Bruineberg et al. argue that one ought not confuse the map (model) for the territory (reality) and delineate a distinction between innocuous Pearl blankets and metaphysically laden Friston blankets. I argue that all we have are models, all knowledge is conditional, and that if there is a Pearl/Friston distinction, it is a matter of the domain of application: latents or observations. This suggests that, if anything, Friston blankets may inherit philosophical significance previously assigned to observations.

This paper concerns the question of how to draw inferences common sensically from uncertain knowledge. Since the early work of Shore and Johnson (1980), Paris and Vencovská (1990), and Csiszár (1989), it has been known that the Maximum Entropy Inference Process is the only inference process which obeys certain common sense principles of uncertain reasoning. In this paper we consider the present status of this result and argue that within the rather narrow context in which we work this complete and (...) consistent mode of uncertain reasoning is actually characterised by the observance of just a single common sense principle (or slogan). (shrink)

Alexandre Kojève declared himself a Stalinist. This declaration has puzzled his own students from the inter-war period and many later commentators. The present article takes Kojève at his word; its imaginative thrust is to cast Kojève’s declaration in the context of a more comprehensive reflection on revolution and the revolutionary project undertaken by Stalinism. Kojève envisages revolution as completing history and ushering in a new era, whose exact contours appear paradoxical, since the end of history is also the end of (...) humanity. This conception of history Kojève associates with Hegel. At the same time Kojève suggests that revolution may never be complete but remains a continuous striving for an end that is always “underway.” This conception of history Kojève associates with Kant and, ultimately, with the universal and homogeneous state and, by extension, with the historical Stalinist state as well. Such a state expresses a skeptical attitude to revolution in terms of both its possibility and perhaps even its desirability. (shrink)

This important collection reveals a hitherto neglected aspect of Heidegger’s impact, adding to our knowledge of the interaction between Western philosophy and Russia as well as the often neglected East European milieu.

"Nietzche and Dostoevsky"are collectedessays on Nietzsche Dostoevsky andtwentieth-century intellectual history.".

SummaryThis paper analyses the revival of Pliny's Naturalis historia within the scientific culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, focusing on a French effort to produce an edition with annotations by scientists and scholars. Between the Renaissance and the early eighteenth century, the Naturalis historia had declined in scientific importance. Increasingly, it was relegated to the humanities, as we demonstrate with a review of editions. For a variety of reasons, however, scientific interest in the Naturalis historia grew in (...) the second half of the eighteenth century. Epitomizing this interest was a plan for a scientifically annotated, Latin-French edition of the Naturalis historia. Initially coordinated by the French governmental minister Malesherbes in the 1750s, the edition was imperfectly realized by Poinsinet a few decades later. It was intended to rival two of the period's other distinguished multi-volume books of knowledge, Diderot and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie and Buffon's Histoire naturelle, to which we compare it. Besides narrating the scientific revival of the Historia naturalis during this period, we examine its causes and the factors contributing to its end in the first half of the nineteenth century. (shrink)

_Schelling’s masterpiece investigating evil and freedom._.

This paper corrects three widely held misunderstandings about Maxent when used in common sense reasoning: That it is language dependent; That it produces objective facts; That it subsumes, and so is at least as untenable as, the paradox-ridden Principle of Insufficient Reason.

The article argues that historical materialism is not only a theory of historical change but more generally a mediation between the natural foundations of human life and its meaningful symbolic expressions. The article begins with an interpretation of the general philosophical significance of the basic premises of historical materialism as they are sketched in the German Ideology. I argue that these premises point us in two different directions: down, towards a scientific understanding of the natural world, and up, towards interpretations (...) of meaningful human expressions. Reductionist scientific models are appropriate for the understanding of natural forces, but these reveal their own limitations when applied to social life. Social life cannot be understood outside its symbolic expressions, but these are not free floating ideal abstractions, but remain connected to fundamental human purposes and must be understood as such. (shrink)

Review of Donald Davidson ed. Kirk Ludwig (CUP 2003).

We consider two formalizations of the notion of irrelevance as a rationality principle within the framework of (Carnapian) Inductive Logic: Johnson's Sufficientness Principle, JSP, which is classically important because it leads to Carnap's influential Continuum of Inductive Methods and the recently proposed Weak Irrelevance Principle, WIP. We give a complete characterization of the language invariant probability functions satisfying WIP which generalizes the Nix-Paris Continuum. We argue that the derivation of two very disparate families of inductive methods from alternative perceptions of (...) 'irrelevance' is an indication that this notion is imperfectly understood at present. (shrink)

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1987, the Russian-born American poet Joseph Brodsky argued that aesthetics is the mother of ethics. However, there is an ambiguity in his use of the term aesthetics. In the first part of this article, I distinguish between Brodsky’s narrow use of aesthetics, which refers to problems of beauty, and the broader sense, which refers to the cognitive function of sensibility and feeling. I then suggest that good sense can be made of the claim (...) about the origins of ethics only if we employ the broader sense of aesthetics. The second part draws on examples from Brodsky and the American poet Jorie Graham to illustrate the ways in which the feelings generated by human sensuous receptivity transform the world from a meaningless physical system into meaningful sets of life-valuable relationships. The third part sharpens this conclusion by considering the conditions under which the world can appear to be meaningless. In the final section I link Brodsky’s poetic responsiveness to the world to John McMurtry’s philosophical analysis of “the felt side of being.” Poetic evocation and philosophical argument are two approaches to the same problem which, when brought together, provide a comprehensive explanation of why aesthetics is the mother of ethics. (shrink)

This paper is a review essay of two collections of essays focused on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. The review focuses on three core themes. First, it discusses those papers that explore the central role that the relationship between practices and institutions plays in MacIntyre’s critique of modernity. Second, it turns to those papers that examine the foundational role that human needs play in MacIntyre’s ethics. Third, it places in dialogue those papers that defend MacIntyre’s politics as a form of (...) ‘revolutionary Aristotelianism’ with those that contest the soundness of this categorization. (shrink)

The papers in this volume examine Kant's legacy by addressing issues concerning creativity in all aspects of human experience.

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

The essay argues that the most influential liberal accounts of moral theory (utilitarianism and deontology) assume that human material nature is the seat of desire, and that desire is essentially unsociable. Moral systems are then interpreted as a means of counteracting the essentially self-interested desires that are assumed to ordinarily drive human beings. The essay challenges the normative presuppositions of these arguments. It maintains that liberal moral philosophy must be interpreted in the historical context of the rise of a competitive (...) market society. It then contends that contra liberal moral theory, human beings are neither essentially egoistic nor altruistic, but interdependent. Moral theory is better seen as following from a recognitions of this material interdependence than as an ideal limit on ?naturally? self-interested and competitive behaviour. (shrink)

Dussel’s complex work calls into question the standard history of philosophy, reveals a counter-history at work beneath the official history that gives voice to the victims of capitalism and colonialism, and systematically develops a novel ‘material ethics’ grounded in an unqualified, universal affirmation of life as the foundation of liberatory values. The Ethics of Liberation brings together the major problems explored in Dussel’s prolific body of earlier work: the relationship between Western philosophy and the expansion of European society; the relationship (...) between centre and periphery in global political economy, considered as both a philosophical and an ethical problem; the ethical interpretation of Marxism; the politics of liberation in the colonial context; the defence of universal foundations of ethical norms; and the distinction between formal and critical ethics. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the normative foundations and political implications of David Held's cosmopolitan social democracy are insufficient as solutions to the moral and social problems he criticizes. The article develops a life-grounded alternative critique of globalization that roots our ethical duties towards each other in consciousness of our shared needs and capabilities. These ethical duties are best realized in political projects aimed at fundamental long-term transformations in the principles that govern major socio-economic institutions.

This essay focuses on the purported duty—defended by Walter Benjamin but widely assumed in much political theory and practice—of the living to redeem the suffering of those who died as a consequence of oppression, exploitation, and political violence. I consider the cogency and ethical value of this duty from the perspective of a politics grounded in the equal life-value of human beings. For both metaphysical and ethical reasons I conclude that this duty does not obtain, first because the dead cannot (...) experience redemption, and secondly because it is politically counterproductive: it personalizes a pathological form of political resistance which may easily incite further violence and thus perpetuate human suffering and oppression. (shrink)

Human life is finite. Given that lifetime is necessarily limited, the experience of time in any given society is a central ethical problem. If all or most of human lifetime is consumed by routine tasks then human beings are dominated by the socially determined experience of time. This article first examines time as the fundamental existential framework of human life. It then goes on to explore the determination of time today by the ruling value system that underlies advanced capitalist society. (...) It concludes that the equation ‘time is money’ rules the contemporary experience of time, and goes on to argue that this experience deprives those who live under this ruling value system of a central requirement of free human life: the experience of time as an open matrix of possibilities for action. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 7-8, November - December 2020, Page 880-881.

Volume 24, Issue 3-4, May - June 2019, Page 437-445.

Volume 25, Issue 2, February - March 2020, Page 217-224.

The article is a critical examination of Marcuse's speculations about the possibility of determining a biological foundation for ethical norms. It considers three key objections to this project: that Marcuse fails to adequately define needs, that he misinterprets Freud, and that, details aside, he fundamentally misunderstands what a `biological' foundation for ethics would entail. The objections are accepted, to varying degrees, as regards the content of Marcuse's argument. The article concludes, however, with a different account of biological foundations designed to (...) rescue the deeper aims of Marcuse's project. Key Words: biology • ethics • foundation • Herbert Marcuse • needs • socialism. (shrink)

(1999). Subjecthood and Self-Determination: The Limitations of Postmodernism as Democratic Theory. Canadian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 29, Supplementary Volume 25: Civilization and Oppression, pp. 147-169.

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 5, Page 704-705, August 2012.

At different times Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse argued that immortality is a condition of overcoming misery and achieving complete human freedom. Their arguments were made before “practical immortality” had become a concrete scientific project. The difference between what was then and what is now scientifically possible alters the ethical and political value of the idea of immortality. Had the first generation of critical theorists occupied the present historical moment, they would have realized that science harnessed to the demand for limitless (...) life would not solve the kind of ethical and existential problems they hoped it would. I argue that the scientific struggle against human finitude is driven by the same egocentric concern for money and self-maximization that early critical theory diagnosed as the main psychological pathology caused by capitalism. Finitude, I conclude, is the price human beings must pay if they are to live free and meaningful lives. (shrink)