Philosophy Lab: An Experiential Approach to Conceptual Analysis gives students the skills and strategies needed to do philosophical work in the Analytic tradition. They are presented with a step-by-step method for performing a preliminary conceptual analysis and practice examples to apply the method to standard philosophical problems. Students are introduced to the work of great thinkers including Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Wittgenstein, and Ryle. These works are complemented by contemporary empirical findings concerning perception, desire, emotion, moral intuition, and other basic elements (...) of explicit intentional cognition. Each chapter features primary source material, commentary, and activity instructions. The activities are designed to allow students to experience each mode of cognition in relative isolation, and then to see how they combine and interrelate in more complex contexts. Finally, students use the template model of conceptual analysis to explore the material. They identify and isolate the concept to be analyzed, determine whether it is simple or complex, and if complex, identify the constituent parts of the concept. Specific topics covered include causal power, sex and marriage, compassion, ambition, justice, and death. Through presentation and modeling the book not only enables student to do conceptual analysis with precision, it helps them understand and interpret philosophical issues. Philosophy Lab is a comprehensive, carefully designed text for first courses in philosophy. It may be used with first-year undergraduate students, advanced high-school students, or adult learners. Asher Walden holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and religion from Drew University. Dr. Walden is currently an adjunct lecturer at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Butler on Subjectivity and Authorship: Reflections on Doing Philosophy in the First PersonAsher WaldenWhat drew me to theology a number of years ago was that it was the most personal kind of philosophy, to the extent that it deals with the most important issues of one’s own “personal” life. It used the tools of the philosophical tradition to address questions that the philosophers—especially those in the University of Chicago’s (...) analytically oriented environment—seemed not to want to ask; at least, not when I was an undergraduate there some years ago. My engagement with philosophy has always been about personal questions, and in the past I tended to eschew the political realm as being at best external to the more essential business of philosophy. But the questions I have been asking lately are rather different from the ones that concerned me back when I was still in Chicago. Largely due to the birth of my son two years ago, questions that before were only secondhand—questions about education, democracy, and debt—are now very personal and very, very important to me. I am perhaps a latecomer to the position that, as the saying goes, “The personal is the political.” But being a convert, like the earliest Christian Apologists, may afford me an opportunity and motivation to argue the position all the more earnestly.The way I have sought to incorporate these different questions and perspectives in my theologizing has primarily been through engagement with the Confucian philosophical tradition. The Confucian tradition is, in large measure, a series of reflections on the individual’s utter embeddedness in familial, sociopolitical, environmental, and sacred structures and forces. The tradition has its own resources for expressing and navigating this embeddedness, but what has become interesting to me is that the requisite resources are being developed independently, and perhaps more forcefully, within the realm of postmodern and postcolonial theory. Indeed, these newer articulations may [End Page 55] well be vital for present-day Confucian thinkers to consider in reformulating and re-presenting their own commitments and traditions in the current era.The questions posed to and for the current paper are, first, how does the religiously committed philosopher (or theologian, in a loose sense of the term) consciously incorporate political and economic considerations into her theological research and discursive product; and second, to what extent and in what ways is it necessary for her also to include and address her own personal life/history into the same. Naturally, these are questions which religious thinkers will ask and answer anew for themselves, and repeatedly. My own engagement with Judith Butler in the current paper will merely provide, I hope, one possible model for such an account of how the personal and the political may function in theological discourse. Generally, the model given here suggests that such considerations are not external add-ons to the more essential “hard-core” theologizing of the doctrines of God and Christology. It is not a matter of (first) theory and (then) application. Rather, theological discourse is one place where ethical subjectivity is attained, if provisionally, through conscientious and critical engagement with both one’s religious tradition and the sociopolitical-economic structures in which those traditions are practiced, and where one’s own place within those structures is both questioned and created.In her recent work Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler continues her project of deconstructing the metaphysics of the substantive self, begun in her deservedly noted early work, Gender Trouble. In particular, she argues that the subject comes into being through processes and in contexts that, while not completely determinative of one’s subjectivity, do limit one’s ability to give a complete account of oneself, one’s actions and motivations. She asks the important question of whether this opacity of the conditions of one’s coming into being limits the possibility of taking responsibility, or being held responsible, for one’s actions. She ultimately finds, with Foucault, that selfhood is itself an ethical process, one occasioned and in large part constituted by the call, and subsequent attempt, to give an account.The question which drives Butler’s essay is, generally, if the subject comes... (shrink)

This book explores the problem of moral metaphysics through investigations of four pivotal philosophers. It uses the contemporary idea of moral sentimentalism as a comparative category to explore the problems and challenges inherent in the project of moral metaphysics.

The study of the feeling of knowing may have implications for some of the metatheoretical issues concerning consciousness and control. Assuming a distinction between information-based and experience-based metacognitive judgments, it is argued that the sheer phenomenological experience of knowing (''noetic feeling'') occupies a unique role in mediating between implicit-automatic processes, on the one hand, and explicit-controlled processes, on the other. Rather than reflecting direct access to memory traces, noetic feelings are based on inferential heuristics that operate implicitly and unintentionally. Once (...) such heuristics give rise to a conscious feeling that feeling can then affect controlled action. Examination of the cues that affect noetic feelings suggest that not only do these feelings inform controlled action, but they are also informed by feedback from the outcome of that action. (shrink)

Animal welfare science and ecology are both generally concerned with the lives of animals, however they differ in their objectives and scope; the former studies the welfare of animals considered ‘domestic’ and under the domain of humans, while the latter studies wild animals with respect to ecological processes. Each of these approaches addresses certain aspects of the lives of animals living in the world though neither, we argue, tells us important information about the welfare of wild animals. This paper argues (...) for the development of a new scientific discipline ‘welfare biology’ to address these issues and more, given the deficiencies of pre-existing life science disciplines to research the subject. Welfare biology is the study of the welfare of all living beings who have a welfare, with a value orientation toward promoting that welfare, regardless of the beings’ situation or relationship to humans and our activities. (shrink)

This paper draws upon Hannah Arendt's idea of the 'right to have rights' to critique the current protection gap faced by refugees today. While refugees are protected from refoulement once they make it to the jurisdiction or territory of a state, they face an ever-increasing array of non-entrée policies designed to stymie access to state territory. Without being able to enter a state capable of securing their claims to safety and dignity, refugees cannot achieve the rights which ought to be (...) afforded to them under international law. Drawing upon both legal theory and political philosophy, this paper argues that refugees today, just as the stateless in Arendt’s time, must be afforded the ‘right to have rights’, understood as a right to enter state territory. (shrink)

Fundamentismus und Skeptizismus-Anarchismus sind zwei entgegengesetzte Positionen in der traditionellen Erkenntnistheorie und in der modernen Wissenschaftstheorie. Zwischen ihnen gibt es einen dritten Standpunkt, den Evolutionismus. Beispiele sind zwei neuere Arbeiten von Putnam und Stegmüller . Im Gegensatz zum logisch-statischen Fundamentismus berücksichtigt der Evolutionismus auch dynamische und naturalistische Ansätze. Stegmüller folgend entlehnen wir in der vorliegenden Untersuchung aus der Sprachphilosophie pragmatische Gesichtspunkte, um die logische Syntax und Semantik, die Werkzeuge des Fundamentismus, zu ersetzen. Wir zeigen die Kraft der Pragmatik bei der (...) Behandlung von Problemen wie Erkenntniswachstum, Begriffswechsel, Theorien- und Bedeutungsdynamik, wissenschaftliche Entdeckung und besonders beim Problem der Inkommensurabilität. Unser nicht-fundamentistischer Vorschlag ist ein heuristisches Modell, das auf der modernen genetischen Theorie basiert. (shrink)

This chapter develops a theory of categorical normativity, of those principles that have authority over us regardless of our ends and interests. It argues that there is an intimate connection between these norms and the conditions of agency. In this respect, it offers a version of constitutivism. But the version of constitutivism defended is unique in a few respects. First, it is naturalistic: agency is an emergent property, like the properties of biology and economics. Second, it is social: agency is (...) something constructed by the complex interaction of agents. And third, it supports the normativity of a particular contractualist procedure: adhering to Kant’s Formula of the Realm of Ends is a condition on agency, and so a categorical requirement. (shrink)

In this rejoinder we clarify several issues raised by the commentators with the hope of resolving some disagreements. In particular, we address the distinction between information-based and experience-based metacognitive judgments and the idea that memory monitoring may be mediated by direct access to internal representations. We then examine the possibility of unconscious metacognitive processes and expand on the critical role that conscious metacognitive feelings play in mediating between unconscious activations and explicit-controlled action. Finally, several open questions are articulated for further (...) scrutiny. (shrink)

This article is intended to emphasize several ethical issues relating to the activities of the internal auditor. The points of view expressed relate mainly to the public sector of Israel. Beyond the discussion of the specific issues against its unique Israeli background (Internal Audit Law), the discussion throws light on general problems that have not yet been solved.

The relationship between metacognition and mindreading was investigated by comparing the monitoring of one’s own learning and another person’s learning . Previous studies indicated that in self-paced study judgments of learning for oneself are inversely related to the amount of study time invested in each item. This suggested reliance on the memorizing-effort heuristic that shorter ST is diagnostic of better recall. In this study although an inverse ST–JOL relationship was observed for Self, it was found for Other only when the (...) Other condition followed the Self condition. The results were interpreted in terms of the proposal that the processes underlying experience-based metacognitive judgments are largely unconscious. However, participants can derive insight from observing themselves as they monitor their own learning, and transfer that insight to Other, thus exhibiting a shift from experience-based to theory-based judgments. Although different processes mediate metacognition and mindreading, metacognition can inform mindreading. (shrink)

Schiller says that “it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” Here I attempt to defend a claim in the same spirit as Schiller’s but by different means. My thesis is that a person’s autonomous agency depends on their adopting an aesthetic identity. To act, we need to don contingent features of agency, things that structure our practical thought and explain what we do in very general terms but are neither universal nor necessary features of agency (...) as such. Without these things, the question of what to do for any individual would be underdetermined. The problem is that adopting such a contingent form of agency amounts to a restriction on what we can do, and so it is a prima facie threat to our autonomy. I will argue that one way, and indeed the only way, of meeting this challenge lies in aesthetic experience. Granting our capacity for aesthetic pleasure the authority to determine the particularities of our agency is compatible with autonomy because doing so means identifying with one’s capacity for pleasure in free and creative activity. Doing this allows us to be both particular sorts of agents and creatures regulated by the universalizing demands of reason. (shrink)

Martin Buber’s political thought has enjoyed renewed attention lately, particularly his concept of “theopolitics,” a type of political practice that recognizes God as the ultimate political authority. In Buber’s biblical exegesis, theopolitics is a condition of everyday life in premonarchical Israel, but following the installation of the monarchy, it becomes a specialized activity of prophets, consisting chiefly in divinely commanded intercession against state actions. Buber suggests that a version of this prophetic activity is manifest in present-day socialist cooperatives, especially the (...) kibbutzim. Indeed, for Buber, these cooperatives can be seen as laying the groundwork for messianic redemption. This essay probes some potentially troubling implications of Buber’s theopolitical framework, taking objections raised in Walter Benjamin’s correspondence as an entry point. A central concern for Benjamin is Buber’s nationalist articulation of Jewish identity, which appears all the more problematic when considered in tandem with the teleological view of history evident in Buber’s framework. (shrink)

It is stated in many text books that the any metric appearing in general relativity should be locally Lorentzian i.e. of the type η μ ν =diag (1,−1,−1,−1) this is usually presented as an independent axiom of the theory, which can not be deduced from other assumptions. The meaning of this assertion is that a specific coordinate (the temporal coordinate) is given a unique significance with respect to the other spatial coordinates. In this work it is shown that the above (...) assertion is a consequence of requirement that the metric of empty space should be linearly stable and need not be assumed. (shrink)

Philosophers commonly define knowledge as justified true beliefs. A heated debate exists, however, about what makes a belief justified. In this article, we examine the question of belief justification from a psychological perspective, focusing on the subjective confidence in a belief that the person has just formed. Participants decided whether to accept or reject a proposition depicting a social belief, and indicated their confidence in their choice. The task was repeated six times, and choice latency was measured. The results were (...) analyzed within a Self-Consistency Model of subjective confidence. According to SCM, the decision to accept or reject a proposition is based on the on-line sampling of representations from a pool of representations associated with the proposition. Respondents behave like intuitive statisticians who infer the central tendency of a population based on a small sample. Confidence depends on the consistency with which the belief was supported across the sampled representations, and reflects the likelihood that a new sample will yield the same decision. The results supported the assumption of a commonly shared population of representations associated with each proposition. Based on this assumption, analyses of within-person consistency and cross-person consensus provided support for the model. As expected, choices that deviated from the person’s own modal judgment or from the consensually held judgment took relatively longer to form and were associated with relatively lower confidence, presumably because they were based on non-representative samples. The results were discussed in relation to major epistemological theories – foundationalism, coherentism and reliabilism. (shrink)

The study of memory is witnessing a spirited clash between proponents of traditional laboratory research and those advocating a more naturalistic approach to the study of “real-life” or “everyday” memory. The debate has generally centered on the “what” (content), “where” (context), and “how” (methods) of memory research. In this target article, we argue that the controversy discloses a further, more fundamental breach between two underlying memory metaphors, each having distinct implications for memory theory and assessment: Whereas traditional memory research has (...) been dominated by thestorehousemetaphor, leading to a focus on thenumberof items remaining in store and accessible to memory, the recent wave of everyday memory research has shifted toward acorrespondencemetaphor, focusing on theaccuracyof memory in representing past events. The correspondence metaphor calls for a research approach that differs from the traditional one in important respects: in emphasizing the intentional –representational function of memory, in addressing the wholistic and graded aspects of memory correspondence, in taking an output-bound assessment perspective, and in allowing more room for the operation of subject-controlled metamemory processes and motivational factors. This analysis can help tie together soine of the what, where, and how aspects of the “real-life/laboratory” controversy. More important, however, by explicating the unique metatheoretical foundation of the accuracy-oriented approach to memory we aim to promote a more effective exploitation of the correspondence metaphor inbothnaturalistic and laboratory research contexts. (shrink)

My aesthetic judgements seem to make claims on you. While some popular accounts of aesthetic normativity say that the force of these claims is third-personal, I argue that it is actually second-personal. This point may sound like a bland technicality, but it points to a novel idea about what aesthetic judgements ultimately are and what they do. It suggests, in particular, that aesthetic judgements are motions in the collective legislation of the nature of aesthetic activity. This conception is recommended by (...) its ability to explain some important but otherwise recondite features of aesthetic practice and, more importantly, by allowing us to ground the normativity of aesthetic judgement in the familiar normativity of practice. It also offers a more systematic way of understanding the rivalry between the ideals of aesthetic universality and diversity. (shrink)

Inhuman Thoughts is a philosophical exploration of the possibility of increasing the physiological and psychological capacities of humans to the point that they are no longer biologically, psychologically, or socially human. The movement is from the human through the trans-human, to the post-human. Seidel argues that such an evolution would be of positive value on the whole.

RésuméJohn Searlea récemment soutenu que le cerveau ne peut pas être un ordinateur (non connexionniste). Son argument est que les vrais systèmes physiques comme les cerveaux fonctionnent à la causalité, tandis que les opérations computationnelles ne sont pas causales, mais sont plutôt des séquences formelles qui requièrent un interprète extérieur pour lew existence en tant que systèmes formels. Les vrais systèmes physiques, par contre, ne requièrent aucune interprétation pour lew existence comme systèmes physiques opérationnels.Contrairement à Searle, je soutiens qu'iln'y a (...) pas de démarcation nette entre notre application des formalismes mathématiques standard à des phénomènes physiques comme les oscillations, et notre application des formalismes computationnels aux divers phénomènes physiques qui sont, effectivement ou potentiellement, bien décrits et expliqués pas ces formalismes. (shrink)

The Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox (1935) is reexamined in the light of Shannon’s information theory (1984). The EPR argument did not take into account that the observer’s information was localized, like any other physical object.

Bell inequalities are derived for any number of observers, any number of alternative setups for each one of them and any number of distinct outcomes for each experiment. It is shown that if a physical system consists of several distant subsystems, and if the results of tests performed on the latter are determined by local variables with objective values, then the joint probabilities for triggering any given set of distant detectors are convex combinations of a finite number of Boolean arrays, (...) whose components are either 0 or 1 according to a simple rule. This convexity property is both necessary and sufficient for the existence of local objective variables. It leads to a simple graphical method which produces a large number of generalized Clauser-Horne inequalities corresponding to the faces of a convex polytope. It is plausible that quantum systems whose density matrix has a positive partial transposition satisfy all these inequalities, and therefore are compatible with local objective variables, even if their quantum properties are essentially non-local. (shrink)

Popper conceived an experiment whose analysis led to a result that he deemed absurd. Popper wrote that his reasoning was based on the Copenhagen interpretation and therefore invalidated it. Many authors who have examined Popper's analysis have found in it various technical flaws which are briefly summarized here. However, the aim of the present article is not technical. My concern is to redress logical flaws in Popper's argument: the terminology he uses is ambiguous, his analysis involves counterfactual hypotheses, and it (...) violates Bohr's complementarity principle. Therefore, the absurdity of Popper's result only confirms Bohr's approach. (shrink)

This volume is about abstract objects and the ways we refer to them in natural language. Asher develops a semantical and metaphysical analysis of these entities in two stages. The first reflects the rich ontology of abstract objects necessitated by the forms of language in which we think and speak. A second level of analysis maps the ontology of natural language metaphysics onto a sparser domain--a more systematic realm of abstract objects that are fully analyzed. This second level reflects (...) the commitments of real metaphysics. The models for these commitments assign truth conditions to natural language discourse. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR. (shrink)

CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing can and has altered human genomes, bringing bioethical debates about this capability to the forefront of philosophical and policy considerations. Here, I consider the underexplored implications of CRISPR-Cas9 gene drives for heritable human genome editing. Modification gene drives applied to heritable human genome editing would introduce a novel form of involuntary eugenic practice that I term guerrilla eugenics. Once introduced into a genome, stealth genetic editing by a gene drive genetic element would occur each subsequent generation irrespective (...) of whether reproductive partners consent to it and irrespective of whether the genetic change confers any benefit. By overriding the ability to ‘opt in’ to genome editing, gene drives compromise the autonomy of carrier individuals and their reproductive partners to choose to use or avoid genome editing and impose additional burdens on those who hope to ‘opt out’ of further genome editing. High incidence of an initially rare gene drive in small human communities could occur within 200 years, with evolutionary fixation globally in a timeframe that is thousands of times sooner than achievable by non-drive germline editing. Following any introduction of heritable gene drives into human genomes, practices intended for surveillance or reversal also create fundamental ethical problems. Current policy guidelines do not comment explicitly on gene drives in humans. These considerations motivate an explicit moratorium as being warranted on gene drive development in heritable human genome editing. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a rekindling of interest in the method of reflective equilibrium. Most of this attention has been suspicious, however. Critics have alleged that the method is nothing more than a high-minded brand of navel-gazing, that it suffers from all the classic problems of inward-looking coherence theories, and that it overestimates the usefulness of self-scrutiny. In this paper I argue that these criticisms miss their mark because they labor under crucial misconceptions about the method of reflective equilibrium. In (...) defending reflective equilibrium I put forward a handful of theses about the nature of inquiry (or, more generally, norm-governed enterprises) that form the backdrop to the method. The critics’ objections fall short, I argue, because they do not recognize reflective equilibrium’s embrace of these theses. Confronting these objections and understanding why they fail brings us to a better understanding what, exactly, the method of reflective equilibrium is. The answer I come to in the final section of the paper is that the method of reflective equilibrium is not, exactly, anything. It is a mistake to try to give a positive characterization of the view, to identify it with a concern with a particular species of data, particular procedures and methods, or even a particular conception of normative success. Instead, it should be understood as the denial of essentialism about just these matters—as a form of anti-essentialism about our epistemic inputs, methods, and goals. (shrink)

The proof of Bell's inequality is based on the assumption that distant observers can freely and independently choose their experiments. As Bell's inequality isexperimentally violated, it appears that distant physical systems may behave as a single, nonlocal, indivisible entity. This apparent contradiction is resolved. It is shown that the “free will” assumption is, under usual circumstances, an excellent approximation.I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life.... —Deuteronomy XXX, 19.

This paper contains four new dialogues among Simplicio, Salviati, and Sagredo, on the fate of Schrödinger's cat, the existence of physical quantities, the paradigm of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, and why a watched kettle may boil, after all.