We know, since Descartes (1641), that exercises of sensory imagining (S-imagining) are not purely imagistic: they possess multiple aspects. This much is agreed upon among philosophers but, when the question of the intentionality of S-imaginings arises, agreement seems to unravel. -/- According to the Two Content View (TCV), S-imagining “has two kinds of content, qualitative content and assigned content” (Kung, 2010:632) – e.g., my image of an apple is about both (i) shapes and colors and (ii) about the fact that (...) it is an apple, rather than a perfect imitation thereof. Advocates of TCV claim that the imagistic content does represent something, but it is not enough to individuate the imagining of an A rather than a B (Kung, 2010; Langland-Hassan, 2015; Martin, 2002; Noordhof, 2002; Peacocke, 1985; Tooming, 2018; White, 1990). -/- Some, however, have expressed skepticism about TCV. As Sartre claims, “despite some prejudices […] when I produce in myself the image of Pierre, it is Pierre who is the object of my current consciousness.” (1940/2010:4) The intentional object of our S-imaginings is exhausted by a single content treated in a specific way (Currie & Ravenscroft, 2002; Goldman, 2006; Hutto, 2015; Mulligan, 1999; Soteriou, 2013; Stock, n.d.; Wiltsher, 2016,2019). -/- In the following, (1) I sketch one of the most efficient pleas for the TCV by Peter Langland-Hassan, (2) I give two reasons to doubt the decisiveness of his arguments, and (3) suggest that S-imagining can be captured by the attitude/content distinction. (shrink)

Lorsque nous avons affaire à des objets ou des états de choses complexes, il est difficile de réduire ces objets, ces états de choses, à la somme de leurs parties. Le holisme est la thèse selon laquelle un objet ou un état de choses ne se réduit pas à la somme de ses parties. On retrouve ce phénomène partout : en sciences (les états mentaux ne semblent pas se réduire à des activations de neurones même s’ ils surviennent sur eux), (...) en sociologie (l’ OM est plus que la somme des joueurs, c’ est pourquoi l’ OM existe même après un changement de joueur), en ontologie (le tout constitué par une moto est plus que l’ ensemble de ses parties, encore faut-il qu’ elles soient assemblées correctement) et en gastronomie (dans une fondue les parties et le tout sont indistinguables). -/- Dans cet article, je vais considérer une forme particulière de holisme, peut-être la plus mystérieuse puisqu’ il s’ agit d’ un holisme de valeurs. Soit la thèse suivante : la valeur d’ un tout n’ est pas égale à la somme des valeurs de ses parties. (shrink)

Anthropocentrism has been claimed to be the root of the global environmental crisis. Based on a multidisciplinary (e.g. environmental philosophy, animal ethics, anthropology, law) and multilingual (English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese) literature review, this article proposes a conceptual analysis of ‘anthropocentrism’ and reconstructs the often implicit argument that links anthropocentrism to the environmental crisis. The variety of usages of the concept of ‘anthropocentrism’ described in this article reveals many underlying disagreements under the apparent unanimity of the calls to reject anthropocentrism, (...) both regarding what exactly is the root of the problem, and the nature of the possible solutions. It highlights the limitations of the argument of anthropocentrism as the scapegoat of the environmental crisis and identifies two main challenges faced by attempts to go beyond anthropocentrism: an epistemological challenge regarding knowledge and the place of sciences, and a metaethical challenge related to values and cultural pluralism. Beyond the issue of an anthropocentric point of view, the core of the problem might be an intertwinement of views and assumptions that work together to undermine attempts to protect the environment from the greed of some humans, such as the human-nature dichotomy, capitalism, consumerism, industrialism, etc. Finally, this article suggests that making the nuances and the presuppositions that underlie various versions of the anti-anthropocentric rhetoric explicit is necessary to foster constructive dialogue among different anti-anthropocentrism proponents, as well as with their detractors. (shrink)

Dans cette entrée, après une introduction qui servira de cadre à notre discussion (section 1.), nous allons présenter et analyser des définitions du concept « Art ». Nous discuterons brièvement les définitions classiques les plus influentes puis nous nous concentrerons sur les principales définitions contemporaines. -/- Nous verrons pourquoi les définitions classiques sont aujourd’hui considérées comme insatisfaisantes (2.a.), et comment les philosophes, à partir de la seconde moitié du XXème siècle ont tenté de pallier leurs défauts. Dans les grandes lignes, (...) le problème principal soulevé à l’encontre des théories classiques est qu’elles cherchent toutes l’essence de l’art dans un trait caractéristique qui serait reconnaissable dans les œuvres elles-mêmes. Les théories contemporaines répondent à ce problème principalement de quatre façons, comme on le verra dans les sections 2.b à 2.d. Les théories sceptiques (2.b.) défendent qu’il est dès lors impossible de définir l’art – qu’on peut au mieux en donner certains caractères typiques, des airs de famille. Les théories relationnalistes (2.c.) défendent que ce qui fait qu’une chose est de l’art est à trouver en dehors de celle-ci, notamment dans les relations qu’elle entretient avec son contexte de création ou de présentation. Les théories néo-classiques (2.d.) continuent à chercher l’essence de l’art dans un trait caractéristique reconnaissable dans les œuvres elles-mêmes tout en prenant en compte les réactions sceptiques ou relationnalistes. Enfin, la théorie du ‘renvoi de la balle’ (2.e.) défend que l’on ne peut pas définir l’art mais seulement des sous-catégories comme la musique, la sculpture, les installations, les performances, etc. -/- Nous présenterons les avantages et les inconvénients principaux des théories contemporaines. Nous verrons qu’aucune n’est dénuée de problèmes, expliquant pourquoi il n’existe pas de consensus sur une définition de l’art aujourd’hui. Nous verrons également que – à l’exception d’un certain scepticisme qui jette, semble-t-il, trop vite l’éponge – chacune de ces théories amène, par son originalité, à une compréhension nouvelle et plus profonde de cette notion extrêmement complexe qu’est le concept « Art ». (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:136 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28" 1 JANUARY 199 ~ to the principle of acting for the common good are played down by Grant in her discussion of Locke. Nevertheless, Grant advances the important proposition with respect to the tradition of liberalism as a political doctrine that "Locke's political theory contains two tendencies that are not entirely harmonious." That is, there is an uneasy blend of radical (...) and conservative elements in Lockean liberalism, and "this ambivalent attitude is an expression of the central axis of conflict within liberal theory generally" (204). For those who seek to understand Locke's role as a progenitor of liberalism and the persistence of certain types of arguments and problems which retain their significance for thinkers who identify themselves with that political theory, therefore, John Locke's Liberalism provides an excellent starting point. RICHARD ASHCRAFT Universityof California, Los Angeles Fabio Todesco. Riforma della metafisica e sapere scientifico. Saggio suJ. H. Lambert (z 7281777 ). CoUana di Filosofia, vol. x5. Milan: Franco Angeli, 1987. Pp. 348- L 3o,ooo. Voltaire expressed his view of Wolffian metaphysics in a letter to Prince Frederick of Prussia: "Ce sont des 6clairs au milieu d'une nuit profonde; c'est tout ce qu'on peut esp~rer, je crois, de la m~taphysique. "~ Voltaire's attitude towards metaphysics was not shared by Condillac, who in his Essai sur l'origine des connoissances humaines (1746) distinguishes two kinds of metaphysics: one, ambitious and obscure of itself, pretends to discuss the essences of beings and the inscrutable causes of things; the other, more circumspect, confines itself to the analysis of knowledge, and so provides the only possible basis for a clarification of mind; it is "la science qui contribue le plus ~ rendre l'esprit lumineux, precis et 6tendu, et qui, par cons6"quent, doit le preparer ~ l'6tude de toutes les autres." It started with Locke, and is to be treated with the same exactitude as geometry in order to give a clear and invariable meaning to the words used, and a simple and easy order to the propositions." Maupertuis, who in 1746 became the President of the newly re-founded Berlin Acad~mie Royale des Sciences, hoped for the application of mathematics to metaphysics; nevertheless, he didn't expect the same degree of certitude from the latter as from the former. 3 In 1761 the Berlin Academy proposed a prize question as to whether metaphysics were capable of the same degree of evidence as mathematics. Lambert answered the question by claiming that geometrical demonstrations might be applied to metaphysics. 4 Four years afterwards (January 1765) Lambert was enrolled as a merei Letter of 1 September 1736, in Voltaire'sCorrespondence,ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva: Librairie E. Droz, 1954), 5: 232. " Oeuw-esPhilosophiquesde Condillac,ed. Georges Le Roy (Paris: P.U.F., 19~7), 1:3. DesDevoirsde l'Acadg, micien, in Histoirede l'AcademieRoyaledesSciencesetBelles-Lettres,~5 vols. (Berlin, 1746-71), 1 (1746): 142-43. 4 "Llber die Methode, die Metaphysik, Theologie und Moral richtiger zu beweisen.... "ed. K. Bopp, Kantstud,en, suppl. 4~ (1918). BOOK REVIEWS a37 ber of the Berlin Academy; in the speech he delivered on that occasion he maintained that the simple concepts first formulated by Locke were the basis of human knowledge. From these simple concepts were drawn axiomata and postulata, the starting points of demonstrations that were necessarily and strictly to follow "l'ordre et le rigueur g~ometrique. ''~ In his own research, Lambert's point of departure was the philosophy of Christian Wolff, who had applied geometrical method to philosophy and provided demonstrations of its propositions, and definitions of all its constituent terms. The result Lambert obtained is very different from that of Wolff's metaphysics, which was constructed by deduction from the most general concept of ens, elaborated through a series of classifications per genera et species. Lambert abandoned this Wolffian system of classification in order to follow the anatomical method introduced by Locke, and by which the fundamental constituent elements of thought might be reached. The metaphysics of Lambert is a reversal of that of Wolff: it is built up from simple ideas derived immediately from sense perception: these simple ideas, being indivisible, are... (shrink)

Fondée en 1950 par Eugénie Droz, la collection des Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance a réuni, en soixante-cinq ans, plus de 550 titres. Elle s'est imposée comme la collection la plus importante au monde de sources et d'études sur l'Humanisme (Politien, Ficin, Erasme, Budé...), la Réforme francophone (Lefèvre d'Etaples, Calvin, Farel, Bèze...), la Renaissance (littéraire et artistique, Jérôme Bosch ou Rabelais, Ronsard ou le Primatice...), mais aussi la médecine, les sciences, la philosophie, l'histoire du livre et toutes les formes de (...) savoir et d'activité humaine d'un long XVIe siècle, des environs de 1450 jusqu'à la mort du roi Henri IV, seuil de l'âge classique. Les Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance sont le navire-amiral des éditions Droz. (shrink)

How do modal expressions determine which possibilities they range over? According to the Modal Anchor Hypothesis (Kratzer in _The language-cognition interface: Actes du 19_ _e_ _congrès international des linguistes_, Libraire Droz, Genève, 179–199, 2013 ), modal expressions determine their domain of quantification from particulars (events, situations, or individuals). This paper presents novel evidence for this hypothesis, focusing on a class of Spanish relative clauses that host verbs inflected in the subjunctive. Subjunctive in Romance is standardly taken to be licensed (...) only in a subset of intensional contexts. However, in our relative clauses, subjunctive is exceptionally licensed in extensional contexts. At the same time, the interpretation of these relative clauses still involves modality, a type of modality that targets the goals of the agent of the main event. We argue that the pattern displayed by these relative clauses follows straightforwardly if subjunctive is associated with a modal operator that, like modal indefinites (Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito in _Journal of Semantics_ 35(1):1–41, 2017 ), can project its domain from a volitional event. Overall, our proposal supports the event-based analysis of mood (Kratzer in Evidential mood in attitude and speech reports. Talk delivered at the 1st Syncart Workshop, Siena, July 13, 2016 ; Portner and Rubinstein in _Natural Language Semantics_ 28:343–393, 2020 ) and extends its application beyond attitudinal and modal complements. (shrink)

Coping with uncertainty is a necessary part of ordinary life and is crucial to an understanding of how the mind works. For example, it is a vital element in developing artificial intelligence that will not be undermined by its own rigidities. There have been many approaches to the problem of uncertain inference, ranging from probability to inductive logic to nonmonotonic logic. Thisbook seeks to provide a clear exposition of these approaches within a unified framework. The principal market for the book (...) will be students and professionals in philosophy, computer science, and AI. Among the special features of the book are a chapter on evidential probability, which has not received a basic exposition before; chapters on nonmonotonic reasoning and theory replacement, matters rarely addressed in standard philosophical texts; and chapters on Mill's methods and statistical inference that cover material sorely lacking in the usual treatments of AI and computer science. (shrink)

Measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) has been fundamental to our understanding of how language is encoded in the brain. One particular ERP response, the N400 response, has been especially influential as an index of lexical and semantic processing. However, there remains a lack of consensus on the interpretation of this component. Resolving this issue has important consequences for neural models of language comprehension. Here we show that evidence bearing on where the N400 response is generated provides key insights into what it (...) reflects. A neuroanatomical model of semantic processing is used as a guide to interpret the pattern of activated regions in functional MRI, magnetoencephalography and intracranial recordings that are associated with contextual semantic manipulations that lead to N400 effects. (shrink)

Using payment to recruit research subjects is a common practice, but it raises ethical concerns that coercion or undue inducement could potentially compromise participants’ informed consent. This is the first national study to explore the attitudes of IRB members and other human subjects protection professionals concerning whether payment of research participants constitutes coercion or undue influence, and if so, why. The majority of respondents expressed concern that payment of any amount might influence a participant’s decisions or behaviors regarding research participation. (...) Respondents expressed greater acceptance of payment as reimbursement or compensation than as an incentive to participate in research, and most agreed that subjects are coerced if the offer of payment makes them participate when they otherwise would not or when the offer of payment causes them to feel that they have no reasonable alternative but to participate . Views about undue influence were similar. We conclude that human subjects protection professionals hold expansive and inconsistent views about coercion and undue influence that may interfere with the recruitment of research participants and impede valuable research. (shrink)

Insight experiences are sudden, persuasive, and can accompany valuable new ideas in science and art. In this preregistered experiment, we aim to validate a novel visceral and continuous measure of insight problem solving and to test whether real-time and embodied feelings of insight can predict correct solutions. We report several findings. Consistent with recent work, we find a strong positive relationship between Aha moments and accuracy for problems that demand implicit processing. We also found that the intensity of the insight (...) experience further predicted the accuracy of solutions and participants naturally embodied the intensity of their insight experiences by squeezing the dynamometer more tightly. Intriguingly, this unintentional embodiment further predicted the accuracy of solutions. We suggest that the dynamometer complements previous measures by (1) simultaneously capturing both process and feeling in real-time, (2) highlights the value of measuring Aha moments on a continuum of intensity, and (3) firmly establishes that the impulsive feeling of Aha can carry information about the veracity of an idea. We discuss the findings in light of a recent theoretical account of how feelings of insight may act as a heuristic to select ideas from the stream of consciousness. (shrink)

A renowned scholar investigates the "human crisis" that Albert Camus confronted in his world and in ours, producing a brilliant study of Camus's life and influence for those readers who, in Camus's words, "cannot live without dialogue and friendship. As France--and all of the world--was emerging from the depths of World War II, Camus summed up what he saw as 'the human crisis'. 'We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right, whether it be in their machines (...) or their ideas. And for all who cannot live without dialogue and the friendship of other human beings, this silence is the end of the world.' In the years after he wrote these words, until his death fourteen years later, Camus labored to address this crisis, arguing for dialogue, understanding, clarity, and truth. When he sailed to New York, in March 1946--for his first and only visit to the United States--he found an ebullient nation celebrating victory. Camus warned against the common postwar complacency that took false comfort in the fact that Hitler was dead and the Third Reich had fallen. Yes, the serpentine beast was dead, but "we know perfectly well," he argued, "that the venom is not gone, that each of us carries it in our own hearts." All around him in the postwar world, Camus saw disheartening evidence of a global community revealing a heightened indifference to a number of societal ills. It is the same indifference to human suffering that we see all around, and within ourselves, today. (shrink)

This Element is on new developments in the psychology of reasoning that raise or address philosophical questions. In traditional studies in the psychology of reasoning, the focus was on inference from arbitrary assumptions and not at all from beliefs, and classical binary logic was presupposed as the only standard for human reasoning. But recently a new Bayesian paradigm has emerged in the discipline. This views ordinary human reasoning as mostly inferring probabilistic conclusions from degrees of beliefs, or from hypothetical premises (...) relevant to a purpose at hand, and as often about revising or updating degrees of belief. This Element also covers new formulations of dual-process theories of the mind, stating that there are two types of mental processing, one rapid and intuitive and shared with other animals, and the other slow and reflective and more characteristic of human beings. The final topic covered is the new developments and rationality. (shrink)

The dual concepts of mindfulness and mindlessness are described. Mindfulness is a state of conscious awareness in which the individual is implicitly aware of the context and content of information. It is a state of openness to novelty in which the individual actively constructs categories and distinctions. In contrast, mindlessness is a state of mind characterized by an over reliance on categories and distinctions drawn in the past and in which the individual is context-dependent and, as such, is oblivious to (...) novel aspects of the situation. Mindlessness is compared to more familiar concepts such as habit, functional fixedness, overlearning, and automatic processing. Like mindlessness, these concepts concern rigid invariant behavior that occurs with little or no conscious awareness. The primary difference is that mindlessness may result from a single exposure to information. When information is given in absolute language, is given by an authority, or initially appears irrelevant, there is little manifest reason to critically examine the information and thereby recognize the ways it may be context-dependent. Instead, the individual mindlessly forms a cognitive commitment to the information and freezes its potential meaning. Alternative meanings or uses of the information become unavailable for active cognitive use. Automatic vs controlled processing, while seemingly most similar to mindlessness/mindfulness, are orthogonal to them. One can process information in a controlled but mindless manner, or automatic but mindful. Related concepts like scripts, set, expectancy, labels, and roles direct behavior, but these too may be enacted mindlessly or mindfully. The major consequences of mindlessness/mindfulness are discussed with respect to their relevance for overt behavior , memory, and health. Finally, the relationship between traditional notions of consciousness and mindfulness is briefly examined. (shrink)

Soeurs ennemies ou soeurs jumelles, servante et maîtresse ou compagnes de labeur, s'ignorant l'une l'autre ou unies au point de presque s'identifier, la foi et la raison entretiennent à l'évidence une relation intense et tumultueuse. N'est-ce pas justement au coeur du mouvement qui tantôt les rapproche tantôt les oppose que s'ajuste leur rapport? Plus que d'un état stable acquis une fois pour toutes il s'agit bien d'une dynamique, d'un processus. C'est cc que visent à montrer les essais réunis dans cc (...) livre, qui rassemble les fruits d'un colloque de théologie et de philosophie tenu à l'initiative du Studium de Philosophie de Chartres et de l'Institut de Théologie des Dombes, centres de formation de la Communauté du Chemin Neuf. (shrink)