This volume is a collection of original contributions about the core knowledge in fundamental domains. It includes work on naive physics, such as formal specifications of intuitive theories of spatial relations, time causality, substance and physical objects, and on naive psychology.

Plato's thinking on courage, manliness and heroism is both profound and central to his work, but these areas of his thought remain under-explored. This book examines his developing critique of both the notions and embodiments of manliness prevalent in his culture, and his attempt to redefine them in accordance with his own ethical, psychological and metaphysical principles. It further seeks to locate the discussion within the framework of his general approach to ethics, an approach which focuses on concepts of flourishing (...) and virtue, rather than on consequences or duty. The question of why courage is necessary in the flourishing life in its turn leads to Plato's bid to unify the noble and the beneficial and the tensions this unification creates between human and divine ideals. The issue of manliness also raises problems of gender: does Plato conceive of the ethical subject as human or male? (shrink)

Coherence in conversations and in texts can be partially characterized by a set of coherence relations, motivated ultimately by the speaker's or writer's need to be understood. In this paper, formal definitions are given for several coherence relations, based on the operations of an inference system; that is, the relations between successive portions of a discourse are characterized in terms of the inferences that can be drawn from each. In analyzing a discourse, it is frequently the case that we would (...) recognize it as coherent, in that it would satisfy the formal definition of some coherence relation, if only we could assume certain noun phrases to be coreferential. In such cases, we will simply assume the identity of the entities referred to, in what might be called a “petty conversational implicature,” thereby solving the coherence and coreference problems simultaneously. Three examples of different kinds of reference problems are presented. In each, it is shown how the coherence of the discourse can be recognized, and how the reference problems are solved, almost as a by‐product, by means of these petty conversational implicatures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Transcendental Phenomenology as Human Possibility: Husserl and Fink on the Phenomenologizing Subject by Denis DŽANIĆD. J. HobbsDŽANIĆ, Denis. Transcendental Phenomenology as Human Possibility: Husserl and Fink on the Phenomenologizing Subject. Cham: Springer, 2023. x + 236 pp. Cloth, $119.99Denis Džanić’s Transcendental Phenomenology as Human Possibility, despite its superficially historical focus on a specific period of collaboration between Edmund Husserl and his somewhat wayward protégé Eugen Fink, addresses key (...) systematic issues in transcendental phenomenology, namely, how the act of phenomenologizing should be understood in connection with the specific human beings who aim to become phenomenologists, and what the answer to this question tells us about both the genuine subject of phenomenology and the motivation for phenomenologizing. These questions are important for our understanding of not only the historical development of phenomenology but also the practice and goals of phenomenology—specifically, for a conception of phenomenologizing as a project in which we, as particular, historical, empirical figures, might want to engage.Much of the book focuses on laying the groundwork for understanding these complicated issues both historically and systematically. Džanić does an admirable job of tracing the rapidly evolving interactions between Husserl and Fink, both as intellectual collaborators on this philosophical project and as a pair of very human figures who ultimately found themselves pursuing quite different solutions to the problems of the subject and origin of phenomenology. He focuses particularly on the Sixth Cartesian Meditation, Fink’s attempt to extend Husserl’s famous text to include a phenomenology of the act of phenomenologizing itself (including Husserl’s marginal comments on the text), although he draws on a number of other significant texts and manuscripts (mostly Husserl’s, albeit with an extended aside on Heidegger) wherever they are helpful for explicating the complex evolution of Husserl’s thought on the subject. Admittedly, the book thus takes on a challenging task—both because of the difficult nature of this topic and because of the obscurity of the technical terms required to discuss it. However, despite the necessarily enigmatic character of the relevant language, Džanić’s attempts to explore the main outlines of this issue are worthwhile, particularly due to his ability to resist the temptation to view Husserl’s thought here as monolithic.In the early chapters, Džanić explicates in detail the rather complicated solution that Fink proposed to this difficulty, namely, the abandonment (to some extent) of the ultimately human origin of phenomenology in favor of a fundamentally nonhuman (and eventually meontic) conception of the transcendental ego, which generated a great deal of elaborate and (at least in the Sixth Meditation) inadequately supported speculation. For Fink, both the motivation to phenomenologize and the act of phenomenologizing itself ultimately stem from a source that is fundamentally prior to—in a(n onto)logical rather than temporal sense—any empirical ego or empirical act of phenomenologizing, a source that merely “enworlds” itself (in various complicated senses that Džanić does [End Page 145] an admirable job of clarifying) in the apparently anthropologistic, everyday world of individual phenomenologists. Džanić calls this interpretation of phenomenology Fink’s “epistemological anti-humanism,” and it serves as the basis for one potential (radically anti-Heideggerian but nevertheless somewhat disappointing) solution to the question of why we should phenomenologize at all. As Džanić notes, this solution was at least briefly taken up by Fink’s mentor Husserl himself, although the degree to which Husserl actually endorsed this path beyond the level of a fleeting flirtation remains questionable. Ultimately, as Džanić rightly highlights and as becomes abundantly clear in Husserl’s (often rather scathing) notes on Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation, he abandoned this interpretation.Accordingly, in the later chapters of the book, Džanić traces Husserl’s ultimate development of a quite different solution to the problems of the origin and motivation of phenomenology—a solution that, unlike his brief foray into Finkian grandeur, views the act of phenomenologizing as essentially rooted in human possibility (that is, as part of the famous lifeworld that features so prominently in Husserl’s work, especially in the Crisis and other late texts). After his collaboration with and... (shrink)

In this paper, planning models developed in artificial intelligence are applied to the kind of planning that must be carried out by participants in a conversation. A planning mechanism is defined, and a short fragment of a free‐flowing videotaped conversation is described. The bulk of the paper is then devoted to an attempt to understand the conversation in terms of the planning mechanism. This microanalysis suggests ways in which the planning mechanism must be augmented, and reveals several important conversational phenomena (...) that deserve further investigation. (shrink)

In the TACITUS project for using commonsense knowledge in the understanding of texts about mechanical devices and their failures, we have been developing various commonsense theories that are needed to mediate between the way we talk about the behavior of such devices and causal models of their operation. Of central importance in this effort is the axiomatization of what might be called commonsense metaphysics. This includes a number of areas that figure in virtually every domain of discourse, such as granularity, (...) scales, time, space, material, physical objects, shape, causality, functionality, and force. Our effort has been to construct core theories of each of these areas, and then to define, or at least characterize, a large number of lexical items in terms provided by the core theories. In this paper we discuss our methodological principles and describe the key ideas in the various domains we are investigating. (shrink)

The practice of medicine involves obtaining, evaluating and analyzing information drawn from a variety of sources; thus physicians assess and act upon information that varies in terms of both reliability and the extent to which it may be directly perceived. In the hospital setting, physicians’ progress notes provide a record of this process that serves as a primary means of communication between treaters who are not co-present with one another; accordingly, in order to permit independent evaluation of the information they (...) contain, physicians have developed a repertoire of linguistic devices to express differing attitudes towards the information that their notes convey. In this article, through the microanalysis of a pediatric resident’s note, I demonstrate how physicians use evidential markers, including the passive voice and agentless constructions, to construct frameworks of credibility and responsibility that both underlie and enable medical work. These grammatical devices permit the physician-reader to weigh for himself or herself the evidence which supports the conclusions reached. (shrink)

In a response to two essays by Jan Zwicky on “lyric philosophy,” this piece questions whether there are positions that cannot be fully articulated in conventional, linear prose without contradiction and, if so, whether or in what sense they can be considered philosophical positions. Zwicky's experimental deployment of polyphonic textual structures to render her conception of a patterned and resonant whole is, Hobbs argues, part of a tradition, going back to ancient Greece, of radical philosophers struggling to express themselves without (...) pragmatic self-refutation. In particular, Hobbs explores Zwicky's acknowledged debt to the paradoxes and aphorisms of Heraclitus, in whose thought the “backward-turning connection” of the lyre plays a central role. Hobbs suggests that, although both Heraclitus and Zwicky use language to stimulate profound changes in the reader's perception, understanding, and ethical outlook, there are important divergences in their projects: Zwicky assumes that humans have access to the resonant whole, while Heraclitus chooses to write in paradoxes partly in order to highlight the inevitable limitations of mortal knowledge of the Logos, which is known fully only to god. Zwicky's depiction of a generalized “analytic” philosopher may also be thought oversimplified: few analytic philosophers, if any, would claim that meaning can only be “linguistic in form,” and it is unclear what is meant by “technocratically acceptable prose.” Nevertheless, Zwicky's claim that the practice of philosophy is “better understood as an exercise of attention disciplined by discernment of the live, metaphorical relation between things and the resonant structure of the world” is an important one, and the challenges that it poses to our conceptions of what philosophy is and how to write it are not ones that should be ignored. (shrink)

Laplacean determinism remains a popular theory among philosophers and scientists alike, in spite of the fact that the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, with which it is inconsistent, has been around for more than fifty years. There are a number of reasons for its continuing popularity. One, recently articulated by Honderich, is that there are too many possible interpretations of quantum mechanics, and the subject is too controversial even among physicists to be an adequate basis for overturning determinism. Nevertheless, quantum (...) mechanics is an enormously successful theory, considering the quantity and variety of its predictions which have been verified under conditions never dreamt of by its originators; and the Copenhagen Interpretation is the only widely accepted interpretation of it. Although a hidden variable theory consistent with the results of quantum mechanics is not impossible, one of its major advocates admits that it is highly speculative, and far from adequately developed. Yet such a theory would be needed to reconcile Laplacean determinism with quantum mechanics; most of the controversies alluded to by Honderich are irrelevant. (shrink)

Sentimental cosmopolitans argue that cultivating empathy for distant others is necessary in order to motivate action to address global injustices. This paper accepts the basic premises of the senti...

Duties to address global poverty face a motivation gap. We have good reasons for acting yet we do not, at least consistently. A ‘sentimental education’, featuring literature and journalism detailing the lives of distant others has been suggested as a promising means by which to close this gap. Although sympathetic to this project, I argue that it is too heavily wed to a charitable model of our duties to address global poverty—understood as requiring we sacrifice a certain portion of our (...) income. However, political action, aimed at altering institutions at both a global and a local level is likely to be necessary in order to provide effective long-term solutions to poverty globally. To rectify this, the article develops an alternative dialogical account of sentimental education, suitable for motivating support for political action to address global poverty. (shrink)

According to H.O. Mounce, James's pragmatism is a failure simply for being inconsistent with that of C.S. Peirce. Mounce also dismisses James's radical empiricism as involving phenomenalism. There are significant inaccuracies with such a view of James, and, accordingly, this paper is a response to Mounce. The two themes of radical empiricism and pragmatism constitute the heart of William James's philosophical project, and at least for this reason alone I think it important to correct Mounce. In short, his indictment of (...) James for having paved the way for the Richard Rortys of our community both fails to sufficiently engage James on his own terms and fails to present pragmatism in a sufficiently pragmatic manner. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy by John DeweyCharles A. HobbsJohn Dewey. Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012, 351 pp., index.John Dewey’s latest publication marks a watershed moment for scholarship in American philosophy, and, in addition to Dewey himself, we have editor Phillip Deen to thank for discovering it (among the Dewey papers in Special Collections at Morris Library of Southern Illinois (...) University) and editing it. We see Dewey late in life (early 1940s) engaged mainly in a critique of the modern, ancient, and (fragmentarily) medieval philosophical periods, which Dewey argues, are eras not nearly as distinct as traditional understanding admits. In the Introduction, Deen helpfully explains how we are now bequeathed incomplete but in most [End Page 122] cases quite robust chapter drafts that amount to another substantial work by Dewey. While published by Southern Illinois University Press, this volume is not itself part of The Collected Works of John Dewey. Still, the careful editing (of what are actually a number of manuscripts) is comparable in its excellence. There is also a well-done Index.The scope is twofold: retrospective and prospective. Chapters one through seven trace the development of so-called modern philosophy along with its central epistemological problem, with the aim being to demonstrate how thoroughly “unmodern” such philosophy has been. Then, chapters eight through fourteen constitute a genuinely modern approach that naturalistically and functionally undercuts the epistemic problem of subject/object and points to a revolution in the process of knowing.We turn to the retrospective, beginning in the first chapter with the acknowledgement that Dewey comes to philosophy itself as a kind of anthropologist, something we note as consistent with the influence of Franz Boas on Dewey (with whom Dewey was a colleague and intellectual ally at Columbia for about thirty-five years). This is further underscored by a lengthy quotation of anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski on the meaning of culture (p. 290). The ongoing history of philosophy is itself a cultural activity. Indeed, citing James, Dewey declares that “The sickliest way in which a student of philosophy can approach his subject-matter is that of a search for ultimate impersonal revelation of truth.” (p. 16) Rather, let the philosopher have the pragmatic attitude of openness “... to truth from whatever source it comes” (ibid).With that, Dewey once again turns to the Greeks, who initiated “The Discovery of Rational Discourse” (Ch. III) as underscored by the Socratic means of cooperative discourse, with the dialogues—not lectures—being evidence of the Athenian philosophical revolution in turning “from discussing nature and giving an account of it to the examination of the nature and procedure of discussion and report” (p. 38). Yet this project, despite its initial promise, failed for lack of a genuine logic of experimentation or inquiry. Then philosophy focused on going beyond the natural, beginning with the medieval “Search for Salvation” (Ch. IV, a significantly less developed and unified chapter draft). “Modern” philosophers then rightly replaced grand cosmic schemes with a focus on human nature (Ch. V), but they went too far with their introspective methods, gradually resulting in the same consequence supernaturalism had produced: a dualism of mind and nature, as if human nature is somehow not a part of nature. As we recall from Human Nature and Conduct (1922), human nature is not independent of but rather interdependent (or, using Dewey’s later term, transactional) with the rest of nature. The key is to avoid hypostatizing mind and better to talk of culture as nature. [End Page 123]With the Renaissance onward, humans have been “Wandering between Two Worlds” (Ch. VI), and endless arguments between “rationalists” and “empiricists” overlook what these camps share, namely a psychology assuming a fundamental split between subjective/objective and assumptions about certainty as founded upon various first principles or substances. The result is the stagnation of philosophy while science flourishes. Dewey cites Bertrand Russell as an example of continued insistence on such a priori principles (p. 106).We find ourselves in an epoch split between scientism and moral and religious fundamentalism, the result of a lingering tenacious investment in bad elements from ancient and medieval... (shrink)

We pragmatists have within our tradition significant methodological resources for contributing to the understanding of the meaning of beliefs about the nature of death—a topic that has still not received enough attention. 1 I want here to articulate what crucial features of pragmatism I believe to be especially helpful for such a contribution, and to explain something about why they are helpful in this regard. As my title indicates, I am not drawing upon the neo-pragmatism of those such as Richard (...) Rorty, but instead upon some of pragmatism’s rich classical American manifestations, according to which theory must be connected to practice and experience (as opposed to neopragmatism’s linguistic preoccupation).2 In.. (shrink)

The main title of this work is a little misleading. Hobbs does not begin to consider in any detail Plato’s relation to traditional Greek models of the hero until chapter 6, nearly two-thirds of the way through the book. In fact, Hobbs’s treatment of Plato’s re-working of the hero-figure is embedded in a nexus of themes revolving round the Greek virtue of andreia and its psychological basis in that part of the soul that Plato in the Republic calls the thumos. (...) Commonly translated ‘spirit’, the term is notoriously hard to render by a single English equivalent. Plato’s conception of this human drive can be captured, according to Hobbs’s succinct phrase, as “the need to believe that one counts for something”. (shrink)

This paper considers the implications for education of a reworked ancient Greek ethics and politics of flourishing, where ‘flourishing’ comprises the objective actualisation of our intellectual, imaginative and affective potential. A brief outline of the main features of an ethics of flourishing and its potential attractions as an ethical framework is followed by a consideration of the ethical, aesthetic and political requirements of such a framework for the theory and practice of education, indicating the ways in which my approach differs (...) from other recent work in the field. I argue that the teaching of philosophy in schools and philosophical approaches to the teaching of other subjects are ideally suited to meet the pedagogic requirements of individual and communal flourishing so understood, contributing greatly both to the understanding of what a well-lived life might be, and to the actual living of it. I further argue that these requirements are not only derived from ancient Greek philosophy but are in turn especially well-served by the teaching and deployment of Greek philosophy itself. My claim is not that Greek philosophy has all the answers, or that other philosophers and philosophical approaches should be excluded; it is simply that Greek philosophy offers rich resources for those seeking to introduce children and young people to philosophy and to foster thereby their flourishing in both childhood and as adults. (shrink)

In his 1922/1923 articles for the Japanese magazine _Kaizō_, Edmund Husserl identifies a particular “humanity” or human culture by the purposeful idea [_Zweckidee_] consciously embraced by the community. This purposeful idea is attained through rational self-formation on the part of the community in a manner analogous to the rational self-formation of the individual human being. Thereafter, it can be referenced to distinguish different cultures (or stages of cultural development) from one another through its objective manifestation in communal groups and cultural (...) products, as Husserl retraces in a historical account of the development of Western history. This paper explores the essential character of this conception of the purposeful idea from both an exegetical and a systematic perspective, examining in particular the relationship between such an idea and the values experienced by individual subjects within a culture (which are, according to Husserl, also available at the level of objective culture in relation to a communal subject). The paper argues that Husserl’s basic conception of the purposeful idea is a good model for understanding certain essential characteristics of cultural constitution in general, although some of his fundamental assumptions—especially the strict identity he attempts to establish between a purposeful idea as such and the specific goal of universal, rational self-understanding—turn out to be somewhat more questionable in light of the connection between the purposeful idea and the genuinely felt values underlying it. (shrink)

The inductive argument from the falsity of most past scientific theories (more than 100 years old) to the falsity of most present ones is defensible, I argue, if it is modified to account for the degrees of theoreticity or observationality in such theories, and the extent to which they are hedged. The case of descriptive astronomy is examined to show that most of the true theories of the 1890s were high in observationality and/or significantly hedged. The false theories of that (...) period, however, were not even approximately true. Apparently, scientists are more interested in supplanting theories with improved observations than in producing true theories. (shrink)

The eighteenth-century Physiocrats are widely considered to be precursors to classical economics, the French ninteenth-century Economistes, and contemporary free-market economics. They advocated free trade against mercantilism, and natural law against despotism. Although the Physiocrats also contributed to Walras and modern economic engineering, they fit squarely within the French (and world) liberal tradition.

Can religious premises ever be cited legitimately in explanations of matters of fact? Scientific practice is generally regarded as the source of our explanatory paradigms and the final arbiter of matters of fact, and is so constituted that it could never endorse such explanations. Neither would they be sanctioned by the non-cognitive reconstructions of religious discourse currently fashionable. I argue: Some scientific constraints on explanations, such as consistency, testability, and corrigibility, are generally legitimate in non-scientific contexts. Other cognitive values, such (...) as clarity and simplicity, though not constraints, still have adequate credentials to serve globally in the evaluation of theories and explanations. In addition to these, science employs overtly ideological constraints on explanation, plus a number of parochial values, including control, replicability, and skepticism. These serve to circumscribe the range of acceptable explanations more narrowly than reasonable standards of rationality would necessitate. In particular, they are responsible for precluding religious explanations unnecessarily. ;Finally, one can reconstruct from religious contexts a system of cognitive values with broad application that takes exception to scientific norms pertaining to the status of teleological explanations, the ranking of outstanding problem areas in importance, the usefulness of anecdotal material, and the appropriateness of pragmatic conceptions of truth. The additional explanations this value structure sanctions will be less secure than scientific explanations generally, and somewhat idiosyncratic. They may be appropriate when no scientific explanations are possible or available, or if the religious explanation is teleological and the scientific explanation is not. Near-death experiences represent a major potential source of religious explanations, although one in great need of development. More generally, our ability to give religious explanations is hampered by inadequate theoretical articulations of the concept of God. (shrink)