An e-mail discussion can be rendered into print in several ways. Rather than trying to imitate a genuine conversation, this is a personal essay containing comments and replies by the other contributors. Most of the substantial points made in the e-mail discussion are contained here, although not always in the order they happened.

An e-mail discussion can be rendered into print in several ways. Rather than trying to imitate a genuine conversation, this is a personal essay containing comments and replies by the other contributors. Most of the substantial points made in the e-mail discussion are contained here, although not always in the order they happened.

This debate, principally between myself (Nigel Thomas) and Patrick Hayes, the well known computer scientist and Artificial Intelligence researcher, took place through the internet mailing list for the discussion of the scientific study of consciousness, PSYCHE-D (moderated by Patrick Wilken), which is associated with the on-line journal PSYCHE. The discussion touches on the various different senses in which the expression "mental image" may be used, the underlying cognitive mechanisms of imagery, and the relevance of an understanding of (...) imagery to the understanding of conscious thought, and thought in general. As the debate became rather 'unthreaded' on the list, following it through this page may help the reader to better understand what was going on. (shrink)

This chapter examines a little-known movement to make the Our Lady of Perpetual Help icon the patroness of the proceedings of the Second Vatican Council. Begun by American Redemptorists, it sought to integrate a Marian piety into the conciliar ethos, but one that was decidedly cross-cultural and ecumenical. Explicit in its mission for unity between Roman Catholics and the separated churches of the East, the movement promoted the icon as the key to repairing centuries-old wounds. Insofar as 2015 begins the (...) sesquicentennial year of the icon’s association with Redemptorists, as well as its value as an ecumenical tool, the author explores whether OLPH can lend new impetus for unity between Orthodox and Catholics ahead of the proposed joint synod in 2025. (shrink)

This volume explores how Catholicism began and continues to open its doors to the wider world and to other confessions in embracing ecumenism, thanks to the vision and legacy of the Second Vatican Council. It explores such themes as the twentieth century context preceding the council; parallels between Vatican II and previous councils; its distinctively pastoral character; the legacy of the council in relation to issues such as church-world dynamics, as well as to ethics, social justice, economic activity. Several chapters (...) discuss the role of women in the church before, during, and since the council. Others discern inculturation in relation to Vatican II. The book also contains a wide and original range of ecumenical considerations of the council, including by and in relation to Free Church, Reformed, Orthodox, and Anglican perspectives. Finally, it considers the Council’s ongoing promise and remaining challenges with regard to ecumenical issues, including a groundbreaking essay on the future of ecumenical dialogue by Cardinal Walter Kasper. (shrink)

Readable and accessible collection of papers re thinking machines.

Beyond the Ancient Quarrel brings together contributions from leading scholars to explore the boundaries between literature, philosophy, and literary criticism in the work of J.M. Coetzee.

Tens of thousands of students have learned to be more discerning at constructing and evaluating arguments with the help of Patrick J. Hurley. Hurley’s lucid, friendly, yet thorough presentation has made A CONCISE INTRODUCTION TO LOGIC the most widely used logic text in North America. In addition, the book’s accompanying technological resources, such as CengageNOW and Learning Logic, include interactive exercises as well as video and audio clips to reinforce what you read in the book and hear in class. (...) In short, you’ll have all the assistance you need to become a more logical thinker and communicator. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version. (shrink)

This paper offers a new approach to an old debate about superaddition in Locke. Did Locke claim that some objects have powers that are unrelated to their natures or real essences? The question has split commentators. Some (Wilson, Stuart, Langton) claim the answer is yes and others (Ayers, Downing, Ott) claim the answer is no. This paper argues that both of these positions may be mistaken. I show that Locke embraced a robust epistemic humility. This epistemic humility includes ignorance of (...) the real essences of bodies, of the causal processes underlying the production of natural phenomena, and of God’s method of creation. I show how this epistemic humility offers strong support for an agnostic response to the question of superaddition. Locke did not intend to claim that bodies either do or do not have properties unrelated to their real essences. Instead, his primary goal in discussing the topic was to emphasize the strict limits to human knowledge. (shrink)

Locke famously claimed that morality was capable of demonstration. But he also refused to provide a system of demonstrative morality. This paper addresses the mismatch between Locke’s stated views and his actual philosophical practice. While Locke’s claims about demonstrative morality have received a lot of attention it is rare to see them discussed in the context of his general theory of demonstration and his specific discussions of particular demonstrations. This paper explores Locke’s general remarks about demonstration as well as his (...) claims about demonstration in natural philosophy, mathematics, and morality. Careful attention to these detailed discussions motivates a reevaluation of Locke’s views on demonstrative knowledge of morality. Specifically, while Locke did believe that some demonstrative moral knowledge might be in-principle available to us he also believed that facts about the difficulty of demonstration meant that this knowledge would in-practice be largely unattainable. (shrink)

How are we to make sense of madness and psychosis? For most of us the words conjure up images from television and newspapers of seemingly random, meaningless violence. It is something to be feared, something to be left to the experts. But is madness best thought of as a medical condition? Psychiatrists and the drug industry maintain that psychoses are brain disorders amenable to treatment with drugs, but is this actually so? There is no convincing evidence that the brain is (...) disordered in psychosis, yet governments across the world are investing huge sums of money on mental health services that take for granted the idea that psychosis is an illness to be treated with medication. Although some people who use mental health services find medication helpful, many do not, and resist the idea that their experiences are symptoms of illnesses like schizophrenia. Consequently they are forced into having treatment against their wishes. So, how do we make sense of this situation? Postpsychiatry addresses these questions. It involves an attempt to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions of mental health work, showing how recent developments in philosophy and ethics can help us to clarify some of the dilemmas and conflicts around different understandings of madness. Throughout, the authors examine the conflicting ways in which politicians, academics, and mental health professionals appear to understand madness, and contrast this with voices and experiences that are usually excluded - those of the people who use mental health services. They then examine the power of psychiatry to shape how we understand ourselves and our emotions, before considering some of the basic limitations of psychiatry as science to make madness meaningful. In the final section of the book they draw on evidence from service users and survivors, the humanities and anthropology, to point out a new direction for mental health practice. This new direction emphasises the importance of cultural contexts in understanding madness, placing ethics before technology in responding to madness, and minimising 'therapeutic' coercion. (shrink)

This essay addresses a stream of thought manifested in some forms of social justice activism – namely, that members of marginalized groups have privileged insight into the nature of social reality which others cannot understand, much less critique. This position, which I call “epistemic isolationism,” seems to rest on the claim that the knowledge that is embedded in lived experience is incommunicable. The essay proceeds in three parts: first, there is a brief overview of standpoint epistemology, including a recent version (...) which seems to support epistemic isolationism. Second, there is an explication of the concept of “lived experience” as developed by Wilhelm Dilthey. Third, there is an argument against the claim that lived experience is incommunicable, drawing from the work of Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur. The payoff of the argument is that sharing lived experience through expressions like literature and narrative inspires mutual recognition and respect which can, in turn, support a robust form of solidarity and serve as a foundation for more effective social justice advocacy. (shrink)

While the subjective experience of insight during problem solving is a common occurrence, an understanding of the processes leading to solution remains relatively uncertain. The goal of this study was to investigate the restructuring patterns underlying solution of a creative problem, and how providing cues to solution may alter the process. Results show that both providing cues to solution and analyzing problem solving performance on an aggregate level may result in restructuring patterns that appear incremental. Analysis of performance on an (...) individual level provides evidence for insight-like solution patterns. However, no evidence is found for a relationship between an individual’s restructuring pattern and their subjective experience of insight during problem solving. (shrink)

_"One of the most important political books of 2018."—Rod Dreher, ___American Conservative__ Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it _is _an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its (...) legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure. (shrink)

This paper explores the metaphysical system developed in Richard Bentley’s 1692 Boyle Lectures. The lectures are notable for their attempt to argue that developments in natural philosophy, including Newton’s Principia, could bolster natural theology. The paper explores Bentley’s matter theory focusing on his commitment to a particular form of mechanism and his rejection of occult qualities. It then examines his views on the nature of divine omnipotence. Finally, it turns to his understanding of gravitational attraction. While some recent commentators have (...) argued for a “superaddition” interpretation of gravitation in Bentley, this paper argues for an “occasionalist” interpretation. The argument proceeds on the basis of both textual considerations and considerations stemming from the systematic interpretation of Bentley’s metaphysics developed earlier in the paper. (shrink)

From social media to the halls of academia all the way to the White House, everyone is talking about “lived experience”. Yet, there is considerable confusion about what, precisely, the term means. Part of this confusion results from the lack of awareness about the origin of the term and the philosophical need that it was introduced to address. Accordingly, the first aim of this essay is to elucidate the meaning of “lived experience” by teasing out and enumerating its various features (...) as found in the thought of Wilhelm Dilthey, who first developed and popularized it as a philosophical concept. The second goal is to critique the use of “lived experience” in contemporary academic and political discourse. Lived experience is simultaneously denigrated by those who regard it as merely subjective and exalted by those who regard it as epistemically authoritative. A return to Dilthey’s original formulation reveals that both of these attitudes are predicated on misunderstandings of the nature of lived experience. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the metaphysical system developed in Cheyne’s Philosophical Principles of Religion. Cheyne was an early proponent of Newtonianism and tackled several philosophical questions raised by Newton’s work. The most pressing of these concerned the causal origin of gravitational attraction. Cheyne rejected the occasionalist explanations offered by several of his contemporaries in favor of a model on which God delegated special causal powers to bodies. Additionally, he developed an innovative approach to divine conservation. This allowed him to argue that (...) Newton’s findings provided evidence for God’s existence and providence without the need for continuous divine intervention in the universe. (shrink)

On the 4th of December 1967, Hans Kamp sent his UCLA seminar notes on the logic of ‘now’ to Arthur N. Prior. Kamp’s two-dimensional analysis stimulated Prior to an intense burst of creativity in which he sought to integrate Kamp’s work into tense logic using a one-dimensional approach. Prior’s search led him through the work of Castañeda, and back to his own work on hybrid logic: the first made temporal reference philosophically respectable, the second made it technically feasible in a (...) modal framework. With the aid of hybrid logic, Prior built a bridge from a two-dimensional UT calculus to a one-dimensional tense logic containing the ‘now’ operator J. Drawing on material from the Prior archive, and the paper “‘Now”’ that detailed Prior’s findings, we retell this story. We focus on Prior’s completeness conjecture for the hybrid system and the role played by temporal reference. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that Prior and Reichenbach are best viewed as allies, not antagonists. We do so by combining the central insights of Prior and Reichenbach in the framework of hybrid tense logic. This overcomes a well-known defect of Reichenbach’s tense schema, namely that it gives multiple representations to sentences in the future perfect and the future-in-the-past. It also makes it easy to define an iterative schema for tense that allows for multiple points of reference, a possibility noted (...) by Prior and demanded by Comrie, and we sketch how this schema can be generalized to a shift-and-restrict pattern in which special propositional symbols act as restrictors on the range of tense operators. (shrink)

This short essay analyzes an unusual typographical feature in the Epistle to the Reader that precedes Locke’s Essay. Specifically, it asks why there is a line prior to Christiaan Huygens’ name in the famous Underlaborer Passage. The paper provides a thorough look at the line’s longevity through early editions of the Essay and considers a number of possible explanations for the line’s presence. It is argued that the line may well have held some meaning for early readers; contemporary scholars should (...) be motivated to investigate the issue further. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Social‐scientific data, such as those found in Philip E. Converse's 1964 essay, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” have led some to question whether basic assumptions about democratic legitimacy are unfounded. However, by another set of criteria, we have the “democracy” that was intended by the Framers—namely, a liberal representative system that avoids strong civic engagement by the citizenry. At its deepest level, the American system has been designed to ensure elite influence over the main ambitions of (...) American policy: the expansion of public and private power. When social scientists accumulate findings of civic disengagement and ignorance, it is wrongly supposed to be an indictment of the citizenry; rather, those findings should be understood as the expected result of a certain set of commitments throughout American political history, of which civic apathy and ignorance are the desired outcomes. (shrink)

This article explores a previously neglected manuscript essay in which Thomas White offers an account of the metaphysics underpinning transubstantiation. White’s views are of particular interest because his explanation employs a broadly mechanist framework, rather than the hylomorphism traditionally associated with Roman Catholic discussions of the Eucharist. The manuscript helps to shed light on a number of topics of importance to early modern philosophy including the reception of Descartes’ views, the relationship between theology and natural philosophy, and mechanist accounts of (...) identity and individuation. (shrink)

This book examines the theory and practice of argument in primary, secondary and tertiary education. Several of its chapters offer theoretical discussion of the forms and functions of argument within social, philosophical, historical and rhetorical contexts.

In the Queries to the Latin version of the Opticks Newton claims that space is God’s sensorium. Although these passages are well-known, few commentators have offered interpretations of what Newton might have meant by these cryptic remarks. As is well known, Leibniz was quick to pounce on these passages as evidence that Newton held untenable or nonsensical views in metaphysics and theology. Subsequent commentators have largely agreed. This paper has two goals. The first is to offer a clear interpretation of (...) Newton’s claim about space and God’s sensorium by situating those claims within Newton’s philosophical thought. The second is to show how my interpretation rescues Newton from Leibniz’s critiques. I show that Newton had a considered position on the sensorium and the role it played in sensation and volition. The primary evidence for this comes from an experiment Newton performed involving after-images; an experiment he recorded in his student notebook and corresponded with Locke about. I also discuss Newton’s views on mind-body causation, divine extension, and divine analogy. My final position is that we should read Newton as claiming that space in the venue in which God exercises his divine will. I also consider the problem of the missing tanquam pointed out by Koyré and Cohen and propose a solution. (shrink)

Commentators almost universally agree that Locke denies the possibility of thinking matter in Book IV Chapter 10 of the Essay. Further, they argue that Locke must do this in order for his proof of God’s existence in the chapter to be successful. This paper disputes these claims and develops an interpretation according to which Locke allows for the possibility that a system of matter could think (even prior to any act of superaddition on God’s part). In addition, the paper argues (...) that this does not destroy Locke’s argument in the chapter, instead it helps to illuminate the nature of it. The paper proceeds in two main stages. First, Locke denies that matter can produce thought. A distinction between two senses of “production” shows that this claim is compatible with the existence of thinking matter. Second, Locke denies that God could be a system of randomly moving particles. Most commentators take this to mean that such a system could not think. But Locke is better interpreted as denying that such a system could have the wisdom and knowledge of God. (shrink)

In response to demand from investors and other stakeholders, companies have increased voluntary disclosure of climate change-related policies and performance. Information intermediaries have correspondingly emerged to provide needed credibility and commensurability of climate disclosures. However, the provision of performance ratings and lax audit capabilities creates opportunities for firms to manipulate those ratings for impression management. This article explains how firms may attain an intermediary’s favorable assessment of climate performance using varied methods of strategic disclosure. Using data from a prominent climate (...) intermediary (CDP, formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), I find that strategic disclosure is widespread and effective in attaining higher ratings, particularly through disclosure of forward-looking factors, suggesting that ratings may not be an accurate indicator of a firm’s true underlying performance. This article contributes to commensuration and impression management literatures, offers guidance for mechanism design to improve the reliability of intermediated voluntary disclosure, and highlights important areas for future research. (shrink)

This paper examines the way in which Locke's deep and longstanding interest in the non-European world contributed to his views on species and their classification. The evidence for Locke's curiosity about the non-European world, especially his fascination with seventeenth-century travel literature, is presented and evaluated. I claim that this personal interest of Locke's almost certainly influenced the metaphysical and epistemological positions he develops in the Essay. I look to Locke's theory of species taxonomy for proof of this. I argue that (...) Locke uses evidence gathered from the non-European world to (1) show that in taxonomizing objects we rely on their sensible qualities rather than their real essences and to (2) undermine Scholastic Aristotelian views about a mind-independent species/genera structure to the world. (shrink)

The central claim of this book is that the dichotomy between economic dependence and economic independence is completely inadequate for describing the political challenges faced by contemporary capitalist welfare states. The simplistic contrast between markets and states as sources of income renders invisible the relations of dependence established in our basic economic institutions such as the family, property, and money. This book is a work of political theory that attacks narrow conceptions of dependence and identifies distinct senses of dependence that (...) might allow political communities to make clearer decisions about the justice of our economic institutions and practices. Inheritance, for example, is as much a form of dependence as support by a welfare state, but these are never compared in debates about economic justice. This book begins the work of comparing forms of economic dependence, and argues that economic dependence is always an issue of both vulnerability and parasitism. It builds bridges between political theory and social science, and is of relevance to those concerned with social and economic justice in and beyond contemporary capitalist welfare states. (shrink)