It has been a commonplace from the beginnings of philosophical thought that what distinguishes humans from other species is the ability to reason; reason- ing is held to be an essential characteristic of the species and one that is unique to it. The essence condition requires that all humans possess at least the capacity for reasoning and that it be exercised in many of the ordinary cases of acquiring beliefs. And uniqueness entails that non-humans cannot reason, no matter how much (...) their behavior resembles that of humans. I think that a certain specific model of reasoning has been presupposed by proponents of these claims. And there are grounds to believe that this model is inaccurate in essential respects: if reasoning does correspond to it, then few human beliefs are acquired through reason. However, given a more accurate description of what goes on in normal human reasoning, it is no longer plausible to think that only humans reason. So either the essence or the uniqueness claim must be given up. In this paper I argue for the second option. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:20. HUME ON REASON1 One of the main concerns of Hume's Treatise of 2 Human Nature (T) is the investigation of the role that reason plays in belief and action. On the standard interpretation, Hume is taken to argue that neither our beliefs nor our actions are determined by reason; Books I and III are thus seen as sharing a common theme: the denigration of reason's role in human (...) affairs. Arguing for this view, Kemp Smith claims that "Hume's principle of the subordination of reason to the passions runs through his whole philosophy ", not merely through Books II and III. This interpretation of Hume's enterprise presupposes that the faculty of reason whose role in action is discussed in Book III is the same faculty which has been shown not to determine belief in Book I. In this paper I argue that a univocal reading of 'reason' and related terms like 'reasoning' throughout the Treatise has the consequence that there are major internal inconsistencies in Hume's philosophy, cannot account for some important sections of the work, and leads to misinterpretation of the nature of his overall argument. In its place I develop an interpretation which avoids these difficulties and emphasizes the radical nature of Hume's naturalism. The Argument of the Treatise Let me begin by reviewing the salient features of the main argument of the Treatise. In Book I, Hume is concerned to show that our most fundamental beliefs — e.g., about the continued and distinct existence of object, about what we are not presently observing, and in the existence of the self — are not acquired by reason, but instead by the imagination, influenced by custom and habit. In a typical passage, he argues: Reason can never shew us the connexion of one object with another, tho' aided by experience, and the observation of their constant conjunction in all past instances. When the mind, 21. therefore, passes from the idea or impression of one object to the idea or belief of another, it is not determin'd by reason... (T92)4 In Book III, and in Book II, Part III, Section III (Of the influencing motives of the will), Hume is concerned to show that reason alone can never produce any action, or give rise to volition (T414), and the same faculty is as incapable of preventing volition, or of disputing the preference with any passion or emotion (T414-415). Hume uses this result in Book III, Part I, Section I, to show that the rules of morality...are not conclusions of our reason (T457). Proponents of the univocal reading of 'reason' would hold that the Treatise thus constitutes a continuous attack on reason, showing that it causes neither our most fundamental beliefs nor our actions and moral judgments. But if this reading were correct, Hume would fail to avail himself of an obvious and persuasive argument for the conclusion he reaches in Books II and III, and in the latter books he would contradict the results of Book I. Conflict between Book I and Books II and III If Hume did have the same faculty in mind throughout the Treatise, a strong argument to show that reason does not cause action would be available to him in Books II and III, utilizing the results he has established in Book I. The principal way in which reason would be thought to influence action is by informing us of facts about efficient means to achieve our ends and about the possible effects of actions — facts about causal relations. Since the conclusion of Book I is that judgments about causal relations do not result from reason, it follows that even if such beliefs did cause action, it would still not be the case that reason caused action. But Hume not only does not make such an argument in Books II and III, he denies one of its premises — the claim that beliefs about causal relations do not result from reason — which was the main conclusion of Book I. In the 22. later books he asserts repeatedly that reason can cause beliefs about causal relations. For example, in Book III, he says:...reason, in a strict and philosophical... (shrink)

SummaryThe paper examines the conditions someone's believing must satisfy in order to be reasonable and argues that an important necessary condition concerns the nature of the origin and sustain‐ment of the belief. This requirement cannot be captured by conditions on logical relations among the believed propositions, but instead concerns the psychological process of reasoning, concluding, or basing one belief on another. The implications of this result for traditional epistemology are examined, and it is concluded that the most important issues are (...) not just those involved in determining the nature of confirmation but include psychological investigation of the process of belief acquisition. (shrink)

The paper considers the question of whether it is possible to acquire beliefs at will, i.e. directly, simply as the result of willing to do so. In particular, it discusses an argument of Bernard Williams in "Deciding to Believe" to the conclusion that it is a necessary truth that one cannot acquire a belief at will. The argument is first clarified and reformulated so as to exhibit the underlying assumptions and explain precisely what he means by "acquiring beliefs at will." (...) The truth of the premises is then examined. Attention is focused on the most important assumption, which is that necessarily, if in full consciousness I will to acquire a belief b irrespective of its truth, then after the event it is impossible that I believe in full consciousness [b is a present belief of mine and I acquired b at will]. After further clarification of this claim, I argue that whatever plausibility it has results from the plausibility of another claim: Necessarily ~ (Ǝx) (Ǝp) (x believes [x believes p and x's belief of p is not sustained by any truth-considerations] ). I defend the latter claim against apparent counter-examples and show that it is compatible with the possibility conscious irrationality and has important implications. Nevertheless, I argue that even if it is true, other premises of Williams' argument are not plausible and he does not succeed in establishing that we cannot acquire beliefs at will. (shrink)

Czesław Miłosz’s poetry displays two reverberating topics which may be defined as two contradictory existence and world experiences. One of those is admiration for the beauty of the world and awe consequent upon capturing the simultaneous existence of individual entities (Awe), whilst the other is the topic of lack of fulfilment, torment, the feeling of lack of authenticity, blame, and shame (This). Miłosz depicts his “I” (represented by various personae), split between individual consciousness, a strong sense of individuality, distinct from (...) the commune of ordinary people (a strand salient in the pre-war volume Three Winters), as well as nurturing a feeling of strong bonds with the society. The poet’s self-reflection holds for both topics, while the autobiographic discourse is orientated to the questions about the functions of poetic language and about the status and sense of poetry, thereby addressing self-topicality. (shrink)

As William Hart notes, we live in a deconstructive age. Whether we read Derrida or not, many of us in and outside of the academy are invested in destabilizing established narratives, ideas, and categories. Similarly, we are eager to show how dominant narratives and categories tend to cover over more promising ways of imagining and interpreting the world. Recently, this deconstructive spirit has been directed toward discourses about the black church, black religion, and black cultures more generally. Authors like Curtis (...) Evans, Eddie Glaude, Anthony Pinn, and Barbara Savage, for instance, have challenged hoary tendencies to imagine the black church as a monolithic whole, to assume that black folk are naturally .. (shrink)

In Kafka’s literary world, several animals emerge; they belong to an odd and enigmatic fauna, on the edge between violence and artistry but also between stillness and music; according to the writer, scripture represents both the fault and the punishment waiting for the solitary artist. Animals, especially depicted as hordes of small mice or other rodents, also hint to the heterogeneous structure of the Self, who doesn’t manage to keep under control all the divisions in his ambiguous dentity. Through opposition (...) between the point of view of the subject, who considers his own isolation as indispensable to carry on writing, and the multitude of escaping small animals, Kafka also expresses and experiences his own impossibility of “description” (Beschreibung). In the meantime, Kafka’s animals embody the creatural and unconscious sources of imagination the writer draws from that constantly escape his own control and willingness, pushing forwards into an unknown and inhospitable region, towards the wasteland, the eternal winter that can be identified with scripture. In writing, a deep metamorphosis of the Self takes place. Kafka shares this belief with one of the writers he most admired and considered his master, Gustave Flaubert, who firmly thought that, while writing, one loses his previous identity, becoming someone else, even assuming the appearence of the “otherness”. We can state that Kafka’s imagery of animals takes to the extreme the paradox and ambiguity the idea of writing relies on, also reproducing, especially, in his hybrid creatures, the feeling of uncertainty and lack of safety of the assimilated Jewish artist. (shrink)

Barbara Stafford is at the forefront of a growing movement that calls for the humanities to confront the brain’s material realities. In Echo Objects she argues that humanists should seize upon the exciting neuroscientific discoveries that are illuminating the underpinnings of cultural objects. In turn, she contends, brain scientists could enrich their investigations of mental activity by incorporating phenomenological considerations—particularly the intricate ways that images focus intentional behavior and allow us to feel thought. This, then, is a book for (...) both sides of the aisle, a stunningly broad exploration of how complex images—or patterns that compress space and time—make visible the invisible ordering of human consciousness. Stafford demonstrates, for example, how the compound formats of emblems, symbols, collage, and electronic media reveal the brain’s grappling to construct mental objects that are redoubled by prior associations. On the other hand, she compellingly shows that findings in evolutionary biology and the neurosciences are providing profound opportunities for understanding aesthetic conundrums as old and deep-seated as the human urge to imitate, the mapping of inner space, and the role of narrative and nonnarrative representation. As precise in her discussions of firing neurons as she is about the coordinating dynamics of image making, Stafford locates these major transdisciplinary issues at the intersection of art, science, philosophy, and technology. Ultimately, she makes an impassioned plea for a common purpose—for the acknowledgement that, at the most basic level, these separate projects belong to a single investigation. (shrink)

This paper responds to the contributions by Alexander Bird, Nathan Wildman, David Yates, Jennifer McKitrick, Giacomo Giannini & Matthew Tugby, and Jennifer Wang. I react to their comments on my 2015 book Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality, and in doing so expands on some of the arguments and ideas of the book.

Dispositionalism about modality is the view that metaphysical modality is a matter of the dispositions possessed by actual objects. In a recent paper, David Yates has raised an important worry about the formal adequacy of dispositionalism. This paper responds to Yates’s worry by developing a reply that Yates discusses briefly but dismisses as ad hoc: an appeal to a ’plenitude of powers’ including such powers as the necessarily always manifested power for 2+2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} (...) \begin{document}$$2+2$$\end{document} to be 4. I argue that the reply is not ad hoc at all, by defending the metaphysics of dispositions that should underly it. I then argue, first, that a proper understanding of dispositions’ degrees provides us with an argument for such necessarily always manifested dispositions; second, that all the natural attempts to block that argument can be resisted without being ad hoc; and third, that pragmatic considerations explain our intuitive resistance to the ascription of necessarily always manifested dispositions. Dispositionalism can be formally adequate after all. (shrink)

In this study, we investigate the conceptual structure of the metaphor “SIMILARITY IS PROXIMITY.” The results of four experiments suggest a tight mental link between similarity and proximity. Two experiments revealed that people judge entities to be more similar to each other when they are placed closely in space, while two other experiments showed that entities are judged to be closer to each other when they are thought to be more similar. We discuss this bidirectional metaphor transfer effect in light (...) of approaches to metaphor understanding, including the long-standing view that metaphorical mappings are assumed to be asymmetrical. We also consider the implications of this bi-directional mapping for high level cognition. (shrink)

Micheline Sauvage of the French National Scientific Research Centre traces for us the story of this great Athenian and great philosopher, as seen both by his contemporaries and by the European philosophers who followed after him.

This paper explores the prospects for dispositional accounts of abilities. According to so-called new dispositionalists, an agent has the ability to Φ iff they have a disposition to Φ when trying to Φ. We show that the new dispositionalism is beset by some problems that also beset its predecessor, the conditional analysis of abilities, and bring up some further problems. We then turn to a different approach, which links abilities not to motivational states but to the notion of success, and (...) consider ways of implementing that approach. Our results suggest that there are principled disanalogies between abilities and disposition which prevent any dispositional account of abilities from succeeding. (shrink)

Contemporary issues involving knowledge and science examined from a constructivist-pragmatist perspective often labeled "relativism." Individual chapters include a review of the difference between constructivist-pragmatist epistemology and "social constructivism;" an examination of recent writings by Bruno Latour; a critique of computational methods in literary studies; a skeptical look at current efforts to "integrate" the humanities and the natural sciences; and reflections on the social dynamics of belief in relation to denials of climate change and to hopes expressed by environmentalists.

An extended analysis and account of the psychological/social/cognitive dynamics of intellectual controversy. The immediate focus is the recurrent failure of intellectual engagement, in encounters having to do with with truth, knowledge, language, science, and/or objectivity, between, on the one hand, rationalist-realist-objectivist philosophers and/or those they have instructed and, on the other hand, constructivist-pragmatist ("postmodern") theorists and/or those persuaded by their critiques and/or alternative views. Individual chapters examine critiques and defenses of objectivist-rationalist views in law, politics, literary studies, ethics, communication theory, (...) and philosophy of science. Theorists whose views are discussed critically at some length include legal scholar Robin West and philosophers Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, and Philip Kitcher. (shrink)

A critical examination of the charge of self-refutation, particularly as leveled by orthodoxy-defending philosophers against those maintaining epistemologically unorthodox, especially relativistic or skeptical, views. Beginning with an analysis of its classic illustration in Plato’s *Theaetetus* as leveled against Protagoras’s “Man is the measure ...,” I consider various aspects of the charge, including logical, rhetorical, pedagogic, affective, and cognitive.

Advocates of literary Darwinism, cognitive cultural studies, neuroaesthetics, digital humanities, and other such hybrid fields now seek explicitly to make the aims and methods of one or another humanities discipline approximate more closely the aims and methods of science, and at their most visionary, they urge as well the overall integration of the humanities and natural sciences. This essay indicates some major considerations—historical, conceptual, and pragmatic—that may be useful for assessing these efforts and predicting their future. Arguments promoting integration often (...) involve dubious teleological models of intellectual history and betray limited understandings of the distinctive epistemic orientations and cultural functions of the humanities vis-à-vis the sciences. Recurrent institutional difficulties encountered by scholars and/or scientists in hybrid fields reflect steep prestige differentials between the humanities and sciences, along with significant differences of training, experience, style, and temperament. Meanwhile, both the sciences and humanities are being shaken up by technological and related intellectual developments. Though worrisome, the new disciplinary configurations are thus likely to play out in surprising and, not inconceivably, positive ways. (shrink)

The book introduces young researchers to phenomenology and the two primary philosophical approaches along with the vocabulary of phenomenology including how to set up the research design and execute the study to include data collection, data analysis, and presentation of findings.

A study of Philo and Paul and the first-century sophistic movement.

This paper aims to determine whether extended human-machine cognitive systems and group systems can be regarded as autonomous agents. For this purpose, I compare two notions of agency: one developed within analytical philosophy of action and based on the concept of intention, and the other introduced by enactivists via the concepts of autopoiesis and sensorimotor autonomy. I argue that only the latter approach can be used to demonstrate autonomous agency in respect of systems that are not humans as such, though (...) they contain humans as their elements. After introducing Maturana and Varela’s conception of minimal autonomy as a kind of generalization of autopoiesis, I present the three conditions of agency put forward by Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde, noting that they do not invoke the property of being alive as necessary in that respect. I argue that both extended and group systems can satisfy these conditions of agency, even though they are not alive as such. The fulfillment of these conditions, however, is ensured by the autopoietic nature of the living components of these systems. That being said, an autonomous system itself does not need to be alive in the biological sense. Sensorimotor, adaptive agency could emerge out of other processes than those responsible for biological life. The article concludes with a suggestion that this is exactly what will happen if an autonomous system is ever artificially created. It would be functionally indistinguishable from a living organism, though not alive in a biological sense. (shrink)

Some of the series' finest lectures have been lost for many years, unavailable to the public in any form -- until now.

In this response to comments on my article, “The Chimera of Relativism,” in the same issue of *Common Knowledge* , by cognitive neuroscientist Andreas Roepstorff, classicist G. E. R. Lloyd, and anthropologist Martin Holbraad, I illustrate and reinforce Lloyd's cautions regarding the hazards of intercultural—here, Chinese-Western—comparisons in studies of culture and cognition. Examination of a foundational study in East-West cultural/cognitive differences cited by Roepstorff indicates extensive conceptual and methodological problems in that tradition of research. Although Holbraad champions a more radical (...) relativism than that offered in my work, the moves he urges have either been present in my work from the beginning or are both dubiously radical and otherwise undesirable. (shrink)

Das menschliche Leben vollzieht sich in der Spannung von "Natürlichkeit und Künstlichkeit". Jede Epoche definiert ihre Lebensvollzüge in dieser Spannung neu. Die Gegenwart verzeichnet in ihrem technisch zivilisierten Ambiente neue Schübe von "Künstlichkeit", denen kompensatorisch neue Ideen von "Natürlichkeit" entgegentreten. Der Sport ist davon zentral betroffen. Diese Tagung versucht, von unterschiedlichen philosophischen Fragestellungen her sich dem Problem der Künstlichkeit unseres gegenwärtigen Lebens (und des Sports) zu nähern und das Postulat der "Natürlichkeit" in seiner regulativen Funktion zu begreifen. Die nun in (...) Schriftfassung vorgelegten Vorträge dieser Tagung bieten Diskussionsgrundlagen für notwendige Überlegungen, wenn es darum geht, Konzepte von Bewegung, Spiel und Sport kulturell-historisch zu verstehen und moralisch-ethisch zu kritisieren und zu würdigen. (shrink)

A critique of dubious contrasts between "science" and "religion" drawn on the basis of cognitive-evolutionary accounts of human psychology, e.g.,. the claim that religious concepts are “likely” and “natural” for the human mind whereas scientific thinking is “rare” and “unnatural.” Initially made by biologist Lewis Wolpert in *The Unnatural Nature of Science* (1993) and anthropologist Pascal Boyer in *Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought* (2001), they are developed at length by philosopher R. N. McCauley in a*Why Religion is (...) Natural and Science is Not* (2011). These contrasts involve tendentiously narrow or broad definitions of the terms “science” and “religion” and the obliteration of the complex historical and intellectual relations between the ideas and practices currently identified by those terms. (shrink)

How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, reflecting on your actions leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis--that's what is widely believed. But is it true? After exploring some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea, Barbara Gail Montero (...) develops a theory of expertise which emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action. She aims to dispel various myths about experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their action, and she analyzes research in both philosophy and psychology that is taken to show that conscious control and explicit monitoring of one's movements impedes well practiced skills. Montero explores a wide range of real-life examples of optimal performance, in sports, the performing arts, healthcare, the military, and other fields, and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to offer a refreshing and persuasive view of expertise, according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective. (shrink)

In this paper, I will argue that ageing can be construed as disease. First, the concept of disease is discussed, where the distinction is made between two lines of thought, an objectivist and a subjectivist one. After determining the disease conception to be used throughout the argument, it is proposed that senescence could be seen as disease. Three common counterarguments are discussed, none of which appears strong enough to effectively counter the advocated view. In the third section, two potential implications (...) of the view advocated here will be briefly touched upon. These are the quest for a cure or treatment for ageing and the general attitude towards the elderly. It is concluded that, utilizing an objective disease concept, ageing could be seen as a disease. None of the considered counterarguments packs enough of a punch to discard this. The implications are complex and intertwined, but need not be negative. (shrink)