Recently representationalists have cited a phenomenon known as the transparency of experience in arguments against the qualia theory. Representationalists take transparency to support their theory and to work against the qualia theory. In this paper I argue that representationalist assessment of the philosophical importance of transparency is incorrect. The true beneficiary of transparency is another theory, naïve realism. Transparency militates against qualia and the representationalist theory of experience. I describe the transparency phenomenon, and I use my description to argue for (...) naïve realism and against representationalism and the qualia theory. I also examine the relationship between phenomenological study and phenomenal character, and discuss the results in connection with the argument from hallucination. (shrink)

Because they contain idealizations, scientific models are often considered to be misrepresentations of their target systems. An important question is therefore how models can explain the behaviours of these systems. Most of the answers to this question are representationalist in nature. Proponents of this view are generally committed to the claim that models are explanatory if they represent their target systems to some degree of accuracy; in other words, they try to determine the conditions under which idealizations can be made (...) without jeopardizing the representational function of models. In this article, we first outline several forms of this representationalist view. We then argue that this view, in each of these forms, omits an important role of idealizations: that of facilitating the identification of the explanatory components within a model. Via examination of a case study from contemporary astrophysics, we show that one way in which idealizations can do this is by creating a comparison case that s... (shrink)

If we replace first-order logic by second-order logic in the original definition of Gödel’s inner model L, we obtain the inner model of hereditarily ordinal definable sets [33]. In this paper...

Low levels of public trust in data practices have led to growing calls for changes to data-driven systems, and in the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation provides a legal motivation for such changes. Data management is a vital component of data-driven systems, but what constitutes ‘good’ data management is not straightforward. Academic attention is turning to the question of what ‘good data’ might look like more generally, but public views are absent from these debates. This paper addresses this gap, (...) reporting on a survey of the public on their views of data management approaches, undertaken by the authors and administered in the UK, where departure from the EU makes future data legislation uncertain. The survey found that respondents dislike the current approach in which commercial organizations control their personal data and prefer approaches that give them control over their data, that include oversight from regulatory bodies or that enable them to opt out of data gathering. Variations of data trusts – that is, structures that provide independent stewardship of data – were also preferable to the current approach, but not as widely preferred as control, oversight and opt out options. These features therefore constitute ‘good data management’ for survey respondents. These findings align only in part with principles of good data identified by policy experts and researchers. Our findings nuance understandings of good data as a concept and of good data management as a practice and point to where further research and policy action are needed. (shrink)

Research integrity is fundamental to the validity and reliability of scientific findings, and for ethical conduct of research. As part of PRINTEGER (Promoting Integrity as an Integral Dimension of Excellence in Research), this study explores the views of researchers, research managers, administrators, and governance advisors in Estonia, Italy, Norway and UK, focusing specifically on their understanding of institutional and organisational influences on research integrity.A total of 16 focus groups were conducted. Thematic analysis of the data revealed that competition is pervasive (...) and appeared in most themes relating to integrity. The structural frameworks for research such as funding, evaluation and publication were thought to both protect and, more commonly, undermine integrity. In addition, institutional systems, including workload and research governance, shaped participants’ day-to-day work environment, also affecting research integrity. Participants also provided ideas for promoting research integrity, including training, and creating conditions that would be supportive of research integrity.These findings support a shift away from individual blame and towards the need for structural and institutional changes, including organisations in the wider research environment, for example funding bodies and publishing companies. (shrink)

The Culex remains the most bewildering of poems. The consensus of modern opinion holds that it is a deliberate forgery, post-Ovidian in date, purporting to be a work of the youthful Virgil and thus serving to fill the large biographical vacuum in the career of the poet before the publication of the Eclogues. If this is the case, it must be asked why the forger chose to fill that gap with a poem thematically and stylistically so idiosyncratic which nevertheless managed (...) to gain ready acceptance as Virgilian by the end of the first century A.D. This is a very large question, but in postulating the close dependence of parts of the poem on Cornelius Gallus , particularly on his symbolism of poetic inspiration , I hope to go some of the way towards providing an answer . If this article is directed primarily at the problem of the Culex, I would like to think it makes a contribution also to the much more important study of Gallus, whose reputation has suffered somewhat since the publication of those wretched lines from Qasr Ibrîm. Yet, if not a single line of his work had survived, the one thing we could say of his poetry with confidence is that it inspired. Anyone trying to make an assessment of Gallus' poetic achievement should first make a close study of Virgil's Sixth and Tenth Eclogues and then ask whether fragments have ever formed a firm basis for the evaluation of an author's work. Rehabilitation should not be necessary. (shrink)

On Friday, November 15, 1940, Kurt Gödel gave a talk on set theory at Brown University. The topic was his recent proof of the consistency of Cantor’s Continuum Hypothesis with the axiomatic system ZFC for set theory. His friend from their days in Vienna, Rudolf Carnap, was in the audience, and afterward wrote a note to himself in which he raised a number of questions on incompleteness.

Like all discourses on the ‘other’, Bataille’s heterology is faced with the problem of conceptualizing the heterogeneous, while preserving its alterity, its fundamental resistance to conceptual thought. This paper interrogates the potential parallels between this aspect of Bataille’s notion and some of the prevalent concerns of contemporary and traditional aesthetics. The argument is based on the idea that theories of the aesthetic, akin to Bataille’s heterology, are always inevitably confronted with the paradoxical task of conceptually framing an experience that, per (...) definition, resists philosophical or political appropriation. In relation to this my paper traces a development in Bataille’s thinking from an initial rejection of art and the aesthetic to their later reconfiguration as manifestations of sovereignty. Here I show how Bataille’s notion of sovereign art presents an implicit attempt to overcome some of the aporias to have surfaced in his earlier account of heterology. This development in Bataille’s thought is analysed in the context of his changing relationship with Surrealism. (shrink)

This paper reflects on a number of metaphysical and epistemological aspects of theatrical performance and the theatrical aspects of some philosophical writing. It tries to demonstrate that both philosophy and theater say and show philosophical truths while also giving some evidence for the truth of a pluralist view.

Introduction: Bachelard belittled -- The forgetting of space and Gaston Bachelard's concrete metaphysics -- The temple and the cabin: Heidegger's metaphysics of being-in -- The unheimlich house: Danielewski's concrete being-in -- Our first home: Irigaray's metaphysics of being-within -- The hut in the storm: Bosco's concrete being-within -- Conclusion: the recovery of space and Gaston Bachelards concrete metaphysics.

The present volume collects presented at a symposium on The History of Logic held in Helsinki in June 11–13, 2000 hosted by the University of Helsinki, Finland. They bear on issues in the history of logic and foundations of mathematics and are contributions by some of the most renown scholars in the field.

The idea of the classroom as a community of inquiry, and of the community of inquiry as a model for optimal classroom practice, is perhaps one of the great unrealized ideas in Western educational history. We first find it represented in the Socratic dialogues, but it is not realized there, whether becasue of the dominating power of Socrates' intellect, or the scribal distortions which resulted from PLatos's didacticism, or both. More recently, the concept finds powerful theoretical articulation in the epistemology (...) of Peirce, Royce, and Buchler. (shrink)

1936 was a watershed year for computability. Debates among Gödel, Church and others over the correct analysis of the intuitive concept “human effectively computable”, an analysis at the heart of the Incompleteness Theorems, the Entscheidungsproblem, the question of what a finite computation is, and most urgently—for Gödel—the generality of the Incompleteness Theorems, were definitively set to rest with the appearance, in that year, of the Turing Machine. The question I explore here is, do the mathematical facts exhaust what is to (...) be said about the thinking behind the “confluence of ideas in 1936”? I will argue for a cultural role in Gödel’s, and, by extension, the larger logical community’s absorption of Turing’s 1936 model. As scaffolding I employ a conceptual framework due to the critic Leo Marx of the technological sublime; I also make use of the distinction within the technological sublime due to Caroline Jones, between its iconic and performative modes—a distinction operating within the conceptual art of the 1960s, but serving the history of computability equally well. (shrink)

This review of Matthew Lipman’s autobiography, A Life Teaching Thinking, is a reflection on the themes and patterns of his extraordinarily productive career. His book begins with memories of earliest childhood and his preoccupation with the possibility of being able to fly, moves through the years in which his family struggled with the effects of the Great Depression, through his service in the military during World War II, his discovery of the joy and beauty of philosophy, his academic rise at (...) Columbia University, his Fullbright sojourn in Paris, and his early and later career. Lipman’s educational project led in four related directions: the practice of philosophy for children, which he invented, and which presents an epistemological challenge to a second field, philosophy of education, which is as startling as was Rousseau’s two hundred years before. Third, it led to a realm of theory called philosophy of childhood, upon which the practice of philosophy for children is a kind of action-meditation, prompting adults as it does to reflect on children’s differences from and similarities to adults at the same time, and in the same discursive space. Finally, his praxis also implicitly challenged those accounts of children’s philosophies, paradigmatically represented by Piaget’s work, which represent childhood epistemology as evidence for various genetic and epigenetic stage-based theories of cognitive development. The consequence for education of this confluence was a methodology—community of inquiry—that serves as a bridge between the two most influential philosophers of education of the 20th century—John Dewey and Paulo Freire. The educational praxis that emerged from his venture, for all its apparent simplicity, operationalizes a postcolonial standpoint epistemology vis a vis childhood and children, pulls the linchpin that holds in place the school as ideological state apparatus, and empowers the elementary classroom as a primary site for democratic theory and practice. (shrink)

What can the sounds of today tell us about the future? Can an analysis of sound and sonic practices allow us to make reliable predictions in relation to wider social phenomena? And what might they tell us about technology in a world where futurology is such a frenzied and busy field? In order to answer these questions, this book tests a range of propositions that connect noise, sound and music to political, economic and technological events. Hence it is a book (...) about historical trajectories and conflicting ideas about time and the necessity to re-contextualize and interpret them in the digital age. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 87, Issue 4, Page 874-884, August 2021.

This Element takes a deep dive into Gödel's 1931 paper giving the first presentation of the Incompleteness Theorems, opening up completely passages in it that might possibly puzzle the student, such as the mysterious footnote 48a. It considers the main ingredients of Gödel's proof: arithmetization, strong representability, and the Fixed Point Theorem in a layered fashion, returning to their various aspects: semantic, syntactic, computational, philosophical and mathematical, as the topic arises. It samples some of the most important proofs of the (...) Incompleteness Theorems, e.g. due to Kuratowski, Smullyan and Robinson, as well as newer proofs, also of other independent statements, due to H. Friedman, Weiermann and Paris-Harrington. It examines the question whether the incompleteness of e.g. Peano Arithmetic gives immediately the undecidability of the Entscheidungsproblem, as Kripke has recently argued. It considers set-theoretical incompleteness, and finally considers some of the philosophical consequences considered in the literature. (shrink)

This paper is presented as a sociological account of social action and as part of the “cognitive and cultural turn” in sociology. It retains Weber’s definition of social action as meaningful behavior directed toward another, but employs concepts developed by Noam Chomsky, Pierre Bourdieu and Ludwig Wittgenstein to refine and amplify Weber’s understanding of meaning and subjectivity. It attempts to ground symbolic interaction in innate properties of mind suggested by Chomsky and others. It attempts to enrich Bourdieu’s concept of the (...) habitus with concepts taken from cognitive psychology. Finally it attempts to further integrate Wittgenstein’s language games in to the ethnomethodolical analysis of social situations while grounding ethnomethodological analysis in Bourdieu’s concept of social fields. (shrink)