To the age-old debate over what it means to be human, the relatively new fields of sociobiology and artificial intelligence bring new, if not necessarily compatible, insights. What have these two fields in common? Have they affected the way we define humanity? These and other timely questions are addressed with colorful individuality by the authors of _The Boundaries of Humanity_. Leading researchers in both sociobiology and artificial intelligence combine their reflections with those of philosophers, historians, and social scientists, while the (...) editors explore the historical and contemporary contexts of the debate in their introductions. The implications of their individual arguments, and the often heated controversies generated by biological determinism or by mechanical models of mind, go to the heart of contemporary scientific, philosophical, and humanistic studies. (shrink)

This is a reply to de Sousa's 'Emotional Truth', in which he argues that emotions can be objective, as propositional truths are. I say that it is better to distinguish between truth and accuracy, and agree with de Sousa to the extent of arguing that emotions can be more or less accurate, that is, based on the facts as they are.

Various writings of mixed genres, drifting between scientific treatises, mystical epiphanies, and prose fiction related to the school of “cosmism,” have been explored for more than fifty years, and the interpretations range from (religious) utopia to theories of sustainable development. The author discusses the question of whether “cosmism” is exclusively “Russian,” compares its general postulates with the techno-Cosmist approaches of the last ten years (including those involving fiction, such as by Eugene Thacker, and the more philosophical approaches, like that applied (...) by Yuk Hui), and proposes clarifying how the Cosmists literally viewed the structure of the world and how they conceptualized its elements as contrasted with the interest of contemporary theorists in openness to planetary and cosmic horizons. The latter, often oriented to nuclear physics and fragmenting “reality” into stochastic agencies whose temporary couplings are formed by cutting and assembling procedures, can be reformulated from the “cosmist” perspective as gleaned in this case from the works of Valerian Murav’ev and Vladimir Vernadsky, with the aid of the categories of expansion and accomplishment. (shrink)

I discuss a large number of emotions that are relevant to performance at epistemic tasks. My central concern is the possibility that it is not the emotions that are most relevant to success of these tasks but associated virtues. I present cases in which it does seem to be the emotions rather than the virtues that are doing the work. I end of the paper by mentioning the connections between desirable and undesirable epistemic emotions.

Machine generated contents note: ARISTOTELIAN AND CARTESIAN LOGIC AT HARVARD -- by Rick Kennedy -- I. Introduction --II. Religiously-Oriented, Dogmatically-Inclined Humanistic Logics from the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century -- A. Melanchthon and Aristotelianism 01 -- B. Richardson and Ramism 16 -- C. Aristotelianism, Ramism, and Schematic Thinking 25 -- D. Puritan Favoritism From Ramus to Descartes 32 -- E. Cartesian Logic and Christian Skepticism 37 -- F. The Religious and Dogmatic Orientation of The Port-'Royalfogic 42 -- G. Cartesian Logic (...) in British Textbooks 52 -- III. Charles Morton and c A; logick System -- A. Charles Morton 62 -- B. Morton's cAfogick System 78 -- IV. William Brattle and the Compendium of logick -- A. Intellectual Reform in the Puritans' Collapsing World 91 -- B. The Compendium ofJogick 93 -- c. Brattle: Tutor and Unofficial Professor of Divinity 108 -- V. Epilogue: Later Constituencies of Religious Logics and 133 -- The Separation of Logic and Divinity at Harvard. (shrink)

This paper begins with a discussion the role of less-than-admirable epistemic emotions in our respectable, indeed admirable inquiries: nosiness, obsessiveness, wishful thinking, denial, partisanship. The explanation for their desirable effect is Mandevillian: because of the division of epistemic labour individual epistemic vices can lead to shared knowledge. In fact it is sometimes essential to it.

The claim of this paper is that the everyday functions of knowledge make most sense if we see knowledge as contrastive. That is, we can best understand how the concept does what it does by thinking in terms of a relation “a knows that p rather than q.” There is always a contrast with an alternative. Contrastive interpretations of knowledge, and objections to them, have become fairly common in recent philosophy. The version defended here is fairly mild in that there (...) is no suggestion that we cannot think in terms of a simpler not explicitly contrastive relation “a knows that p.” Some, for instance Schaffer (2005) and Karjalainen and Morton (2003), have hinted that this stronger possibility may be right. But all that I am arguing now is that facts that are easily expressed in contrastive terms are vital to understanding why we need the concept of knowledge. In a piece that is in some ways a companion to this one ("Contrastivism" in Duncan Pritchard and Sven Bernecker, eds. The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Routledge 2010, 513-522), I give a general survey of theories of contrastive knowledge and the differences between them. (shrink)

I argue that general constraints on how humans think about humans produce universal features of the concept of mind. Some of these constraints determine how we imagine other people's thinking and action through our own. I formulate this in opposition to what I call the "theory theory". I believe this was the first use of this terminology, and this work was an early version of what has come to be called the simulation theory.

I assess Churchland's views on folk psychology and conceptual thinking, with particular emphasis on the connection between these topics.

In this book, one of America's leading philosophers offers a sweeping reconsideration of the philosophy of culture in the twentieth century. Morton White argues that the discipline is much more important than is often recognized, and that his version of holistic pragmatism can accommodate its breadth. Going beyond Quine's dictum that philosophy of science is philosophy enough, White suggests that it should contain the word "culture" in place of "science." He defends the holistic view that scientific belief is tested (...) by experience but that such testing is rightly applied to systems or conjunctions of beliefs, not isolated beliefs. He adds, however, that we test ethical systems by appealing to feelings of moral obligation as well as to sensory experiences. In the course of his lucidly written analysis, White treats central issues in the philosophy of science, of religion, of art, of history, of law, of politics, and of morality. While doing so he examines the views of Quine, Tarski, Goodman, and Rawls, and shows how they are related to the approaches of Peirce, James, Duhem, Russell, Dewey, Carnap, and the later Wittgenstein. He also discusses the ideas of the legal philosophers Holmes and Hart from a holistic standpoint. White demonstrates how his version of pragmatism bridges the traditional gulf between analytic and synthetic truth as well as that between moral and scientific belief. Indeed, the high point of the book is a brilliant presentation of his view of ethics, based on the idea that our scientific theories face the tribunal of observation whereas our ethical views face the joint tribunal of observation and moral feeling. Scholars and students of the history of ideas and of philosophy will welcome A Philosophy of Culture as the highly finished product of more than sixty years of philosophical reflection by an important thinker. (shrink)

According to Marr's theory of vision, computational processes of early vision rely for their success on certain "natural constraints" in the physical environment. I examine the implications of this feature of Marr's theory for the question whether psychological states supervene on neural states. It is reasonable to hold that Marr's theory is nonindividualistic in that, given the role of natural constraints, distinct computational theories of the same neural processes may be justified in different environments. But to avoid trivializing computational explanations, (...) theories must respect methodological solipsism in the sense that within a theory there cannot be differences in content without a corresponding difference in neural states. (shrink)

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up without Losing Your Way looks at the (...) ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society. -/- Drawing upon philosophy, social science, personal stories, and interviews, Jennifer Morton reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, Morton seeks to reverse this course. She urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves. -/- A powerful work with practical implications, Moving Up without Losing Your Way paves a hopeful road so that students might achieve social mobility while retaining their best selves. (shrink)

Many of the theories that have been discussed in recent years are distrustful of the anthropological inroads or are openly hostile to them. The problems of the environment, global politics, and the discoveries of biology and medicine create a rich foundation for such attitudes. They are also manifested in the genres of comments that emanate from the domains of rigorous theory and science into the zones of unprovable projections, forecasts, and programs. Perhaps only media philosophy still dares to talk about (...) the need for media anthropology. Yet how is it possible to try to determine what is human in such conditions—among conglomerations of particles (Whitehead-Latour) and entanglements (Barad), in the indiscernibility of the organic and the inorganic? What language can one still use to discuss it—the language of psychoanalytic loss, of scientific impartiality, of literary fiction? Through what concepts can one lay out the path—of function, of environment, of system? This article provides a brief summary of the selection of articles included in the present special issue. The authors of these articles attempt to talk about the human by unleashing this concept in their own way from a cosmic and universal perspective. (shrink)

Theoretical work on media, which brings together certain lines of development from both the modern exact sciences and the human sciences, has elevated the pressing global question of the place of t...

Identifying the layer of metaphorical utterances that are always present in media research and distinguishing it from the conscious construction of fabulation and fiction in philosophy, the author...

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 3, Page 728-746, May 2022.

One of the most fundamental debates in metaethics is whether the normative facts are mind-dependent. Yet some philosophers are skeptical that mind-dependence is a category that's significant in the way metaethicists have assumed it is. In this paper, I consider a puzzle that showcases this skepticism, explaining how it undermines the most natural reading of the mind-dependence claim. I then go on to show that no modification of this reading within a certain class can hope to solve the problem. I (...) conclude by suggesting a new way that mind-dependence should be understood: mind-dependence is ultimately a matter of how normative principles are grounded. I develop this view briefly before concluding. (shrink)

I argue that folk psychology does not serve the purpose of facilitating prediction of others' behaviour but if facilitating cooperative action. (See my subsequent book *The Importance of Being Understood*.

The view of teleology sketched in the above remarks seems to me to offer a piece of candy to both the critics and guardians of teleology. The critics want to defend against a number of things: the importation of unverifiable theological or metaphysical doctrines into the sciences; the idea that goals somehow act in favor of their won realization; and the view that biological systems require for their study concepts and patterns of explanation unlike anything employed in the physical sciences. (...) An important part of their defense has been the contention that teleological language can be eliminated without loss from the sciences. I have argued that this is true: any phenomenon that can be described in teleological language can be described otherwise.On the other hand, eliminability does not mean translatability. I have suggested—I do not see how to prove it—that the teleological character of a sentence is so fundamental that it would be preserved under translation. Teleological character is conferred on a sentence by the manner in which it fits into a conceptual scheme designed for the description of certain classes of systems possessing net-like organization. The elimination of teleological language thus involves a conceptual shift, and involves a different method of classifying the elements of a system.The guardians of teleology—myself among them—have insisted that teleological language is perfectly legitimate. This conclusion is plain if my account of “appropriateness” is correct. Indeed, the development of conceptual schemes which render functional ascriptions appropriate is seen to be just a special case of a general scientific procedure: the designing of languages aimed at bringing to light those causal relations which are most interesting to us. (shrink)