The question of the cognitive role of fictionality is this: what is the correct cognitive attitude to take to p, when it is fictional that p? We began by considering one answer to this question, implicit in the work of Kendall Walton, that the correct response to a fictional proposition is to imagine that proposition. However, this approach is silent in cases of fictional incompleteness, where neither p nor its negation are fictional. We argue that that Waltonians should embrace a (...) pluralistic account of the cognitive role of fictional incompleteness: in some cases of fictional incompleteness, we are permitted to resolve the incompleteness during our engagement with the target fiction, and in other cases, we are obliged not to resolve the incompleteness. But though pluralism is accommodated by Walton’s wider account of fictionality, it puts tension on his motivating idea that fictionality stands to the imagination as truth stands to belief. And so we develop a rival conception of the cognitive role of fictionality that is built around a different analogy: on this evidentialist approach, (known) fictionality stands to the imagination as evidence stands to credence. (shrink)

Originally published in 1904, this book discusses the fundamental importance of education and theories of education within the works of Erasmus. Beginning with an outline of the life and characteristics of Erasmus, the text moves through his educational aims, ideas on the beginnings of the educational process and conception of the liberal arts. The second part of the text presents four extracts from the writings of Erasmus which express his views on education. Apart from a short chapter from De Conscribendis (...) Epistolis, which is given in Latin with English headings, these extracts are all translated into English. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Erasmus and the historical development of education. (shrink)

As a philosopher, psychologist, and physician, the German thinker Hermann Lotze defies classification. Working in the mid-nineteenth-century era of programmatic realism, he critically reviewed and rearranged theories and concepts in books on pathology, physiology, medical psychology, anthropology, history, aesthetics, metaphysics, logic, and religion. Leading anatomists and physiologists reworked his hypotheses about the central and autonomic nervous systems. Dozens of fin-de-siècle philosophical contemporaries emulated him, yet often without acknowledgment, precisely because he had made conjecture and refutation into a method. In spite (...) of Lotze's status as a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century intellectual thought, no complete treatment of his work exists, and certainly no effort to take account of the feminist secondary literature. Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography is the first full-length historical study of Lotze's intellectual origins, scientific community, institutional context, and worldwide reception. (shrink)

Situating Lotze in the School of Speculative Theology, I use debates about Schelling’s critique of Hegel—then and now—to understand Lotze’s critique of Hegel. Lotze’s early metaphysics seems to employ a version of Hegel’s dialectical analysis of being, phenomena, and mind emphasizing “the interconnection of things.” One can equally argue that he proceeds in an analytic style of reviewing and testing alternative theories. My tentative conclusion is that he assumes the existence of reality (the Absolute) like Schelling, and makes cognition a (...) process subordinate to that reality. In this respect, he goes beyond his Kantian mentors J. F. Fries and E. F. Apelt. From all these sources came a radically original Gestalt metaphysics. For example, he reverses Kant’s forms of intuition (Anschauung) into “forms of intuitability”(Anschaulichkeit), including the relational categories of space, time, motion, mechanism, organism, law, and event. He then makes the categories into ethical levels of a “teleological idealism.” In this way he overcomes his Herbartian teachers’ separation of metaphysics from ethics, evincing his center Hegelian roots. (shrink)

This book is about the eminent behavioral scientist B. F. Skinner, the American culture in which he lived and worked, and the behaviorist movement that played a leading role in American psychological and social thought during the twentieth century. From a base of research on laboratory animals in the 1930s, Skinner built a committed and influential following as well as a utopian movement for social reform. His radical ideas attracted much public attention and generated heated controversy. By the mid-1970s, he (...) had become the most widely recognized scientist in America, surpassing even Margaret Mead and Linus Pauling. Yet Skinner himself was an unassuming family man from a modest middle-class background, a machine-shop tinkerer whose tastes ran to English and French literature. Drawing on archival research, interviews, and historical styles appropriate to the evidence, the authors assembled in this volume examine Skinner's remarkable rise to prominence in the wider context of America's intellectual, cultural, and social history. (shrink)

The question of the social commitment of the sociologist, and the scientist in general, has become a burning issue facing the sociology of East and West alike, — though it may take different forms. (P. C. Ludz, “Sociology”, in C. D Kernig (ed.), Marxism, communism, and Western society (New York, 1973), vol. viii, p. 46.).

Ca. 40 published papers from a summer institute in the German Democratic Republic in 1988.

A MAJOR PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETER of Kant and critic of Herbart and Hegel, Hermann Lotze ( 1817-1881) is known to historians of psychology primarily for his theory of spatial perception.' As Professor of Philosophy at Gottingen University from 1845 to 1880, he published his theory of the physiological mechanism for spatial consciousness no less than six times.2 Standard accounts present his local sign theory as an associationistic, empiricistic, or empiristic view.3 Yet they also mention its influence among nativists such as Lotze's (...) own student Carl Stumpf. Certainly there is an historical irony here which deserves explanation. This paper will describe Lotze's theory, indicate its origins in the work of scientists such as E. H. Weber and Johannes Muiller and philosophers such as Jakob Friedrich Fries and Johann Friedrich Herbart, and trace its transformation at the hands of psycholo- gists of various theoretical persuasions.4 The intent is not to argue for Lotze's personal influence so much as to illustrate how one fertile idea in the history of science can serve as the catalyst for a much broader conceptual development. (shrink)

The late C. Vann Woodward was one of America's most prominent historians. His books have won every major history award--including the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Parkman Prizes--and he has served as president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. The Future of the Past collects two decades worth of Woodward's most significant essays, addresses, and major book reviews, including two important presidential addresses--"The Future of the Past" and "Clio with Soul" --as well as essays (...) on changing historical concerns of the past decades, the value of comparative history, the South in Reconstruction times and the South today, and the use of fiction in history. Woodward has written illuminating introductory comments on each section and offers an incisive general introduction about history and the direction the profession is taking today. Whether reviewing William Safire's novel Freedom or evaluating Henry Adam's portrait of Jefferson, Woodward's essays reflect a lifetime of thought on history and historical writing, and are essential reading for anyone concerned with either. (shrink)

Research devoted to characterizing phenomena is underappreciated in philosophical accounts of scientific inquiry. This paper develops a diachronic analysis of research over 100 years that led to the recognition of two related electrophysiological phenomena, the membrane potential and the action potential. A diachronic perspective allows for reconciliation of two threads in philosophical discussions of phenomena—Hacking’s treatment of phenomena as manifest in laboratory settings and Bogen and Woodward’s construal of phenomena as regularities in the world. The diachronic analysis also reveals (...) the epistemic tasks that contribute to establishing phenomena, including the development of appropriate investigative techniques and concepts for characterizing them. (shrink)

In this essay I consider whether the theory of organic chemistry is reducible to the theory of quantum chemistry. Using philosophical machinery developed by James Woodward, I characterize the understanding provided by both theories. Then I argue that there are systematic reasons to suspect that quantum chemistry is incapable of supporting some of the significant explanations, predictions, and applications underwritten by an understanding of theoretical organic chemistry. Consequently, even should quantum chemistry be ‘reducible to’ quantum physics in some suitable (...) sense, there are good reasons to doubt that many of the significant results of organic chemistry could be reproduced by quantum chemistry alone. (shrink)

*Note that this project is now being developed in joint work with Rich Woodward* -/- Some things are left open by a work of fiction. What colour were the hero’s eyes? How many hairs are on her head? Did the hero get shot in the final scene, or did the jailor complete his journey to redemption and shoot into the air? Are the ghosts that appear real, or a delusion? Where fictions are open or incomplete in this way, we (...) can ask what attitudes it’s appropriate (or permissible) to take to the propositions in question, in engaging with the fiction. In Mimesis as Make-Believe (henceforth, MMB), Walton argues that just as truth norms belief, truth-in-fiction norms imagination. Granting that what is true-in-the-fiction should be imagined, and what is false-in-the-fiction is not to be imagined, there remains the question of what to say within the Waltonian framework about things that are neither true- nor false-in-the-fiction---the loci of incompleteness. (shrink)

We develop and apply a multi-dimensional conception of explanatory depth towards a comparative analysis of inflationary and bouncing paradigms in primordial cosmology. Our analysis builds on earlier work due to Azhar and Loeb (2021) that establishes initial condition fine-tuning as a dimension of explanatory depth relevant to debates in contemporary cosmology. We propose dynamical fine-tuning and autonomy as two further dimensions of depth in the context of problems with instability and trans-Planckian modes that afflict bouncing and inflationary approaches respectively. In (...) the context of the latter issue, we argue that the recently formulated trans-Planckian censorship conjecture leads to a trade-off for inflationary models between dynamical fine-tuning and autonomy. We conclude with the suggestion that explanatory preference with regard to the different dimensions of depth is best understood in terms of differing attitudes towards heuristics for future model building. (shrink)

Some philosophers have recently argued that decision-makers ought to take normative uncertainty into account in their decisionmaking. These philosophers argue that, just as it is plausible that we should maximize expected value under empirical uncertainty, it is plausible that we should maximize expected choice-worthiness under normative uncertainty. However, such an approach faces two serious problems: how to deal with merely ordinal theories, which do not give sense to the idea of magnitudes of choice-worthiness; and how, even when theories do give (...) sense to magnitudes of choice-worthiness, to compare magnitudes of choice-worthiness across different theories. Some critics have suggested that these problems are fatal to the project of developing a normative account of decision-making under normative uncertainty. The primary purpose of this article is to show that this is not the case. To this end, I develop an analogy between decision-making under normative uncertainty and the problem of social choice, and then argue that the Borda Rule provides the best way of making decisions in the face of merely ordinal theories and intertheoretic incomparability. (shrink)

The debate over the existence of a “public sphere” in China’s Late Qing/Early Republican era began nearly three decades ago, but it has yet to generate a special socio-cultural review on the “Confucian social imaginary” of the Chinese people. The article builds on existing “economic-political approach” and “idea-communication approach” to argue decisive factors hindering the development of a Habermasian “public sphere.” These includes (1) people’s traditional-collectivist lifestyle, (2) lack of understanding of “universal equality,” (3) conservative self-positioning during social transition, (4) (...) regionalist attitude toward outsiders, (5) lack of access to Enlightenment ideas, (6) disregard for parliamentary systems, and (7) ignorance of the rule of law. (shrink)