The attempt of modern social science to follow the methods of the physical sciences in seeking verification of its theories by statistical techniques is a result of an outmoded view of the methods of the physicist. The decisive element in verifying a theory is not the amassing of large bodies of data but insightful judgment into a relatively few cases. Because the will is primary in scientific activity, scientific statements, particularly those of social science, have the same cognitive status as (...) religious and ethical beliefs. Continued disagreements are, therefore, inevitable in the social sciences. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive study of Nietzsche's earliest (and extraordinary) book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872). When he wrote it, Nietzsche was a Greek scholar, a friend and champion of Wagner, and a philosopher in the making. His book has been very influential and widely read, but has always posed great difficulties for readers because of the particular way Nietzsche brings his ancient and modern interests together. The proper appreciation of such a work requires access to ideas that cross (...) the boundaries of conventional specialisms. This is now provided by M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern in their joint study of Nietzsche's book. They examine in detail its content, style and form; its strange genesis and hybrid status; its biographical background and the controversy engendered by its publication; its value as an account of ancient Greek culture and as a theory of tragedy and music; its relation to other theories of tragedy; and its place in the history of German ideas and in Nietzsche's own philosophical career. (shrink)

The first comprehensive study of Nietzsche's earliest book, The Birth of Tragedy, this important volume by M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern examines the work in detail: its place in Nietzsche's philosophical career; its value as an account of ancient Greek culture; its place in the history of German ideas, and its value as a theory of tragedy and music. Presented in a fresh twenty-first-century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface written by Lesley Chamberlain, illuminating its (...) enduring importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this accessible study has been revived for a new generation of readers. (shrink)

Three visual habituation studies using abstract animations tested the claim that infants’ attachment behavior in the Strange Situation procedure corresponds to their expectations about caregiver–infant interactions. Three unique patterns of expectations were revealed. Securely attached infants expected infants to seek comfort from caregivers and expected caregivers to provide comfort. Insecure-resistant infants not only expected infants to seek comfort from caregivers but also expected caregivers to withhold comfort. Insecure-avoidant infants expected infants to avoid seeking comfort from caregivers and expected caregivers to (...) withhold comfort. These data support Bowlby’s (1958) original claims—that infants form internal working models of attachment that are expressed in infants’ own behavior. (shrink)

This investigation examined whether speakers produce reliable prosodic correlates to meaning across semantic domains and whether listeners use these cues to derive word meaning from novel words. Speakers were asked to produce phrases in infant‐directed speech in which novel words were used to convey one of two meanings from a set of antonym pairs (e.g., big/small). Acoustic analyses revealed that some acoustic features were correlated with overall valence of the meaning. However, each word meaning also displayed a unique acoustic signature, (...) and semantically related meanings elicited similar acoustic profiles. In two perceptual tests, listeners either attempted to identify the novel words with a matching meaning dimension (picture pair) or with mismatched meaning dimensions. Listeners inferred the meaning of the novel words significantly more often when prosody matched the word meaning choices than when prosody mismatched. These findings suggest that speech contains reliable prosodic markers to word meaning and that listeners use these prosodic cues to differentiate meanings. That prosody is semantic suggests a reconceptualization of traditional distinctions between linguistic and nonlinguistic properties of spoken language. (shrink)

The volume concludes by examining a critique of Hegel's metaphysical position from the perspective of the "continental" tradition, and in particular Gilles ...

Originally conceived as a forty-page conclusion to Hacker’s twenty years of work on the monumental four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, this book “rapidly assumed a life of its own”. A major contribution to the history of analytic philosophy, this substantial volume delivers even more than the title promises. The eight chapters are best approached as a six-chapter book, itself some 220 pages long, on Wittgenstein’s contribution to twentieth-century philosophy, followed by a two-chapter, 120-page epilogue about how and why (...) his influence has waned. The first six chapters provide an encyclopedic summary of the fruits of Hacker’s research on Wittgenstein’s writing, an immensely learned account of British philosophy from the turn of the century to the 1970s, and a detailed account of Wittgenstein’s reception by Oxford, Cambridge, and the Vienna Circle. The book’s closing chapters, “Post-positivism in the United States and Quine’s Apostasy” and “The Decline of Analytic Philosophy,” polemically argue that Quine’s philosophy, and the post-Quinean naturalism prevalent in Anglo-American philosophy today, amount to such a decisive break with the analytic tradition, as Hacker conceives of it, that they should not be counted as “analytic.”. (shrink)

Drawing on ten years of research on the unpublished Wittgenstein papers, Stern investigates what motivated Wittgenstein's philosophical writing and casts new light on the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. The book is an exposition of Wittgenstein's early conception of the nature of representation and how his later revision and criticism of that work led to a radically different way of looking at mind and language. It also explains how the unpublished manuscripts and typescripts were put together and why they often (...) provide better evidence of the development of his ideas than can be found in his published writing. In doing so, the book traces the development of a number of central themes in Wittgenstein's philosophy, including his conception of philosophical method, the picture theory of meaning, the limits of language, the application of language to experience, his treatment of private language, and what he called the "flow of life." Arguing that Wittgenstein's views are often much more simple (and more radical) than we have been led to believe, Wittgenstein on Mind and Language provides an overview of the development of Wittgenstein's philosophy and brings to light aspects of his philosophy that have been almost universally neglected. (shrink)

Within much contemporary epistemology, Kant’s response to skepticism has come to be epitomized by an appeal to transcendental arguments. This form of argument is said to provide a distinctively Kantian way of dealing with the skeptic, by showing that what the skeptic questions is in fact a condition for her being able to raise that question in the first place, if she is to have language, thoughts, or experiences at all. In this way, it is hoped, the game played by (...) the skeptic can be turned against herself.1 At the same time, however, this appeal to transcendental arguments is also widely felt to show what is wrong with Kant’s response to skepticism: for, it is suggested, such arguments can only be made to work against the background of his transcendental idealism. As we shall see, what this doctrine amounts to is much disputed; but as with any form of idealism, the worry is that it means compromising the very realism and objectivity we want to defend against skepticism in the first place, so that the price for adopting this Kantian strategy appears too high—the cure of using transcendental arguments in conjunction with transcendental idealism is almost as bad as the disease.2 Faced with this difficulty, two kinds of response have been canvassed. On the first, it is accepted that transcendental arguments do require a commitment to the wider philosophical framework of transcendental idealism, but it is claimed that this framework can and should be defended against the suggestion that it is itself ‘‘quasi-skeptical.’’ On the second, transcendental idealism is indeed abandoned as wrongheaded, but it is held that Kant’s transcendental arguments can be made to.. (shrink)

The first English-language collection devoted to Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit.

_The first English-language collection devoted to Hegel’s_ Philosophy of Subjective Spirit.

Une autre face de la philosophie du monde anglo-saxon contemporain, qui nous fait grâce de l'empirisme logique. Francis Jacques en explique la portée dans une interminable préface. Il y avait de quoi.

The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss Luciano Floridi’s 2019 book The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design, the latest instalment in his philosophy of information (PI) tetralogy, particularly with respect to its implications for library and information studies (LIS) .

The Greek original of Galen's is lost, nor has a copy of the complete translation into Arabic, made by Hunayn b. Ishāq in the first half of the ninth century, come down to us, though some passages of it are quoted by various Arab authors. A summary of the translation, however, was discovered by P. Kraus in a miscellaneous manuscript in Cairo and published by him in the Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Egypt, vol. v/i.

The Greek original of Galen's is lost, nor has a copy of the complete translation into Arabic, made by Hunayn b. Ishāq in the first half of the ninth century, come down to us, though some passages of it are quoted by various Arab authors. A summary of the translation, however, was discovered by P. Kraus in a miscellaneous manuscript in Cairo and published by him in the Bulletin of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Egypt, vol. v/i.

Kim’s causal exclusion argument purports to demonstrate that the non-reductive physicalist must treat mental properties (and macro-level properties in general) as causally inert. A number of authors have attempted to resist Kim’s conclusion by utilizing the conceptual resources of Woodward’s interventionist conception of causation. The viability of these responses has been challenged by Gebharter, who argues that the causal exclusion argument is vindicated by the theory of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs). Since the interventionist conception of causation relies crucially on CBNs (...) for its foundations, Gebharter’s argument appears to cast significant doubt on interventionism’s anti-reductionist credentials. In the present article, we both (1) demonstrate that Gebharter’s CBN-theoretic formulation of the exclusion argument relies on some unmotivated and philosophically significant assumptions (especially regarding the relationship between CBNs and the metaphysics of causal relevance), and (2) use Bayesian networks to develop a general theory of causal inference for multi-level systems that can serve as the foundation for an anti-reductionist interventionist account of causation.1. (shrink)

We introduce a notion of complexity for interpretations, which is used to prove some new results about interpretations of sequential theories. In particular, we give a new, elementary proof of Pudlák's theorem that sequential theories are connected. We also demonstrate a counterexample to the infinitary distributive law $a \vee \bigwedge_{i \in I} b_i = \bigwedge_{i \in I} (a \vee b_i)$ in the lattice of chapters, in which the chapters a and b i are compact. (Counterexamples in which a is not (...) compact have been found previously.). (shrink)

From Kierkegaard’s famous polemic against Hegel’s system, and Marx’s rejection of the “mysticism” of reason, to Heidegger’s claim that Hegel completes the tradition of western metaphysics, and contemporary critics’ identification of Hegel as the authoritative spokesman — the “Master” — for the principles of unity and identity, a standard view has governed interpretations and evaluations of Hegel’s philosophy. Though familiarity with the positions just cited reveals considerable disparity, one does not need an especially discerning eye to recognize the common features (...) of the figures drawn. Hegel is, in all of them, the philosopher of the Absolute, the proponent of metaphysics without equal in the modern world. (shrink)

I contend that though Pippin argues persuasively that the most trenchant critics of modernity ? Nietzsche and Heidegger ? failed to break free of modernity, it remains unclear whether the unending character of modernity is thereby defended as an unfinished project, or rather is a fate to which we are condemned. The thesis of my paper is that the ambiguity is traceable to Pippin's Hegelian narrative of legitimation. On his view, the demands of modern self?consciousness inaugurated by Kant and radicalized (...) by Hegel prohibit every appeal to a given, even where the given is construed as contingent historical shifts, or perspectives, or Ereignisse. But this rejection of appeals to something outside the narrative of legitimation implies that even the significance of the narrative can only be an effect of the narrative itself. But if this is true, there is on Pippin's own terms no way of establishing the significance of a narrative about modernity and hence no reason for finding it compelling. Thus the very radicalization of the Kantian critique of dogmatism that Pippin claims is the hallmark of modernity renders unavailable the legitimation of modernity. (shrink)