Paul Moser's book defends what has been an unfashionable view in recent epistemology: the foundationalist account of knowledge and justification. Since the time of Plato philosophers have wondered what exactly knowledge is. This book develops a new account of perceptual knowledge which specifies the exact sense in which knowledge has foundations. The author argues that experiential foundations are indeed essential to perceptual knowledge, and he explains what knowledge requires beyond justified true beliefs. In challenging prominent sceptical claims that we (...) have no justified beliefs about the external world, the book outlines a theory of rational belief. (shrink)

What kind of thing are we? Paul Snowdon's answer is that we are animals, of a sort. This view--'animalism'--may seem obvious but on the whole philosophers have rejected it. Snowdon argues that animalism is a defensible way of thinking about ourselves. Its rejection rests on the tendency when doing philosophy to mistake fantasy for reality.

Paul Pietroski presents an original philosophical theory of actions and their mental causes. We often act for reasons: we deliberate and choose among options, based on our beliefs and desires. However, bodily motions always have biochemical causes, so it can seem that thinking and acting are biochemical processes. Pietroski argues that thoughts and deeds are in fact distinct from, though dependent on, underlying biochemical processes within persons.

Proponents of the extended mind have suggested that phenomenal transparency may be important to the way we evaluate putative cases of cognitive extension. In particular, it has been suggested that in order for a bio-external resource to count as part of the machinery of the mind, it must qualify as a form of transparent equipment or transparent technology. The present paper challenges this claim. It also challenges the idea that phenomenological properties can be used to settle disputes regarding the constitutional (...) status of bio-external resources in episodes of extended cognizing. Rather than regard phenomenal transparency as a criterion for cognitive extension, we suggest that transparency is a feature of situations that support the ascription of certain cognitive/mental dispositional properties to both ourselves and others. By directing attention to the forces and factors that motivate disposition ascriptions, we arrive at a clearer picture of the role of transparency in arguments for extended cognition and the extended mind. As it turns out, transparency is neither necessary nor sufficient for cognitive extension, but this does not mean that it is entirely irrelevant to our understanding of the circumstances in which episodes of extended cognizing are apt to arise. (shrink)

Examples of extended cognition typically involve the use of technologically low-grade bio-external resources (e.g., the use of pen and paper to solve long multiplication problems). The present paper describes a putative case of extended cognizing based around a technologically advanced mixed reality device, namely, the Microsoft HoloLens. The case is evaluated from the standpoint of a mechanistic perspective. In particular, it is suggested that a combination of organismic (e.g., the human individual) and extra-organismic (e.g., the HoloLens) resources form part of (...) a common mechanism that realizes a bona fide cognitive routine. In addition to demonstrating how the theoretical resources of neo-mechanical philosophy might be used to evaluate extended cognitive systems, the present paper illustrates one of the ways in which mixed reality devices, virtual objects (i.e., holograms), and online (Internet-accessible) computational routines might be incorporated into human cognitive processes. This, it is suggested, speaks to the recent interest in mixed/virtual reality technologies across a number of disciplines. It also introduces us to issues that cross-cut disparate fields of philosophical research, such as the philosophy of science and the philosophy of technology. (shrink)

Epistemic Analysis, as I conceive of it, is concerned with the analysis of knowledge. The precincts of my concern have, however, been determined by the ...

Mark Schroeder’s Reasons First is admirable in its scope and execution, deftly demonstrating the theoretical promise of extending the reasons-first approach from ethics to epistemology. In what follows we explore how (not) to account for the evidence-that relation within the reasons-first program, we explain how factive content views of evidence can be resilient in the face of Schroeder’s criticisms, and we explain how knowledge from falsehood threatens Schroeder’s view of knowledge. Along the way we sketch a reliabilist account of the (...) reasons-for relation (inspired by Alston) and show how it limits the applicability of Schroeder’s arguments. (shrink)

Psychologists and philosophers often work hand in hand to investigate many aspects of moral cognition. In this paper, we want to highlight one aspect that to date has been relatively neglected: the stability of moral judgment over time. After explaining why philosophers and psychologists should consider stability and then surveying previous research, we will present the results of an original three-wave longitudinal study. We asked participants to make judgments about the same acts in a series of sacrificial dilemmas three times, (...) 6–8 days apart. In addition to investigating the stability of our participants’ ratings over time, we also explored some potential explanations for instability. To end, we will discuss these and other potential psychological sources of moral stability (or instability) and highlight possible philosophical implications of our findings. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Self-fulfilling beliefs are, in at least some cases, a kind of belief that is rational to form and hold in the absence of evidence. The rationality of such beliefs have significant implications for a range of debates in epistemology. Most startlingly, it undermines the idea that having sufficient evidence for the truth of is necessary for it to be rational to believe that. The rationality of self-fulfilling beliefs is here defended against the idea that their rationality is incompatible with (...) a compelling closure principle. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant claims that transcendental idealism yields a form of realism at the empirical level. Polite silence might best describe the reception this assertion has garnered among even sympathetic interpreters. This book challenges that prejudice, offering a controversial presentation and rehabilitation of Kant's empirical realism that places his realist credentials at the centre of the account of representation he offers in the Critique of Pure Reason. This interpretation ranges over the major themes contained in the Analytic of Principles and relevant (...) portions of the Dialectic. Kant's analysis of the conditions necessary for determinate representation is shown to involve a realist understanding of the relation of mind and world. The realist character of Kant's account of empirical truth, and his commitment to the unity of nature, are defended against competing empiricist, pragmatist, and methodological readings. This title links Kant studies to contemporary philosophical debates, and will appeal to scholars and students of Kant, as well as epistemologists, metaphysicians, and philosophers of science interested in a powerful, experience-sensitive, form of realism. (shrink)

The great plague in London in 1665 was the last in a series of epidemics that had begun with the Black Death in the 14th century. Plagues continued elsewhere in Europe into the 18th century, but after 1679 no cases of plague were reported in England at all. The disease seemed to have disappeared. How could that be explained? The purpose of this paper is to discover when contemporaries began to think that plague had gone for good, and why they (...) thought that had happened. The paper falls into two parts. The first concentrates on the decade of the 1720s, when plague was expected to come from Marseilles and never arrived. In the space of a few months there was fierce and concentrated public debate about a new Quarantine Act to be enforced if an epidemic developed, much of it arguing that the Act was unnecessary because plague was plainly not contagious at all. It depended wholly on local environments, and in England they had been improving ever since the Great Fire of London. The second part of the paper takes the story forward into the later 18th century, when there was no longer much dispute that plague was indeed contagious, but it was confidently supposed that England now enjoyed the double protection of further environmental improvement at home combined with effective quarantine of shipping abroad, especially in the Mediterranean. Over the century, contending explanations for plague were debated, interpretations of the past disputed and sometimes falsified, and expectations and ambitions for the future remodelled, because one epidemic threat had disappeared for good. (shrink)

This entry provides a substantive overview of research and debates concerning creativity in philosophy and related fields. Topics covered include definitions of creativity, whether creativity can be learned, whether it can be explained, attempts to explain creativity in cognitive science, and whether computer programs or AI systems can be creative.

De Marco and colleagues claim that the standard account of invasiveness as commonly encountered ‘…does not capture all uses of the term in relation to medical interventions1 ’. This is open to challenge. Their first example is ‘non-invasive prenatal testing’. Because it involves puncturing the skin to obtain blood, De Marco et al take this as an example of how an incision or insertion is not sufficient to make an intervention invasive; here is a procedure that involves an incision, but (...) it is regarded as non-invasive. However, this ignores the context, and the term should really be understood in reference to the fetus. It is hard to believe healthcare professionals regard taking blood to measure, for example, ferritin levels as invasive but taking blood to look for fragments of fetal DNA as not. If anyone uses the term thinking it is not invasive to the mother, the solution would be to call it invasive, not redefine what is invasive. De Marco and colleagues’ second example is describing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) as invasive. However, this is not borne out by their referenced papers. The first cited source is about non-invasive brain stimulation2 and only contains a single sentence about ECT. This sentence may suggest that their view is that ECT …. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article questions Metz’s purification of the evaluative subject, and wishes to pose the theological question concerning the meaning of life from a normative and social conception of subjectivity. Before asking whether or not God is indispensable to the meaning of life, it is first necessary to identify the ways in which God is hidden in the fundamental evaluations that the contemporary subject makes in the globalized capitalist world.

Many jurisdictions have put regulatory strategies in place to provide incentives and safeguards to whistleblowers to encourage whistleblowing on corporate wrongdoings. One such strategy is the provision of a financial incentive to the whistleblower if the complaint leads to a successful regulatory enforcement action against the offending organization. We conducted an experiment using professional accountants as participants to examine whether such an incentive encourages potential whistleblowers to report an observed financial reporting fraud to a relevant external authority. We also examine (...) the effect of perceived seriousness of the wrongdoing on accountants’ intention to whistleblow. We find that a financial incentive results in a higher intention to whistleblow to a relevant external authority. We also find that perceptions of the seriousness of the wrongdoing are significantly and positively associated with accountants’ intention to whistleblow to a relevant external authority. We find a significant interaction between the provision of a financial incentive and the perceived seriousness of the wrongdoing on the intention to report the wrongdoing externally. The intention to report the financial reporting fraud externally is higher when the level of perceived seriousness is higher, regardless of the availability of a financial incentive. However, when the perceived level of seriousness is lower, the presence of financial incentive results in a higher intention to report the financial reporting fraud externally. These findings indicate that the impact of a financial incentive on the intention to whistleblow is moderated by perceptions of the seriousness of the wrongdoing. (shrink)

This essay is intended to be a systematic exposition and critique of Daniel Dennett's general views. It is divided into three main sections. In section 1 we raise the question of the nature of a plausible scientific psychology, and suggest that the question of whether folk psychology will serve as an adequate scientific psychology is of special relevance in a discussion of Dennett. We then characterize folk psychology briefly. We suggest that Dennett's views have undergone at least one major change, (...) and proceed to discuss both his earlier and his later views. In section 2 we suggest that Dennett is correctly perceived as an instrumentalist in his earlier works. We think that Dennett later abandons this position because of general worries about instrumentalism and, more importantly, because Dennett became convinced that an instrumentalist conception of folk psychology will not enable us to vindicate the notions of personhood, moral agency, and responsibility. This left Dennett with a dilemma. On the one hand, he does not think that beliefs, etc., will turn out to be genuine scientific posits. On the other hand, he thinks that moral agency would be impossible if we could not treat beliefs, etc. as causally efficacious in some suitable sense. In section 3 we discuss Dennett's resolution of this dilemma. The key to his current view, we suggest, is the illata-abstracta distinction. Dennett holds that both illata and abstracta are real and have causal powers, even though only illata are genuine scientific posits. He suggests that beliefs etc. are abstracta, and are the subject matter of what he calls 'intentional system theory'. The subject matter of another theory, what Dennett calls 'subpersonal cognitive psychology', are illata, which are subpersonal intentional states. The important point is that this distinction lets Dennett have it both ways: (i) Since beliefs are mere abstracta, we need not commit ourselves to the thesis that beliefs will turn out to be posits of an adequate scientific psychology. (ii) Since beliefs have causal power, we are assured of moral and rational agency. We shall argue that Dennett's current view is untenable. If we are right in our arguments, then Dennett's program to produce a scientifically plausible psychology, one that will turn out to vindicate folk psychology (in some suitable sense), is a failure. It fails in the following important ways: (i) What Dennett sketches -- intentional system theory cum subpersonal cognitive psychology -- is not a plausible scientific psychology. (ii) As a consequence, Dennett also fails to provide a satisfactory foundation for moral and rational agency. (shrink)

Although the term integration is central to the definition of brain death, there is little agreement on what it means. Through a genealogical analysis, this essay argues that there have been two primary ways of understanding integration in regard to organismal wholeness. One stems from neuroscience, focusing on the role of the brain in responding to external stimuli, which was taken up in phenomenological accounts of life. A second, arising out of cybernetics, focuses on the brain’s role in homeostasis. Recent (...) debates over brain death are largely over this cybernetic understanding of integration. However, the phenomenological understanding of organismal wholeness can be seen in arguments by the President’s Council on Bioethics in favor of brain death. This essay argues that the cybernetic understanding of life is problematic and should be discarded. A phenomenological understanding of life can provide a better basis for arguments over definitions of life and death. (shrink)

Vorrangig als der "strengste Methodenfanatiker und Logizist" der Marburger Schule des Neukantianismus bekannt, trat Natorp jedoch genau an diesem Punkt mit der selbständigen Form seines späten Philosophierens hervor: der Überschreitung der Methode in der Idee einer allgemeinen Logik. Unter allgemeiner Logik versteht er die streng einheitliche logische Grundlegung der Gegenstandssetzung, ja aller irgendwie logisch erfaßlichen Setzung. Damit war ein Zugang geschaffen zu der von Natorp angestrebten Erkenntnis des Geistigen in seiner Ureinheit, aus der erst die Besonderungen hervorgehen.

L'actualité des Chiens de garde, nous aurions préféré ne pas en éprouver la robuste fraîcheur. Nous aurions aimé qu'un même côté de la barricade cessât de réunir penseurs de métier et bâtisseurs de ruines. Nous aurions voulu que la dissidence fût devenue à ce point contagieuse que l'invocation de Nizan au sursaut et à la résistance en parût presque inutile. Car nous continuons à vouloir un autre monde. L'entreprise nous dépasse? Notre insuffisance épuise notre persévérance? Souvenons-nous alors de ce passage (...) par lequel Sartre a résumé l'appel aux armes de son vieux camarade : "Il peut dire aux uns : vous mourez de modestie, osez désirer, soyez insatiables, ne rougissez pas de vouloir la lune : il nous la faut. Et aux autres : dirigez votre rage sur ceux qui l'ont provoquée, n'essayez pas d'échapper à votre mal, cherchez ses causes et cassez-les." Serge Hamili Extrait de la préface. (shrink)

Michel Foucault and Paul Veyne: the philosopher and the historian. Two major figures in the world of ideas, resisting all attempts at categorization. Two timeless thinkers who have long walked and fought together. In this short book Paul Veyne offers a fresh portrait of his friend and relaunches the debate about his ideas and legacy. ‘Foucault is not who you think he is’, writes Veyne; he stood neither on the left nor on the right and was frequently disowned (...) by both. He was not so much a structuralist as a sceptic, an empiricist disciple of Montaigne, who never ceased in his work to reflect on 'truth games', on singular, constructed truths that belonged to their own time. A unique testimony by a scholar who knew Foucault well, this book succeeds brilliantly in grasping the core of his thought and in stripping away the confusions and misunderstandings that have so often characterized the interpretation of Foucault and his work. (shrink)

Various systems that learn are examined to show how content is carried in connections installed by a learning history. Agents do not explicitly use the content of such states in practical reasoning, yet the content plays an important role in explaining behavior, and the physical state carrying that content plays a role in causing behavior, given other occurrent beliefs and desires. This leads to an understanding of the environmental reasons which are the determinate content of these states, and leads to (...) a better grasp of how representational content can be carried by systems without an explicit representation. (shrink)

Mediaeval logicians often wrote about changes between contradictory states, for example a switch’s changing from being on to not being on. One of the questions discussed in these writings was whether at the moment the change occurs the changing thing is in the earlier or the later state. The present paper investigates the general setting for that question, and discusses the answer given by Walter Burley, an important early-fourteenth century author whose theory was a standard one. Burley’s theory at first (...) seems arbitrary, and moreover committed to serious theoretical problems. The last part of the paper therefore considers what unspoken factors may have motivated Burley. Certain causal principles are suggested that would remove the apparent arbitrariness and avoid the theoretical problems with his theory, but only at the expense of revising it in a substantive way. (shrink)

Alasdair MacIntyre's landmark book After Virtue, first published in 1981, begins with sobering words, the resonance of which has, in the three decades since then, been felt by many. We live in a wo...

Where did everything come from? Why are humans so biologically similar, and why do we let small differences divide us? What shall determine our destiny? Paul Singh and John R. Shook draw on the latest findings from the physical and biological sciences, astronomy and cosmology, geology and genetics, and prehistory and archeology in search of answers. As they lucidly and engagingly demonstrate, the answers science gives about ourselves and the universe in which we live are incomparably more surprising and (...) interesting than any mythical tale about some clash of titans or calculating creator. Indeed, science's proud journey of exploration and discovery is humanity's finest narrative yet, about how we trusted our intelligence to find out what we really are and who we can be—intrepidly going wherever the evidence led. Even though science reveals that humanity may have no special place in the universe, humanity is truly special because of our ability to comprehend our universe. Thus, this inspiring story of exploration and discovery is a celebration not only of science—of science's knowledge of the world, and of science's own journeys to gain that knowledge—but also of ourselves. (shrink)

Many artists and scientists - including Buffon, Goethe, and Philipp Otto Runge - who observed the vividly coloured shadows that appear outdoors around dawn and dusk, or indoors when a candle burns under waning daylight, chose to describe their colours as 'beautiful'. Paul Smith explains what makes these ephemeral effects worthy of such appreciation - or how depictions of coloured shadows have genuine aesthetic and epistemological significance. This multidisciplinary book synthesises methodologies drawn from art history, psychology and neuroscience, history (...) of science, and philosophy. This title will be of interest to scholars in art history, art theory, and the history of science and technology. (shrink)

This book discusses some of the most challenging ideas emerging out of the research program on institutional diversity associated with the 2009 co-recipient of 2009 Nobel Prize in economics, Elinor Ostrom, while outlining a set of new research directions and an original interpretation of the significance and future of this program.

Dans cet article, on élabore une réflexion sur les rapports entre intentionnalité et histoire du capitalisme à partir du commentaire schélérien de L’Éthique protestante de Max Weber. Nous montrons d’abord que la psychologie est un moyen de dépasser l’alternative ruineuse entre matérialisme et idéalisme de par sa position centrale dans la genèse des phénomènes sociaux : les individus capitalistes sont portés au travail notamment par des incitations psychologiques qui sont déterminées autant par le contenu du dogme que les conditions sociales (...) de sa pratique. Nous montrons ensuite que la phénoménologie de Scheler décrit une intentionnalité historique en écart avec l’intentionnalité qui vise des essences axiologiques : le capitalisme substitue à l’amour un pseudo a priori contingent qui détermine l’intentionnalité à partir du ressentiment et de l’angoisse, celle-là même dont Weber, au moyen de la figure du puritain abandonné par un dieu hyper-transcendant et épouvanté par son statut sotériologique, faisait l’histoire. Ainsi, on essaie d’indiquer, en compagnie de Scheler, les outils phénoménologiques pour penser l’intentionnalité non pas comme la visée qui aurait toujours déjà disposé d’un donné intuitif, mais comme une instance d’essentialisation constamment contrariée par le processus historique, qui fait écart par rapport à la visée phénoménologique des essences – comme si Scheler faisait usage de ce qu’on pourrait appeler une phénoménologie négative. (shrink)

Paul C. H. Lim offers an insightful examination of the polemical debates about the doctrine of the Trinity in seventeenth-century England, showing that this philosophical and theological re-configuration significantly impacted the politics of religion in the early modern period.