BioPortal is a Web portal that provides access to a library of biomedical ontologies and terminologies developed in OWL, RDF(S), OBO format, Protégé frames, and Rich Release Format. BioPortal functionality, driven by a service-oriented architecture, includes the ability to browse, search and visualize ontologies (Figure 1). The Web interface also facilitates community-based participation in the evaluation and evolution of ontology content.

There is an extensive literature on time travel in both philosophy and physics. Part of the great interest of the topic stems from the fact that reasons have been given both for thinking that time travel is physically possible—and for thinking that it is logically impossible! This entry deals primarily with philosophical issues; issues related to the physics of time travel are covered in the separate entries on time travel and modern physics and time machines. We begin with the definitional (...) question: what is time travel? We then turn to the major objection to the possibility of backwards time travel: the Grandfather paradox. Next, issues concerning causation are discussed—and then, issues in the metaphysics of time and change. We end with a discussion of the question why, if backwards time travel will ever occur, we have not been visited by time travellers from the future. (shrink)

Millikan’s theory of content purports to rely heavily on the existence of isomorphisms between a system of representations and the things in the world which they represent — “the mapping requirement for being intentional signs” (Millikan 2004, p. 106). This paper asks whether those isomorphisms are doing any substantive explanatory work. Millikan’s isomorphism requirement is deployed for two main purposes. First, she claims that the existence of an isomorphism is the basic representing relation, with teleology playing a subsidiary role — (...) to account for misrepresentation (the possibility of error). Second, Millikan relies on an isomorphism requirement in order to guarantee that a system of representations displays a kind of productivity. This seemingly strong reliance on isomorphism has prompted the objection that isomorphism is too liberal to be the basic representing relation: there are isomorphisms between any system of putative representations and any set, of the same cardinality, of items putatively represented. This paper argues that all the work in fixing content is in fact done by the teleology. Deploying Millikan’s teleology-based conditions to ascribe contents will ensure that there is an isomorphism between representations and the things they represent, but the isomorphism ‘requirement’ is playing no substantive explanatory role in Millikan’s account of content determination. So an objection to her theory based on the liberality of isomorphism is misplaced. The second role for isomorphism is to account for productivity. If some kind of productivity is indeed necessary for representation, then functional isomorphism will again be too liberal a constraint to account for that feature. The paper suggests an alternative way of specifying the relation between a system of representations and that which they represent which is capable of playing an explanatory role in accounting for Millikan’s type of productivity. In short, the liberality of isomorphism is no objection to Millikan’s teleosemantics, since the isomorphism ‘requirement’ need play no independent substantive role in Millikan’s account of representation. (shrink)

According to Fumerton in his "How Does Perception Justify Belief?", it is misleading or wrong to say that perception is a source of justification for beliefs about the external world. Moreover, reliability does not have an essential role to play here either. I agree, and I explain why in section 1, using novel considerations about evil demon scenarios in which we are radically deceived. According to Fumerton, when it comes to how sensations or experiences supply justification, they do not do (...) so on their own, and instead only do so only in conjunction with support for background beliefs about how the sensations or experiences are best explained. Here I disagree. In section 2, I first clarify the question of whether sensations or experiences provide justification on their own. I then respond to Fumerton’s arguments that use considerations about concept-possession and about how to close possible gaps between experience and truth. In section 3, I develop my main concern about his positive view, where that concern also brings out some of the merits of the view that experiences do justify beliefs about the external world on their own. (shrink)

Proposes a new model of contractualism based on an interpersonal, deliberative conception of practical reason which answers the twin demands of moral accuracy and explanatory adequacy.

This paper is an essay in counterfactual epistemology. What if experience have high-level contents, to the effect that something is a lemon or that someone is sad? I survey the consequences for epistemology of such a scenario, and conclude that many of the striking consequences could be reached even if our experiences don't have high-level contents.

If our experiences are cognitively penetrable, they can be influenced by our antecedent expectations, beliefs, or other cognitive states. Theorists such as Churchland, Fodor, Macpherson, and Siegel have debated whether and how our cognitive states might influence our perceptual experiences, as well as how any such influences might affect the ability of our experiences to justify our beliefs about the external world. This article surveys views about the nature of cognitive penetration, the epistemological consequences of denying cognitive penetration, and the (...) epistemological consequences of affirming cognitive penetration. (shrink)

What is the meaning of life? Does anything really matter? In the past few decades these questions, perennially associated with philosophy in the popular consciousness, have rightly retaken their place as central topics in the academy. In this major contribution, Nicholas Waghorn provides a sustained and rigorous elucidation of what it would take for lives to have significance. Bracketing issues about ways our lives could have more or less meaning, the focus is rather on the idea of ultimate meaning, (...) the issue of whether a life can attain meaning that cannot be called into question. Waghorn sheds light on this most fundamental of existential problems through a detailed yet comprehensive examination of the notion of nothing, embracing classic and cutting-edge literature from both the analytic and Continental traditions. Central figures such as Heidegger, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Nozick and Nagel are drawn upon to anchor the discussion in some of the most influential discussion of recent philosophical history. In the process of relating our ideas concerning nothing to the problem of life's meaning, Waghorn's book touches upon a number of fundamental themes, including reflexivity and its relation to our conceptual limits, whether religion has any role to play in the question of life's meaning, and the nature and constraints of philosophical methodology. A number of major philosophical traditions are addressed, including phenomenology, poststructuralism, and classical and paraconsistent logics. In addition to providing the most thorough current discussion of ultimate meaning, it will serve to introduce readers to philosophical debates concerning the notion of nothing, and the appendix engaging religion will be of value to both philosophers and theologians. (shrink)

This volume brings together Nicholas Wolterstorff's essays on epistemology written between 1983 and 2008.

This work "collects the author's work at the intersection between political philosophy and religion. Alongside his influential earlier essays, it includes nine new essays in which Wolterstorff develops original lines of argument and stakes out novel positions regarding the nature of liberal democracy, human rights, and political authority. Taken together, these positions are an attractive alternative to the so-called public reason liberalism defended by thinkers such as John Rawls"--jacket.

We argue that there are three coherent, nontrivial notions of basic-ness: conceptual basic-ness, biological basic-ness, and psychological basic-ness. There is considerable evidence for conceptually basic emotion categories (e.g., “anger,” “fear”). These categories do not designate biologically basic emotions, but some forms of anger, fear, and so on that are biologically basic in a sense we will specify. Finally, two notions of psychological basic-ness are distinguished, and the evidence for them is evaluated. The framework we offer acknowledges the force of some (...) of the objections to basic emotion theory whilst demonstrating that the notion of a basic emotion, once properly reformulated, is still of scientific value. (shrink)

Draws on a broad range of scientific evidence to theorize an evolutionary basis for religion, considering how religion may have served as an essential component of early society survival and that the brain may be inherently inclined toward religious behavior.

In this chapter we explore two important questions that we believe should be central to any discussion of the ethics and politics of cultural heritage: What are the harms associated with appropriation and commodification, specifically where the heritage of Indigenous peoples is concerned? And how can these harms best be avoided? Archaeological concerns animate this discussion; we are ultimately concerned with fostering postcolonial archaeological practices. But we situate these questions in a broader context, addressing them as they arise in connection (...) with the appropriation of Indigenous cultural heritage, both past and present. (shrink)

Fodor’s radical concept nativism flowed from his view that hypothesis testing is the only route to concept acquisition. Many have successfully objected to the overly-narrow restriction to learning by hypothesis testing. Existing representations can be connected to a new representational vehicle so as to constitute a sustaining mechanism for a new representation, without the new representation thereby being constituted by or structured out of the old. This paper argues that there is also a deeper objection. Connectionism shows that a more (...) fundamental assumption underpinning the debate can also be rejected: the assumption that the development of a new representation must be explained in content-involving terms if innateness is to be avoided. -/- Fodor has argued that connectionism offers no new resources to explain concept acquisition: unless it is merely an uninteresting claim about neural implementation, connectionism’s defining commitment to distributed representations reduces to the claim that some representations are structured out of others (which is the old, problematic research programme). Examination of examples of representational development in connectionist networks shows, however, that some such models explain the development of new representational capacities in non-representational terms. They illustrate the possibility of representational development that is not explicable-by-content. Connectionist representations can be distributed in an important sense, which is incompatible with the assumption of explanation-by-content: they can be distributed over non-representational resources that account for their development. Rejecting the assumption of explanation-by-content thereby opens up a more radical way of rejecting Fodor’s argument for radical concept nativism. (shrink)

A famous Kant scholar once distinguished two faces of the critical philosophy, one facing the past and less interesting and the other looking forward to the future and still fruitful (Strawson 1966). Rawls's work also has two faces and many of his readers look toward the past, wishing, for instance, that Rawls had been able to provide principles of justice that have the ontological status of categorical imperatives. I thank Andrew Valls for inviting me to clarify points where I diverge (...) from many Rawls scholars. Although this is an academic debate, I believe that the stakes are huge: namely, the future of liberalism in an increasingly interconnected, multicultural world. My response will elaborate how I read Rawls, why I engage Islamic political thought, and how liberals living in Europe or North America may converse with fellow citizens such as Taha Jabir Al-Alwani, who orient themselves politically by the Qur'an rather than, say, the United States Constitution. (shrink)

The ‘interpretive turn’ in twentieth-century hermeneutics rests on the general ontological claim that human reality is the reality of self-interpreting animals. But under the circumstances of advanced modernity, there are aspects of human life, or spheres of human thought and action, that appear to contradict this general thesis, in that they do not present themselves as the doings of self-interpreting animals at all. Of these, the predominant one is the sphere of work or 'productive' action. In face of historical circumstances (...) in which work presents itself as bereft of the meanings that concern self-interpreting animals, hermeneutic philosophy faces a choice: Does it exempt work from the realm of self-interpretive activity, making it an exception to the general ontological thesis; or does it seek to retrieve the hermeneutic provenance of productive action? With a focus on the writings of Gadamer and Ricoeur, the chapter shows that philosophical hermeneutics has vacillated on this issue and it suggests that retrieval of the self-interpretive dimension of productive action is a central task for hermeneutics today. (shrink)

Liberation and Authority provides original, comparative readings of Plato’s Gorgias, the first book of the Republic, and Thucydides’ History, arguing that they share similarities not only in the oft-noted “natural justice” of Callicles, Thrasymachus, and the Melian Dialogue, but also in a development that runs through the whole of each.

The aim of the Schematism chapter of the Critique of Pure Reason is to solve the problem posed by the “inhomogeneity” of intuitions and categories: the sensible properties of objects represented in intuition are of a different kind than the properties represented by categories. Kant's solution is to introduce what he calls “transcendental schemata,” which mediate the subsumption of objects under categories. I reconstruct Kant's solution in terms of two substantive premises, which I call Subsumption Sufficiency (i.e., that subsuming an (...) object under a transcendental schema is sufficient to subsume it under the corresponding category) and Real Possibility (i.e., that it is really possible to subsume objects under each of the transcendental schemata). These two principles, together with a trivial modal one (the Subsumption-Possibility Link), entail that it is possible to subsume objects under categories; in other words, the argument of the Schematism is valid. The main work of the paper consists in reconstructing Kant's arguments for, and explanations of, these premises. I argue that they hinge on Kant's claim that transcendental schemata are “time-determinations,” which I interpret to mean: rules for reflexively representing the temporal relations among our own representational states. On the basis of this reading, I reconstruct Kant's argument for Subsumption Sufficiency, category by category. I also explain why Real Possibility follows almost immediately. Granting Kant the argument up to this point in the Critique, the argument of the Schematism is sound. (shrink)

Given constructivism’s enduring popularity and appeal, it is perhaps something of a surprise that there remains considerable uncertainty among many philosophers about what constructivism is even supposed to be. My aim in this article is to make some progress on the question of how constructivism should be understood. I begin by saying something about what kind of theory constructivism is supposed to be. Next, I consider and reject both the standard proceduralist characterization of constructivism and also Sharon Street’s ingenious standpoint (...) characterization. I then suggest an alternative characterization according to which what is central is the role played by certain standards of correct reasoning. I conclude by saying something about the implications of this account for evaluating the success of constructivism. I suggest that certain challenges that have been raised against constructivist theories are based on dubious understandings of constructivism, whereas other challenges only properly come into focus once a proper understanding is achieved. (shrink)

How Moore’s open question argument works, insofar as it does, remains a matter of controversy. My purpose here is to construct an open question argument based on a novel interpretation of how Moore’s argument might work. In order to sidestep exegetical questions, I do not claim here to be offering Moore’s own argument. Rather, I offer a reconstruction making use of important elements of Moore’s methodology and assumptions that could be reasonable within a Moorean viewpoint. The crucial role within the (...) argument is played by what I call the real thought move. I show that the reconstructed argument is more defensible from some standard objections than the common construction. I finish by drawing attention to a neglected objective that would make sense within Moore’s viewpoint, showing that it fits with a major commitment of Bonjour’s moderate rationalism, and show how the package might be important for the non-naturalist today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 27, Number 1, April 2001, pp. 3-83 Moral Skepticism and Moral Naturalism in Hume's Treatise NICHOLAS L. STURGEON Section I I believe that David Hume's well-known remarks on is and ought in his Treatise of Human Nature (T 469-70)1 have been widely misunderstood, and that in consequence so has their relation to his apparent ethical naturalism and to his skepticism about the role of reason (...) in morality. My aim in this paper is to display their connection with these larger issues in Hume's work by placing them in a more illuminating light. Readers may wonder whether there is anything left to say about the passage containing these remarks; they may also share Barry Stroud's suspicion that the vast literature focused on this one paragraph has "given it an importance and point out of all proportion to its actual role in the text of the Treatise."2 But I have some new things to say. I agree, moreover, that many recent discussions, in projecting twentieth-century assumptions onto Hume's text, have accorded this passage the wrong sort of importance: that is part of what I want to correct. But getting clear about what Hume is saying here is, I shall argue, a way of moving familiar and obviously central questions about his views on morality into an unfamiliar but revealing focus. Hume's is-ought thesis is commonly, and I believe correctly, seen as an application of his more general skepticism about the capacity of reason to discover "moral distinctions." But that general skepticism is usually taken, in turn, to conflict with those many passages in which Hume Nicholas L. Sturgeon is Professor of Philosophy, Sage School of Philosophy, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-3201, USA. e-mail: [email protected] 4 Nicholas L. Sturgeon appears to say, in a reductive and naturalistic vein, that ascriptions of moral virtue and vice simply state certain empirical facts, facts about our own sentiments. My central thesis, however, is that Hume's view that there is a logical gap between is and ought is not merely consistent with his reductive naturalism, but actually depends on it. It is precisely because moral ascriptions state the facts that they do about our sentiments that no ought can be derived from an is and, a bit more generally, that reason is unable to discover moral distinctions. Hume's skepticism about reason in ethics depends, I shall argue, on his reductive ethical naturalism. This is not the usual understanding of Hume's views, and it will require careful explanation and defense. I shall proceed in several stages. My first step, in Section II, will be to argue that Hume's naturalism is at least consistent with his skepticism about reason, and in particular with his remarks about is and ought. I shall show this by focusing on a difficulty often taken to epitomize the conflict between these two strains in his thought: namely, that the paragraph containing these remarks (T 469-70: henceforth, the is-ought paragraph) and the one immediately preceding it (which I shall call the matter -of-fact paragraph (T 468-9)) appear, on their most natural readings, flatly to contradict one another.3 On the most common reading of the is-ought paragraph, it assumes the existence of two classes of statements, «-statements and oM^hr-statements, and declares that no member of the latter class can be derived entirely from members of the former. In the preceding paragraph, however, Hume appears in the guise of an ethical naturalist and subjectivist, and, if we take him at his word, simply equates a moral judgment with one asserting what he himself calls a "matter of fact," albeit a psychological fact about oneself: So that when you pronounce any action or character to be vicious, you mean nothing, but that from the constitution of your nature you have a feeling or sentiment of blame from the contemplation of it. (T 469) But, one supposes, if a moral assessment of an action or character is equivalent in meaning to a description of one's sentiments, then it can be derived from that description, and there... (shrink)

Participation in religious liturgies and rituals is a pervasive and complex human activity. This book discusses the nature of liturgical activity and the various dimensions of such activity. Nicholas Wolterstorff focuses on understanding what liturgical agents actually do and shows religious practice as a rich area for philosophical reflection.

Navigating the ambiguity of invasiveness: is it warranted? Authors De Marco and colleagues have presented a new model on the concept of invasiveness, redefining both its technical definition and practical implementation. 1 While the authors raise valid critiques regarding the discrepancy in definitions, I cannot help but wonder about the purpose of redefining terms for which little confusion, if any, exists? This commentary seeks to scrutinise the rationale supporting the new model in the absence of significant clinical confusion and to (...) explore the implications for clinical practice. What are we trying to solve? Initially, one may notice there is no mention of clinical relevancy, confusion among patients or whether the discrepancy in terms is causing miscommunication. It seems reasonable that some clinical confusion may exist, but so too does a similar imbalance of terms when speaking technically across the specialties; take depression and its definition... (shrink)

Three thoughts strongly influence recent work on sensory imagination, often without explicit articulation. The image thought says that all mental states involving a mental image are imaginative. The attitude thought says that, if there is a distinctive imaginative attitude, it is a single, monolithic attitude. The function thought says that the functions of sensory imagination are identical or akin to functions of other mental states such as judgment or belief. Taken together, these thoughts create a theoretical context within which eliminativism (...) appears attractive. Eliminativism is the idea that we needn’t refer to a distinctive attitude in order to characterize sensory imagination: the attitudes involved in other states provide all the resources we need. Peter Langland-Hassan’s account of sensory imagination provides an example of such eliminativism. Via close examination of this account, I make manifest the three thoughts and their collective tendency to support eliminativism. I argue that all three are dubious, and that we should reject eliminativism; we need a distinctive imaginative attitude if we are to adequately explicate sensory imagination. (shrink)

This essay is an attempt to explain Kantian transcendental idealism to contemporary metaphysicians and make clear its relevance to contemporary debates in what is now called ‘meta-metaphysics.’ It is not primarily an exegetical essay, but an attempt to translate some Kantian ideas into a contemporary idiom.

It is unreasonable to assume that our pre-scientific emotion vocabulary embodies all and only those distinctions required for a scientific psychology of emotion. The psychoevolutionary approach to emotion yields an alternative classification of certain emotion phenomena. The new categories are based on a set of evolved adaptive responses, or affect-programs, which are found in all cultures. The triggering of these responses involves a modular system of stimulus appraisal, whose evoluations may conflict with those of higher-level cognitive processes. Whilst the structure (...) of the adaptive responses is innate, the contents of the system which triggers them are largely learnt. The circuits subserving the adaptive responses are probably located in the limbic system. This theory of emotion is directly applicable only to a small sub-domain of the traditional realm of emotion. It can be used, however, to explain the grouping of various other phenomena under the heading of emotion, and to explain various characteristic failings of the pre-scientific conception of emotion. (shrink)

In this essay I offer a partial rehabilitation of Cohen’s Kant interpretation. In particular, I will focus on the center of Cohen’s interpretation in KTE, reflected in the title itself: his interpretation of Kant’s concept of experience. “Kant hat einen neuen Begriff der Erfahrung entdeckt,”7 Cohen writes at the opening of the first edition of KTE (henceforth, KTE1), and while the exact nature of that new concept of experience is hard to pin down in the 1871 edition, he states it (...) succinctly in the second edition (henceforth KTE2): experience is Newtonian mathematical natural science.8 While this equation of experience with mathematical natural science has few contemporary defenders, I believe it is substantially correct, with one important qualification. Kant uses the term Erfahrung in a number of different senses in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft (henceforth, KrV). I will argue that a central, and neglected, sense of that key technical term aligns with Cohen’s reading; what Kant sometimes refers to as ‘universal experience’ (sometimes, simply ‘experience’) is, in broad outlines, correctly interpreted by Cohen as mathematical natural science. (shrink)

In Republican Guard , Nicholas Xenos describes the Straussian network and its nature, focusing upon delineating what in Leo Strauss’ writings has influenced and can tell us about the ‘character of American power today and the rhetoric through which it is enhanced and sustained.’ In the end he argues and demonstrates that Strauss’ political theory provides the means by which an imperial project can be camouflaged under the cloak of an appeal to liberal democracy. This book will be of (...) interest to students and scholars of politics and international relations. (shrink)

One of Bolzano’s objections to Kant’s way of drawing the analytic-synthetic distinction is that it only applies to judgments within a narrow range of syntactic forms, namely, universal affirmative judgments. According to Bolzano, Kant cannot account for judgments of other syntactic forms that, intuitively, are analytic. A recent paper by Ian Proops also attributes to Kant the view that analytic judgments beyond a limited range of syntactic forms are impossible. I argue that, correctly understood, Kant’s conception of analyticity allows for (...) analytic judgments of a wider range of syntactic forms. (shrink)

Gerald Allan Cohen was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford for 23 years and is considered one of the most influential political philosophers of the past quarter-century. He died in 2009.The Political Philosophy of G. A. Cohen is the first full-length study of Cohen's highly influential thinking and method in political philosophy covering a range of fundamental topics such as equality, freedom and fraternity and his views on Marx, Nozick and Rawlsian concepts.Nicholas Vrousalis (...) brings together the diverse strands of argument in Cohen's political thought and critically reconstructs them in the context of contemporary debates in political, economic, and social theory. This reconstruction will highlight common threads running through Cohen's numerous contributions to contemporary philosophy, without underrating certain inevitable tensions between them. (shrink)

The major reason given in the philosophical literature for dissatisfaction with theories of vagueness based on fuzzy logic is that such theories give rise to a problem of higherorder vagueness or artificial precision. In this paper I first outline the problem and survey suggested solutions: fuzzy epistemicism; measuring truth on an ordinal scale; logic as modelling; fuzzy metalanguages; blurry sets; and fuzzy plurivaluationism. I then argue that in order to decide upon a solution, we need to understand the true nature (...) and source of the problem. Two possible sources are discussed: the problem stems from the very nature of vagueness—from the defining features of vague predicates; or the problem stems from the way in which the meanings of predicates are determined—by the usage of speakers together with facts about their environment and so on. I argue that the latter is the true source of the problem, and on this basis that fuzzy plurivaluationism is the correct solution. (shrink)

Developmental systems theory (DST) is a general theoretical perspective on development, heredity and evolution. It is intended to facilitate the study of interactions between the many factors that influence development without reviving `dichotomous' debates over nature or nurture, gene or environment, biology or culture. Several recent papers have addressed the relationship between DST and the thriving new discipline of evolutionary developmental biology (EDB). The contributions to this literature by evolutionary developmental biologists contain three important misunderstandings of DST.

In behavioral ecology some authors regard the innateness concept as irretrievably confused whilst others take it to refer to adaptations. In cognitive psychology, however, whether traits are 'innate' is regarded as a significant question and is often the subject of heated debate. Several philosophers have tried to define innateness with the intention of making sense of its use in cognitive psychology. In contrast, I argue that the concept is irretrievably confused. The vernacular innateness concept represents a key aspect of 'folkbiology', (...) namely, the explanatory strategy that psychologists and cognitive anthropologists have labeled 'folk essentialism'. Folk essentialism is inimical to Darwinism, and both Darwin and the founders of the modern synthesis struggled to overcome this way of thinking about living systems. Because the vernacular concept of innateness is part of folkbiology, attempts to define it more adequately are unlikely to succeed, making it preferable to introduce new, neutral terms for the various, related notions that are needed to understand cognitive development. (shrink)