Traditional debate on the metaphysics of gender has been a contrast of essentialist and social-constructionist positions. The standard reaction to this opposition is that neither position alone has the theoretical resources required to satisfy an equitable politics. This has caused a number of theorists to suggest ways in which gender is unified on the basis of social rather than biological characteristics but is “real” or “objective” nonetheless – a position I term social objectivism. This essay begins by making explicit the (...) motivations for, and central assumptions of, social objectivism. I then propose that gender is better understood as a real kind with a historical essence, analogous to the biologist’s claim that species are historical entities. I argue that this proposal achieves a better solution to the problems that motivate social objectivism. Moreover, the account is consistent with a post-positivist understanding of the classificatory practices employed within the natural and social sciences. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy involves subjecting philosophical methods and judgments to empirical scrutiny. I begin by exploring conceptual, confirmational, and empirical factors that limit the significance of experiment-based and survey-based approaches to the evaluation of philosophical epistemic activities. I then consider specific criticisms of experimental philosophy: its experimental conditions lack ecological validity; it wrongly assumes that philosophers rely on psychologized data; it overlooks the reflective and social elements of philosophical case analysis; it misconstrues the importance of both procedural and evaluative forms of (...) philosophical expertise; it incorrectly views psychological bias as incompatible with reliability; and it generalizes to a global, self-defeating skepticism about case judgment. I explain why these criticisms should be understood as converging and interdependent. I also set out a three-level model of philosophical case judgment that frames the criticisms. (shrink)

There is broad agreement among social researchers and social ontologists that the project of dividing humans into social kinds should be guided by at least two methodological commitments. First, a commitment to what best serves moral and political interests, and second, a commitment to describing accurately the causal structures of social reality. However, researchers have not sufficiently analyzed how these two commitments interact and constrain one another. In the absence of that analysis, several confusions have set in, threatening to undermine (...) shared goals for the responsible modeling of social kinds of humans. This essay first explains the source and substance of these confusions. Then, by distinguishing different value-laden investigative questions into the classification of social kinds of humans, it sets out specific relations of dependence and constraint between empirically-driven investigations and value-driven investigations into social kinds of humans. The result is a more detailed and fruitful framework for thinking about the classification of social kinds that respects both normative interests and mind-independent causal regularities. (shrink)

In domains like stock brokerage, clinical psychiatry, and long‐term political forecasting, experts generally fail to outperform novices. Empirical researchers agree on why this is: experts must receive direct or environmental learning feedback during training to develop reliable expertise, and these domains are deficient in this type of feedback. A growing number of philosophers resource this consensus view to argue that, given the absence of direct or environmental philosophical feedback, we should not give the philosophical intuitions or theories of expert philosophers (...) greater credence than those of novice philosophers. This article has three objectives. The first is to explore several overlooked issues concerning the strategy of generalizing from empirical studies of non‐philosophical expertise to the epistemic status of philosophical expertise. The second is to explain why empirical research into a causal relationship between direct learning feedback and enhanced expert performance does not provide good grounds for abandoning a default optimism about the epistemic superiority of expert philosophical theories. The third is to sketch a positive characterization of learning feedback that addresses developmental concerns made salient by the empirical literature on expert performance for specifically theory‐driven or “armchair” domains like philosophy. (shrink)

Modularity theorists have challenged that there are, or could be, general learning mechanisms that explain theory-of-mind development. In response, supporters of the ‘scientific theory-theory’ account of theory-of-mind development have appealed to children's use of auxiliary hypotheses and probabilistic causal modeling. This article argues that these general learning mechanisms are not sufficient to meet the modularist's challenge. The article then explores an alternative domain-general learning mechanism by proposing that children grasp the concept belief through the progressive alignment of relational structure that (...) occurs as a result of structural-comparison. The article also explores the implications of the proposed account for Fodor's puzzle of conceptual learning. (shrink)

The theory of mind debate has reached a “hybrid consensus” concerning the status of theory-theory and simulation-theory. Extant hybrid models either specify co-dependency and implementation relations, or distribute mentalizing tasks according to folk-psychological categories. By relying on a non-developmental framework these models fail to capture the central connection between simulation and theory. I propose a “dynamic” hybrid that is informed by recent work on the nature of similarity cognition. I claim that Gentner’s model of structure-mapping allows us to understand simulation (...) as a process in which psychological representations are aligned, causing the spontaneous abstraction of theoretical generalizations about the psychological domain. (shrink)

For the last several years I have made the daily newspaper the pedagogical center piece of my philosophy seminar. This essay begins by describing the variations, themes, and logistics of this approach. The essay then offers several arguments in support of the value of this approach. The first argument references measurable indicators of success. A second argument contends that by “going live” with philosophical concepts, the newspaper-centered approach is uniquely well-positioned to motivate and excite the philosophy student. A third argument (...) claims that the newspaper-centered approach is well-positioned to construct an individualized bridge between the student and the world of philosophy. (shrink)

This essay explains the prevalence of porn consumption by modeling it as a form of simulation. According to simulation theory (Gordon 1986, Goldman 2006) people predict and explain other’s behavior by using their own mind to model the mind of a target individual, much like an engineer might use a model aircraft to simulate the behavior of an actual aircraft. However, the cognitive mechanisms required for simulation have application outside of psychological interpretation. For example, it is plausible that while consuming (...) pornography individuals simulate the actual activities as depicted by the pornographic material. On this construal, viewers of pornography think and feel as though they are truly having the depicted experience: from the psychological and phenomenological perceptive of someone watching a pornographic video, they really are being sexually pleasured by others, and in just those specific ways. The goal of this essay is to develop the pornography-as-simulation model and examine both its social and theoretical implications. (shrink)

This essay adjudicates between theoretical models of psychological concept acquisition. I provide new reasons to be skeptical about both simulationist and modularist models. I then defend the scientific-theory-theory account against familiar objections. I conclude by arguing that the scientific-theory-theory account must be supplemented by an account of hypothesis discovery.

There has been a significant amount of research, from a variety of disciplines, targeting the nature and political status of human categories such as woman, man, Black, and Latino. The result is a tangle of concepts and distinctions that often obscure more than clarify the subject matter. This incentivizes the creation of fresh terms and distinctions that might disentangle the old, but too often these efforts just add to the snarl. The process iterates, miscommunication becomes standard, and insufficiently vetted concepts (...) can gain central theoretical status. Over the last two decades, Sally Haslanger ’s work in this area – conveniently consolidated in the volume “Resisting Reality: Social construction and social critique” – has been a much needed corrective to this process; Haslanger ’s terms and distinctions really do disentangle. This review organizes and explicates central themes from Haslanger ’s volume. It then offers some critical comments, arguing that some of Haslanger ’s distinctions and proposals are less successful than others. (shrink)

Presenting a novel account of singular thought, a systematic application of recent work in the theory of speech acts, and a partial revival of Russell's analysis of singular terms, this book takes an original approach to the perennial problems of reference and singular terms by separating the underlying issues into different levels of analysis.

Persistence through time is like extension through space. A road has spatial parts in the subregions of the region of space it occupies; likewise, an object that exists in time has temporal parts in the various subregions of the total region of time it occupies. This view — known variously as four dimensionalism, the doctrine of temporal parts, and the theory that objects “perdure” — is opposed to “three dimensionalism”, the doctrine that things “endure”, or are “wholly present”.1 I will (...) attempt to resolve this dispute in favor of four dimensionalism by means of a novel argument based on considerations of vagueness. But before argument in this area can be productive, I believe we must become much clearer than is customary about exactly what the dispute is, for the usual ways of formulating the dispute are flawed, especially where three dimensionalism is concerned. (shrink)

Although it might go without mention, editor Bret Davis nevertheless reminds us on the first page of his introduction to Key Concepts that “Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is widely considered to be the most famous, influential, and controversial philosopher of the twentieth century.” This really fine new companion put together by Davis promises to elucidate the main lines of Heidegger’s thought at a moment when Heidegger is perhaps receiving more scholarly attention and, indeed, more diverse scholarly attention, than at any previous (...) time. Alongside the vast and ever-growing body of literature on Heidegger, not only has a new edition of Joan Stambaugh’s English translation of Being and Time, revised by Dennis Schmidt, now appeared (State University of New York Press, 2010) but also previously untranslated writings are being put into English at an impressive clip. The purpose of Key Concepts, as Davis indicates in the “Acknowledgements,” is to facilitate readers’ access to Heidegger’s thought with a companion that strikes a mean between more advanced scholarly treatments of Heidegger’s ideas and more introductory surveys. (shrink)

Many otherwise reasonable philosophers are impatient with ontology. These philosophers will probably have little time for Objects and Persons, which claims that while there do exist “atoms arranged statuewise”, there do not exist statues; while there do exist atoms arranged tablewise and atoms arranged chairwise, there exist no tables and chairs. Though I join these philosophers, at the end of the day, in rejecting Merricks’s claims, that day is long, whereas they want a quick verdict. But why? Do our impatient (...) friends think that Merricks’s claims are contradictory, analytically false, or otherwise conceptually incoherent? They may say that the conventional meaning of “there exists a statue” is “there exist atoms arranged statuewise”, but this does not stand up to scrutiny. Someone could, of course, just decide to mean such a thing by “there exists a statue”, but then her pronouncements would be irrelevant to Merricks, who intends to be using a.. (shrink)

In this paper we present an informal review of our recent work whose goal is to develop a mathematical theory of the physical phenomenon of emission and absorption of radiation by systems of nonrelativistic matter such as atoms and molecules.

No contemporary philosopher has tried harder to demystify the mind than Fred Dretske. But how to demystify it without eviscerating it? Can consciousness be explained? Many philosophers think that no matter how detailed and systematic our knowledge becomes of how the brain works and how it subserves mental functions, there will always remain an "explanatory gap." Call it a brute fact or call it a mystery, trying to explain consciousness, they think, is as futile as trying to explain why there (...) is something rather than nothing. Dretske is not exercised by the explanatory gap-he'd rather exorcise it. He thinks we can get all the explanation we need by understanding what consciousness does. Consciousness is at bottom sensory experience and what it does, essentially, is to represent the world. Explaining consciousness, therefore, comes down to understanding the representational character of experience. (shrink)

At its inception, the Medicare program was seen as a way to bring the elderly into the mainstream of American medicine. The program after twenty years is increasingly viewed as an instrumentality to influence the nature and costs of American medicine. The first part of this article reviews the origins, history, and evolution of the Medicare program in order to explain how and why this change has come about. In the concluding section, the article explores further the implications of the (...) program's concentration on the aged, its uncertain notion of entitlement, and the bewildering character of the current claims of generational inequity allegedly imposed by Medicare's present outlays of $70 billion and its persistingly high rate of cost increases. Keywords: elderly, Medicare, health care CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 136-137 [Access article in PDF] John Watkins. Human Freedom after Darwin: A Critical Rationalist View. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1999. Pp. xi + 348. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $24.95. John Watkins examines man's place in nature since Darwin. As a critical rationalist, using the methods of science, Watkins hopes to construct a world-view which challenges competing hypotheses and supports his own. He (...) recognizes that his view is, also, a candidate for critical rejection. All scientific views are, in principle, fallible. He divides his book into two parts: Naturalism and Freedom. [End Page 137]In evolutionary development, he accepts, as critically established, the sequence: matter before life, life before mind, and, no mind without a brain. Thus, naturalism is preferred beforesupernaturalism or divine intervention. These guides may support a continuous, steady evolutionaryprocess or discontinuity, mutations, and various stages of change. Darwin acceptedthe former and held physical changes were unaffected by consciousness. All change is, in principle,present from the beginning and unfolds over time. Darwin's view, then, is deterministic.Watkins challenges this position and argues for consciousness affecting physical change in new and unpredictable ways. It is herein that the possibility of animal and human freedom lies. Watkins gives examples of the actions of the hunter and hunted among animals, and of strategies developed by humans during crises, to support the view that there are novel and unpredictable actions by conscious beings. These actions can hardly be called predetermined in the nature of things. There is a huge difference between a general genetic structure for kinds of behavior and specific actions during crises (not that these are the only instances of freedom). At any rate, there is a reciprocal action between an individual and its environment and not merely a unilinear one.In Part II, Freedom, Watkins examines some classical, philosophical views of human freedom. He gives brief, but penetrating, analyses of Hobbes, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza. Either they account for human action in strictly physical terms that are causally deterministic or they turn to non-empirical sources that are not verifiable. Since the latter make no difference in our account of behavior, they are entities multiplied beyond necessity. Those who give a completely deterministic view—Hobbes, Hume, and Schopenhauer—offer no continuum between cause and chance. Chance turns out to depend upon our ignorance of causes; further examination would show it causally determined.Watkins seems most sympathetic to Spinoza's treatment. In his hard-headed naturalism, Spinoza rejects any non-natural or supernatural accounts of human behavior. He is a strict determinist where man's confrontation with nature is concerned. Human emotions are passive and react to our environment; they do not affect it. Human reason makes no difference, but in its capacity to contemplate eternal truths it offers a way out. Instead of reacting to nature, man may transcend it. This transcendence is the key to Spinoza's view of the intellectual love of God, and human freedom. Watkins criticizes this flight from man's place in nature and the limited use of reason. In this vein, Spinoza seems to abandon the confrontation of nature for a flight to eternal truths. For Watkins, however, reasons must be used in confronting nature. As we saw, he claims that reason may have an effect upon the environment that is novel and unpredictable. Human agency is a part of the evolutionary story. Human agency is not an either/or proposition. There are degrees of effectiveness in human response to nature.In his analysis of human freedom, Watkins turns to the works of Newton, Faraday, Einstein, and others. In studying the problems posed by the consideration of natural phenomena during their time, they showed intellectual perspicacity of the highest order. Faraday's unified field theory brought electrical and magnetic phenomena, previously thought to be disparate, together. Newton's laws of motion brought celestial and terrestrial mechanics under one theory. Einstein changed the way in which space, time, mass, energy, and light were conceived. In a real sense, they were... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American UniversityTheodore GracykArt Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, by Howard Singerman. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1999, 296 pp., $19.95 paper.Howard Singerman's Art Subjects is a study of the training of visual artists in American universities from 1912 to the present. More precisely, the book is an account of how two philosophies ofeducation have competed to inform (...) that training. At the outset, Singerman announces that the book explores a long-standing "struggle between vision and language" (p. 10) that culminates with a decisive privileging of language. The book mimics its putative subject in at least one interesting way. As it was for art and the training of American artists in the twentieth century (at least on Singerman's account of them), so it is with the book. Each moves from a practice grounded in objective reality to a jargon-ridden discourse that limits entry to anyone outside of its acutely self-regarding disciplinary field. Although the book's acknowledgments segment thanks one individual for demanding thatSingerman "come to a real conclusion" for the book, readers should note Singerman's subsequent admission that it may not have one. At times it even appears that Singerman goes out of his way to avoid drawing one.Art Subjects appears to have started life as Singerman's doctoral dissertation, but it only occasionally displays the dull by-the-numbers writing of such documents. The book has a clear organization and its numerous quotations are carefully documented. The overall argument is framed, beginning and end, with Singerman's autobiography of his own time as a university art student. It provides him with his framing question: if he has a M.F.A. in sculpture but never learned to sculpt, what does his professional degree signify? The answer is that it indicates that his work is no longer facile. He has progressed from the realm of the artist whose work is professional, displaying facility, to the stage where he is professional. He has progressed to the point where being an artist is theartist's true subject: "Artists are the subject of graduate school; they are both who and what is taught" (p. 3). If this progression is best indicated by an artist's lack of facility in producing works of art, that is the price of professionalism. In the post-World War II university, art training is "founded on the primacy of theory over practice" (p. 181). Yet the result is professionalism without a clear profession other than as an employee of the post-World War II university: the M.F.A. prepares artists for the university discipline of art. Citing Foucault, Singerman seems satisfied that artists have taken command of a theoretical field. Disciplinary boundaries are created and policed by its rules of professional discourse. At the same time, Singerman declares his intention to "use the concept of the discipline as it constrains and structures discourses to keep from having to judge whether or not art is a profession" (p. 201). He likewise mentions [End Page 119] but does not take any stand on the "putative decline of recent art" (p. 210). This ongoing refusal to judge deprives the book of potentially interesting conclusions. It also calls into question Singerman's repeated references to the "self-criticality" of the discipline.Singerman's neutrality might berefreshing were it not for his use of Foucault to introduce the notion that each new "proposition" within the disciplinary discourse represents progress in a "theoretical field," moving "knowledge" forward. Talking about art (and not, to be sure, talking all that much about specific works of art) and talking about being an artist may or may not represent progress. For instance, Singerman's early chaptersmake the case that the triumph of artistic modernism must be understood as a repudiation of a "female" aesthetic and even of women as artists. Singerman returns to the topic ofwomen artists only once, to note Griselda Pollock's approval of the entry of feminism into the academic discipline of art. Thus Singerman is silent on the question of whether progress is made when the number of women is... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary EntertainmentTheodore GracykNeo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, by Angela Ndalianis. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2004, 323 pp., $34.95 cloth.Like the cliché about not judging a book by its cover, the prominence of the term "aesthetics" in a book's title is no indication of what one will find inside. Has the term become so elastic that it will now cover everything cultural? Or is (...) it the case, as in Angela Ndalianis's discussions of theme park rides and computer games, that the term applies to anything that has a parallel in earlier practices covered by this rubric? Ndalianis may be stretching it too far, for the book in question emphasizes parallels with baroque practices that predate Alexander Baumgarten's 1735 proposal to use "aesthetics" as the name of an emerging discipline concerned [End Page 115] with perception. We are alternately informed that the book explores the poetics, semiotics, and the "logic of contemporary media." But because Ndalianis holds that recent visual media involve a "specific system of perception" that arises from a "radical cultural transformation" (22-23), the term "aesthetics" may be as good as any other in conveying her purposes. For she is not concerned with artistic style—presumably the province of art historians. She is theorizing broadly about visual media by examining an assortment of media strategies found in the two eras and aims to identify their common "morphology" (19). Her sources are Fredric Jameson, Walter Benjamin, and Gilles Deleuze rather than, say, Kendall Walton, Noël Carroll, or Gregory Currie.Ndalianis's main idea is that there is a strong but not exact parallel between our own times and the visual forms favored in the seventeenth century. (For Ndalianis, the baroque period stretches from 1492 to the 1680s.) The two epochs involve similar cultural sensibilities and artistic practices, so if we understand baroque art and visual media, we will better understand what is going on in contemporary media. In short, the framing assumption is Shelley's dictum that art is the expression of the spirit of its time. More specifically, the design of modern entertainment media is argued to be very similar to a wide range of baroque entertainment and representational practice. But the similarity is not due to either awareness or imitation of baroque style. Each "logically emerged as a result of systemic and cultural transformations" peculiar to its own time (17). The similar "logic" of each period is thus seen as evidence that there are parallels in the "general tendencies" and consequent "dominant cultural sensibilities" of the two periods (17-21). Because hindsight is more reliable than precognition, a backward glance at the baroque may help us to better grasp our own historical and cultural context.Having outlined these proposals in a lengthy introduction, Ndalianis offers five chapters, each devoted to a specific parallel. All five chapters share a similar strategy. A different aspect of neo-baroque communication is highlighted, and one type of baroque art or entertainment is compared and contrasted with its neo-baroque counterpart, with at least one neo-baroque example explored in considerable detail.The introduction focuses on Jurassic Park (both the film and the theme park ride). Chapter 1 focuses on neo-baroque "narrative strategies," as first Don Quixote and its sequel and then the palace at Versailles are compared to the various Alien films and comic books. The main focus is "serial" art as an outgrowth of capitalism, generating "an aesthetics of repetition" enriched by its "rampant self-reflexivity" (69). Chapter 2 shifts to the baroque love of labyrinthine structure, with its "enforced circuitousness, planned chaos, choice among paths, intricacy, complexity, and an invitation to the audience to engage reflexively" in exploring the labyrinth (84). Ndalianis's baroque case is Pietro de Cortona's elaborate painted ceiling for the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. The neo-baroque counterpart is the Doom video game and its sequel, Doom II. Inexplicably, for a book with numerous illustrations, there are no visuals to display Doom for those unfamiliar with such games. Chapter 3 examines baroque cartography as a background for discussing geographic discovery and colonization, leading to the neo-baroque... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 133-134 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Heidegger's Concept of Truth Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Heidegger's Concept of Truth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxx + 462. Cloth, $59.95. This somewhat trite and overly generic English title, from a Heideggerian perspective, is better specified by the title of the German original, which was perhaps too provocative for an analytical (...) English audience conditioned by Carnap's critique of Heidegger: "The Prejudice of Logic: Investigations into the Theory of Truth of the Early Heidegger." The author's more-than-literal, amplifying and supplementing translation of his own German text of 1994 aims to face up to all the "hard interpretive decisions" (xxii) that Heidegger poses by leaving no German term uninterpreted or untranslated, including even Dasein as "being-here." The translation is thus more illuminating from the start in the sense in which "logic" too narrowly conceived and claimed to be the sole arbiter of truth becomes a "disabling" prejudice (xvi) rather than the "enabling prejudice" that logic normally is for any discourse and thought. Dahlstrom's focus is on the early and so "logical" Heidegger (1912-29), before he decided to lose even logic (better, "onto-theo-logic") in a more original tornadic "whirl" of abyssal questioning in the "turning." Hence, the opening pages point to Heidegger's quest for a more original philosophical (transcendental, phenomenological, ontological, hermeneutical) "logic of philosophy" (Emil Lask's phrase) that "produces" the fundamental concepts or categories for any field of being, including itself. This original productive logic of category formation "transcends" the formal logic of judgment while founding it.It is the transcendental and material logic that Heidegger found in Kant, which is oriented toward the spatio-temporal schematisms of the imagination that emerge from the transcendental aesthetic to mediate the application of the judicative forms of the understanding into befitting categories of reality. But Dahlstrom does not get around to detail this quasi-Kantian account of material logic, or Lask's version of it, which finds its fundamental stratum in the already categorized (i.e., conceptually interpreted) originally unitary object, prior to its distinction into form and matter, subject and predicate, etc. Lask calls this a priori categorized realm of intentionally structured meaning (intelligibility, truth) a "panarchy of the logos," which Heidegger will readily transform into his "hermeneutics of facticity" (double genitive: "life lays itself out, interprets itself") and identify with the prejudicative, prepredicative temporal realm of truth as "disclosedness" and "unconcealment." [End Page 134]But Dahlstrom does find, in Husserl's unpublished logic courses of the early twenties in which "Analyses of Passive Synthesis" are carried out, a "genetic logic" on the level of the "transcendental aesthetic" in the "complicated intentional systems" of the sensing human body situating itself by constituting the time and space of its world prepredicatively and prejudicatively, a "logic" or logos which accordingly "anticipates much of the analysis of being-in-the-world undertaken in Being and Time" (155). And yet Heidegger, who as Husserl's trusted assistant was granted generous access to such unpublished manuscripts, "remained silent" about these clear anticipations. Instead he criticizes Husserl publicly in his own courses, culminating in Being and Time, for neglecting the question of the "being of intentionality" as well as of the "sense" of being as such, which Heidegger finds in "timeliness" (Zeitlichkeit), the originary time of being-here. Yet in arriving at this temporal sense of being, Heidegger "clearly appropriates the horizonal (allegedly preobjective and presubjective) character of time-consciousness elaborated by Husserl." Why, then, "Heidegger's silence"? "These breakthroughs of Husserl's later thinking are not mentioned by Heidegger because he wants to appropriate them in his own way and without the framework out of which they arose. An injustice and a disservice is thus done to Husserl's phenomenology... [which is] the price of the philosophical maturity of its most famous student... [as] his thinking moves to a plane beyond the reach of Husserlian phenomenology and terminology" (169f).This in-depth discussion of Heidegger's relationship with Husserl... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 136-137 [Access article in PDF] John Watkins. Human Freedom after Darwin: A Critical Rationalist View. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1999. Pp. xi + 348. Cloth, $49.95. Paper, $24.95. John Watkins examines man's place in nature since Darwin. As a critical rationalist, using the methods of science, Watkins hopes to construct a world-view which challenges competing hypotheses and supports his own. He (...) recognizes that his view is, also, a candidate for critical rejection. All scientific views are, in principle, fallible. He divides his book into two parts: Naturalism and Freedom. [End Page 137]In evolutionary development, he accepts, as critically established, the sequence: matter before life, life before mind, and, no mind without a brain. Thus, naturalism is preferred beforesupernaturalism or divine intervention. These guides may support a continuous, steady evolutionaryprocess or discontinuity, mutations, and various stages of change. Darwin acceptedthe former and held physical changes were unaffected by consciousness. All change is, in principle,present from the beginning and unfolds over time. Darwin's view, then, is deterministic.Watkins challenges this position and argues for consciousness affecting physical change in new and unpredictable ways. It is herein that the possibility of animal and human freedom lies. Watkins gives examples of the actions of the hunter and hunted among animals, and of strategies developed by humans during crises, to support the view that there are novel and unpredictable actions by conscious beings. These actions can hardly be called predetermined in the nature of things. There is a huge difference between a general genetic structure for kinds of behavior and specific actions during crises (not that these are the only instances of freedom). At any rate, there is a reciprocal action between an individual and its environment and not merely a unilinear one.In Part II, Freedom, Watkins examines some classical, philosophical views of human freedom. He gives brief, but penetrating, analyses of Hobbes, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza. Either they account for human action in strictly physical terms that are causally deterministic or they turn to non-empirical sources that are not verifiable. Since the latter make no difference in our account of behavior, they are entities multiplied beyond necessity. Those who give a completely deterministic view—Hobbes, Hume, and Schopenhauer—offer no continuum between cause and chance. Chance turns out to depend upon our ignorance of causes; further examination would show it causally determined.Watkins seems most sympathetic to Spinoza's treatment. In his hard-headed naturalism, Spinoza rejects any non-natural or supernatural accounts of human behavior. He is a strict determinist where man's confrontation with nature is concerned. Human emotions are passive and react to our environment; they do not affect it. Human reason makes no difference, but in its capacity to contemplate eternal truths it offers a way out. Instead of reacting to nature, man may transcend it. This transcendence is the key to Spinoza's view of the intellectual love of God, and human freedom. Watkins criticizes this flight from man's place in nature and the limited use of reason. In this vein, Spinoza seems to abandon the confrontation of nature for a flight to eternal truths. For Watkins, however, reasons must be used in confronting nature. As we saw, he claims that reason may have an effect upon the environment that is novel and unpredictable. Human agency is a part of the evolutionary story. Human agency is not an either/or proposition. There are degrees of effectiveness in human response to nature.In his analysis of human freedom, Watkins turns to the works of Newton, Faraday, Einstein, and others. In studying the problems posed by the consideration of natural phenomena during their time, they showed intellectual perspicacity of the highest order. Faraday's unified field theory brought electrical and magnetic phenomena, previously thought to be disparate, together. Newton's laws of motion brought celestial and terrestrial mechanics under one theory. Einstein changed the way in which space, time, mass, energy, and light were conceived. In a real sense, they were... (shrink)

This survey seeks to define the present situation and climate for translating Heidegger into English after the disastrous translation (1999) of the Beiträge, Heidegger’s second magnum opus after Sein und Zeit. The 12 translations that have appeared since then tend to handle Heidegger’s neologisms in less ludicrous ways and continue to find ways to bend the highly restrictive rules imposed on translations by Heidegger’s literary executor. There are still errors of omission and commission in the German originals that carry over (...) into the translations. A few of the English translators add to the errors of omission and commission but most tend to be competent and conscientious, producing excellent results. Yet even the best translators slack off in their production of the permitted glossaries, which are indispensable for demarcating Heidegger’s terminology in the time period involved and provide the reader a starting basis for an index, which is prohibited. (shrink)

Surgical expertise does not have a clear definition and is often culturally associated with power, authority, prestige, and case number rather than more objective proxies of excellence. Multiple models of expertise progression have been proposed including the Dreyfus model, however, they all currently require subjective evaluation of skill. Recently, efforts have been made to improve the ways in which surgical excellence is measured and expertise is defined using artificial intelligence, video recordings, and accelerometers. However, these aforementioned methods of assessment are (...) still subjective or indirect proxies of expertise, thus uncovering the neural mechanisms that differentiate expert surgeons from trainees may enhance the objectivity of surgical expertise validation. In fact, some researchers have already suggested that their neural imaging-based expertise classification methods outperform currently used methods of surgical skill certification such as the Fundamentals of Laparoscopic Surgery scores. Such imaging biomarkers would not only help better identify the highest performing surgeons, but could also improve residency programs by providing more objective, evidence-based feedback and developmental milestones for those in training and perhaps act as a marker of surgical potential in medical students. Despite the potential advantages of using neural imaging in the assessment of surgical expertise, this field of research remains in its infancy. This systematic review identifies studies that have applied neuromonitoring in assessing surgical skill across levels of expertise. The goals of this review are to identify the strongest neural indicators of surgical expertise, the limitations of the current literature on this subject, the most sensible future directions for further study. We found substantial evidence that surgical expertise can be delineated by differential activation and connectivity in the prefrontal cortex across multiple task and neuroimaging modalities. Specifically, novices tend to have greater PFC activation than experts under standard conditions in bimanual and decision-making tasks. However, under high temporal demand tasks, experts had increased PFC activation whereas novices had decreased PFC activation. Common limitations uncovered in this review were that task difficulty was often insufficient to delineate between residents and attending. Moreover, attending level involvement was also low in multiple studies which may also have contributed to this issue. Most studies did not analyze the ability of their neuromonitoring findings to accurately classify subjects by level of expertise. Finally, the predominance of fNIRS as the neuromonitoring modality limits our ability to uncover the neural correlates of surgical expertise in non-cortical brain regions. Future studies should first strive to address these limitations. In the longer term, longitudinal within-subjects design over the course of a residency or even a career will also advance the field. Although logistically arduous, such studies would likely be most beneficial in demonstrating effects of increasing surgical expertise on regional brain activation and inter-region connectivity. (shrink)

Locke’s view that continuants are numerically distinct from their constituting hunks of matter is popular enough to be called the “standard account”.1 It was given its definitive contemporary statement by David Wiggins in Sameness and Substance2, and has been defended by many since. Baker’s interesting book contributes new arguments for this view, a new definition of ‘constitution’, and a sustained application to persons and human animals. Much of what she says develops this view in new and important ways. But in (...) some cases she does not advance the position, and in others she takes steps backwards. According to Baker, a person is numerically distinct from her constituting animal. One of Baker’s leading arguments is surprisingly unconvincing. Persons differ in important ways from non-human animals. Only persons are moral agents, modify their goals, have wars, culture, etc. If persons were identical to animals—if we were “nothing but animals”, as she puts it—then the manifest discontinuity between humans and non-human animals would be located “within the domain of biology”. “But from a biological point of view, human animals…are biologically continuous with non-human animals.” (p. 17) The argument fails: why should identifying persons with animals preclude saying that these particular animals have radically distinctive features that are of little interest to biologists? The traditional case for non-identity (which Baker accepts) is more powerful: a person and her constituting animal differ by having different persistence conditions. If my memories were transferred to a new body and my old body destroyed, I the person might survive, but the human animal who constituted me would perish. Therefore, before the transfer, I and the animal that constituted me would be numerically distinct but extremely similar things located in exactly the same place. This consequence—the central thesis of the Wiggins view—is surprising: so surprising that some reject the Wiggins view on that basis.. (shrink)

This survey seeks to define the present situation and climate for translating Heidegger into English after the disastrous translation (1999) of the Beiträge, Heidegger’s second magnum opus after Sein und Zeit. The 12 translations that have appeared since then tend to handle Heidegger’s neologisms in less ludicrous ways and continue to find ways to bend the highly restrictive rules imposed on translations by Heidegger’s literary executor. There are still errors of omission and commission in the German originals that carry over (...) into the translations. A few of the English translators add to the errors of omission and commission but most tend to be competent and conscientious, producing excellent results. Yet even the best translators slack off in their production of the permitted glossaries, which are indispensable for demarcating Heidegger’s terminology in the time period involved and provide the reader a starting basis for an index, which is prohibited. (shrink)

In spite all the efforts made by pundits and policy-makers nowadays, the article intends to show how the concepts of jus in bello and jus ad bellum have been misjudged and misinterpreted along its own consolidation in our juridical thought. We also believe they deserve a new approach opened by Foucault´s point of view. In doing so, the issues of sovereignty, war and peace are all reviewed before a genealogical approach which opens us a different window to access the new (...) themes of political agenda, such as responsibility to protect, non-intervention and self-determination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 133-134 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Heidegger's Concept of Truth Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Heidegger's Concept of Truth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxx + 462. Cloth, $59.95. This somewhat trite and overly generic English title, from a Heideggerian perspective, is better specified by the title of the German original, which was perhaps too provocative for an analytical (...) English audience conditioned by Carnap's critique of Heidegger: "The Prejudice of Logic: Investigations into the Theory of Truth of the Early Heidegger." The author's more-than-literal, amplifying and supplementing translation of his own German text of 1994 aims to face up to all the "hard interpretive decisions" (xxii) that Heidegger poses by leaving no German term uninterpreted or untranslated, including even Dasein as "being-here." The translation is thus more illuminating from the start in the sense in which "logic" too narrowly conceived and claimed to be the sole arbiter of truth becomes a "disabling" prejudice (xvi) rather than the "enabling prejudice" that logic normally is for any discourse and thought. Dahlstrom's focus is on the early and so "logical" Heidegger (1912-29), before he decided to lose even logic (better, "onto-theo-logic") in a more original tornadic "whirl" of abyssal questioning in the "turning." Hence, the opening pages point to Heidegger's quest for a more original philosophical (transcendental, phenomenological, ontological, hermeneutical) "logic of philosophy" (Emil Lask's phrase) that "produces" the fundamental concepts or categories for any field of being, including itself. This original productive logic of category formation "transcends" the formal logic of judgment while founding it.It is the transcendental and material logic that Heidegger found in Kant, which is oriented toward the spatio-temporal schematisms of the imagination that emerge from the transcendental aesthetic to mediate the application of the judicative forms of the understanding into befitting categories of reality. But Dahlstrom does not get around to detail this quasi-Kantian account of material logic, or Lask's version of it, which finds its fundamental stratum in the already categorized (i.e., conceptually interpreted) originally unitary object, prior to its distinction into form and matter, subject and predicate, etc. Lask calls this a priori categorized realm of intentionally structured meaning (intelligibility, truth) a "panarchy of the logos," which Heidegger will readily transform into his "hermeneutics of facticity" (double genitive: "life lays itself out, interprets itself") and identify with the prejudicative, prepredicative temporal realm of truth as "disclosedness" and "unconcealment." [End Page 134]But Dahlstrom does find, in Husserl's unpublished logic courses of the early twenties in which "Analyses of Passive Synthesis" are carried out, a "genetic logic" on the level of the "transcendental aesthetic" in the "complicated intentional systems" of the sensing human body situating itself by constituting the time and space of its world prepredicatively and prejudicatively, a "logic" or logos which accordingly "anticipates much of the analysis of being-in-the-world undertaken in Being and Time" (155). And yet Heidegger, who as Husserl's trusted assistant was granted generous access to such unpublished manuscripts, "remained silent" about these clear anticipations. Instead he criticizes Husserl publicly in his own courses, culminating in Being and Time, for neglecting the question of the "being of intentionality" as well as of the "sense" of being as such, which Heidegger finds in "timeliness" (Zeitlichkeit), the originary time of being-here. Yet in arriving at this temporal sense of being, Heidegger "clearly appropriates the horizonal (allegedly preobjective and presubjective) character of time-consciousness elaborated by Husserl." Why, then, "Heidegger's silence"? "These breakthroughs of Husserl's later thinking are not mentioned by Heidegger because he wants to appropriate them in his own way and without the framework out of which they arose. An injustice and a disservice is thus done to Husserl's phenomenology... [which is] the price of the philosophical maturity of its most famous student... [as] his thinking moves to a plane beyond the reach of Husserlian phenomenology and terminology" (169f).This in-depth discussion of Heidegger's relationship with Husserl... (shrink)

In this paper, a Wittgensteinian account of the human sciences is constructed around the notions of the surface of human life and of surface phenomena as expressions. I begin by explaining Wittgenstein's idea that the goal of interpretive social science is to make actions and practices seem natural. I then explicate his notions of the surface of life and of surface phenomena as expressions by reviewing his analysis of mental state language. Finally, I critically examine three ideas: (a) that the (...) goal of interpretive inquiry is realized through a descriptive, context-constructing method that enables investigators to grasp the instincts, mental states, and experiences (Geist) expressed in surface phenomena; (b) that uncovering rules plays a minor role in this enterprise; and (c) that surface phenomena not only can be made natural but also have causes and are subject to causal explanation. (shrink)

Harvey Siegel argues that minimum competency testing (MCT) is incompatible with strong sense critical thinking. His arguments are reviewed and contrasted with positions held by John E. McPeck and Michael Scriven. Siegel's arguments seem directed against the prevailing form of MCT. However, alternative formats which allow for the aggregate and context-sensitive nature of critical thinking are not doomed to the arbitrariness Siegel finds. MCT may be a legitimate and useful means for furthering critical thinking as one of our educational ideals.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)