According to Thomas Reid, every act of mind is accompanied by a conception of its object. For instance, he holds that the thing one conceives in an act of perception is always an individual thing that exists, and that the thing one conceives in an act of judgment is the thing expressed by the proposition judged. However, Reid never is clear about what kind of thing is expressed by a proposition; neither is it clear from the existing literature on Reid. (...) What he says about judgments, propositions, and general conceptions together suggests four distinct candidates. But I will argue that each of these candidates either fails to have sufficient textual support, or leads to absurd conclusions (such as that we conceive semi-existent things). In conclusion, I argue that while Reid does not offer an account of the kind of conception accompanying judgments, his writings leave the matter open. (shrink)

Too often the study of philosophical texts is carried out in ways that do not pay significant attention to how the ideas contained within them are presented, articulated, and developed. This was not always the case. The contributors to this collected work consider Jewish philosophy in the medieval period, when new genres and forms of written expression were flourishing in the wake of renewed interest in ancient philosophy. Many medieval Jewish philosophers were highly accomplished poets, for example, and made conscious (...) efforts to write in a poetic style. This volume turns attention to the connections that medieval Jewish thinkers made between the literary, the exegetical, the philosophical, and the mystical to shed light on the creativity and diversity of medieval thought. As they broaden the scope of what counts as medieval Jewish philosophy, the essays collected here consider questions about how an argument is formed, how text is put into the service of philosophy, and the social and intellectual environment in which philosophical texts were produced. (shrink)

This essay examines the relationship between academic and public philosophy through the lens of Heidegger studies. Specifically, this essay: shows how Heidegger uses technical terminology within the context of the academy to break new philosophical ground; explains how suitably clarified technical terminology can be used to introduce people to Heidegger’s philosophy and to apply Heidegger’s ideas to current affairs; and illustrates how the application of Heidegger’s ideas to contemporary issues results in new forms of academic research. Ultimately, this essay argues (...) that there is a dialectical relationship between academic and public philosophy: i.e., public philosophy translates esoteric ideas developed in the academy into publicly accessible prose and then applies those ideas to daily life; but in doing so, public philosophy inspires new lines of academic inquiry. (shrink)

In Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom, and Normativity, Sacha Golob criticizes and offers an alternative to the standard interpretation of intentionality in Being and Time. According to Golob, the dominant reading’s derivation of propositional intentionality from practical intentionality fails on textual and philosophical grounds, so he develops a different approach that involves deriving propositional intentionality from prototype intentionality. In this essay, I offer an overview of dominant reading of intentionality in Being and Time and Golob’s alternative account, and then I criticize (...) them both for attempting to derive propositional intentionality for some form of non-propositional intentionality. Finally, I offer my own ontological interpretation of intentionality by arguing that Heidegger’s aim in Being and Time is not to derive one form of intentionality from another but to describe the basic aspects of human existence that make any and all forms of intentionality possible. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos by Keith LemnaAaron WilliamsThe Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos by Keith Lemna (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico, 2019), xxx + 488 pp.Keith Lemna has done the theological world a great service. In The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos, he offers the English-speaking world for the first time a monograph (...) on the thought of the Oratorian Louis Bouyer. Bouyer is undoubtedly one of the theological giants of the twentieth century. Born in Paris in 1913, he was ordained a Lutheran pastor in 1936. After only three years as a Lutheran clergyman, he was received into the Catholic Church at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Wandrille. Then ordained as an Oratorian priest in 1944, he taught from 1946 to 1962 at the Institut Catholique de Paris and abroad for the three decades following.1 He is most well-known for his work on the liturgy both before and after the Second Vatican Council. With fifty books to his name, including a nine-part synthesis on Christian doctrine, the breadth of his theological vision and work is astounding. In France he is considered one of the four preeminent theologians of the post-World War II era, and his theological contemporaries in Europe, such as Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger / Benedict XVI, always held the Oratorian in high regard.2 Yet, in the English-speaking world, much of his work has gone without comment.3 Thankfully, into the void steps this excellent work by Lemna. [End Page 1353]Anyone familiar with the Bouyerian corpus knows the challenge of approaching it. With its vast array of subject matter, ranging from biblical to liturgical to historical to spiritual to speculative theology, one wonders whether there is any one thread woven throughout the varied strands, a single theme around which the whole sprawling corpus can be understood. In fact, there is, and Lemna has deftly identified it. For Bouyer, the fundamental question of theology is the world's relation to God.4 The structure of the first six books of his nine-part treatise on systematic theology attest to the priority of the question with the first three works addressing the question of the world, or the economy of creation and salvation, and the latter three works addressing the question of God, or theology properly speaking: the doctrine of the Trinitarian God. Interestingly, though Bouyer's work on theological cosmology, Cosmos, is the third book in the series, it was, in fact, the last of the six to be written. In this sense, as Lemna points out, "Cosmos is a capstone monograph... summarizing in important ways the decisive first six volumes" (xiv). Theological cosmology fully illuminates the God–world relation as Bouyer sees it, and since this relation sits at the heart of his thought, Cosmos is for Bouyer both his "most personal, as well as most speculative work" and indeed, "opens up the meaning of his other writings" beyond the dogmatic sphere (25). One could, then, scarcely choose a better entry point into the wide theological world of this "mind with a very special character," as Joseph Ratzinger saw him.5The Apocalypse of Wisdom is an expansive commentary on Bouyer's cosmology at the heart of which is a liturgical, even nuptial, vision of the whole of creation known and loved in the mind of God from all eternity, as the uncreated Wisdom of God. In creation God freely gives existence to the world ex nihilo, so that it might return to him in a liturgical song of praise and thanksgiving, as the Bride of his eternal Son, the eschatological and cosmic Church, created wisdom now made glorious and radiant through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. As Lemna puts it, "Bouyer shows that cosmology should be a pursuit of wisdom, but that Wisdom is ultimately a gift revealed or uncovered by means of apokalypsis in the re-creative interventions of the divine Word and Holy Spirit in history" (xvii). The wisdom of man seeking a unified vision of the whole of reality [End... (shrink)

In addition to discussing some philosophical accounts of common sense, this article considers several ways in which common sense can be altered or disturbed in psychopathology. Common sense can be defined as practical understanding, capacity to see and take things in their right light, sound judgment, or ordinary mental capacity. The philosopher Vico described it as the ability to distinguish the probable from the improbable. Goethe understood common sense as an "organ" that is formed in communication for the purpose of (...) communication. Common sense is rooted in the intersubjective constitution of the life-world. Obsessive-compulsive patients show relatively mild disturbances of common sense. Patients with major affective psychoses, in their premorbid personality structure, are overly attached to common sense. In schizophrenia, however, there seems to be a true abdication of common sense involving a loss of "natural self-evidence." Even in premorbid states, such persons often lose both the sense of tact and the ability to "take things in their right light." Although logic, and the ability to engage in theoretical discussion, may be preserved, there is a loss of interpretive skills and the "faculty of judgment"; this results in an inability to cope with everyday practical and social activity. There is also a characteristic sense of perplexity, a sense of amazement before that which would normally seem self-evident and a frequent tendency to reflect upon the conditions of possibility of existence that otherwise remain concealed. The author suggests that the fragility of common sense should not be seen as a mere deficiency state. Rather, it derives from a basic vulnerability inherent in the very structure of being human. (Abstract written by special issue editor: L.A.S.). (shrink)

This paper suggests that “systemic risk” has a distinctive kind of moral significance. Two intuitive data points need to be explained. The first is that the systematic imposition of risk can be wrongful or unjust in and of itself, even if harm never ensues. The second is that, even so, there may be no one in particular to blame. We can explain both ideas in terms of what I call responsibilities of “Collective Due Care.” Collective Due Care arguably precludes purely (...) aggregative cost-benefit decision-making and requires one kind of “precautionary” attitude in public choice. (shrink)

My favourite leading question when teaching Philosophy of Mind is ‘Could a goldfish long for its mother?’ This introduces the philosophical technique of ‘conceptual analysis’, essential for the study of mind (Sloman 1978, ch. 4). By analysing what we mean by ‘A longs for B’, and similar descriptions of emotional states we see that they inv olve rich cognitive structures and processes, i.e. computations. Anything which could long for its mother, would have to hav e some sort of representation of (...) its mother, would have to believe that she is not in the vicinity, would have to be able to represent the _possibility _of being close to her, would have to desire that possibility, and would have to be to some extent pre-occupied or obsessed with that desire. That is, it should intrude into and interfere with other activities, like admiring the scenery, catching smaller fish, etc. If the desire were there, but could be calmly put aside, whilst other interests were pursued, then it would not be truly a state of longing. It might be a state of preferring. Thus longing involves computational interrupts. The same seems to be true of all emotions. (shrink)

This paper outlines a design-based methodology for the study of mind as a part of the broad discipline of Artificial Intelligence. Within that framework some architectural requirements for human-like minds are discussed, and some preliminary suggestions made regarding mechanisms underlying motivation, emotions, and personality. A brief description is given of the `Nursemaid' or `Minder' scenario being used at the University of Birmingham as a framework for research on these problems. It may be possible later to combine some of these ideas (...) with work on synthetic agents inhabiting virtual reality environments. (shrink)

Research on brain or cognitive/affective processes, culture, social interaction, and structural analysis are overlapping but often independent ways humans have attempted to understand the origins of their evolution, historical, and contemporary development. Each level seeks to employ its own theoretical concepts and methods for depicting human nature and categorizing objects and events in the world, and often relies on different sources of evidence to support theoretical claims. Each level makes reference to different temporal bandwidths (milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, (...) years, decades, and centuries) and focuses on different spatio-temporal activities and controlled and non-controlled stimulus conditions. Biological mechanisms and environmental pressures for survival simultaneously created a gradual intersection and enhancement of cognitive/affective skills, cultural practices, and changes in collaborative social interaction and communicative skills. The evolution of a given level of analysis is assumed to have been incremental and overlapping. These innovative and independent ways humans have learned to characterize their brain or cognitive/affective and social/economic/political life often depend on unexamined, representational re-descriptions or cognitive/affective and socio-cultural devices and forms of communication that facilitate the depiction of practices and beliefs we attribute to respondents or subjects and research colleagues. (shrink)

This paper extends three decades of work arguing that researchers who discuss consciousness should not restrict themselves only to (adult) human minds, but should study (and attempt to model) many kinds of minds, natural and artificial, thereby contributing to our understanding of the space containing all of them. We need to study what they do or can do, how they can do it, and how the natural ones can be emulated in synthetic minds. That requires: (a) understanding sets of requirements (...) that are met by different sorts of minds, i.e. the niches that they occupy, (b) understanding the space of possible designs, and (c) understanding complex and varied relationships between requirements and designs. Attempts to model or explain any particular phenomenon, such as vision, emotion, learning, language use, or consciousness lead to muddle and confusion unless they are placed in that broader context. A methodology for making progress is summarised and a novel requirement proposed for a theory of how human minds work: the theory should support a single generic design for a learning, developing system that, in addition to meeting familiar requirements, should be capable of developing different and opposed philosophical viewpoints about consciousness, and the so-called hard problem. In other words, we need a common explanation for the mental machinations of mysterians, materialists, functionalists, identity theorists, and those who regard all such theories as attempting to answer incoherent questions. No designs proposed so far come close. (shrink)

CONJECTURE: Alongside the innate physical sucking reflex for obtaining milk to be digested, decomposed and used all over the body for growth, repair, and energy, there is a genetically determined information-sucking reflex, which seeks out, sucks in, and decomposes information, which is later recombined in many ways, growing the information-processing architecture and many diverse recombinable competences.

This discussion responds to important questions raised about my theory of fairness in the global economy by Christian Barry, Charles Beitz, A.J. Julius and Kristi Olson. I further elaborate how moral argument can be ‘internal’ to a social practice, how my proposed principles of fairness depend on international practice, how I can admit several relevant conceptions of ‘harm’ and why my account does not depend on a problematic conception of societal ‘endowments’.

The paper suggests that the state is subject to assessment according to principles of social justice because state institutions or practices exercise forms of power over which no particular person has control. This rationale for assessment of social justice equally applies to legally optional or informal social practices. But it does not apply to individual conduct. Indeed, it follows that principles of social justice cannot provide a basis for the assessment and guidance of individual choice. The paper develops this practice-based (...) conception of the subject of justice by rejoining G. A. Cohen's influential critique of Rawls’ focus on the “basic structure” of society. (shrink)

For over half a century I have been interested in the role of intuitive spatial reasoning in mathematics. My Oxford DPhil Thesis (1962) was an attempt to defend Kant's philosophy of mathematics, especially his claim that mathematical proofs extend our knowledge (so the knowledge is "synthetic", not "analytic") and that the discoveries are not empirical, or contingent, but are in an important sense "a priori" (which does not imply "innate") and also necessarily true. -/- I had made my views clear (...) in courses on philosophy of science and mathematics when teaching at Sussex University (from 1964) which was why one of our former students, Mary Pardoe (then Mary Ensor) who had become a mathematics teacher informed me, while visiting the university, that she had found a new diagrammatic proof of the triangle sum theorem. I reported her proof in some papers and presentations on methods of representation and reasoning, e.g. here, but neither she nor I has encountered anyone else who knew about the proof. (shrink)

Some thoughts arising out of the fact that the University of Birmingham has recently gone through a re-branding exercise led by its administrators responsible for marketing, who failed miserably in marketing the exercise to staff and students within the University, as a result of which there is an online 'Save the Crest' petition that has attracted so many supporters that it made the national news. (2005).

RCLIB is a 2-D graphical interface package available as an addition to the Poplog software development system. "RC" stands for "Relative Coordinates": all the graphical commands are relative to a frame of reference, which can be changed without altering the commands, making it easy to draw the same thing in different parts of a display, using different sizes or orientations, and possibly stretched or sheared.

At the ceremony Ron Chrisley introduced me and my work with some kind words and ended with a reference to the claim on my website that I tend to upset vice chancellors and other superior beings. After Ron, I had to make a short speech. I had prepared a few bullet points to be projected on the screen to remind me of what I wanted to say, but for some reason they never appeared, so I talked from memory. I remembered (...) all the points except one, about computing education. Since that is a very important point, I thought I would retrospectively write out an expanded version of the acceptance speech here, with the omitted point included, below, as point 3, and other parts expanded and corrected, thanks to reminders from Sussex colleagues who have read and commented on this. (shrink)

Since the 1970s AI as a science has progressively fragmented into many activities that are very narrowly focused. It is not clear that work done within these fragments can be combined in the design of a human-like integrated system – long held as one of the goals of AI as science. A strategy is proposed for reintegrating AI based around a backward-chaining analysis to produce a roadmap with partially ordered milestones, based on detailed scenarios, that everyone can agree are worth (...) achieving, even when they disagree about means. (shrink)

It is often said that the only reason why so many mischief-makers or criminals develop viruses/worms/trojan-horses that attack PCs running Windows is that there are far more PCs running Windows accessible via the internet than any other operating system.

Maybe they have been made, but I missed them because I don’t read and listen enough, as most of my energies are focused elsewhere. Apologies if this is all old hat. Don’t feel you have to read on. In case others are interested, I shall put this on my web site at http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/˜axs/gov/ My main point is that it is just silly to talk so much about universities and top-up fees without putting universities in the context of a complete policy (...) on post-school education. What I am offering is not a detailed policy, but a framework for thinking about the problem. Perhaps someone has already done this but I have never heard it mentioned in any of the public debates. I suspect that’s because this top-up fees issue is not part of a coherent policy but just a sort of religious commitment to a “new way”, like other things done by this government. I start with some comments on the fees issue, then go on to talk about how to think about post-school education, distinguishing several categories that need to be separated and funded differently as part of a joined-up system. (shrink)

• These ... have now been joined by ... dynamical systems theory which is being used to interpret brain dynamics on the one hand and language and cognition on the other.

I am populating this file from the bottom up. Later years are still empty. Try stuff in or before 1998 for a start. My Oxford DPhil Thesis (1962) is the oldest item available here.

In December 2005 I was invited by a well known researcher, Carrol Izard, on emotions to contribute to a discussion by answering a few questions as briefly as possible. He asked for 'one-liners', but I was not able to comply with that condition. However, the answers were short for me!

NOTE: Neither the University of Birmingham nor the School of Computer Science is responsible for any of the views expressed here. I am grateful to both for continuing support and access to facilities. All my work is subject to a creative commons licence and may be freely copied, quoted, or used for any purpose, without charge.

and who has recently founded a company Numenta to develop 'a new type of computer memory system modeled after the human neocortex'. With science writer Sandra Blakeslee he wrote a book On Intelligence . I confess the book is still on my (very long) 'to be read' list, though I have read and heard quite a lot about it.

Some of the movies were produced using techniques and scripts suggested by Mike Lees at Nottingham University where he is using SimAgent on a project directed by Brian Logan.

The implication is that the majority of universities are inferior. A consequence of this is that whether such pronouncements are accurate or not they will influence decision-making in various quarters in such a way as to attract resources towards a small subset of the organisations, thereby amplifying differences that already exist, or, in some cases introducing real differences in quality where previously the alleged differences were spurious.

Evolution produced many species whose members are pre-programmed with almost all the competences and knowledge they will ever need. Others appear to start with very little and learn what they need, but appearances can deceive. I conjecture that evolution produced powerful innate meta-knowledge about a class of environments containing 3- D structures and processes involving materials of many kinds. In humans and several other species these innate learning mechanisms seem initially to use exploration techniques to capture a variety of useful (...) generalisations after which there is a "phase transition" in which learnt generalisations are displaced by a new generative architecture that allows novel situations and problems to be dealt with by reasoning -- a pre-cursor to explicit mathematical theorem proving in topology, geometry, arithmetic, and kinematics. This process seems to occur in some non-human animals and in preverbal human toddlers, but is clearest in the switch from pattern-based to syntax-based language use. The discovery of non-linguistic toddler theorems has largely gone unnoticed, though Piaget investigated some of the phenomena, and creative problem solving in some other animals also provides clues. A later evolutionary development seems to have enabled humans to cope with domains that involve both regularities and exceptions, explaining "U-shaped" language learning. Only humans appear to be able to develop meta-meta-competences needed for teaching learnt "theorems" and their proofs. I'll sketch a speculative theory, present examples, and propose a research programme, reducing the 'G' in AGI, while promising increased power in return. (shrink)