Online research in philosophy

Integration Area C. Nature, sources, and limits of human knowledge; roles of perception, reason, testimony, and intuition in acquiring rational beliefs; e.g. science, mathematics, values, the arts, religion, social issues, and psychological states. G.E. Integration IC.

Science starts out with the idea of a person as billions of neurons housed in a body that is a cloud of particles. Common sense starts out with the idea of a person having capacities belonging to a single individual. The common sense person does not have parts. Our objectifying science slowly takes over the person as it tends toward physical materialism. Where will it end? What is being gradually pushed out of the world? If science had already taken over, (...) if the categories of neuroscience were complete, then it would be possible to speculate about its relation to earlier stages of thought. However, that is not the situation. The categories of science have yet to emerge. The puzzling character of new scientific objects reveals that we are on the threshold of profound conceptual change. The.. (shrink)

Science starts out with the idea of a person as billions of neurons housed in a body that is a cloud of particles. Common sense starts out with the idea of a person having capacities belonging to a single individual. The common sense person does not have parts. Our objectifying science slowly takes over the person as it tends toward physical materialism. Where will it end? What is being gradually pushed out of the world? If science had already taken over, (...) if the categories of neuroscience were complete, then it would be possible to speculate about its relation to earlier stages of thought. However, that is not the situation. The categories of science have yet to emerge. The puzzling character of new scientific objects reveals that we are on the threshold of profound conceptual change. The Humanities are at a crossroad. Do the Humanities scoff at the encroachment of science and risk the fate of those who resisted the Copernican revolution? Do they embrace the changes only to be burned at the stake like those who accepted the Copernican revolution? I suggest that the Humanities mobilize their collective power to create the categories in terms of which science will explicate the very idea of a person. Over the last fifty years, philosophers in the Kantian tradition have offered strategies for developing the new categories in humanistic terms. One approach follows “color” and “consciousness” through their passage from a common sense image of the world to a developing scientific image. It is a journey that illustrates the problems and the puzzles ahead. It indicates the perils of the next recategorization of the world. (shrink)

(10) Examples (13) meaning as functional classification (14) meaning as functional classification (14) Introduces dot-quotes (15) “stand for” is a special case of functional classification (19) classical problem of “participation”.

My goal is to illustrate Descartes’ reliance on two quite different and competing interpretations of objective reality by explaining how each is used in defending his causal axioms. The initial criticism comes from Caterus (and is later taken up by Gassendi) who charges that Descartes makes it appear as if the thought in its objective aspect (the intentional entity) is really distinct from the thought qua modification of the mind (i.e., the thought in its formal aspect). This implies that the (...) object-of-the-thought is actually distinct from the thought-of-the-object in which case, (a) Descartes cannot account for the purported relation between the two, and (b) the intentional entity must exemplify properties which belong neither “immaterially” to mental substance nor concretely to physical substance. Descartes rejects Caterus’ assessment of his position: he has not introduced a fourth kind of real entity into the causal order distinct from the mind, its modifications, and the physical object thought of. However, in responding to Caterus, Descartes implicitly appeals to a Suarezian theory of intentionality in which reference to the ostensibly separate reality of the objective entity is reducible to the formal concept: the thought-of-the-object is not really distinct from the object-of-thought. Clearly, Descartes cannot explicitly use the Suarezian theory because it relies on a system of causal explanation (the doctrine of the species “flitting through the air”) which Descartes rejects on scientific grounds. I shall argue that Descartes is committed to a notion of the “form” of the mind, viz., a modification of mind, which should allow for a non-relational modeling of the thought qua modification of the mind and its intentional object, but that he cannot consistently attribute to mental acts enough structure to support his theory. (shrink)

Among late Renaissance and early Modern philosophers, the concepts of “sympathy” or “harmony” are a recurring theme. My goal is to show that theories which rely on such concepts, far from being an attempt to avoid the emerging mechanistic or empirical trends, are actually the form which these trends took in the wake of an increasing disenchantment with Aristotelian psychology. Fracastorius, Suarez and Descartes provide the texts: their accounts of the interaction between cognitive faculties exhibit a growing awareness that the (...) conception of causality had to be supplemented. And while each appears to share the general belief that aspects of the Thomistic-Aristotelian framework can survive the necessary changes, they disagree about how much dogmatic psychology has to be discarded. What they decide to leave in and the reasons given for discarding the rest provide insight into the history of explanation. It is in the metaphysics of harmony that we can trace the early growth of Rationalism. (shrink)