Is there anything peculiarly "photographic" about photography—something which sets it apart from all other ways of making pictures? If there is, how important is it to our understanding of photographs? Are photographs so unlike other sorts of pictures as to require unique methods of interpretation and standards of evaluation? These questions may sound artificial, made up especially for the purpose of theorizing. But they have in fact been asked and answered not only by critics and photographers but by laymen. Furthermore, (...) for most of this century the majority of critics and laymen alike have tended to answer these questions in the same way: that photographs and paintings differ in an important way and require different methods in interpretation precisely because photographs and paintings come into being in different ways. These answers are interesting because, even within the rather restricted classes of critics, photographers, and theorists, they are held in common by a wide variety of people who otherwise disagree strongly with each other—by people who think that photographs are inferior to paintings and people who believe they are superior; by people who think that photographs ought to be "objective" and those who believe they should be "subjective"; by those who believe that it is impossible for photographers to "create" anything and by those who believe that they should at least try. Joel Snyder teaches criticism and history of photography at the University of Chicago and is presently compiling a book of his own photographs. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Picturing Vision" and "Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost", written with Ted Cohen in the Winter 1980 issue. Neil Walsh Allen produces educational audio-visual materials and has designed eight permanent exhibits on the history and applications of photography for the Smithsonian Institution. (shrink)

I find it more than merely suggestive that we call many different kinds of pictures "realistic." As a category label, "realistic" is remarkably elastic. We cheerfully place into the category pictures that are made in strict accordance with the rules of linear perspective, pictures that are at slight variance with those rules but that nonetheless look perfectly "correct" , and pictures made in flagrant contravention of perspective geometry . We accept as realistic pictures that are made in strict accordance with (...) the rules of perspective construction that we could never judge as being similar to anything we might or could ever see . We accept as realistic pictures that are in sharp disagreement with what we now take to be the facts of vision . . . There is something charming and yet nasty about the belief in the special relation of picture to world. It is charming because it allows us to "enter" with ease into pictures and allows them to "extend" into our world. It allows us to think of pictures as "true to life," to use [Ernst] Gombrich's beguiling term, to look at a picture and ask questions of it, as if we were looking at the world through a window. It allows us to treat pictures as substitutes for the objects they represent and so, for example, to buy clothing from an illustrated catalogue, or to analyze architectural styles from pictures of buildings. In brief, it allows us to feel proximity to what is depicted and urges us to conclude that in certain important respects looking at a picture is equivalent to looking at what is pictured. Joel Snyder, associate professor of humanities and of art and design at the University of Chicago, teaches aesthetics, and theory and history of photography. A practicing photographer, he is currently completing a monograph on the photographer Timothy H. O'Sullivan. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Photography, Vision, and Representation" and "Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost", written with Ted Cohen in the Winter 1980 issue. (shrink)

Surely [John R.] Searle must rely on a stable, formal conception of the point of view. He sets Las Meninas on a par with the antimony of the liar and the paradoxes of set theory. But nothing is an antimony or a paradox just because it seems so or just because it is confusing or difficult, even if it seems so to everyone. To deserve such a description, a thing must be, so to speak, intrinsically intractable, not merely resistant when (...) looked at in a particular way. If a man says "I do not believe I am alive," that would be odd, and it would be hard to understand just what he means, and it may even be hard or impossible to believe that he is telling the truth; but there is no antimony. If a man says "I am lying," then we have a primitive version of the antimony of the liar. Given the meaning of this utterance—and nothing else—there is no way to get a grip on it. If what the man says is true, then it's false; if what he says is false, then it's true. Joel Snyder, a practicing photographer, is associate professor of humanities and of art and design at the University of Chicago. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Photography, Vision, and Representation," written with Neil Walsh Allen , and "Picturing Vision" . Ted Cohen, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, has written on language, aesthetics, and taste. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Metaphor and the Cultivation of Intimacy," appeared in the Autumn 1978 issue. (shrink)

It is ironic that, with few exceptions, the now vast body of critical literature about Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas fails to link knowledge to understanding—fails to relate the encyclopedic knowledge we have acquired of its numerous details to a convincing understanding of the painting as a whole. Las Meninas is imposing and monumental; yet a large portion of the literature devoted to it considers only its elements: aspects of its nominal subjects, their biographies, and their roles in the household of (...) the queen or the king. Niceties of court etiquette; concerns about clothing, and shoes , and the small cup of water offered to the Infanta Margarita .This increasingly intimate discussion of the painting’s details is not altogether beside the point; some of this information deserves to be integrated into descriptions of the painting as a whole. But a reader of these descriptive accounts soon begins to suspect they are offered in the hope that some new details might provoke an understanding of the entire painting, might prove to be the key to our comprehension of it. In fact, Las Meninas invites such analysis. Some nineteenth-century critics called it “photographic” in its naturalism , in the profusion of its detail, and in the alleged “snapshot” quality of its composition.1 The underlying motive of this understanding ought not to be dismissed, even thought the photography analogy is clearly grotesque, in terms both of history and visual sensibility. Although we know a great deal about the contention, in seventeenth-century Spanish art theory, that a major function of art is the perfecting of nature according to ideal standards, Las Meninas nonetheless is most commonly taken to be a pure spectacle memorializing an incidental moment, seemingly explicable solely in terms of what is apparent in it. 1. Gustav Waagen, paraphrased in Carl Justi, Diego Velazquez and His Times , p. 419; William Stirling-Maxwell, quoted in ibid. Joel Snyder is associate professor of humanities and of art and design and is chairman of the Committee on General Studies in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a book about the foundations of perspective. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Photography, Vision, and Representation,” written with Neil Walsh Allen , “Picturing Vision” , and “Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost,” written with Ted Cohen. (shrink)

Some of the most celebrated images of nineteenth-century American photography emerged from government-sponsored geological surveys whose purpose was to study and document western territories. Timothy H. O'Sullivan and William Bell, two survey photographers who joined expeditions in the 1860s and 1870s, opened the eyes of nineteenth-century Americans to the western frontier. Highlighting a recent Smart Museum of Art acquisition, One/Many brings together an exquisite group of photographs by Bell and O'Sullivan. Particularly noteworthy are their photographic panoramas, assemblages of individual images (...) joined together to form a continuous, horizontal landscape view. These panoramas have not been exhibited in well over a century and have never before been published. For the first time, One/Many investigates their role and purpose both within and outside of the surveys, taking into account the larger context of nineteenth-century modes of viewing. The volume also allows the little-known Bell's work to be better understood next to that of his more famous colleague. (shrink)

Numerous writers on photography and motion pictures have claimed that photographically originated pictures are essentially different from handmade pictures. Arguments made on behalf of the essential difference of photographs from other kinds of pictures generally depend upon one or another of two models of the photographic process: the visual model claims that photographs are closely allied to vision and show what we would have seen from the standpoint of the camera at the time of exposure; the mechanical or automatic model (...) claims that irrespective of what a photograph looks like, it is a reliable index of what was the case at the moment of exposure. Each of these models is examined and shown to be faulty on either or both factual and/or conceptual grounds. Stanley Cavell's assertions about the "automatic" nature of photography are examined in some detail and shown to be either equivocal or false. It is suggested, in closing, that sharp, categorial differences between photographs and handmade pictures do not exist and that questions about the differences between photographs and, say, paintings, can be solved only within the context of viewing particular photographs and particular paintings. In sum, claims about the ontological distinctions between photographs and handmade pictures cannot be warranted. (shrink)

Numerous writers on photography and motion pictures have claimed that photographically originated pictures are essentially different from handmade pictures. Arguments made on behalf of the essential difference of photographs from other kinds of pictures generally depend upon one or another of two models of the photographic process: the visual model claims that photographs are closely allied to vision and show what we would have seen from the standpoint of the camera at the time of exposure; the mechanical or automatic model (...) claims that irrespective of what a photograph looks like, it is a reliable index of what was the case at the moment of exposure. Each of these models is examined and shown to be faulty on either or both factual and/or conceptual grounds. Stanley Cavell's assertions about the "automatic" nature of photography are examined in some detail and shown to be either equivocal or false. It is suggested, in closing, that sharp, categorial differences between photographs and handmade pictures do not exist and that questions about the differences between photographs and, say, paintings, can be solved only within the context of viewing particular photographs and particular paintings. In sum, claims about the ontological distinctions between photographs and handmade pictures cannot be warranted. (shrink)

Objections arise to the concept of artistic intention based upon the psychology of a period. Here too we experience trends or volitions which can only be explained by precisely those artistic creations which in their own turn demand an explanation on the basis of these trends and volitions. Thus "Gothic" man or the "primitive" from whose alleged existence we wish to explain a particular artistic product is in truth the hypostatized impression which has been culled from the works of art (...) themselves. Or it is a question of intentions and evaluations which have become conscious as they find their formulation in the contemporary theory of art or in contemporary art criticism. Thus these formulations, just like the individual theoretical statements of the artists themselves, can once more only be phenomena parallel to the artistic products of the epoch; they cannot already contain their interpretation. Here again this parallel phenomenon would, in its entirety, represent an extraordinarily interesting object of humanistic investigation, but it would be incapable of defining in detail a methodologically comprehensible volition. So, too, the view of art which accompanies a period's artistic output can express the artistic volition of the period in itself but cannot put a name to it for us. This view can be of eminent significance when we are seeking a logical explanation for the perception of tendencies dominating at a given time and thus also for the judgment of artistic volition at that time, which must also be interpreted.Erwin Panofsky, the renowned art historian, was professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, until his death in 1968. Among his many books and articles are Meaning in the Visual Arts, Early Netherlandish Painting, and Renaissance and Renascenes in Western Art. Kenneth Northcott is professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Chicago and the translator of Arnold Hauser's Sociology of Art . Joel Snyder is chairman of the committee on general studies in the humanities at the University of Chicago. (shrink)

Both target papers cite evidence from infancy and early childhood to support the notion of human musicality as a somewhat static suite of capacities; however, in our view they do not adequately acknowledge the critical role of developmental timing, the acquisition process, or the dynamics of social learning, especially during later periods of development such as middle childhood.

Katzav and Vaesen have argued that control by analytic philosophers of key journals, philosophy departments and at least one funding body plays a substantial role in explaining the emergence of analytic philosophy into dominance in the Anglophone world and the corresponding decline of speculative philosophy. They also argued that this use of control suggests a characterisation of analytic philosophy as, at the institutional level, a sectarian form of critical philosophy. I test these hypotheses against data about philosophy job hires at (...) key philosophy departments in the USA during the period 1930-1979, and against data about PhD completions during the period 1956-1965. I argue, further, that Katzav and Vaesen’s hypotheses can fully explain the data and are more fully able to do so than are some other key accounts of the emergence of analytic philosophy in the USA. (shrink)

It is common for young Christians to go off to college assured in their beliefs but, in the course of their first year or two, they meet what appears to them to be powerful defenses of scientific naturalism and crushing critiques of the basic Christian story (BCS), and many are thrown into doubt. They think to themselves something like this: "To be honest, I am troubled about the BCS. While the problem of evil, the apparent cultural basis for the diversity (...) of religions, the explanatory breadth of contemporary science, naturalistic explanations of religious experience and miracle reports, and textual and historical criticism of the Bible, among other things, don’t make me believe the BCS is false , I am in serious doubt about it, so much so that I lack belief of it. In that case, how can I have Christian faith? And if I don’t have faith, how can I keep on praying, attending church, affirming the creed, confessing my sins, taking the sacraments, singing the hymns and songs, and so on? I can’t, unless I’m a hypocrite. So integrity requires me to drop the whole thing and get out." Of course, our student is not alone. Many Christians find themselves for some portion of their lives somewhere on the trajectory from doubt to getting out. Indeed, Christians in the West struggle with intellectual doubt more than they used to, especially university-educated Christians. What should we say to them? Some will say “Get out!,” welcoming the development as a path to liberation. We explore a different response in this essay. (shrink)

A brief article on faith as a psychological attitude.

A core commitment of Bob Hale and Crispin Wright’s neologicism is their invocation of Frege’s Constraint—roughly, the requirement that the core empirical applications for a class of numbers be “built directly into” their formal characterization. According to these neologicists, if legitimate, Frege’s Constraint adjudicates in favor of their preferred foundation—Hume’s Principle—and against alternatives, such as the Dedekind–Peano axioms. In this paper, we consider a recent argument for legitimating Frege’s Constraint due to Hale, according to which the primary empirical application of (...) the naturals is transitive counting, or answering ‘how many’-questions using numerals. We make two claims regarding Hale’s argument. First, it fails to legitimate Frege’s Constraint in virtue of resting on unsupported and highly contentious assumptions. Secondly, even if sound, Hale’s argument would vindicate a version of Frege’s Constraint which fails to adjudicate in favor of Hume’s Principle over alternative characterizations of the naturals. (shrink)

A critique of Plantinga's free will defense. For an updated version of this critique, with a reply to objections from William Rowe and Alvin Plantinga, see my "The logical problem of evil: Plantinga and Mackie," in Justin P. McBrayer & Daniel Howard‐Snyder (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, pp. 19-33.

This book explores and defends George Saunders’ causal thesis that successful stories are those that establish causation well. The book includes an in-depth discussion of causation’s role in several different key craft elements of fiction writing and examines different theories of causation and their implications for causation in fiction. Other discussions include the role of causation in building suspense, character and causation, causation in dialogue and connections between fiction and counterfactuals (or hypotheticals). The book also considers a number of objections (...) to the causal thesis and offers a reply. (shrink)

Most philosophers are familiar with the metaphysical puzzle of the statue and the clay. A sculptor begins with some clay, eventually sculpting a statue from it. Are the clay and the statue one and the same thing? Apparently not, since they have different properties. For example, the clay could survive being squashed, but the statue could not. The statue is recently formed, though the clay is not, etc. Godehart Link 1983’s highly influential analysis of the count/mass distinction recommends that English (...) draws a distinction between uncountable “stuff” and countable “things”. There are two mereological relations, related in specific ways. Our primary question here is whether an empirically adequate account of the mass/count distinction really does require distinguishing “things” from “stuff”, and thus postulating two corresponding mereological relations, or if instead positing only one sort of entity and corresponding mereological relation is sufficient, as other semantic theories would have it. This question is meant to be one of what we call natural language mereology. We are asking about the mereological commitments of English, or perhaps competent speakers of English, and not about ultimate reality as such. There is no pretense that we will definitively solve the metaphysical puzzle of the statue and clay. (shrink)

In the contemporary debate on free will, most philosophers assume that the defense of libertarianism implies the defense of the notion of alternative possibilities. This article discusses this presupposition by showing that it is possible to build a libertarianism without alternative possibilities, apparently more robust than libertarianism with alternative possibilities. Inspired by Bergson, this nonclassical libertarianism challenges the idea that all causation implies the actualization of a predetermined possibility (an idea shared by determinism and classical libertarianism). Moreover, it challenges the (...) idea that free will is a mere choice between prefixed possibilities: for this libertarianism, free will is the result of a creative process of the mind—an entirely causal process whose outcome is not, however, predetermined. This nonclassical libertarianism describes the process of forming a will in a more realistic way than classical libertarianism does. Furthermore, it is not threatened by the problem of chance. (shrink)

The concept of minimal risk has been used to regulate and limit participation by adolescents in clinical trials. It can be understood as setting an absolute standard of what risks are considered minimal or it can be interpreted as relative to the actual risks faced by members of the host community for the trial. While commentators have almost universally opposed a relative interpretation of the environmental risks faced by potential adolescent trial participants, we argue that the ethical concerns against the (...) relative standard may not be as convincing as these commentators believe. Our aim is to present the case for a relative standard of environmental risk in order to open a debate on this subject. We conclude by discussing how a relative standard of environmental risk could be defended in the specific case of an HIV vaccine trial among adolescents in South Africa. (shrink)

An introduction to the philosophy of mathematics grounded in mathematics and motivated by mathematical inquiry and practice. In this book, Joel David Hamkins offers an introduction to the philosophy of mathematics that is grounded in mathematics and motivated by mathematical inquiry and practice. He treats philosophical issues as they arise organically in mathematics, discussing such topics as platonism, realism, logicism, structuralism, formalism, infinity, and intuitionism in mathematical contexts. He organizes the book by mathematical themes--numbers, rigor, geometry, proof, computability, incompleteness, (...) and set theory--that give rise again and again to philosophical considerations. (shrink)

We often hear stories of people in terrible and seemingly intractable situations that are preyed upon by individuals offering empty promises of help. Frequently these cases are condemned as "exploiting the hope" of another. These accusations are made in a range of contexts, including human smuggling, the beauty industry, and unproven medical interventions. This concept is meant to do heavy lifting in public discourse, identifying a specific form of unethical conduct. However, it is poorly understood what is intended to be (...) wrong by exploiting hope, the range of activities that can accurately be captured under this concept, and what should be done about it. Thus, it is an ethical concept that is ripe for extended analysis and discussion. (shrink)

Grace A. de Laguna was an American philosopher of exceptional originality. Many of the arguments and positions she developed during the early decades of the twentieth century later came to be central to analytic philosophy. These arguments and positions included, even before 1930, a critique of the analytic-synthetic distinction, a private language argument, a critique of type physicalism, a functionalist theory of mind, a critique of scientific reductionism, a methodology of research programs in science and more. Nevertheless, de Laguna identified (...) herself as a defender of the speculative vision of philosophy, a vision which, in her words, “analytic philosophy condemns.” I outline her speculative vision of philosophy as well as what is, in effect, an argument she offers against analytic philosophy. This is an argument against the view that key parts of established opinion, e.g., our best theoretical physics or most certain common sense, should be assumed to be true in order to answer philosophical questions. I go on to bring out the implications of her argument for the approaches to philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Willard V. Quine and David Lewis, and I also compare the argument to recent, related arguments against analytic philosophy. I will suggest that de Laguna offers a viable critique of analytic philosophy and an alternative approach to philosophy that meets this critique. (shrink)

Many of us think that we just aren't enough. Not good enough, not pretty enough, not rich enough, and not happy enough. But just because we think something doesn't mean it's true. You are more than you think you are teaches you how to revise your belief system, fulfill your deepest dreams and desires, and create an epic, successful, and inspiring life. Unlocking your True Self is the key to new levels of joy, beauty, and peace. But what is the (...) True Self, and how can you realize its infinite potential? In this easy-to-read book, Kimberly Snyder answers these questions and shows you how to tap into this unstoppable force to transform every aspect of your life for the better. Drawing inspiration from the teachings of the great guru Paramahansa Yogananda along with personal stories and the latest scientific research, Kimberly offers simple exercises, potent ancient practices, and in-depth meditations to help you overcome negative beliefs and see yourself as you truly are--a goddess, a warrior, a lover, and a creator of your extraordinary destiny" -- Back cover. (shrink)

Most philosophers are familiar with the metaphysical puzzle of the statue and the clay. A sculptor begins with some clay, eventually sculpting a statue from it. Are the clay and the statue one and the same thing? Apparently not, since they have different properties. For example, the clay could survive being squashed, but the statue could not. The statue is recently formed, though the clay is not, etc. Godehart Link 1983’s highly influential analysis of the count/mass distinction recommends that English (...) draws a distinction between uncountable “stuff” and countable “things”. There are two mereological relations, related in specific ways. Our primary question here is whether an empirically adequate account of the mass/count distinction really does require distinguishing “things” from “stuff”, and thus postulating two corresponding mereological relations, or if instead positing only one sort of entity and corresponding mereological relation is sufficient, as other semantic theories would have it. This question is meant to be one of what we call natural language mereology. We are asking about the mereological commitments of English, or perhaps competent speakers of English, and not about ultimate reality as such. There is no pretense that we will definitively solve the metaphysical puzzle of the statue and clay. (shrink)

The stories in this book offer strategies and practices for applying systems thinking in education to unleash human energy for the journey of continuous improvement.

Drawing upon the life and work of S. Kay Toombs, I explore the impact and import of phenomenological accounts of disability for the existentialist tradition. Through the case of multiple sclerosis, a noncongenital, late-onset, and degenerative disability, I show how the general structures that emerge from its lived experience largely support a mere-difference view of disability and highlight the need for an equitably habitable world. I further argue that phenomenological accounts of disability demonstrate accessibility to be the defining feature of (...) what it means to be embodied as we are. I conclude with a discussion of the more general philosophical relationship between disability, embodiment, and existentialism. (shrink)

Ethical extensionism is a common argument pattern in environmental and animal ethics, which takes a morally valuable trait already recognized in us and argues that we should recognize that value in other entities such as nonhuman animals. I exposit ethical extensionism’s core argument, argue for its validity and soundness, and trace its history to 18th century progressivist calls to expand the moral community and legal franchise. However, ethical extensionism has its critics. The bulk of the paper responds to recent criticisms, (...) including (1) environmental ethicists’ objection against its austere conception of moral value (2), feminist ethicists’ claim that extensionism fails to account for the moral significance of difference, (3) disability theorists’ concern that ethical extensionist arguments are offensive, and (4) animal rights theorists’ lament that extensionism is a practical failure. While something is to be gained from each criticism, I argue that they ultimately fail and that extensionism remains compelling. (shrink)

I develop Tetsurō Watsuji’s relational model of the self as “betweenness”. I argue that Watsuji’s view receives support from two case studies: solitary confinement and dementia. Both clarify the constitutive interdependence between the self and the social and material contexts of “betweenness” that define its lifeworld. They do so by providing powerful examples of what happens when the support and regulative grounding of this lifeworld is restricted or taken away. I argue further that Watsuji’s view helps see the other side (...) of this deprivation, how reconstructing aspects of betweenness is, at the same time, a reconstruction of the self. I conclude by briefly indicating further consequences of this view. (shrink)

Biocentrism, a prominent view in environmental ethics, is the notion that all and only individual biological organisms have moral status, which is to say that their good ought to be considered for its own sake by moral agents. I argue that biocentrism suffers two serious problems: the Origin Problem and the Normativity Problem. Biocentrism seeks to avoid the absurdity that artifacts have moral status on the basis that organisms have naturalistic origins whereas artifacts do not. The Origin Problem contends that, (...) contra biocentrism, an entity’s origin is not relevant to whether that entity has moral status. The Normativity Problem is that biocentrists are preoccupied with accounting for the goods or interests of nonsentient organisms yet fail to establish why interests so construed confer moral status; biocentrism fails to bridge the good-ought gap. It is shown how these problems emerge in three prominent book-length works representative of the biocentrists’ positions over three decades: Paul Taylor’s Respect for Nature, Gary Varner’s In Nature’s Interests?, and Nicholas Agar’s Life’s Intrinsic Value. At minimum, these criticisms suggest that biocentrism is crucially incomplete as a moral framework at present and, optimistically, where more work remains to be done. If biocentrism really is dead, then moral status should be restricted to a more plausible locus such as sentience or rationality, the value of organisms needs a different expression, and environmental ethics needs an axiological foundation different than bare life. (shrink)

The Management of Scientific Integrity within Academic Medical Centers discusses the impact scientific misconduct has in eight complex case studies. Authors look at multifaceted mixtures of improper behavior, poor communication, cultural issues, adverse medical/health issues, interpersonal problems and misunderstandings to illustrate the challenge of identifying and managing what went wrong and how current policies have led to the establishment of quasi legal processes within academic institutions. The book reviews the current global regulations and concludes with a section authored by a (...) US federal court judge who provides his perspective on the adequacy of current regulations and policies. (shrink)

Since the publication of Wahrheit und Methode in 1960 (Tfibingen), Gadamer's hermeneutics has called forth a varied and fruitful response from the Continent, without receiving anything near the same attention from the English-speaking world. Though E. D. Hirsch thought Gadamer sufficiently important in 1965 to merit an early rebuttal and rehabilitation (Validity in Interpretation [New Haven, Conn., 1967], pp. 245-64), Wahrheit und Methode remained unread in England and America, partly because a translation was not available until 1975 (Truth and Method, (...) ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming [New York]). Even after that date, Gadamer's influence on Anglo-American debate has been largely secondhand, filtering in through such figures as Paul Ricoeur and Jiurgen Habermas. But a renewed interest in the question of what we are to make of tradition, no doubt spurred in large measure by deconstruction's effort to unmake it, has lent Gadamer a new pertinence. One sign that his stock is on the rise is the publication of Joel Weinsheimer's Gadamer's Hermeneutics, a much needed and admirably written introduction to Truth and Method that should push its value even higher. -- JSTOR (June 12, 2012.). (shrink)

This is an encyclopedia entry for William P. Alston.

Presents arguments on both sides of the issue of euthanasia, including questions regarding ethics and legality, physician-assisted suicide, living wills, and removing life support from patients in a persistent vegetative state.

This paper pursues two main aims. First, it distinguishes two kinds of improvisation: expert and inexpert. Expert improvisation is a (usually artistic) practice that the agent consciously sets as their goal and is evaluated according to (usually artistic) standards of improvisation. Inexpert improvisation, by contrast, supports and structures the agent’s action as it moves them towards their (usually everyday life) goals and is evaluated on its success leading the agent to the achievement of those goals. The second aim is to (...) describe inexpert improvisation as a robustly distributed affair, one that involves the ongoing integration of embodied practices with social and material resources within our surrounding environments. On the wide approach to improvisation fostered in this paper, inexpert improvisation is claimed to be our default way of inhabiting our world. (shrink)

Contrastive epistemologists say knowledge displays the ternary relation “S knows p rather than q”. I argue that “S knows p rather than q” is often equivalent to “S knows p rather than not-p” and hence equivalent to “S knows p”. The result is that contrastive knowledge is often binary knowledge disguised.

This paper introduces the philosophy of Grace Andrus de Laguna in order to renew interest in it. I show that, in the 1910s and 1920s, she develops ideas and arguments that are also found playing key roles in the development of analytic philosophy decades later. Further, I describe her sympathetic, but acute, criticism of pragmatism and Heideggerian ontology, and situate her work in the tradition of American, speculative philosophy. Before 1920, we will see, de Laguna appeals to multiple realizability to (...) undermine reductionism in science, to support perspectival, scientific realism and, with help from a private language argument, to favour the view that mental states are classified by behavioural, teleological roles over what came to be called ‘type physicalism’. Her view of speech, mostly developed in the 1920s, tells us that its primary role is coordinating group behaviour rather than expressing thoughts. Belief is understood in terms of its causal role, including its causal relations to other kinds of mental states, when coordinating group behaviour. Thought is similarly understood. In developing her theory of mind, de Laguna rejects the pragmatist claims that belief can be reduced to dispositions to behaviour and that thought’s function is to address specific, rather than general, problems. She also favours meaning holism and rejects the analytic–synthetic distinction. In later work, de Laguna argues that individuals’ activity of self-maintenance brings universals, conceived of as irreducible potentialities, into being and makes them increasingly determinate. Further, she identifies the existence of all individuals with forms of self-maintenance and takes the existence of people to include maintenance of the cultural world. Such a unified treatment of existence, she holds, permits making its evolution intelligible. Heidegger’s view of being is rejected for not permitting this. All de Laguna’s work, we will see, fits a vision of philosophy as the systematic, imaginative and naturalistic examination of being as well as a source of criticism of science. (shrink)

Basic concepts -- Identifying arguments -- Logic and language -- Informal fallacies -- Categorical logic: statements -- Categorical logic: syllogisms -- Statement logic: truth tables -- Statement logic: proofs -- Predicate logic -- Induction -- Probability.

As technology improves, artificial systems are increasingly able to behave in human-like ways: holding a conversation; providing information, advice, and support; or taking on the role of therapist, teacher, or counsellor. This enhanced behavioural complexity, we argue, encourages deeper forms of affective engagement on the part of the human user, with the artificial agent helping to stabilise, subdue, prolong, or intensify a person's emotional condition. Here, we defend a fictionalist account of human/AI interaction, according to which these encounters involve an (...) elaborate practise of imaginative pretence: a make-believe in which the artificial agent is attributed a life of its own. We attend, specifically, to the temporal characteristics of these fictions, and to what we imagine artificial agents are doing when we are not looking at them. (shrink)

This book is concerned with the role of intuitions in the justification of philosophical theory. The author begins by demonstrating how contemporary philosophers, whether engaged in case-driven analysis or seeking reflective equilibrium, rely on intuitions as evidence for their theories. The author then provides an account of the nature of philosophical intuitions and distinguishes them from other psychological states. Finally, the author defends the use of intuitions as evidence by demonstrating that arguments for skepticism about their evidential value are either (...) self-defeating or guilty of arbitrary and unjustified partiality towards non-intuitive modes of knowledge. (shrink)