Abstract: Kant declares the judgment of beauty to be neither ‘objective’ nor ‘merely subjective’. This essay takes up the question of what this might mean and whether it can be taken seriously. It is often supposed that Kant's denials of ‘objectivity’ to the judgment of beauty express a rejection of realism about beauty. I suggest that Kant's thought is not to be understood in these terms—that it does not properly belong in the arena of debates about the constituents of ‘reality’—motivating (...) the suggestion by first considering a pair of opposing views on the question of whether Kant can be understood to develop a real alternative to realism about beauty at all. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment is widely recognized as a founding document of modern aesthetics, but its legacy has fallen into disrepute. In this book Katalin Makkai calls for the rediscovery of Kant's aesthetics, showing that its centerpiece, his investigation of the judgment of taste, paints a compelling portrait of our relationships with works of art that we love. At its heart is a scene of aesthetic encounter in which one feels oneself to be 'animated' - brought to (...) life - by an object, finding there to be something in one's experience of it, beyond what there is to know about it, that one wants to explore and articulate. Tracing Kant's insight that to judge is to reveal one's sense of what bears judging, and hence of what matters, Makkai situates Kant's aesthetics within his larger study, begun in the first Critique, of judgment's fundamental role in the life of the mind. (shrink)

The dissertation offers a study of Kant's aesthetic theory as it is developed in the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment", the first half of his Critique of Judgment, which is widely acknowledged to be the founding text of modern philosophical aesthetics. I aim to show that this work elaborates an important and deeply interesting study of the nature and conditions of aesthetic judgment which---despite the recent resurgence of commentary and of secondary literature---has not yet been inherited. I give an account focused (...) on understanding Kant's idea that aesthetic judgment makes a claim to "subjective universality" and "exemplary necessity", the "twofold peculiarity" of aesthetic judgment that Kant himself presents as the main thematic guiding the course of the Critique. I argue for an interpretation of Kant's notion of aesthetic judgment which takes seriously his idea that its demand for the agreement of others takes the form of a presumption, in which the judge offers her judgment as exemplary of a "universal voice", apart from any independently or transcendentally assured authorization. (shrink)

Released in 1958, Vertigo is widely regarded as Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece and one of the greatest films of all time. This is the first book devoted to exploring the philosophical aspects of Vertigo . Following an introduction by the editor that places the film in context, each chapter reflects upon Hitchcock’s film from a philosophical perspective. Topics discussed include: memory, loss, memorialisation, and creativity mimetic or representational art and art as magic the nature of romantic love gender, sexual objectification, and (...) identity looking, "the gaze", and voyeurism film and psychoanalysis fantasy, illusion, and reality the phenomenology of colour. Including annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, this collection is essential reading for anyone interested in Vertigo , and an ideal resource for students of film and philosophy. (shrink)

A listing is given of the published writings of the logician and philosopher Hao Wang , which includes all items known to the authors, including writings in Chinese and translations into other languages.

A listing is given of the published writings of the logician and philosopher Hao Wang (1921—1995), which includes all items known to the authors, including writings in Chinese and translations into other languages.

A review of Katalin Makkai, _Kant’s Critique of Taste: The Feeling of Life Cambridge_: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

The perennial challenge for any Kant scholar is to offer close reading of a dense and often exceedingly abstract text that is faithful both to its driving philo.

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Hallucinations occur in a wide range of organic and psychological disorders, as well as in a small percentage of the normal population According to usual definitions in psychology and psychiatry, hallucinations are sensory experiences which present things that are not there, but are nonetheless accompanied by a powerful sense of reality. As Richard Bentall puts it, “the illusion of reality ... is the sine qua non of all hallucinatory experiences” (Bentall 1990: 82). The aim of this paper is to find (...) out what lends an experience ‘a sense of reality’: what features are required for an experience to feel ‘real’, in the relevant sense? I will investigate the claim that phenomenological features are largely responsible for a sense of reality, and will find this claim wanting. My suggestion is that a sense of reality is created and sustained by the larger nexus of the subject's beliefs. (shrink)

During the last two decades, several different anti-physicalist arguments based on an epistemic or conceptual gap between the phenomenal and the physical have been proposed. The most promising physicalist line of defense in the face of these arguments – the Phenomenal Concept Strategy – is based on the idea that these epistemic and conceptual gaps can be explained by appeal to the nature of phenomenal concepts rather than the nature of non-physical phenomenal properties. Phenomenal concepts, on this proposal, involve unique (...) cognitive mechanisms, but none that could not be fully physically implemented. David Chalmers has recently presented a Master Argument to show that the Phenomenal Concept Strategy – not just this or that version of it, but any version of it – fails. Chalmers argues that the phenomenal concepts posited by such theories are either not physicalistically explicable, or they cannot explain our epistemic situation with regard to qualia. I argue that it is his Master Argument that fails. My claim is his argument does not provide any new reasons to reject the Phenomenal Concept Strategy. I also argue that, although the Phenomenal Concept Strategy is successful in showing that the physicalist is not rationally compelled to give up physicalism in the light of the anti-physicalist arguments, the anti-physicalist is not rationally compelled to give up the anti-physicalist argument in the light of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy either. (shrink)

On a Cartesian conception of the mind, I could be a solitary being and still have the same mental states as I currently have. This paper asks how the lives of other people fit into this conception. I investigate the second-person perspective—thinking of others as ‘you’ while engaging in reciprocal communicative interactions with them—and argue that it is neither epistemically nor metaphysically distinctive. I also argue that the Cartesian picture explains why other people are special: because they matter not just (...) for the effect that they have on us. (shrink)

Sequent calculi constitute an interesting and important category of proof systems. They are much less known than axiomatic systems or natural deduction systems are, and they are much less known than they should be. Sequent calculi were designed as a theoretical framework for investigations of logical consequence, and they live up to the expectations completely as an abundant source of meta-logical results. The goal of this book is to provide a fairly comprehensive view of sequent calculi -- including a wide (...) range of variations. The focus is on sequent calculi for various non-classical logics, from intuitionistic logic to relevance logic, through linear and modal logics. A particular version of sequent calculi, the so-called consecution calculi, have seen important new developments in the last decade or so. The invention of new consecution calculi for various relevance logics allowed the last major open problem in the area of relevance logic to be solved positively: pure ticket entailment is decidable. An exposition of this result is included in chapter 9 together with further new decidability results (for less famous systems). A series of other results that were obtained by J. M. Dunn and me, or by me in the last decade or so, are also presented in various places in the book. Some of these results are slightly improved in their current presentation. Obviously, many calculi and several important theorems are not new. They are included here to ensure the completeness of the picture; their original formulations may be found in the referenced publications. This book contains very little about semantics, in general, and about the semantics of non-classical logic in particular. (shrink)

This book celebrates and expands on J. Michael Dunn’s work on informational interpretations of logic. Dunn, in his Ph.D. thesis, introduced a semantics for first-degree entailments utilizing the idea that a sentence can provide positive or negative information about a topic, possibly supplying both or neither. He later published a related interpretation of the logic R-mingle, which turned out to be one of the first relational semantics for a relevance logic. An incompatibility relation between information states lends itself to a (...) definition of negation and it has figured into Dunn's comprehensive investigations into representations of various negations. The informational view of semantics is also a prominent theme in Dunn’s research on other logics, such as quantum logic and linear logic, and led to the encompassing theory of generalized Galois logics. Dunn’s latest work addresses informational interpretations of the ternary accessibility relation and the very nature of information. The book opens with Dunn’s autobiography, followed by a list of his publications. It then presents a series of papers written by respected logicians working on different aspects of information-based logics. The topics covered include the logic R-mingle, which was introduced by Dunn, and its applications in mathematical reasoning as well as its importance in obtaining results for other relevance logics. There are also interpretations of the accessibility relation in the semantics of relevance and other non-classical logics using different notions of information. It also presents a collection of papers that develop semantics for various logics, including certain modal and many-valued logics. The publication of this book is well timed, since we are living in an "information age.” Providing new technical findings, intellectual history and careful expositions of intriguing ideas, it appeals to a wide audience of scholars and researchers. (shrink)

This book honors J. Michael Dunn, who was a preeminent relevance logician. Dunn's career spanned over 50 years and his research results had an impact on philosophy, mathematics and informatics. Dunn often used algebraic techniques in his research into logics such as relevance, orthomodular and substructural logics. He invented the logic R-mingle and the sequent calculus LR+; he proved crucial theorems about 2-valued first-order logic and non-classical higher-order logics - among many other results. The papers in this volume touch upon (...) topics that Dunn was concerned with. Some authors were students or colleagues of Dunn; some other authors had not met Dunn in person, but share his research interests. None of the articles published here have appeared in print before; indeed, most of the papers were written specifically for this collection. The diversity of the themes of the articles reflects the scope of Dunn's own research in logic. It will also ensure that anybody with an interest in logic - whether a student, a logician or a scholar in another field - will find reading this book a worthwhile endeavor. The editor, Katalin Bimbó was the 14th Ph.D. student of J. Michael Dunn at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN, U.S.A.; currently, she is a professor of philosophy at the University of Alberta in Canada. (shrink)

The purpose of our study was to measure the relationship between performance on various attentional tasks and hypnotic susceptibility. Healthy volunteers participated in a study, where they had to perform several tasks measuring various attention components in a waking state: sustained attention, selective or focused attention, divided attention and executive attention in task switching. Hypnotic susceptibility was measured in a separate setting by the Waterloo-Stanford Groups Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form C .We found no significant correlation between any of the (...) attentional measures and hypnotic susceptibility. Highly hypnotizables did not prove to be superior to or worse than the other individuals in any of the tests.These results do not support the neuropsychophysiological model of hypnosis, as they show no consistent relationship between hypnotic susceptibility and waking attentional performance. (shrink)

In this paper I begin to develop an account of the acquaintance that each of us has with our own conscious states and processes. The account is a speculative proposal about human mental architecture and specifically about the nature of the concepts via which we think in first personish ways about our qualia. In a certain sense my account is neutral between physicalist and dualist accounts of consciousness. As will be clear, a dualist could adopt the account I will offer (...) while maintaining that qualia themselves are non-physical properties. In this case the non-physical nature of qualia may play no role in accounting for the features of acquaintance. But although the account could be used by a dualist, its existence provides support for physicalism. (shrink)

The paper begins with the account of a focus group discussion of Hungarian female managers who demonstrated high level of trust. Drawing on the discussion the author explores the nature of trust and looks at works and research findings in different disciplines. In psychology Erikson’s findings on human growth and development are discussed. Representatives of Eastern and Western philosophy are quoted to highlight the underlying differences of thinking in relation to trust. The impact of cultural heritage and the influence of (...) the environment on trust add further dimensions to the argument. In conclusion it is suggested that management education could be a platform for further research and exploration of trust in individuals and organisations. (shrink)

I. Identitások és váltások -- II. Médiák és váltások.

This paper was chosen by The Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best articles appearing in print in 2000. Reprinted in Volume XXIII of The Philosopher’s Annual. In his very influential book David Chalmers argues that if physicalism is true then every positive truth is a priori entailed by the full physical description – this is called “the a priori entailment thesis – but ascriptions of phenomenal consciousness are not so entailed and he concludes that Physicalism is false. As (...) he puts it, “zombies” are metaphysically possible. I attempt to show that this argument is refuted by considering an analogous argument in the mouth of a zombie. The conclusion of this argument is false so one of the premises is false. I argue at length that this shows that the original conceivability argument also has a false premise and so is invalid. (shrink)

Descartes's philosophy has had a considerable influence on the modern conception of the mind, but many think that this influence has been largely negative. The main project of The Subject's Point of View is to argue that discarding certain elements of the Cartesian conception would be much more difficult than critics seem to allow, since it is tied to our understanding of basic notions, including the criteria for what makes someone a person, or one of us. The crucial feature of (...) the Cartesian view defended here is not dualism--which is not adopted--but internalism. Internalism is opposed to the widely accepted externalist thesis, which states that some mental features constitutively depend on certain features of our physical and social environment. In contrast, this book defends the minority internalist view, which holds that the mind is autonomous, and though it is obviously affected by the environment, this influence is merely contingent and does not delimit what is thinkable in principle. Defenders of the externalist view often present their theory as the most thoroughgoing criticism of the Cartesian conception of the mind; Katalin Farkas offers a defence of an uncompromising internalist Cartesian conception. (shrink)

In recent years, several philosophers have defended the idea of phenomenal intentionality : the intrinsic directedness of certain conscious mental events which is inseparable from these events’ phenomenal character. On this conception, phenomenology is usually conceived as narrow, that is, as supervening on the internal states of subjects, and hence phenomenal intentionality is a form of narrow intentionality. However, defenders of this idea usually maintain that there is another kind of, externalistic intentionality, which depends on factors external to the subject. (...) We may ask whether this concession to content externalism is obligatory. In this paper, I shall argue that it isn’t. I shall suggest that if one is convinced that narrow phenomenal intentionality is legitimate, there is nothing stopping one from claiming that all intentionality is narrow. (shrink)

Frankish positions his view, illusionism about qualia (a.k.a. eliminativist physicalism), in opposition to what he calls radical realism (dualism and neutral monism) and conservative realism (a.k.a. non-eliminativist physicalism). Against radical realism, he upholds physicalism. But he goes along with key premises of the Gap Arguments for radical realism, namely, 1) that epistemic/explanatory gaps exist between the physical and the phenomenal, and 2) that every truth should be perspicuously explicable from the fundamental truth about the world; and he concludes that because (...) physicalism is true, there could be no phenomenal truths, and no qualia. I think he is wrong to accept 2); and even if he was right to accept it, the more plausible response would be not to deny the existence of qualia but to deny physicalism. In either case, denying the existence of qualia is the wrong answer. I present a physicalist realist alterative that refutes premise 2 of the Gap Argument; I also make a general case against the scientism that accompanies Frankish’s metaphysics. (shrink)

This article is about the special, subjective concepts we apply to experience, called “phenomenal concepts”. They are of special interest in a number of ways. First, they refer to phenomenal experiences, and the qualitative character of those experiences whose metaphysical status is hotly debated. Conscious experience strike many philosophers as philosophically problematic and difficult to accommodate within a physicalistic metaphysics. Second, PCs are widely thought to be special and unique among concepts. The sense that there is something special about PCs (...) is very closely tied up with features of the epistemic access they afford to qualia. When we deploy phenomenal concepts introspectively to some phenomenally conscious experience as it occurs, we are said to be acquainted with our own conscious experiences. Accounts of PCs either have to explain the acquaintance relation, or acquaintance with our phenomenal experiences has to be denied. PCs have received much attention in recent philosophy of mind mainly because they figure in arguments for dualism and in physicalist responses to these arguments. The main topic of this article is to explore different accounts of phenomenal concepts and their role in recent debates over the metaphysical status of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

Know -wh ascriptions are ubiquitous in many languages. One standard analysis of know -wh is this: someone knows-wh just in case she knows that p, where p is an answer to the question included in the wh-clause. Additional conditions have also been proposed, but virtually all analyses assume that propositional knowledge of an answer is at least a necessary condition for knowledge-wh. This paper challenges this assumption, by arguing that there are cases where we have knowledge-wh without knowledge- that of (...) an answer, for example in the cases familiar from arguments for the Extended Mind hypothesis. (shrink)

It is an integral part of the phenomenology of mature perceptual experience that it seems to present to us an experience-independent world. I shall call this feature 'perceptual intentionality'. In this paper, I argue that perceptual intentionality is constructed by the structure of more basic sensory features, features that are not intentional themselves. This theory can explain why the same sensory feature can figure both in presentational and non-presentational experiences. There is a fundamental difference between the intentionality of sensory experiences (...) and the intentionality of thoughts: unlike the former, the latter is not constructed. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that besides knowledge of facts or truths, there is also knowledge of things–for example, we say that we know people or know places. We could call this "objectual knowledge". In this paper, I raise doubts about the idea that there is a sui generis objectual knowledge that is distinct from knowledge of truths.

The central and paradigmatic cases of knowledge discussed in philosophy involve the possession of truth. Is there in addition a distinct type of practical knowledge, which does not aim at the truth? This question is often approached through asking whether states attributed by “know-how” locutions are distinct from states attributed by “know-that”. This paper argues that the question of practical knowledge can be raised not only about some cases of “know-how” attributions, but also about some cases of so-called “know-wh” attributions; (...) and that certain features of this practical knowledge-wh put pressure on the standard analysis of know-wh. (shrink)

According to the Extended Mind thesis, the mind extends beyond the skull or the skin: mental processes can constitutively include external devices, like a computer or a notebook. The Extended Mind thesis has drawn both support and criticism. However, most discussions—including those by its original defenders, Andy Clark and David Chalmers—fail to distinguish between two very different interpretations of this thesis. The first version claims that the physical basis of mental features can be located spatially outside the body. Once we (...) accept that the mind depends on physical events to some extent, this thesis, though not obvious, is compatible with a large variety of views on the mind. The second version applies to standing states only, and has to do with how we conceive the nature of such states. This second version is much more interesting, because it points to a potential tension in our conception of minds or selves. However, without properly distinguishing between the two theses, the significance of the second is obscured by the comparative triviality of the first. (shrink)

In “The Meta-Problem of Consciousness”, David Chalmers draws a new framework in which to consider the mind-body problem. In addition to trying to solve the hard problem of consciousness – the problem of why and how brain processes give rise to conscious experience –, he thinks that philosophy, psychology, neuro-science and the other cognitive sciences should also pursue a solution to what he calls the “meta-problem” of consciousness – i.e., the problem of why we think there is a problem with (...) consciousness. My claim is that, while Chalmers’s project is generously ecumenical as well as beautiful in its meticulous detail, it is mistaken in its core assumption that the meta-problem can be formulated as an “easy problem” for science to solve. Furthermore, the project tilts the field toward illusionism against Type-B materialism, as far as physicalist solutions to the hard problem and the meta-problem are concerned. I will argue that Type-B materialism emerges unscathed from this dialectic. (shrink)

Using the framework of categorical logic, this paper analyzes and streamlines Gabbay's semantical proof of the Craig interpolation theorem for intuitionistic predicate logic. In the process, an apparently new and interesting fact about the relation of coherent and intuitionistic logic is found.

The content of the externalist thesis about the mind depends crucially on how we define the distinction between the internal and the external. According to the usual understanding, the boundary between the internal and the external is the skull or the skin of the subject. In this paper I argue that the usual understanding is inadequate, and that only the new understanding of the external/internal distinction I suggest helps us to understand the issue of the compatibility of externalism and privileged (...) access. (shrink)