton address topics in philosophy of language: understanding, misunderstanding, rules, regularities, and proper names. Michael Resnik examines the nature of numbers, Rita Nolan addresses `mutant predicates', and Peter Alexander discusses microscopes and corpuscles. Douglas (...) C. Long ruminates on Ziff's claim that machines can neither think nor feel. The essays of Dale Jamieson, Bill E. Lawson, Douglas Dempster, and Joseph Ullian address various questions in aesthetics: aesthetic appreciation and morality, expression, the scope of appreciation, and the aesthetics of sport. In the spirit of Ziff, Douglas Stalker criticizes some of the `mush' that looms large in our intellectual lives. The volume begins with a reminiscence by Paul Benacerraf, and ends with selections from an unpublished volume of plays by Paul Ziff. The volume should appeal to anyone whose work has been influenced by Ziff, or is interested in central philosophical problems concerning language, mind, and art. (shrink)
This essay develops standards for grading religions including various forms of spiritualism. First, I examine the standards proposed by William James, John Hick, Paul Knitter, Dan Cohn-Sherbok, and Harold Netland. Most of them are useful in grading religions with or without conditions. However, those standards are not enough for refined and piercing evaluation. Thus, I introduce standards used in spiritualism. Although those standards are for grading spirits and their teachings, they are useful in refined and piercing evaluation of (...) religious phenomena. The spiritual standards complement James's, Hick's, Knitter's, and Netland's standards. Although most of the spiritual standards are rationally unjustifiable, they have practical value. (shrink)
The work of the late Paul Grice (1913–1988) exerts a powerful influence on the way philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists think about meaning and communication. With respect to a particular sentence φ and an “utterer” U, Grice stressed the philosophical importance of separating (i) what φ means, (ii) what U said on a given occasion by uttering φ, and (iii) what U meant by uttering φ on that occasion. Second, he provided systematic attempts to say precisely what meaning is (...) by providing a series of more refined analyses of utterer’s meaning, sentence meaning, and what is said. Third, Grice produced an account of how it is possible for what U says and what U means to diverge. Fourth, by characterizing a philosophically important distinction between the “genuinely semantic” and “merely pragmatic” implications of a statement, Grice clarified the relationship between classical logic and the semantics of natural language. Fifth, he provided some much needed philosophical ventilation by deploying his notion of “implicature” to devastating effect against certain overzealous strains of “Ordinary Language Philosophy,” without himself abandoning the view that philosophy must pay attention to the nuances of ordinary talk. Sixth, Grice undercut some of the most influential arguments for a philosophically significant notion of “presupposition.” Today, Grice’s work lies at the center of research on the semantics-pragmatics distinction and shapes much discussion of the relationship between language and mind. In a nutshell, Grice has forced philosophers and linguists to think very carefully about the sorts of facts a semantic theory is supposed to account for and to reflect upon the most central theoretical notions, notions that otherwise might be taken for granted or employed without due care and attention. To be sure, Grice’s own positive proposals have their weaknesses; but in the light of his work any theory of meaning that is to be taken at all seriously must now draw a sharp line between genuinely semantic facts and facts pertaining to the nature of human interaction.. (shrink)
In this chapter I discuss Charles Taylor's and Paul Ricoeur's theories of narrative identity and narratives as a central form of self-interpretation.1 Both Taylor and Ricoeur think that self-identity is a matter of culturally and socially mediated self-definitions, which are practically relevant for one's orientation in life.2 First, I will go through various characterisations that Ricoeur gives of his theory, and try to show to what extent they also apply to Taylor's theory. Then, I will analyse more closely Charles (...) Taylor's, and in section three, Paul Ricoeur's views on narrative identity. (shrink)
The paper discusses some aspects of the relationship between Feyerabend and Kuhn. First, some biographical remarks concerning their connections are made. Second, four characteristics of Feyerabend and Kuhn's concept of incommensurability are discussed. Third, Feyerabend's general criticism of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions is reconstructed. Forth and more specifically, Feyerabend's criticism of Kuhn's evaluation of normal science is critically investigated. Finally, Feyerabend's re-evaluation of Kuhn's philosophy towards the end of his life is presented.
For a solid quarter century Paul Churchland and I have been wheeling around in the space of work on consciousness, and though from up close it may appear that we =ve been rather vehemently opposed to each other =s position, from the bird =s eye view, we are moving in a rather tight spiral within the universe of contested views, both staunch materialists, interested in the same phenomena and the same empirical theories of those phenomena, but differing only over (...) where the main chance lies for progress. (shrink)
GRICE, H. PAUL (1913-1988), English philosopher, is best known for his contributions to the theory of meaning and communication. This work (collected in Grice 1989) has had lasting importance for philosophy and linguistics, with implications for cognitive science generally. His three most influential contributions concern the nature of communication, the distinction betwen speaker's meaning and linguistic meaning, and the phenomenon of conversational implicature.
Comment on Paul Boghossian, “The nature of inference” Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-11 DOI 10.1007/s11098-012-9892-9 Authors Crispin Wright, New York University, New York, NY, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116.
The present paper uses the theme of dialectic and dialogue to begin unraveling the similarities and differences between the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and H.G. Gadamer. Ricoeur is shown to distance himself from Heidegger by insisting on a dimension of explanation and distanciation (which he sometimes identifies with Plato's `descending dialectic') that cannot be reduced to, or absorbed by, understanding and appropriation. This same move, however, leads him to reject Platonic dialogue, with the attendant prioritizing of oral conversation over (...) the written text, as a model for hermeneutics. Ricoeur therefore sees in Gadamer's recourse to such a model a regression to the problematic position of Heidegger. Yet the conception of philosophy as dialectical and dialogical which Gadamer finds in Plato is capable of responding to Ricoeur's objections. Where the fundamental difference between the hermeneutics of Ricoeur and Gadamer emerges is in the question of whether experience is fundamentally dialectical and whether language is inherently dialogical. (shrink)
On Paul Ricoeur examines the later work of Paul Ricoeur, particularly his major work, Time and Narrative. The essays in this volume, including three pieces by Ricoeur, consider Time and Narrative, extending and developing the debate it has inspired. Time and Narrative is the finest example of contemporary philosophical hermeneutics and is one of the most significant works of philosophy published in the late twentieth century. Paul Ricoeur's study of the intertwining of time and narrative proposes and (...) examines the possibility that narrative could remedy a fatal deficiency in any purely phenomenological approach. He analyzed both literary and historical writing, from Proust to Braudel, as well as key figures in the history of philosophy: Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger. His own recognition of his limited success in expunging aporia opens onto the positive discovery of the importance of narrative identity, on which Ricoeur writeshere. An essential companion to Time and Narrative, this collection also provides an excellent introduction to Ricoeur's later work and to contemporary works in philosophical hermeneutics. It will be of major interest to philosophers, literary theorists, and historians. (shrink)
Paul Churchland's epistemology contains a tension between two positions, which I will call pragmatic pluralism and eliminative materialism. Pragmatic pluralism became predominant as Churchland's epistemology became more neurocomputationally inspired, which saved him from the skepticism implicit in certain passages of the theory of reduction he outlined in Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. However, once he replaces eliminativism with a neurologically inspired pragmatic pluralism, Churchland 1) cannot claim that folk psychology might be a false theory, in any significant (...) sense 2) cannot claim that the concepts of Folk psychology might be empty of extension and lack reference. 3) cannot sustain Churchland's criticism of Dennett's "intentional stance" . 4) cannot claim to be a form of scientific realism, in the sense of believing that what science describes is somehow realer that what other conceptual systems describe. (shrink)
Kalam cosmological arguments have recently been the subject of criticisms, at least inter alia, by physicists---Paul Davies, Stephen Hawking---and philosophers of science---Adolf Grunbaum. In a series of recent articles, William Craig has attempted to show that these criticisms are “superficial, iII-conceived, and based on misunderstanding.” I argue that, while some of the discussion of Davies and Hawking is not philosophically sophisticated, the points raised by Davies, Hawking and Grunbaum do suffice to undermine the dialectical efficacy of kalam cosmological arguments.
The idea that films can be philosophical, or in some sense 'do' philosophy, has recently found a number of prominent proponents. What is at stake here is generally more than the tepid claim that some documentaries about philosophy and related topics convey philosophically relevant content. Instead, the contention is that cinematic fictions, including popular movies such as The Matrix , make significant contributions to philosophy. Various more specific claims are linked to this basic idea. One, relatively weak, but pedagogically important (...) observation is that some films can be used to provide philosophy students with vivid and thought-provoking illustrations of philosophical issues. Film screenings stimulate discussion and may motivate renewed engagement with difficult philosophical texts. A stronger contention, however, seeks to link innovative and philosophically valuable thinking to 'the film itself' or to the 'specificity of the cinematic medium'. Such claims raise interesting questions, including questions about the status of the increasingly prevalent philosophically motivated interpretations of particular movies. Who is actually doing the philosophizing in such cases? Is it the audio-visual display, the film-maker, or the philosopher who devises an interpretation of the work? What is the role of specifically cinematic devices in the philosophical points made in such interpretations? Is there any tension between the goal of appreciating a film as a work of art and the goal of arguing that a film has significant implications for a position on a problem in philosophy? A course in the general area of cinema as philosophy can focus on issues related to the locus and status of cinematic philosophizing. It can also delve into specific films and film-makers and philosophically oriented interpretations of specific philosophical topics, such as personal identity. Issues pertaining to interpretation, meaning, and authorship can be usefully investigated in this connection, as can topics in meta-philosophy related to the very nature of philosophical insight or knowledge. Author Recommends Carroll, Noël and Jinhee Choi, eds. 2008. The Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology , Part VIII: Film and Knowledge. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 381–405. Inclues a brief introduction by Carroll followed by papers by Bruce Russell, Karen Hanson, and Lester H. Hunt. Kania, Andrew, ed. 2009. Memento . London: Routledge. A number of philosophers elucidate philosophical themes in Memento and discuss more general issues pertaining to cinema's philosophical significance. Livingston, Paisley. 2009. Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Film as Philosophy . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Part 1 surveys arguments surrounding the cinema as philosophy theme, providing detailed criticisms of some of the bold theses in this area. Part 2 discusses issues related to cinematic authorship and the status of philosophically motivated interpretations of works of fiction, arguing for a partial intentionalist account of a work's meanings. Part 3 illustrates the intentionalist principles in a discussion of Ingmar Bergman's philosophical sources, providing insight into themes of motivated irrationality, inauthenticity, and self-knowledge in some of Bergman's works. Livingston, Paisley and Carl Plantinga, eds. 2009. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film , Part IV: Film as Philosophy. London: Routledge. 547–659. Offers a succinct survey by Wartenberg as well as entries on Ingmar Bergman, Terrence Malick, and Andrei Tarkovsky, discussions of film and specific philosophical topics (morality, skepticism, personal identity, and practical wisdom), and examples of philosophically motivated interpretations of three specific films: The Five Obstructions , Gattaca , and Memento . Smith, Murray and Thomas E. Wartenberg, eds. 2006. Thinking Through Cinema: Film as Philosophy . Malden, MA: Blackwell. A collection of papers that combines essays devoted to general positions on the cinema as philosophy topic as well as specific interpretations of works in different genres. Turvey, Malcolm. 2008. Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition . Oxford: Oxford University Press. A probing critical investigation into the assumptions underlying influential philosophical claims about the epistemic value of cinema. Wartenberg, Thomas E. 2008. Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy . London: Routledge. Ably surveys and responds to arguments against the idea that films can 'do philosophy'. It defends a conditionalist form of intentionalism in response to the 'imposition objection' according to which it is only the commentator who reads philosophical themes 'into' the movie; illustrates the favored account of film as philosophy with interpretations of specific cinematic fictions. Online Materials Film-Philosophy http://www.film-philosophy.com/ > Founded in 1996, this peer-reviewed online journal is dedicated to philosophically oriented interpretations of films and cinema studies more generally. The e-mail salon encourages discussion of related topics. Includes essays, festival reports, calls for papers, conference and job information, and book reviews. The archive includes contributions from 1997 to the present. Wartenberg, Thomas E. 'Philosophy of Film.' The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy ; http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/film/ > A brief survey of a range of issues in the philosophy of cinema including a few paragraphs on the film as philosophy topic. Philosophical Films http://www.philfilms.utm.edu/2/filmlist.htm > A briefly annotated list of philosophical films grouped in rubrics such as 'The Meaning of Life' and 'Environmental Ethics'. Sample Syllabus What follows is a 4-week 'start-up module' followed by samples of optional units that focus on particular topics and cinematic examples. Introductory Module Week I: Introduction & Overview Livingston, Paisley. 'Recent Work on Cinema as Philosophy.' Philosophy Compass 3 (2008): 1–14, 20 (DOI: 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2008.00158.x ). Wartenberg, Thomas E. 2009. 'Film as Philosophy.' The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film . Ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 549–59. Russell, Bruce. 2008. 'The Philosophical Limits of Film.' The Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology . Ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 387–390. Week II: The Bold Thesis on Film as Philosophy Reading: Livingston, Paisley, 'Theses on Cinema as Philosophy.' Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman, Chapter One. 11–38. Screening: October (dir. Sergei Eisenstein 1928). Week III: Debating the Bold Thesis: The Case of October Carroll, Noël. 1998. 'For God and Country.' Interpreting the Moving Image . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 80–91. Smuts, Aaron. 2009. 'Film as Philosophy: In Defense of a Bold Thesis.' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , 67:4: 409–20. Week IV: Cinema as Philosophy: Objections and Replies Livingston, Paisley. 2009. 'Arguing over Cinema as Philosophy.' Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman, Chapter Two. 39–59. Additional Optional Units Depending on the instructor's areas of interest and expertise, any of the following units could be added (and in some cases, easily expanded into longer segments). The Case of Ingmar Bergman Livingston, Paisley. 2009. 'Ingmar Bergman.' The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film . Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 560–568. Screening(s): Wild Strawberries (dir. Ingmar Bergman 1957), or The Seventh Seal (dir. Ingmar Bergman 1957), or Persona (dir. Ingmar Bergman 1966). Skepticism Fumerton, Richard. 2009. 'Skepticism.' In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film . Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 601–10. Screening: The Matrix (dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski 1999) or Total Recall (dir. Paul Verhoeven 1990). Ethics Kupfer, Joseph. 1999. Visions of Virtue in Popular Film . Boulder, CO: Westview. 35–60. Falzon, Chris. 2009. 'Why be Moral?' The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film . Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 591–599. Screening: Groundhog Day (dir. <span class='Hi'>Harold</span> Ramis 1993), or Crimes and Misdemeanors (dir. Woody Allen 1989), or Hollow Man (dir. Paul Verhoeven 2000). Personal Identity Knight, Deborah. 2009. 'Personal Identity.' The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film . Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 611–619. Hanley, Richard. 2009. ' Memento and Personal Identity: Are We Getting it Backwards?' Memento . Ed. Andrew Kania. London: Routledge. 107–126. Martin, Raymond. 2009. 'The Value of Memory: Reflections on Memento. ' Memento . Ed. Andrew Kania. London: Routledge. 87–106. Screening: Memento (dir. Christopher Nolan 2000). Freedom and (Genetic) Determinism Sesardic, Neven. 2009. 'Gattaca.' The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film . Eds. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga. London: Routledge. 641–649. Screening: Gattaca (dir. Andrew Niccol 1997). Focus Questions • Is there anything special about the experience of fiction films that is especially well suited to the stimulation of worthwhile philosophical reflection? • Have any novel and philosophically significant ideas found their first expression in a cinematic work? • Under what circumstances can the film medium be used as an expression of a cinematic author's views? • What sort of background knowledge has to be in place for a film to be interpreted as articulating reasonably precise philosophical theses and arguments? • Does the goal of spelling out a film's philosophical meaning sometimes conflict with the goal of appreciating its value as a work of art? (shrink)
"[A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness] represents, I believe, a very important beginning of a deservingly serious effort to make the whole ...
John Preston has claimed that we must understand Paul Feyerabend's later, post-1970, philosophy in terms of a disappointed Popperianism: that Feyerabend became a sceptical, relativistic, literal anarchist because of his perception of the failure of Popper's philosophy. I argue that this claim cannot be supported and trace the development of Feyerabend's philosophy in terms of a commitment to the central Popperian themes of criticism and critical explanatory progress. This commitment led Feyerabend to reject Popper's specific methodology in favour of (...) a pluralistic methodology, but the commitment to the central values of criticism and critical explanatory progress remained . Moreover, methodological pluralism does not imply scepticism, relativism, or literal anarchism. Feyerabend was not a disappointed Popperian, but, in many respects, a die-hard pluralistic Popperian. (shrink)
Although Paul Ricoeur's writings are widely and appreciatively read by theologians, this is the first book to offer a full, sympathetic yet critical account of Ricoeur's theory of narrative interpretation and its contribution to theology. Unlike many previous studies of Ricoeur, Part I argues that Ricoeur's hermeneutics must be viewed in the light of his overall philosophical agenda, as a fusion and continuation of the unfinished projects of Kant and Heidegger. Particularly helpful is the focus on Ricoeur's recent narrative (...) theory as the context in which Ricoeur deals with problems of time and the creative imagination; and it becomes clear that narrative stands at the crossroads of Ricoeur's search for the meaning of human being as well as his search for the meaning of texts. Part II examines the potential of Ricoeur's narrative theory for resolving certain theological problems, such as the dichotomy betweens the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. In so doing Vanhoozer relates Ricoeur's work to that of theologians such as Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, Pannenberg, Frei and Tracy. (shrink)
No contemporary thinker has participated in more intellectual debates in the post-war period than Paul Ricoeur. His writings evolved from an initial concern with existentialism and phenomenology, through structuralism and psychoanalysis and the work he undertook within the hermenuetic tradition, to his recent studies in metaphor and narrative. This introduction is the first study to survey the entire range of Ricoeur's work and, exploiting the obvious thematic parallels, situates it within the context of post-structuralism. It includes the first discussion (...) of Ricoueur's Time and Narrative , a work likely to prove the most significant contribution to the theory of narrative since early structuralism. (shrink)
The paper considers Paul Natorp's Kantian reading of Plato's theory of ideas, as developed in his monumental work, Platos Ideenlehre, eine Einführung in den Idealismus (1903, 1921). Central to Natrop's reading are, I argue, the following two claims: (1) Plato's ideas are laws, not things; and (2) Plato's theory of ideas in the first instance a theory about the possibility and nature of thought - in particular cognitive and indeed scientific or explanatory thought - and only as a consequence (...) is it a theory about the nature of reality. Natrop thus argues that Plato's theory of ideas is at its heart a transcendental theory, and that Plato's metaphysics is built on this basis. The paper considers these claims - and their textual basis in Plato - in some detail, and attempts an initial evaluation of their plausibility as a reading of Plato. I am on the whole sympathetic to Natorp's reading, though a proper assessment goes beyond the present paper. The wider interest of this idealist or anti-realist reading of Plato ought to be obvious, especially in view of the commonly accepted assumption these days that both Plato and Aristotle, and indeed the Greeks in general, took realism entirely for granted (see e.g. M. Burnyeat). Natorp argues that this is true of Aristotle, but quite untrue of Plato. But he is quite clear that the idealism he ascribes to Plato is not Berkeleyan or metaphysical idealism, but a certain kind of transcendental or epistemological idealism. Natorp, however, is no uncritical follower of Kant, and the version of trascendental idealism that he ascribes to Plato is, I argue, very different from Kant's. (shrink)
Paul Klee's art found broad impact upon philosophers of varying commitments, including Hans-Georg Gadamer. Moreover, Klee himself was not only one of the most important artists of aesthetic modernism but one of its leading theoreticians, and much in his work, as in Gadamer's, originated in post-Kantian literary theory's explications of symbol and allegory. Indeed at one point in Truth and Method, Gadamer associates his project for a general "theory of hermeneutic experience" not only with Goethe's metaphysical account of the (...) symbolic but equally with a "rehabilitation" of allegory. In this paper, I examine this position and Gadamer's own use of it in his analysis of Klee's work, contrasting it with that of Walter Benjamin's account of allegory, equally indebted to Goethe and this archive. Finally, I contrast the resulting interpretations of Klee, discussing the implications that evolve for understanding both Gadamer and Benjamin— but equally for understanding Klee's work and, provisionally, the work of art, thus construed, for philosophy. (shrink)
This paper proposes an approach to the question of meaning and understanding based on the idea of constitutive rules and their relationship to the social objects they are used to create. This approach implicates mutual attention as an essential aspect of the social processes constitutive of social objects and mutual intelligibility. Social objects as such include the meaning, perception and coherence of things, identities and talk, etc. There is a relatively unexplored but important line of argument in sociology that has, (...) from the beginning, explained the coherence and mutual intelligibility of social objects and associations in terms of constitutive practices and social facts. This line of argument begins with Emile Durkheim (1893) and carries through the work of Harold Garfinkel to current studies of work and interaction, human computer interaction and talk. The argument is that we use constitutive practices (Constitutive rules or constitutive background expectancies) to create social objects and make coherent and shared meanings. To act is in this sense for Garfinkel ([1948]2006) to “mean”. Explaining the consistency of social objects and orders in terms of constitutive orders, rules, or practices is an approach that meets the challenges posed to social science and philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953), Peter Winch (1958) and Paul Grice (1989). (shrink)
This paper considers the questions that Badiou's theory poses to the culture of economic managerialism within education. His argument that radical change is possible, for people and the situations they inhabit, provides a stark challenge to the stifling nature of much current educational debate. In Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism , Badiou describes the current universalism of capitalism, monetary homogeneity and the rule of the count. Badiou argues that the politics of identity are all too easily subsumed by (...) the prerogatives of the marketplace and unable to present, therefore, a critique of the status quo. These processes are, he argues, without the potential for truth. What are the implications of Badiou's claim that education is the arranging of 'the forms of knowledge in such a way that truth may come to pierce a hole in them' ( Badiou, 2005 , p. 9)? I will argue that Badiou's theory opens up space for a kind of thinking about education that resists its colonisation by the cultures of management and marketisation and leads educationalists to consider the emancipatory potential of education in a refreshing new light. (shrink)
Reflections on Meaning refines Paul Horwich’s use theory of meaning. Horwich holds that the meaning of a word is constituted by the nonsemantic property that best explains a certain law. For a given word, the law to be explained governs that word’s use by specifying the “acceptance conditions” of a privileged class of sentences containing the word (26). Horwich devotes considerable energy to details in Reflections on Meaning and focuses on especially pressing problems for his use theory of meaning. (...) As a result the book’s topics run the gamut, and the connections between its chapters are not always strong. Rather than try to provide a synoptic overview, I’ll discuss three areas where it seems further clarification and detail could be fruitful: the distinction between semantic and nonsemantic properties, context sensitivity, and compositionality. Horwich thinks ours is a “fundamentally non-semantic world” (27), making it crucial that meaning be explained in nonsemantic terms. In particular, he insists that we “exclude from the analyzing-properties [of word meaning] anything that would itself require analysis in terms of meaning”: we can’t appeal to reference, belief, or intention, for example (37). But Horwich does not object to “accounts of meaning in psychological terms,” and his own theory relies heavily on a psychological, nonsemantic relation that Horwich calls “acceptance” (37). It’s difficult to see a substantive difference between this technical notion and belief. Acceptance, for Horwich, is “the psychological (but nonsemantic) relation to a sentence that is manifested in our relying on it as a premise in theoretical and practical inference” (40–41). Belief, on the other hand, is a relation with these properties except that it is semantic. Horwich’s other characterizations of acceptance don’t sharpen the distinction very much: “S accepts a sentence just in case that sentence, or its mental correlate, is in S’s belief box” (41); “believing a given proposition is nothing more than accepting some sentence that expresses it” (61).. (shrink)
Impossible worlds are regarded with understandable suspicion by most philosophers. Here we are concerned with a modal argument which might seem to show that acknowledging their existence, or more particularly, the existence of some hypothetical (we do not say “possible”) world in which everything was the case, would have drastic effects, forcing us to conclude that everything is indeed the case—and not just in the hypothesized world in question. The argument is inspired by a metaphysical (rather than modal-logical) argument of (...)Paul Kabay’s which would have us accept this unpalatable conclusion, though its details bear a closer resemblance to a line of thought developed by Jc Beall, in response to which Graham Priest has made some philosophical moves which are echoed in our diagnosis of what goes wrong with the present modal argument. Logical points of some interest independent of the main issue arise along the way. (shrink)
In Moral Creativity, John Wall argues that moral life and thought are inherently and radically creative. Human beings are called by their own primordially created depths to exceed historical evil and tragedy through the ongoing creative transformation of their world. This thesis challenges ancient Greek and biblical separations of ethics and poetic image-making, as well as contemporary conceptions of moral life as grounded in abstract principles or preconstituted traditions. Taking as his point of departure the poetics of the will of (...)Paul Ricoeur, and ranging widely into critical conversations with Continental, narrative, feminist, and liberationist ethics, Wall uncovers the profound senses in which moral practice and thought involve tension, catharsis, excess, and renewal. In the process, he draws new connections between sin and tragedy, practice and poetics, and morality and myth. Rather than proposing a complete ethics, Moral Creativity is a meta-ethical work investigating the creative capability as part of what it means, morally, to be human. This capability is explored around four dimensions of ontology, teleology, deontology, and social practice. In each case, Wall examines a traditional perspective on the relation of ethics to poetics, critiques it using resources from contemporary phenomenology, and develops a conception of a more original poetics of moral life. In the end, moral creativity is a human capability for inhabiting tensions among others and in social systems and, in the image of a Creator, creating together an ever more radically inclusive moral world. (shrink)
Harold Jeffreys' ideas on the interpretation of probability and epistemology are reviewed. It is argued that with regard to the interpretation of probability, Jeffreys embraces a version of logicism that shares some features of the subjectivism of Ramsey and de Finetti. Jeffreys also developed a probabilistic epistemology, characterized by a pragmatical and constructivist attitude towards notions such as ‘objectivity’, ‘reality’ and ‘causality’. 1 Introductory remarks 2 The interpretation of probability 3 Jeffreys' probabilistic epistemology.
Upshot: During the late 1990s’ “Science Wars,” the concept of “social construction” was hotly debated between postmodernist scholars and realist scientists. In this context, Paul Boghossian delivers a concise critique of a Rortyan constructivism. Yet in doing so, he excludes the majority of constructivisms and relativisms from his analysis, fails to engage in the existing literature on those arguments he analyses, and, occasionally, misreads his opponents.
The context for these interviews was a seminar [Peter Gratton] conducted on speculative realism in the Spring 2010. There has been great interest in speculative realism and one reason Gratton surmise[s] is not just the arguments offered, though [Gratton doesn't] want to take away from them; each of these scholars are vivid writers and great pedagogues, many of whom are in constant contact with their readers via their weblogs. Thus these interviews provided an opportunity to forward student questions about their (...) respective works. Though each were conducted on different occasions, the interviews stand as a collected work, tying together the most classical questions about “realism” to ancillary movements about the non-human in politics, ecology, aesthetics, and video gaming—all to point to future movements in this philosophical area. (shrink)
In order to examine fully the nature of human beings, Paul Ricoeur crossed disciplinary boundaries in his work, moving from phenomenology to social and ...
This book explores the usefulness of major categories of Paul Ricoeur's work, such as "memory, " "narrativity, " and his conception of self, within different ...
The following is an essay review of Paul Needham's translation of Pierre Duhem's Lemixte et la combinaison chimique and a numberof other essays. In this review we describe theintent and general features of Le mixte and try to place it in the larger context of Duhem'sprogram for energetics. The long essay (Essay3) opposing Marcellin Berthelot'sthermochemistry is singled out for detailedcommentary, since it gives Duhem's reasons forendorsing Josiah Willard Gibbs's chemicalstatics. We argue that a chemical mechanics ofa Gibbsian sort, defended (...) in Le mixte and otheressays in this volume, was the inspiration for,and basis of, Duhem's energetics. Needham'swelcome translations help an English-languageaudience to better understand the basiccontours of Duhem's important, if ultimatelymisguided, project. We conclude with somecomments on the difficulties in translatingDuhem and on the quality of the translationsNeedham has provided. (shrink)
Oberman, H. A. Quoscunque tulit foecunda vetustas.--Bouwsma, W. J. The two faces of humanism.--Gilmore, M. P. Italian reactions to Erasmian humanism.--Dresden, S. The profile of the reception of the Italian Renaissance in France.--IJsewijn, J. The coming of humanism to the Low Countries.--Hay, D. England and the humanities in the fifteenth century.--Spitz, L. W. The course of German humanism.
(2013). Heidegger, Wittgenstein and St Paul on the Last Judgement: On the Roots and Significance of ‘The Theoretical Attitude’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 143-164. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2012.686980.
Jacob Boehme, the seventeenth-century mystical philosopher, had a significant influence upon Paul Tillich. In this article I offer a reassessment of the relationship between these two thinkers by arguing for an orthodox interpretation of Boehme's doctrine of God that links him more closely with Tillich than recent commentators have suggested. Specifically, I show how Boehme and Tillich stand united against the heterodox Hegel in their presentation of a dynamic process of divinity's self-differentiation and reconciliation that completes itself apart from (...) history rather than within history. This move, I conclude, keeps Boehme and Tillich squarely within the realm of Christian orthodoxy. (Published Online April 7 2006). (shrink)
Paul Otlet (1868–1944) was a Belgian intellectual, a utopian internationalist and a visionary theorist of the field of information science. His work is a milestone in the history of information science since he launched the concept of "documentation," a field that evolved out of bibliography and developed into information science.1 Otlet defined documentation as the whole of the proper means of passing on, communicating, and distributing information. Otlet was a convinced apostle of the idea of universalism as the title (...) of one of his seminal books, Monde. Essai d'Universalisme, illustrates. This was the outcome of a course of fifteen lessons, entitled "L'universalisme, doctrine philosophique et économie mondiale," .. (shrink)
When talk of philosophy of pedagogy comes up today, it is common to hear the names of Aristotle, Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey, or Paulo Freire, but the name of Paul Goodman, who campaigned vigorously for pedagogical reform much of his life, is seldom mentioned. In spite of neglect of his work, Goodman had much to say on pedagogical practice that is rich, poignant, and relevant today. In consequence, it is unfortunate that he is seldom read and discussed today. This (...) essay is an attempt to fill in the gap in the scholarship. I begin by presenting an elaboration of Goodman's key insights. I then offer a critical analysis of those pedagogical insights. (shrink)
This paper examines the ambiguity that attends Paul Klee's characterization of the daemonic element in his work. It does so by analyzing the history of this concept in classical German thought from Wincklemann to Goethe. I note transformations of the concept in writings contemporaneous to Klee in literary theory and theology. These include Lukács, for whom the modern novel articulates the daemonic as an ironic world devoid of transcendental immanence, homeland, or essence; and Otto, for whom the world remained (...) in some sense still not devoid of the numinous. I further consider these issues in brief discussion of Klee's account of the polyphonic construction of the artwork. Finally, attention is given to proximate philosophical treatments of the topic in writers influenced by Klee's work. (shrink)
Kant's treatment of pure aesthetic judgement can ignore ugliness, since an analytic of the ugly, according to a recent essay by Paul Guyer, uncovers the aesthetic impurity of the criteria against which we judge ugliness. Free beauty, as Kant expounds it, does not admit a contrary, and hence a Kantian account of ugliness, such as Guyer's, must look elsewhere in order to scrabble together terms for its definition. Yet if we recognise the ugly by its unsuitability as an object (...) of pure contemplation, then we have made a disinterested judgement of free ugliness. The pleasure of the harmony of the faculties, which is a pleasure in the way the world and our faculties fit together, observes itself contradicted by ugliness. (shrink)
Paul Churchland's philosophical work enjoys an increasing popularity. His imaginative papers on cognitive science and the philosophy of psychology are widely discussed. Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (1979), his major book, is an important contribution to the debate on realism. Churchland provides us with the intellectual tools for constructing a unified scientific Weltanschauung. His network theory of language implies a provocative view of the relation between science and common sense. This paper contains a critical examination of Churchland's (...) network theory of language, which is the foundation of his philosophy. It is argued that the network theory should be seen as deriving its point from traditional empiricism. The network theory enables the empiricist to resist the phenomenalistic temptations inherent in his position, and to build a realist philosophy on the basis of the representative theory of perception. This interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the representative theory is presupposed by Churchland's main argument in favour of the network view. Churchland tends to conceive of himself as a naturalistic epistemologist. But the philosophical faction to which Churchland belongs is rather that of modern neo?Kantianism. (shrink)
In his recent The Temptation of Evolutionary Ethics, Paul Farber has given a negative assessment of the last one hundred years of attempts in Anglo-American philosophy, beginning with Darwin, to develop an evolutionary ethics. Farber identifies some version of the naturalistic fallacy as one of the central sources for the failures of evolutionary ethics. For this reason, and others, Farber urges that though it has its attraction, evolutionary ethics is a temptation to be resisted. In this discussion I identify (...) three major, historically relevant forms of the naturalistic fallacy, the (1) the deductive, (2) genetic, and (3) open question forms and argue that none of them pose an intrinsic problem for evolutionary ethics. I conclude that on this score at least there is no reason to resist temptation. (shrink)
Is Jean-Paul Sartre to be credited for Richard Wright's existentialist leanings? This essay argues that while there have been noteworthy philosophical exchanges between Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Richard Wright, we can find evidence of Wright's philosophical and existential leanings before his interactions with Sartre and Beauvoir. In particular, Wright's short story "The Man Who Lived Underground" is analyzed as an existential, or Black existential, project that is published before Wright met Sartre and/or read his scholarship. Existentialist (...) themes that emerge from Wright's short story include flight, guilt, life, death, dread, and freedom. Additionally, it is argued that "The Man Who Lived Underground" offers a reversal of the prototypical allegory of the cave that we find in the Western (ancient Greek) philosophical tradition. The essay takes seriously the significance of the intellectual exchanges between Sartre, Beauvoir, and Wright while also highlighting Wright's own philosophical legacy. (shrink)
While the origin and development of the just war tradition until the early modern period blended concerns, ideas, and practices from the moral, legal, political, and military spheres, from the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth it largely disappeared as a conscious source of moral reflection about war and its restraint. Beginning in the 1960s, however, American theologian Paul Ramsey initiated a recovery of just war thinking in a series of writings applying the principles of discrimination and proportionality, ideas he (...) traced both to Augustinian theology and to natural law, to the debate over nuclear weapons and later to the Vietnam War. Ramsey's work directly engaged both theological and policy debate over military force, initiating lines of reflection that have since developed further and become increasingly institutionalized. This brief essay examines the nature of Ramsey's just war thought and its influence over the last 40 years. (shrink)
Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida have each made significant contributions to philosophies of difference and yet few have tackled the difficult task of studying the connection between the two. In their forthcoming book, Between Deleuze and Derrida, editors Paul Patton and John Protevi do exactly this. What emerges is a fascinating study of the similarities and differences between the two philosophers and in particular the ethical and political threads underlying their connection.
Presents a response to the Paul Burkett's review of the book ``Ecology and Historical Materialism.'' Overview of the book; Details of the criticisms presented by Burkett; Information on sociologist Karl Marx's theory of history.
Harold Garfinkel: Memorial Remarks, Recollections and Reflections Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-3 DOI 10.1007/s10746-012-9216-2 Authors Stacy Lee Burns, Loyola Marymount University, University Hall, One LMU Drive, Suite 4341, Los Angeles, CA 90045-2659, USA Journal Human Studies Online ISSN 1572-851X Print ISSN 0163-8548.
Recent scholarship has shown chattel slavery in the Roman Empire to have been a deeply oppressive experience. Paul knew that reality well and used the language of slavery metaphorically in Galatians and Romans to describe humanity's subjection to sin. However, he also made a remarkable shift in his use of the metaphor to indicate a new form of slavery to God which brings freedom, thereby subverting conventional ways of understanding slavery.In Paul's sense, slavery is an ineluctable part of (...) human existence in which we have a choice of being a slave to sin or a slave to God. Becoming a slave means giving up all claims to status and relates to Christ's humble-mindedness in Philippians. The slave is also a model of faithfulness, comparable with God's faithfulness to Israel and Christ's faithfulness to the mission given him by his Father. Being a slave (in Paul's sense) is at the heart of the Christian life, exemplifying the ‘obedience of faith’, for it is through this faithfulness that we become righteous. (shrink)
Paul Ricoeur's understanding of the relations of faith, love, and hope suggests a unique approach to theological ethics, one that holds fresh promise for bringing together considerations of the good (teleology) and the right (deontology) around the notion of an "economy of the gift." The economy of the gift articulates Ricoeur's distinctively dialectical understanding of the relation of the human and the divine, and the resulting dialectical moral relation of the self and the other. Despite our fallen condition, Ricoeur (...) suggests, we are called by the divine to embrace the radical possibility of the reconciliation of human goods under the requirement of accountability to human diversity and otherness. (shrink)
Hermeneutics, or the science of interpretation,is well accepted in the humanities. In thefield of education, hermeneutics has played arelatively marginal role in research. It isthe task of this essay to introduce thegeneral methods and findings of Paul Ricoeur'shermeneutics. Specifically, the essayinterprets the usefulness of Ricoeur'sphilosophy in the study of domination. Theproblem of domination has been a target ofanalysis for critical pedagogy since itsinception. However, the role of interpretationas a constitutive part of ideology critique isrelatively understudied and it is here (...) thatRicoeur's ideas are instructive. Last, theessay radicalizes Ricoeur's insights in orderto realize their potential to disruptasymmetrical relations of power in education. To this extent, the author contributes to thebuilding of a critical brand of hermeneutics,or the interpretation of domination. (shrink)
Speakers can use sentences to make assertions. Theorists who reflect on this truism often say that sentences have linguistic meanings, and that assertions have propositional contents. But how are meanings related to contents? Are meanings less dependent on the environment? Are contents more independent of language? These are large questions, which must be understood partly in terms of the phenomena that lead theorists to use words like ‘meaning’ and ‘content’, sometimes in nonstandard ways. Opportunities for terminological confusion thus abound when (...) talking about the relations among semantics, pragmatics, and truth. As Stalnaker (2003) stresses, in Quinean fashion, it is hard to separate the task of evaluating hypotheses in these domains from the task of getting clear about what the hypotheses are. But after some stage-setting, I suggest that we combine Stalnaker’s (1970, 1978, 1984, 1999, 2003) externalist account of content with Chomsky’s (1965, 1977, 1993, 2000a) internalist conception of meaning. (shrink)
In 'Religious Pluralism and the Divine: Another Look at John Hick's Neo-Kantian Proposal' ("Religious Studies", xxx, 1994) Paul Eddy argues against the ultimate ineffability of the Real, and claims that a neo-Kantian epistemology leads to a Feuerbachian non-realism. In response I stress (a) the impossibility of attributing to the Real the range of incompatible characteristics of its phenomenal (i.e. experienceable) manifestations, so that it must lie beyond the range of our human religious categories, and (b) the distinction, (...) which Eddy fails to observe, between grounds for believing in the Divine, and reasons for thinking that the Divine can be differently conceived and experienced. (shrink)
Feminism and Farming: A Response to Paul Thompson’s the Agrarian Vision Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9328-0 Authors Erin McKenna, Department of Philosophy, Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, WA, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.
Paul Bernays was both a philosopher and a mathematician. He is famous for his logical-mathematical production (also in collaboration with David Hilbert), while his philosophical works have been given less consideration. The present article is an attempt to reconstruct the way that led Bernays from his early writings on ethics to his final epistemological thought.
An Exact Pair for the Arithmetic Degrees whose join is not a Weak Uniform Upper Bound, in the Recursive Function Theory-Newsletters, No. 28, August-September 1982.
We think recent work in linguistics tells against the traditional claim that a string of words like (1) Every girl pushed some truck has two readings, indicated by the following formal language sentences (with restricted quantifiers): (1a) [!x:Gx]["y:Ty]Pxy (1b) ["y:Ty][!x:Gx]Pxy. In our view, (1) does not have any b-reading in which ‘some truck’ has widest scope.1 The issue turns on details concerning syntactic transformations and terms like ‘every’. This illustrates an important point for the study of natural language: ambiguity hypotheses (...) are indeed hypotheses—i.e., theoretical claims to be justified in light of various considerations, not theses whose truth can be directly observed by speakers. (shrink)
It is, I suppose, a truism that an adequate theory of meaning for a natural language L will associate each sentence of L with its meaning. But the converse does not hold. A theory that associates each sentence with its meaning is not, by virtue of that fact, an adequate theory of meaning. For it is also a truism that a semantic theory should explain the (interesting and explicable) semantic facts. And one cannot decree that the relevant facts are all (...) reportable with instances of schemata like ‘S means that p’ or ‘S, by virtue of its meaning, is true iff p’. Investigation suggests that there is much more for semanticists to explain: natural languages exhibit synonymies, ambiguities, and entailments; for any string of words, there are endlessly many meanings it cannot have; there are semantic generalizations, including crosslinguistic generalizations, that go uncaptured and unexplained by merely associating sentences with their meanings; etc. Initially, one might think these facts are “peripheral” and can thus be ignored if the aim is to explain why sentences mean what they do. But the study of natural language suggests otherwise. (One can’t tell, in advance of investigation, which facts are peripheral to a given domain. It was initially tempting to think that one could ignore falling bodies, and the tides, if the aim was to explain why planets move as they do.). (shrink)
Peter-Paul Verbeek's Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11569-012-0143-5 Authors Sadjad Soltanzadeh, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Canberra, Australia Journal NanoEthics Online ISSN 1871-4765 Print ISSN 1871-4757.
This paper is a reflection on the boundaries of academic discourse as I came to be acutely aware of them while attempting to teach a graduate seminar in qualitative research methods. The purpose of the readings in Husserl and Schutz and the writing exercises was to assist students trained in quantitative methods and steeped in positivistic assumptions about research to write phenomenological descriptions of lived experience. Paul could not write the assigned papers due to a diagnosed writing disability but (...) he did submit fictional stories and sketches which beautifully illustrated the concepts of Husserl and Schutz. Paul's disability presented a natural bracketing experiment which brought the positivistic assumptions surrounding academic research and writing to the forefront. I engaged in verbal dialogues with Paul, in which he discussed the philosophical ideas. My work with Paul highlighted the extent to which the academic lifeworld marginalizes those who seek to write from the heart, disguising even the work of those philosophers who wish to uncover direct experiences.The crisis of the sciences is the loss of meaning for life. (Husserl, 1970: 5). (shrink)
An effort to recover and explicate the idea of just war in Christian terms spans Paul Ramsey's career for almost four decades, from his earliest book (1950: 166-84) to his last (1988). His writings on this subject constitute one of the most important thematic and substantive contributions of his thought. This essay begins with a summary of classical just war tradition and assesses the relation of Ramsey's conception of just war to it. Then it examines that conception in (...) detail, focusing on three topics: the core idea of Christian love as an absolute moral norm expressed in the principle of discrimination, Ramsey's conversionist understanding of history and of politics that undergirds his argument from both discrimination and proportionality in conversation with the secular policy community, and the imbalance between treatment of the "jus in hello and the jus ad helium" in Ramsey's just war thought. Emphasis throughout is given to the influence of the contexts of debate in which Ramsey developed his ideas. (shrink)
Taking inspiration from developments in neurocomputational modeling, Paul Church-land develops his positions in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science. Concerning the former, Churchland relaxes his eliminativism at various points and seems to endorse a traditional identity account of sensory qualia. Although he remains unsympathetic to folk psychology, he no longer seeks the elimination of normative epistemology, but rather its transformation to a philosophical enterprise informed by current developments in the relevant sciences. Churchland supplies suggestive discussions of (...) the character of knowledge, simplicity, explanation, theory, and conceptual change. Many of his treatments turn on his prototype activation model of neural representation, which looks to the notion of a 'prototype' as it is employed in the psychological literature on concept representation, however, this and other features of Churchland's neurocomputational program do not square well with some of his views about cross-scientific relations. (shrink)
