In this paper I have attempted to develop Hegel’s philosophy of religion in light of his critical appropriation of both Kant and Schleiermacher. My purposes for doing so are two-fold. On the one hand, I think that many of the difficulties in interpreting Hegel’s philosophy of religion stem from a failure to see his position as a response to both of these key figures. On the other hand, I wished to give emphasis to the fact that Hegel’s philosophy of religion (...) can only be understood as a continution of Kant’s and Schleiermacher’s attempts to reinterpret religion in the light of the strong notion of subjective freedom arising out of the Enlightenment. In short, my position is that Hegel’s conception of religion presents a clearer and more coherent account of God’s aseity or transcendence and of his relation to the world in general and humanity within the limits imposed by the Enlightenment understanding of human subjectivity and freedom. (shrink)

Rousseau’s discussion of education in Émile has for its essential background his rejection of a truly public education in modern society on the one hand and the rejection of the possibility of modern human beings developing in a state of natural innocence on the other hand. His suggestion in Émile is that a form of private education (“home-schooling”) is possible that preserves the inherent goodness of the natural state while at the same time providing the instruction necessary for the student (...) to become a successful social, and thus moral, person. The possibility of such an education on Rousseau’s own terms will be the central focus of this essay; though implications for education today will also be raised. (shrink)

It can be little disputed that modern philosophy, as it is generally understood, stands under the broader tradition of the Enlightenment—and, for the most part, consciously and vigorously so! Despite the nuances and important distinctions of style and substance found in the great thinkers of this tradition, one can see clearly a general commitment to the fostering of the natural capacity of human beings to know their world and to interact with it and with other rational creatures in increasingly productive (...) ways. Even if such figures were also critical of some of the tradition’s excesses, they were in an important sense united in their confidence in the successful use of those faculties that passed the critical test of reason. Certainly, Horaces’s words, “Sapere aude!” rang true throughout the modern period, as Kant insists in his essay, What is Enlightenment? Though Kant’s vigorously positive response might not have been fully affirmed in every detail by all Enlightenment philosophers, his central affirmation that humanity was moving from the age of its minority to that of its majority resonates throughout the thought of this era. (shrink)

On the basis of careful textual exegesis and philosophical analysis, and contrary to the received view, Mark R. Wheeler demonstrates that Aristotle presents and systematically explicates his definition of the essence of the truth in the Metaphysics. Aristotle states the nominal definitions of the terms "truth" and "falsehood" as part of his arguments in defense of the logical axioms. These nominal definitions express conceptions of truth and falsehood his philosophical opponents would have recognized and accepted in the context of (...) dialectical argument. On the basis of these nominal definitions, Aristotle develops his definitions of the essences of truth and falsehood--his "real" definitions of truth and falsehood. Aristotle's methodical exposition of his essential definitions of truth and falsehood in the Metaphysics serves as a well-developed example of how his philosophical inquiry starts with nominal definitions and ends with real definitions. Wheeler also argues for the novel claim that Aristotle defines the most fundamental kind of truth in terms of accurate measurement. Aristotle's metrical conception of truth serves as the theoretical basis for specifying the truth conditions of various assertions, for identifying the sorts of beings implicated in these truth conditions, and for explaining the nature of approximate truth and falsehood. Far from offering us a minimal account of truth, Wheeler shows how Aristotle offers us a sophisticated and metrical theory of truth. (shrink)

The human spark -- Catch a fire -- The idea of you -- The idea of I -- Forbidden ideas -- Artful ideas -- Vast ideas -- Tight ideas -- Recurring ideas -- Future ideas.

Mark Vernon links the resources of the philosophical tradition with numerous illustrations from modern culture to ask what friendship is and how it relates to sex, work, politics and spirituality. Unusually, he argues that Plato and Nietzsche, as much as Aristotle and Aelred, should be put center stage. Their penetrating and occasionally tough insights are invaluable if friendship is to be a full, not merely sentimental, way of life for today.

We usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and dispensable, an activity for specialists: poets, prophets, lunatics, and babysitters. Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, for example, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday (...) thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom is wrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thought makes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking. In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination in parable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the role of parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind. Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers to classic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and invention. (shrink)

Let us begin with the simple observation that applied mathematics can be very tough! It is a common occurrence that basic physical principle instructs us to construct some syntactically simple set of differential equations, but it then proves almost impossible to extract salient information from them. As Charles Peirce once remarked, you can’t get a set of such equations to divulge their secrets by simply tilting at them like Don Quixote. As a consequence, applied mathematicians are often forced to pursue (...) roundabout and shakily rationalized expedients if any useful progress is to be made. Often these provisional and quasi-empirical procedures within applied mathematics loom large in motivating the “anti-realist” or “anti-unificationist” conclusions of Nancy Cartwright and allied authors. (shrink)

Freud’s famous essay “The ‘Uncanny’” is often poorly understood. In this paper, I clear up the popular misconception that Freud identifies all uncanny phenomena with the return of repressed infantile complexes by showing that he offers not one but two theories of the uncanny: “return of the repressed,” and another explanation that has to do with the apparent confirmation of “surmounted primitive beliefs.” Of the two, I argue that it is the latter, more often overlooked theory that faces fewer serious (...) objections and carries greater explanatory power in respect of the uncanny. (shrink)

Current sociological theories appear to have lost their general persuasiveness in part because, unlike the theories of the ‘classical era’, they fail to maintain an integrated stance toward society, and the practical role that sociology plays in society. The authors explore various facets of this failure and possibilities for reconstructing sociological theories as integrated wholes capable of conveying a moral and political immediacy. They discuss the evolution of several concepts (for example, the social, structure, and self) and address the significant (...) disputes (for example, structuralism versus humanism, and individual versus society) that have dominated twentieth-century sociological thought. Their ideas and analyses are directed towards an audience of students and theorists who are coming to terms with the project of sociological theory, and its relationship with moral discourses and political practice. The authors of these essays are sociological theorists from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada. They are all established, but not ‘establishment’ authors. The book contains no orthodoxies, and no answers. However, the essays do contribute to identifying the range of issues that will constitute the agenda for the next generation of sociological theorists. (shrink)

This is one of those cases to which Dr. 8 oodhouse's remark applies with all its force, that a method which leads to true results must have its logic — H.S Smith (" On Some of the Methods at Present in Use in Pure Geometry," p. 6) A goodly amount of modern metaphysics has concerned itself, in one form or another, with the question: what attitude should we take in regard to a language whose semantic underpinnings seem less than certain? (...) Since much of standard English is surely of this type, many philosophers have felt driven to extreme and unpalatable resolutions — wholesale rejection of attractive logical rules, radical "antirealism", "minimalism" about truth, and so forth, Scientists, however, have long dealt with analogous foundational insecurities and, under the duress of practicality, have framed a set of shifting attitudes towards language and reasoning that seem far more commonsensical than the extreme positions to which pure philosophy has often been led. Following this lead, this essay will recommend a more nuanced approach to linguistic insecurity that is neither naively optimistic nor mired in the gloomy sloughs of antirealism. (shrink)

Together again for the first time, Marx and Durkheim join forces in the pages of Disintegration: Bad Love, Collective Suicide, and the Idols of Imperial Twilight for a dialectical exploration of the moral economy of neoliberalism, animated, as it is not only by the capitalist chase for surplus value, but also by an immortal vortex of sacred powers. Classical sociology and psychoanalysis are reconstituted within Hegelian social ontology and dialectical method that differentiates between the ephemeral and free and the eternal (...) and fixed aspects of modern life. (shrink)

In ancient China, a revered Taoist sage named Zhuangzi told many parables. In Existential Psychology and the Way of the Tao, a selection of these parables will be featured. Following each parable, an eminent existential psychologist will share a personal and scholarly reflection on the meaning and relevance of the parable for psychotherapy and contemporary life. The major tenets of Zhuangzi's philosophy are featured. Taoist concepts of emptiness, stillness, Wu Wei (i.e. intentional non-intentionality), epistemology, dreams and the nature of reality, (...) character building in the midst of pain, meaning and the centrality of relationships, authenticity, self-care, the freedom that can come from one's willingness to confront death, spiritual freedom, and gradations of therapeutic care are topics highlighted in this book. (shrink)

There is considerable likelihood that Gottlob Frege began writing his Foundations of Arithmetic with the expectation that he could introduce his numbers, not with sets, but through some algebraic techniques borrowed from earlier writers of the Gottingen school. These rewriting techniques, had they worked, would have required strong philosophical justification provided by Frege's celebrated "context principle," which otherwise serves little evident purpose in the published Foundations.

Artificial intelligence, the "science and engineering of intelligent machines", still has yet to create even a simple "Advice Taker" [McCarthy, 1959]. We have previously argued [Waser, 2011] that this is because researchers are focused on problem-solving or the rigorous analysis of intelligence (or arguments about consciousness) rather than the creation of a "self" that can "learn" to be intelligent. Therefore, following expert advice on the nature of self [Llinas, 2001; Hofstadter, 2007; Damasio, 2010], we embarked upon an effort to design (...) and implement a self-understanding, self-improving loop as the totality of a (seed) AI. As part of that, we decided to follow up on Richard Dawkins' [1976] speculation that "perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself" by defining a number of axioms and following them through to their logical conclusions. The results combined with an enactive approach yielded many surprising and useful implications for further understanding consciousness, self, and "free-will" that continue to pave the way towards the creation of safe/moral autopoiesis. (shrink)

Stereological techniques allow biologists to create quantitative, three-dimensional descriptions of biological structures from two- dimensional images of tissue viewed under the microscope. For example, they can accurately estimate the size of a particular organelle, the total length of a mass of capillaries, or the number of neurons or synapses in a particular region of the brain. This book provides a practical guide to designing and critically evaluating stereological studies of the nervous system and other tissues. It explains the basic concepts (...) behind design-based stereology and how to get started. Also included are detailed descriptions of how to prepare tissue appropriately, perform pilot studies and decide on the appropriate sampling strategy, and account for phenomena such as tissue shrinkage. Numerous examples of applications of stereological methods that are applicable to studies of the central system and a wide variety of other tissues are explained. The book is therefore essential reading for neurobiologists and cell biologists interested in generating accurate representations of cell and tissue architecture. (shrink)

What can we learn about the nature of technology by studying practices of maintenance and repair? This volume addresses this question by bringing together scholarship from philosophers of technology working at the forefront of this emerging and exciting topic. -/- The chapters in this volume explore how attending to maintenance and repair can challenge and complement existing ways of thinking about technology focused on use and design and introduce new philosophical perspectives on the relationship between technology, time and human practice. (...) They examine the significance of maintenance and repair practices at different scales in relation to a diverse range of philosophical traditions and a wide variety of technologies, from urban infrastructure such as bridges and buildings to data technologies such as servers and software systems. Together, the contributions highlight common themes in the philosophical study of maintenance, including the role of skill, the significance of social values and the potential of these practices to transform the technologies to which they are applied. By reflecting on the different ways in which we keep technologies going, from the devices we use in our homes to the large technical systems which surround us, this volume reveals the philosophical significance of practices of maintenance, not only as a source of new insights but also as a resource for enriching our understanding of a variety of existing topics in philosophy. -/- Maintenance and Philosophy of Technology will appeal to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of technology, philosophy of engineering and science & technology studies. (shrink)

Tandis que l’expression ‘waste time’ ne nécessite pas d’adjoint, ceci n’est pas le cas de ‘spend time’ (e.g. ‘he spent time _ on his homework _.’) Pourquoi?_ _L’étude propose une analyse des deux expressions et avance l’idée que l’utilisation du temps en tant que ressource nécessite la conceptualisation d’un événement concomitant (cf. Lawlor 1986). La référence à celui-ci s’impose en fonction de son rôle d’entité de référence (the ‘Ground’ ; Talmy 1985, 2000), rôle conceptuel qui déclenche la présence d’un adjoint (...) chez _spend_ mais pas chez _waste_, ce dernier faisant déjà référence indirecte à l’événement cible. Ensuite, on trouve dans les travaux sur la métaphore conceptuelle une quantité importante d’exemples linguistiques. Or, des analyses linguistiques profondes font souvent défaut (Evans 2013). Je propose donc une étude de corpus de _spend time_ et _waste time_ en ciblant des variables précises, tels que les types d’adjoints utilisés. Les adjoints de _spend time_, contrairement à ceux de _was..._. (shrink)

Metaethics: A Contemporary Introduction provides a solid foundation in metaethics for advanced undergraduates by introducing a series of puzzles that most metaethical theories address. These puzzles involve moral disagreement, reference, moral epistemology, metaphysics, and moral psychology. From there, author Mark van Roojen discusses the many positions in metaethics that people will take in reaction to these puzzles. Van Roojen asks several essential questions of his readers, namely: What is metaethics? Why study it? How does one discuss metaethics, given its (...) inherently controversial nature? Each chapter closes with questions, both for reading comprehension and further discussion, and annotated suggestions for further reading. (shrink)

This article draws attention to the origins, forms, and implications of “toxic discourse” as a genre central to the understanding of the public sphere in business in society.RachelCarson'sSilentSpringis used as a pivotal cultural document establishing “toxic discourse” as an ongoing form of moral narrative rooted in the rationality of counterpublics. Toxic discourse is framed within a center/periphery model in which toxic discourse gains salience in periods of economic dislocation and uncertainty. In these periods, toxic discourse draws together those on the (...) periphery or counterpublics who otherwise would not unite in their opposition to the center. The article critically examines how stakeholder theory, despite making sense of the public sphere for agents of organizations, glosses counterpublics and relegates toxic discourse, as evident in the “Occupy Movement,” to the ephemeral role of temporary, disruptive protest groups with very little of substance to communicate. (shrink)

This chapter addresses some basic ethical questions about psychological operations. It defines PSYOP, then compares and contrasts it with both conventional military activities and contemporary information warfare. Then it briefly clarifies emerging public policy problems, outlines relevant legal particularities, and offers general policy considerations with regard to ethical considerations in its employment.

What Is Man? is Mark Twain's skeptical assessment of free will, and determinism, religious belief, and the nature of humanity. He put off publishing it for 25 years, and then released it anonymously in a limited edition of 250 copies. The book takes the form of a Socratic dialogue between a romantic young idealist and an elderly cynic, who debate such issues as whether man is a machine or a free actor, whether personal merit is meaningless given how our (...) environment shapes who we are, and whether man has any impulse other than pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. As readers "we listen attentively, leaning forward in our chairs," Charles Johnson writes in his introduction, weighing on our own such statements as the Old Man's claim that "No man ever originates anything.... Men observe and combine, that is all. So does a rat." Linda Wagner-Martin, in the afterword, sees the ideas expressed in this volume as "a thread that runs through even the lightest of Mark Twain's fiction, the calmest of his memoirs; and as the questioning hook that may provide a rationale for his becoming a writer in the first place.". (shrink)

The chapter explores the similarities between the human mind and the patterns of the parable which are vital to daily thought, action, and reasoning. Spatial stories involving actors and bodily action are projected onto stories involving spatial and nonspatial events and actions with and without actors to support the book's basic premise. The parable is able to expand the range of a simple action story by projecting this onto unfamiliar or complex event stories through patterns such as events are actions, (...) and this is illustrated with a passage from Homer's Odyssey. Events are then shown to possess internal structures based on image schemas, enabling humans to process and understand them. A section is also devoted to the discussion of “the invariance principle”, which states that projections are not arbitrary and avoid image-schematic clashes in the target. Excerpts from Robert Browning's “Porphyria's Lover” and Euripides' Alcestis are used to illustrate this principle. (shrink)

The book posits that the human mind is essentially literary and the chapter begins with a short parable related to the story of Shahrazad that illustrates this point. Narrative imagining, or the creation of stories, is identified as being a literary capability which is indispensable to human cognition, along with the ability to project one story onto another. The parable effectively combines these two and the chapter explores in detail its capacity for story generation and projection. The remaining sections enumerate (...) the mental patterns of the parable. These include prediction, evaluation, planning, explanation, objects and events, actors, stories, projection, metonymy, emblem, image schemas, counterparts and imaginative domains, conceptual blending, and language. These terms are discussed in the context of Shahrazad's story and specific examples are provided. The concluding section asserts that basic mental processes exist that enable the creation of meaning, with the parable being one example. (shrink)

The chapter discusses meaning, which is posited to originate from connections across various mental spaces. It is dynamic and involves complex operations such as projection, integration, linking, and blending. Blending is a general and central parabolic activity of the everyday mind which generates blended spaces from which central inferences are constructed. The blended space consists of input spaces which provide projections to the blend and also receives projections back from the projected blend. Thus a model of projection arises that is (...) dynamic, as opposed to the direct, one-way, and positive model presented in the previous chapters. In parabolic blending, input spaces to the blend do not have to be related as source and target and are often rhetorically unequal. Projecting influences from the blend to an input space also involves selection and translation in order to fit the latter. The remaining section summarizes the principles of parabolic blending and discusses the concepts of completion, composition, and elaboration. (shrink)

The chapter opens with a discussion of ACTORS ARE MOVERS, which is a subset of events are actions and projects stories of body motion onto action stories. Another special subset, ACTORS ARE MANIPULATORS, involves projecting stories of bodily manipulation onto other action stories. The two cases are compatible and even overlap to create another sub-pattern: ACTORS ARE MOVERS AND MANIPULATORS. These in turn lead to more specific patterns which include THE MIND IS A BODY MOVING THROUGH SPACE and a second (...) one involving a body manipulating cognitive instruments and conceptual tools: A THINKER IS A MOVER AND A MANIPULATOR. The subsets of the general pattern involving event stories are also identified and discussed and these include: EVENTS ARE BODY ACTORS, EVENTS ARE MOVERS, EVENTS ARE MANIPULATORS, and EVENTS ARE MOVERS AND MANIPULATORS. The remaining section discusses the projection of spatial stories without animate actors as well as nonspatial stories. (shrink)

The chapter applies the scientific approach to the question of how human beings recognize and execute small spatial stories which organize and add meaning to an otherwise chaotic jumble of human experiences. The skeletal framework of these stories is called the image schema, which recurs in a person's sensory and motor experience. These schemas originate from the acts of perception and interaction and can be combined to form complex groups. Paralleling the parable, image schemas are also projected through links and (...) paths that assure alignment and preclude conflict. The recognition of spatial stories also necessitates the recognition of the sequence of the related situations which are structured by image schemas. The appropriate human action is then produced through the execution, recognition, imagination, prediction, evaluation, planning, and explanation of these image schemas. The difference between animacy and agency is then discussed, followed by additional research on image schemas. (shrink)

The final chapter expounds on the concept of language as it relates to the book's central assertion. The opening section provides a discussion on origins of language. The author refutes the predominant theory on the origin of language which proposes that genetic change enabled the development of genetic instructions for creating a special grammar module in the human brain. The author proposes an alternative theory which points to the parable as the origin of language. The parable, which combines the dynamic (...) and complex acts of narrative imagining and projection, provides a cognitive basis for the development of language with its meanings and constructions. Thus, the parable is said to precede the creation of grammar. Several illustrations and explanations are provided to support these concepts throughout the section. The chapter concludes with the assertion that parable — hence the literary mind — is the root of the human mind's basic cognitive processes. (shrink)

The chapter discusses the concept of generic space which houses the abstract structure shared by input spaces and indicates the counterpart connections between these input spaces. The author identifies a related projection model called GENERIC IS SPECIFIC, wherein generic information that is often image-schematic is projected from a specific space to give structure to a generic space. Blends are constructed when two stories share an abstract structure which is contained in the generic space that connects them. Generic space can be (...) awakened by transforming it into a blended space through the application of specifics from both the source and target. The gradient of middle spaces is then introduced as the path along which a generic space travels to be transformed gradually into a richly blended space. The remaining sections summarize the characteristics of the parable and reasserts that literary processes like blending enable the everyday mind to function. (shrink)

The chapter discusses the concepts of focus, viewpoint, role, and character and their role in providing connections between mental spaces and enabling people to transcend singularities. The singularity of human life and its impact on perception and understanding is discussed. Despite this singularity, humans are able to have multiple spatial and temporal viewpoints, as well as focus. A person's ability to assume multiple roles and characters throughout his life is also tackled. These concepts allow the construction of constancy across variation. (...) However, humans and their lives present inconstancies and variations. The concept of blended spaces addresses this dilemma by their inherent ability to absorb incompatibilities. The notion of blended characters is then introduced, which involves identity and metaphoric projection. The last section discusses the GREAT CHAIN METAPHOR which is a model for projecting conceptual structures across the many levels of the Great Chain — the hierarchy of attributes by types. (shrink)

Over the last decade there have been various attempts to use empirical data about people’s dispositions to choose to undermine various moral positions by arguing that our judgements about what to do are unreliable. Usually they are directed at non-consequentialists by consequentialists, but they have also been directed at all moral theories by skeptics about morality. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has been one of the leading proponents of such general skepticism. He has argued that empirical results particularly undermine intuitionist moral epistemology. This (...) paper is an attempt to look at what intuitionists should say in response. Consider the following argument : Regress (R1) If any person S is ever justified in believing a normative claim that p then S must be able to infer p from other beliefs of S. (shrink)

Brouwer and Weyl recognized that the intuitive continuum requires a mathematical analysis of a kind that set theory is not able to provide. As an alternative, Brouwer introduced choice sequences. We first describe the features of the intuitive continuum that prompted this development, focusing in particular on the flow of internal time as described in Husserl's phenomenology. Then we look at choice sequences and their logic. Finally, we investigate the differences between Brouwer and Weyl, and argue that Weyl's conception of (...) choice sequences is defective on several counts. (shrink)

Brouwer and Weyl recognized that the intuitive continuum requires a mathematical analysis of a kind that set theory is not able to provide. As an alternative, Brouwer introduced choice sequences. We first describe the features of the intuitive continuum that prompted this development, focusing in particular on the flow of internal time as described in Husserl's phenomenology. Then we look at choice sequences and their logic. Finally, we investigate the differences between Brouwer and Weyl, and argue that Weyl's conception of (...) choice sequences is defective on several counts. (shrink)

On Friday, November 15, 1940, Kurt Gödel gave a talk on set theory at Brown University. The topic was his recent proof of the consistency of Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis with the axiomatic system ZFC for set theory. His friend from their days in Vienna, Rudolf Carnap, was in the audience, and afterward wrote a note to himself in which he raised a number of questions on incompleteness.