New technologies are the source of uncertainties about the applicability of moral and morally connotated concepts. These uncertainties sometimes call for conceptual engineering, but it is not often recognized when this is the case. We take this to be a missed opportunity, as a recognition that different researchers are working on the same kind of project can help solve methodological questions that one is likely to encounter. In this paper, we present three case studies where philosophers of technology implicitly engage (...) in conceptual engineering (without naming it as such). We subsequently reflect on the case studies to find out how these illustrate conceptual engineering as an appropriate method to deal with pressing concerns in the philosophy of technology. We have two main goals. We first want to contribute to the literature on conceptual engineering by presenting concrete examples of conceptual engineering in the philosophy of technology. This is especially relevant, because the technologies that are designed based on the conceptual work done by philosophers of technology potentially have crucial moral and social implications. Secondly, we want to make explicit what choices are made when doing this conceptual work. Making explicit that some of the implicit assumptions are, in fact, debated in the literature allows for reflection on these questions. Ultimately, our hope is that conscious reflection leads to an improvement of the conceptual work done. (shrink)

Barbara Herman argues for a radical shift in the way we perceive Kant's ethics. She convincingly reinterprets the key texts, at once allowing Kant to mean what he says while showing that what Kant says makes good moral sense. She urges us to abandon the tradition that describes Kantian ethics as a deontology, a moral system of rules of duty. She finds the central idea of Kantian ethics not in duty but in practical rationality as a norm of unconditioned (...) goodness. This book both clarifies Kant's own theory and adds programmatic vitality to modern moral philosophy. (shrink)

Most of us have been brought up on the idea that moral theories divide as they are, at the root, either deontological or consequentialist. A new point of division has been emerging that places deontological and consequentialist theories together against theories of virtue, or a conception of morality constrained at the outset by the requirements of the “personal.” In a series of important essays Bernard Williams has offered striking arguments for the significance of the personal in moral thought based on (...) the role of integrity in human activity and character. His criticisms of both Kantian and utilitarian theories for their deep-seated tendencies to undermine the integrity of persons brings to a new level of seriousness and subtlety long-standing complaints against these theories—the invasive do-gooding of utilitarianism, the coldness and severity toward normal human concerns of Kantian theory. Although Williams is inclined to find the sources of the attack on integrity in these different features of the two traditional theories, in the end his complaint against both of them turns on their demand that the moral agent submit himself to the authority of impartial value. (shrink)

Historian Arthur Herman traces the roots of declinism and shows how major thinkers, past and present, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism. From Nazism to the Sixties counterculture, from Britain's Fabian socialists to America's multiculturalists, and from Dracula and Freud to Robert Bly and Madonna, this work examines the idea of decline in Western history and sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization's inevitable end has become a fixed part of the (...) modern Western imagination. Through a series of biographical portraits spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, the author traces the roots of declinism and aims to show how major thinkers of the past and present, including Nietzsche, DuBois, Sartre, and Foucault, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism. (shrink)

Startingpoint of the investigation is the Humean idea that the notion and problem of personal identity (and a fortiori of personhood) is best understood not from an epistemological-ontological perspective‚ but in the context of an analysis of ‘the concern we take in ourselves’ as in pride. It turns out that an insight in pride requires an analysis of the paradoxical relation of identification. It is argued that this relation cannot be understood in terms of a conscious strategy from the part (...) of the individual. The analysis shows that identification involves a fundamental passivity of the subject‚ but at the same time requires a certain capacity of distantiation with respect to the object(s) of identification. Pride and the identification(s) going with it‚ involve value-judgments not only concerning the value of the self as identified with certain valuable objects‚ but also concerning the mode of identification. The question is asked by whom and how the criteria of these judgments are determined. An attempt is made to give a rationale for the absence of definitive criteria in this matter. In the last parts of the paper‚ the fundamental passivity of the self in its identification(s) is interpreted as a fundamental ‘vulnerability’ which must somehow be assumed to fully be a person. (It is suggested that the analysis of pride and self-esteem in terms of ‘vulnerability’ could profit from an analysis of gratitude). (shrink)

The present paper studies the general implications of theprinciple of compositionality for the organization of grammar.It will be argued that Janssen''s (1986) requirement that syntax andsemantics be similar algebras is too strong, and that the moreliberal requirement that syntax be interpretable into semanticsleads to a formalization that can be motivated and applied more easily,while it avoids the complications that encumber Janssen''s formalization.Moreover, it will be shown that this alternative formalization evenallows one to further complete the formal theory of compositionality, inthat (...) it is capable of clarifying the role played by translation,model-theoretic interpretation and meaning postulates,of which the latter two aspects received little or no attention inMontague (1970) and Janssen (1986). (shrink)

The uniform halting problem (UH) can be stated as follows.Give a decision procedure which for any given Turing machine (TM) will decide whether or not it has an immortal instantaneous description (ID).An ID is called immortal if it has no terminal successor. As it is generally the case in the literature (see e.g. Minsky [3, p. 118]) we assume that in an ID the tape must be blank except for some finite numbers of squares. If we remove this restriction the (...) UH becomes the immortality problem (IP). The UH should not be confused with the initialised uniform halting problem (whether or not a TM has an immortal ID when started in a specified state) which can easily be shown to be undecidable (see e.g. Minsky [3, p. 151]). (shrink)

Philosophy as a discipline is facing new challenges that will determine its future. The challenges include the historic ones relating to economic conditions and administrative leadership that focuses on preparation for employment in a way that lessens the intellectual development of students. But the new challenges occur in a worldwide democratic recession and in political leadership that seems to be moving toward greater censorship and less academic freedom. In America, this is also occurring with a decline in student enrollment that (...) negatively impacts the liberal arts and particularly philosophy. This article examines the way two forms of American naturalism may respond. John Dewey’s cultural naturalism and George Santayana’s thorough, non-reductive naturalism provide an array of alternatives. I explore alternatives open to philosophers that include abandoning philosophy by leaving the university or becoming an administrator as well as alternatives available if one remains in the university. Finally, I offer four criteria for judging the viability of choosing any of the alternatives. (shrink)

Philosopher, poet, literary and cultural critic, George Santayana is a principal figure in Classical American Philosophy. His naturalism and emphasis on creative imagination were harbingers of important intellectual turns on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a naturalist before naturalism grew popular; he appreciated multiple perfections before multiculturalism became an issue; he thought of philosophy as literature before it became a theme in American and European scholarly circles; and he managed to naturalize Platonism, update Aristotle, fight off idealisms, and (...) provide a striking and sensitive account of the spiritual life without being a religious believer. His Hispanic heritage, shaded by his sense of being an outsider in America, captures many qualities of American life missed by insiders, and presents views equal to Tocqueville in quality and importance. Beyond philosophy, only Emerson may match his literary production. As a public figure, he appeared on the front cover of Time (3 February 1936), and his autobiography (Persons and Places, 1944) and only novel (The Last Puritan, 1936) were the best-selling books in the United States as Book-of-the-Month Club selections. The novel was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and Edmund Wilson ranked Persons and Places among the few first-rate autobiographies, comparing it favorably to Yeats's memoirs, The Education of Henry Adams, and Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Remarkably, Santayana achieved this stature in American thought without being an American citizen. He proudly retained his Spanish citizenship throughout his life. Yet, as he readily admitted, it is as an American that his philosophical and literary corpuses are to be judged. Using contemporary classifications, Santayana is the first and foremost Hispanic-American philosopher. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Life and Publications Naturalism, Creative Imagination, and Pragmatism America Conclusion.

Larry Hickman has fostered his own analysis, explication and application of Dewey’s philosophy as well as overseen the critical edition of John Dewey’s works at the Center for Dewey Studies. In America our democracy is struggling, making Hickman’s scholarly work even more important. I attempt to explain some of Hickman’s use of Dewey’s philosophy to address current issues that include the roles of religion and education in American democracy. Much of Hickman’s pragmatic naturalism provides hope for democracy as a way (...) of life and as a governmental organization. But will that hope meet contemporary challenges in our society? I suggest some possible limitations to Dewey’s and Hickman’s views but highlight the central role both play in American philosophy. (shrink)

We dispute Penn et al.'s claim of the sharp functional discontinuity between humans and nonhumans with evidence in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) of higher-order generalizations: spontaneous integration of previously learned rules and concepts in response to novel stimuli. We propose that species-general explanations that are in approach are more plausible than Penn et al.'s innatist approach of a genetically prespecified supermodule.

Inductivism is understood as the explication of the degree of confirmation as conditional logical probability. Inductivism is not recommendable in the form of Carnap's λ-system, but tenable in the form of Bayesianism. Objections directed at it are either irrelevant or can be taken account of within Bayesianism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Parables of Narrative ImaginingDavid Herman (bio)Mark Turner. The Literary Mind. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.The literary mind? The literary mind? The literary mind? Any which way you parse it, the title of Mark Turner’s provocative, elegantly written study seems to beg important questions, assume things that do not by any means go without saying. First parse: is there in fact a literary (part of the) mind? That is, is (...) there some nondiscrete but semi-autonomous module of cognitive capacities required for using and understanding literary discourse—a module that takes information (as its input) from other modules, operates on that information in some way, then feeds the transformed information (as its output: “literature”) into yet other modules, which in turn take that information as their input? 1 Second parse: assume that there is some module involved in the production and interpretation of literary discourse. Then of what nature, exactly, are the operations performed within that module, and how do they operate on the input in a way that makes the output specifically literary? How precisely is literature born from this process or set of processes? Doesn’t this kind of account suffer from all the disadvantages (inexplicitness, for example) that it inherits from its parent model, the black-box explanation? Third parse: should we even be talking about “minds” at all in connection with literature and the study of literature? Hasn’t “The Intentional Fallacy” and everything that has happened since in the fields of critical and cultural theory—from Marxism and poststructuralism to New Historicism and cultural studies—taught us to center critico-theoretical discourse anywhere but in “the mind”? Hasn’t all this research exposed the mind (of the author, reader, subject, or postsubject, as the case may be) as a construct with more or less noxious political and cultural properties? Are not the discourses of and about the mind so many strategies of interpellation—vehicles by which ideology can work to implant the illusions of inviolable inwardness, unchanging essence, and predetermined identity within a subject that takes such imagined realities to be its real conditions of existence? 2Turner does not directly address any of these questions—at least in the way that I have framed them. That may be grounds for criticism: if you are using a title that can be construed as polemical, then the onus is on you to explain just how the title positions your work in a wider context of argumentation. But at the same time, Turner’s analysis reformulates the underlying problems to which some of my questions point, thus raising [End Page 20] other, equally important issues. Coming to terms with these other issues may change the way we ask questions about things like literature and the mind. Specifically, as part of a larger “cognitive revolution” now unfolding in social-scientific and humanistic disciplines ranging from linguistics to literary and narrative theory, Turner’s book provides ample reasons for not thinking the idea of mind tantamount to an ideology of mind. 3 After all, reducing mind to an ideology of inwardness leaves unexplained any number of basic facts about perception, cognition, and language processing. There is, for example, our ability to use “image schemata” such as motion along a path and bounded interior to make sense of events like milk being poured into a cup, on the one hand, and contained spaces like the ones inside bottles, heads, and houses, on the other hand [Turner 16]. Relying on such schemata, I don’t regularly try to pour wine into a cutting board or to measure, in miles per hour, the speed of an asparagus stalk as it sits on the kitchen counter.There is also—to invoke a slightly different cognitive-scientific vocabulary—our ability to make predictions about emergent situations and sequences of events on the basis of prior, stereotypical situations and sequences stored in the memory as knowledge representations sometimes called frames and scripts [see Schank and Abelson]. For example, the script associated with making a purchase guides me in my interaction with the person at a cash register, such that I can make seemingly effortless predictions about what this person wants me to do... (shrink)

This essay concerns the multiple faces of science in ethical environmental decision-making. Environmental crises pose existential threats to human and non-human life. Science is essential to any meaningful response to these crises, but science as it is conventionally understood and practiced is not adequate to the task. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour in his 2013 Gifford Lectures on ―Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature,‖1 I will critique this understanding and practice in relation to four (...) faces of science - capacity builder, informer and guide, philosophy, and institution—and propose reforms. (shrink)

In keeping with recent views of consciousness of self as represented in the body in action, empirical studies are reviewed that demonstrate a bottlenose dolphin’s conscious awareness of its own body and body parts, implying a representational “body image” system. Additional work reviewed demonstrates an advanced capability of dolphins for motor imitation of self-produced behaviors and of behaviors of others, including imitation of human actions, supporting hypotheses that dolphins have a sense of agency and ownership of their actions and may (...) implicitly attribute those levels of self-awareness to others. Possibly, a mirror-neuron system, or its functional equivalent to that described in monkeys and humans, may mediate both self-awareness and awareness of others. (shrink)