This chapter begins with a discussion of the emergence of the analytic movement in British philosophy. It highlights G. E. Moore's two most influential works, ‘The Refutation of Idealism’ and Principia Ethica, both of which were seminal contributions to the analytic movement that he and Bertrand Russell initiated. Both feature the realist doctrine and the method of decompositional analysis that are the hallmarks of Moore's early philosophy. The discussions then turn to Moore's views about moral philosophy and Henry Sidgwick; (...) class='Hi'>John Cook Wilson, the most influential realist at Oxford; meta-ethics; and postwar ethics. (shrink)

This essay proposes a comprehensive blueprint for the hylomorphic foundations of cosmology. The key philosophical explananda in cosmology are those dealing with global processes and structures, the regularity of global regularities, and the existence of the global as such. The possibility of elucidating these using alternatives to hylomorphism is outlined and difficulties with these alternatives are raised. Hylomorphism, by contrast, provides a sound philosophical ground for cosmology insofar as it leads to notions of cosmic essence, the unity of complex essences, (...) and globally emergent properties. These are used as the basis to account for the aforementioned cosmological explananda and to resolve two problems in the philosophy of cosmology: the meta-law dilemma and the uniqueness of the universe. In summary, cosmology needs hylomorphism because it is able to ground cosmology’s efforts as a scientific inquiry. It can do so because hylomorphism philosophically accounts for changing substances and aggregates of substances, the various scales of law-governed behavior measured by the natures of those substances, and how those substances as parts relate to the universe as a whole. (shrink)

Talks collected from lectures given by Bennett with Gurdjieff's approval, to help people understand All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. Bennett regarded Gurdjieff's All and Everything as a work of superhuman genius.

Japanese constructions of whiteness have been shaped by mainstream media and popular culture, which both reproduces and localizes the western discourse of whiteness. At the same time, the growth of the internet, social media, and online culture have exposed Japan to contentious debates in the United States (and elsewhere) concerning racial representation, race-switching, and diversity, as well as providing a platform for Japanese to reexamine contemporary Japanese racial attitudes. This chapter explores the impact that the discourse of representation and diversity (...) in the United States, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, and demographic changes, particularly the growth of diasporic African communities in Japan since the 1980s, have had on Japanese perceptions of “whiteness,” “blackness,” and “Japaneseness.”. (shrink)

The present paper examines the arguments and data presented by Nisbett and Wilson relevant to their thesis that subjects do not have access to their own cognitive processes. It is concluded that their review of previous research is selective and incomplete and that the data they present in behalf of their thesis does not withstand a demand characteristics analysis. Furthermore, their use of observer-subject similarity as evidence of subjects' inability to access cognitive processes makes tests of their hypothesis confounded and, (...) at the same time, reveals limitations in the application of the pre-inquiry quasi-control to research on social behavior. Problems with postexperiment questionnaires, such as the demand characteristics of the inquiry procedure are also considered. Although there are difficulties in assessing subjects' cognitive processes, many of these may be overcome through the application of novel techniques and research conducted on more traditional methods. In contrast to the view that subjects have limited access to cognitive processes and that their verbal reports are not valid, it is concluded that subjects' verbalizations are a rich source of psychological data which must be pursued if we are to tap their cognitive processes and are to gain an adequate understanding of human behavior. (shrink)

Recently, social-media tools have been widely credited with igniting pervasive social upheavals in the Middle East, some of which brought down governments. This article explores the putative structure of such gatherings and considers new developments in what such collectives might be from a Sartrean perspective, in particular as mediated by the arrival of social media. A Sartrean perspective on the still indefinite composition of media collectives is offered under Sartre's concept of the groupe en fusion , yet still open to (...) discussion under his concept of individual free choice. Throughout, the chimerical presence of the We-subject, as an ontologically suspect entity arises, in particular when reification is attempted by socialmedia users living under illiberal political regimes. The situation of dissident women in the Middle East is often referred to. (shrink)

Alfred Jules Ayer was born in London and educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. He attended sessions of the logical positivist ‘Vienna Circle’ in 1932, and taught at Oxford from 1933 until joining the Army in 1940. His Language, Truth and Logic was published in 1936, and The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge in 1940. After war service he returned to Oxford in 1945, and became Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College, London, the following (...) year. The Problem of Knowledge was published in 1956. In 1959 he returned to Oxord as Wykeham Professor of Logic, a post he held until his retirement in 1977. He had been made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1952, and was knighted in 1970. Among his publications after he returned to Oxford are The Concept of a Person , Philosophical Essays , The Origins of Pragmatism , Metaphysics and Common Sense , Russell and Moore: the Analytical Heritage , Probability and Evidence , The Central Questions of Philosophy , and Philosophy in the Twentieth Century. (shrink)

We wish to give a precise formulation of the intuitive concept: The degree to which the known facts support a given hypothesis.

Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics deals with these problems is reviewed. A new interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics, the transactional interpretation, is presented. The basic element of this interpretation is the transaction describing a quantum event as an exchange of advanced and retarded waves, as implied by the work of Wheeler and Feynman, Dirac, and others. The transactional interpretation is explicitly nonlocal and thereby consistent with recent tests of the Bell inequality, yet is relativistically invariant and fully causal. (...) A detailed comparison of the transactional and Copenhagen interpretations is made in the context of well-known quantum-mechanical Gedankenexperimenre and "paradoxes." The transactional interpretation permits quantum-mechanical wave functions to be interpreted as real waves physically present in space rather than as "mathematical representations of knowledge" as in the Copenhagen interpretation. The transactional interpretation is shown to provide insight into the complex character of the quantum-mechanical state vector and the mechanism associated with its "collapse." It also leads in a natural way to justification of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the Born probability law (P = ii iij*), basic elements of the Copenhagen interpretation. (shrink)

This book shines bright light into the dim recesses of quantum theory, where the mysteries of entanglement, nonlocality, and wave collapse have motivated some to conjure up multiple universes, and others to adopt a "shut up and calculate" mentality. After an extensive and accessible introduction to quantum mechanics and its history, the author turns attention to his transactional model. Using a quantum handshake between normal and time-reversed waves, this model provides a clear visual picture explaining the baffling experimental results that (...) flow daily from the quantum physics laboratories of the world. To demonstrate its powerful simplicity, the transactional model is applied to a collection of counter-intuitive experiments and conceptual problems. (shrink)

Includes chapters on scientific language, mathematics, probability, credibility and induction, scientific explanations, life, and science and values.