Paul Ramsey was one of the most important ethicists of the twentieth century. From the publication of his classic Basic Christian Ethics in 1950 until his death in 1988, his writings decisively shaped moral discourse and reflection in the areas of theology, law, politics, and medicine. This collection of Ramsey's most important essays on Christian, political, and medical ethics displays the scope and depth of his vision, highlighting both the character of his theological commitments and the continuing significance (...) of his work for the pressing moral problems of our day. Selections deal with such issues as race relations, sexuality and marriage, war, the meaning of Christian love, abortion, and medical care for the sick and dying. A general introduction by William Werpehowski and Stephen D. Crocco evaluates Ramsey's career and accomplishments and reviews contemporary criticism of his output and legacy. Shorter introductions to each selection point out crucial themes and lines of development in Ramsey's thought. (shrink)

Veronique Foti delves into the full range of Heideggerian texts to elaborate the problematics of historicity, language, and the structure of disclosure or "manifestation" in connection with the Herman poets whom Heidegger invoked along his path of thinking. Foti’s reading of these ports (Morike, Trakl, Rilke, Holderlin, and Celan) is a probing inquiry into the aesthetic, ethical, and political implications of Heidegger’s thought. She knows how technicity (techne) and poetizing (poiesis) are opposed yet brought together in Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology, how (...) they are both politicized and linked with ethical praxis, and how technicity, poetizing, and praxis cannot be dissevered from Heidegger’s essential thinking. (shrink)

Veronique Foti delves into the full range of Heideggerian texts to elaborate the problematics of historicity, language, and the structure of disclosure or "manifestation" in connection with the Herman poets whom Heidegger invoked along his path of thinking. Foti's reading of these ports is a probing inquiry into the aesthetic, ethical, and political implications of Heidegger's thought. She knows how technicity and poetizing are opposed yet brought together in Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology, how they are both politicized and linked with ethical (...) praxis, and how technicity, poetizing, and praxis cannot be dissevered from Heidegger's essential thinking. (shrink)

The French philosopher Renaud Barbaras remarked that late in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s career, “The phenomenology of perception fulfills itself as a philosophy of expression.” In _Tracing Expression in Merleau-Ponty: Aesthetics, Philosophy of Biology, and Ontology, _Véronique M. Fóti_ _addresses the guiding yet neglected theme of expression in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. She traces Merleau-Ponty’s ideas about how individuals express creative or artistic impulses through his three essays on aesthetics, his engagement with animality and the “new biology” in the second of his lecture courses (...) on nature of 1957–58, and in his late ontology, articulated in 1964 in the fragmentary text of _Le visible et l’invisible _. With the exception of a discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s 1945 essay “Cezanne’s Doubt,” Fóti engages with Merleau-Ponty’s late and final thought, with close attention to both his scientific and philosophical interlocutors, especially the continental rationalists. Expression shows itself, in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, to be primordial, and this innate and fundamental nature of expression has implications for his understanding of artistic creation, science, and philosophy. (shrink)

The present publication forms part of a projected book that F. P. Ramsey drafted but never completed. It survived among his papers and ultimately came into the possession of the University of Pittsburgh in the circumstances detailed in the Editor's Introduction. Our hope in issuing this work at this stage - some sixty years after Ramsey's premature death at the age of 26 - is both to provide yet another token of his amazing philosophical creativity, and also to (...) make available an important datum for the still to be written history of the development of philosophical analysis. This is a book whose appearance will, we hope and expect, be appreciated both by those interested in linguistic philosophy itself and by those concerned for its historical development in the present century. EDITORS'INTRODUCTION 1. THE RAMSEY COLLECTION Frank Plump ton Ramsey was an extra ordinary scholarly phenomenon. Son of a distinguished mathematician and President of Magdalene College, Cambridge and brother of Arthur Michael, eventual Archbishop of Canterbury, Ramsey was closely connected with Cambridge throughout his life, ultimately becoming lecturer in Mathematics in the University. Notwithstanding his great mathematical talent, it was primarily logic and philosophy that engaged his interests, and he wrote original and important contributions to logic, semantics, epistomology, probability theory, philosophy of science, and economics, in addition to seminal work in the foundations of mathematics. (shrink)

With the emergence of service provisioning environments and new networking capabilities, antagonistic businesses have been able to collaborate securely by sharing information in order to have a beneficial result for all. This collaboration has sometimes been imposed by state legislation and sometimes been desirable by the firms themselves so as to resolve frequently occurring abnormalities. In any case, as information exchange takes place between antagonistic firms, security and privacy issues arise. In the context of this paper, a collaborative environment has (...) been analyzed for enterprises that set out in the banking sector. A Grid-based Anti-Money Laundering (AML) system has been developed in an effort to take advantage of the Grid infrastructure, supporting the secure and trustful exchange of information between financial institutions and ensuring the confidentiality of the data transferred and the authentication of the users to whom they are available. Special emphasis is put on security mechanisms for supporting identity and privacy management as well as in Service Level Agreements (SLA) enforcement for enabling a trust enforcement platform in a collaboration business model. (shrink)

John Moschos includes the story of a female filicide in his Spiritual Meadow. After exploring the authorial self of Moschos, this article discusses the relation between this beneficial story and the biblical book of Jonah on the one hand, and Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis and Medea on the other. Finally, the story is examined in the wider framework of the seventh century, in an attempt to understand John Moschos’ viewpoint on his own time.

We introduce here evoText, a new tool for automated analysis of the literature in the biological sciences. evoText contains a database of hundreds of thousands of journal articles and an array of analysis tools for generating quantitative data on the nature and history of life science, especially ecology and evolutionary biology. This article describes the features of evoText, presents a variety of examples of the kinds of analyses that evoText can run, and offers a brief tutorial describing how to use (...) it. (shrink)

Evolutionary biology since Darwin has seen a dramatic entrenchment and elaboration of the role of chance in evolution. It is nearly impossible to discuss contemporary evolutionary theory in any depth at all without making reference to at least some concept of “chance” or “randomness.” Many processes are described as chancy, outcomes are characterized as random, and many evolutionary phenomena are thought to be best described by stochastic or probabilistic models. Chance is taken by various authors to be central to the (...) understanding of fitness, genetic drift, macroevolution, mutation, foraging theory, and environmental variation, to take but a few examples. And for each of these notions, there are yet more stories to tell. Each weaves itself into the various branches of evolutionary theory in myriad different ways, with a wide variety of effects on the history and current state of life on Earth. Each is grounded in a particular trajectory in the history of philosophy and the history of biology, and has inspired a variety of responses throughout science and culture. This book endeavors to offer a cross-section of biological, historical, philosophical, and theological approaches to understanding chance in evolutionary theory. (shrink)

Frank Ramsey was a brilliant Cambridge philosopher, mathematician, and economist who died in 1930 at 26 having made landmark contributions to decision theory, game theory, mathematics, logic, semantics, philosophy of science, and the theory of truth. This rich biography tells the story of his extraordinary life and intellectual achievement.

In den letzten zehn Jahren sind die digitalen Geisteswissenschaften von einem Randphänomen zu einem der sichtbareren Felder kultur- und geisteswissenschaftlicher Forschung geworden. Dieser Erfolg ist von Kritik begleitet und Fotis Jannidis identifiziert drei Topoi der Kritik an den Digital Humanities, die oft vorgebracht und wiederholt werden: 1. ›Das wussten wir schon vorher‹ 2. ›Die Themen der Digital Humanities sind veraltet‹ 3. Es handle sich bei den Digital Humanities um eine neue Form des Positivismus, der geisteswissenschaftliche Gegenstände nicht adäquat beschreibt. Diese (...) drei Vorwürfe gegen die Digital Humanities werden von Jannidis aufgegriffen und auf ihren argumentativen und wissenschaftspolitischen Gehalt befragt und hinterfragt. Der Beitrag schließt mit einem Plädoyer für das Ausprobieren, Basteln und für die Neugierde auf die neu entstehenden Datensammlungen in den Bibliotheken und Archiven. Markus Krajewski hält die Erwartungen an das Innovationspotenzial der Digital Humanities dagegen für überzogen, die aus seiner Perspektive bisher über den Status einer Hilfswissenschaft nicht hinausgekommen sind. So wie die Diplomatik um die Analyse von Urkunden oder die Numismatik um die Einordnung von Münzen oder die Paläographie um die Analyse von Handschriften besorgt ist, so kümmern sich die Digital Humanities bisher lediglich um die Nahtstelle von geisteswissenschaftlichen Forschungsfragen mit computergestützten Methoden. Die eigentliche Aufgabe der Digital Humanities bestünde aber darin, die Kulturtechnik Codieren in den Vordergrund zu rücken. Denn Programmcodes lesen und schreiben zu können, seien auch für Geisteswissenschaftler eine Schlüsselkompetenz, damit die Schrift der Zukunft – die von Softwareentwicklern, Computeringenieuren und selbstlernenden Maschinen entworfenen Algorithmen – weiterhin kritisch kommentiert und interpretiert (und nicht bloß passiv angewandt) werden kann. During the last ten years, the so-called digital humanities have developed from a footnote to being a major player in the academic field of cultural studies and humanities alike. However, success goes hand in hand with increasing criticism, and Fotis Jannidis identifies three topoi of critique digital humanities repeatedly have to face. 1. ›We already knew that‹ 2. ›The topics of digital humanities are outdated‹ 3. Digital humanities are said to be a new form of positivism not adequately describing humanities related issues. Jannides takes up these accusations against digital humanities by scrutinizing and questioning their argumentative and scientific- political substance. The article closes with a speech promoting of a phase of trial and error, of tinkering and of curiosity for the subject at hand while analyzing newly originated data collections from libraries or archives. In Markus Krajewski’s opinion, however, the expectations placed in the potential of innovation of digital humanities are exaggerated which subsequently leads him to label them an ancillary discipline. The usefulness of digital humanities is entirely limited to providing the link between humanities-related research questions and computer-based methods in the same way diplomatics relies on the analysis of records, numismatics on the process of categorizing coins or paleography on the analysis of historical manuscripts. Krajewski sees the real task of digital humanities in bringing the cultural technology of coding into the spotlight. He describes the ability to write and read source code as a key competence every modern humanities scholar needs in order to be able to critically comment and interpret the script of the future: algorithms designed by software developers, computer engineers, and auto-didactic machines. (shrink)

Background Over the last decade, the return of results (ROR) in precision medicine research (PMR) has become increasingly routine. Calls for individual rights to research results have extended the “duty to report” from clinically useful genetic information to traits and ancestry results. ROR has thus been reframed as inherently beneficial to research participants, without a needed focus on who benefits and how. This paper addresses this gap, particularly in the context of PMR aimed at increasing participant diversity, by providing investigator (...) and researcher perspectives on and questions about the assumed value of ROR in PMR.Methods Semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of investigators and researchers across federally funded PMR studies in three national consortia, as well as observations of study activities, focused on how PM researchers conceptualize diversity and implement inclusive practices across research stages, including navigating ROR.Results Interviewees (1) validated the value of ROR as a benefit of PMR, while others (2) questioned the benefit of clinically actionable results to individuals in the absence of sufficient resources for translating findings into health care for diverse and disadvantaged populations; (3) expressed uncertainties in applying the presumed value of ROR as a benefit for non-clinical results; and (4) and debated when the promise of the value of ROR may undermine trust in PMR, and divert efforts to return value beyond ROR.Conclusions Conceptualizations of diversity and inclusion among PM researchers and investigators raise unique ethical questions where unexamined assumptions of the value of ROR inform study recruitment efforts to enroll minoritized and under-represented populations. A lack of consideration for resources and infrastructure necessary to translate ROR into actionable information may hinder trustworthy community-research relationships. Thus, we argue for a more intentional interrogation of ROR practices as an offer of benefit and for whom. (shrink)

In much of his later work, such as Le théâtre des philosophes of 1995, and perhaps most succinctly in his essay “Was Merleau-Ponty on the Move from Husserl to Heidegger?” of 2008, Taminiaux acknowledges the inspiration of Hannah Arendt’s concern for the lifeworld as a realm of shifting appearances and of human heterogeneous plurality and interlocutory political praxis. He traces Arendt’s insights back to Husserl’s late concern for the lifeworld, as well as to Aristotle, insofar as the Stagirite, in disagreement (...) with Plato, recognizes the autonomous intellectual excellence of phronêsis, and also understands tragic drama in its political importance as a mimêsis of action itself and as accomplishing an intrinsic purification of the powerful passions that it arouses, such as pity and terror. As the title of the 2008 essay indicates, and as Taminiaux acknowledges, however, Merleau-Ponty’s thought also plays a major role in this intellectual nexus. (shrink)

Deweyan pedagogy seeks to promotes growth, characterized as an increased sensitivity, responsiveness, and ability to participate in an environment. Growth, Dewey says, is fostered by the development of habits that enable further habit formation. Unfortunately, humans have their own habitual ways of encountering other species, which often do not support growth. In this article, I briefly review some common conceptions of learning and the process of habit-formation to scope out the landscape of a more responsible and responsive approach to taking (...) growth seriously. What emerges is a reflexive biosemiotics that has humans explicitly concerned with the in situ emergence of new signification in themselves and in other organisms. This requires we take a pedagogical stance in our attitudes and practices towards other species, which we can enrich with insights derived from re-interpreting traditional empirical studies. By freeing the habit-forming process from confining stereotype, a biological pedagogy can enable a more fluid and creative biosphere, unencumbered to explore unfolding possibilities in semiotic space. (shrink)

Cognitive representation is the single most important explanatory notion in the sciences of the mind and has served as the cornerstone for the so-called 'cognitive revolution'. This book critically examines the ways in which philosophers and cognitive scientists appeal to representations in their theories, and argues that there is considerable confusion about the nature of representational states. This has led to an excessive over-application of the notion - especially in many of the fresher theories in computational neuroscience. Representation Reconsidered shows (...) how psychological research is actually moving in a non-representational direction, revealing a radical, though largely unnoticed, shift in our basic understanding of how the mind works. (shrink)

Frank Ramsey’s philosophy, developed in the 1920s in Cambridge, was in conversation with the debates surrounding intellectualism in the early twentieth century. Ramsey made his mark on the anti-intellectualist tradition via his notion of habit. He posited that human judgments take shape through habitual processes, and he rejected the separation between the domain of reason, on one hand, and the domain of habit, on the other. Ramsey also provided the ground to explore the nature of knowledge employed (...) in acting from habit. That ground was passed onto Margaret MacDonald who came up with the distinction between knowing that something is the case and knowing how to apply a rule (or habit), the distinction that set the stage for Gilbert Ryle’s philosophical project against intellectualism from the 1940s onward. Ramsey thus influenced Ryle’s account of knowledge through the channel of MacDonald. (shrink)

This article surveys recent scholarship on Confucian role ethics, examines some of its fundamental commitments, and suggests future directions for scholarship. Role ethics interprets early Confucianism as promoting a relational conception of persons and employs this conception to emphasize how a person's roles and relationships are the source of her ethical obligations and ethical growth. While there is much consensus among role ethic scholars, they disagree over the role of theory in further explicating the view and about the metaphysical basis (...) of relational persons. Strong and moderate versions of role ethics emerge, and the article explores the strengths and weaknesses of both. (shrink)

A compilation of all previously published writings on philosophy and the foundations of mathematics from the greatest of the generation of Cambridge scholars that included G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Maynard Keynes.

In Le théatre des philosophes, Taminiaux suggests that both German Idealism and Heidegger understand Greek tragedy as ontological in its import. So does Plato who, however, censures it for the inadequacy of its ontological vision, which he seeks to correct by means of the aesthetic education of the guardians of the ideal city. Taminiaux stresses that Aristotle understands tragedy as a mimēsis of action which is pluralistic, willing to engage with appearances, and oriented toward phronēsis. A key question concerns his (...) understanding of the katharsis or purification of powerful passions, treated here as a cognitive clarification requiring the intense passional engagement that Plato censors. In response to Taminiaux’s claim that Hölderlin’s tragic inspiration is Aristotelian, this essay explores his understanding of tragic purification. In separating the hybristic union of god and man, such purification restores the possibility of interlocutory praxis. (shrink)

While the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty remained engaged with artistic creation throughout his entire work, which continues to inspire artists today in manifold ways, no systematic and artistically inclusive study of this dimension of his thought has existed so far. Du sensible à l’œuvre fills this gap by offering not only an in-depth study of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthesiology and aesthetics by international Merleau-Ponty scholars spanning three generations, but also a rich selection of essays by art critics and theorists who assess the (...) impact of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy on their own artistic fields, including cinema, music, literature, film, dance, and installation art. (shrink)

The purpose of this contemporary history study is to analyse nursing strategy documents produced by NHS Trusts in England in the period 2009–2013, through a process of discourse analysis. In 2013 the Francis Report on the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust was published. The Report highlighted the full range of organisational failures in a Trust that valued financial efficiency over patient care. The analysis that followed, however, dwelt heavily on the failings of the nurses. Nursing strategy documents at that time served (...) to set the future direction for NHS Trusts, prescribing specific value frameworks for each nursing workforce. However, the values chosen frequently conflicted with each other pitting nursing values against a managerial trope. It is argued that documents provided a response to wider NHS concerns and high-profile failures in care, particularly the Francis Report, paying lip service to staff engagement whilst maintaining a corporate focus. Nursing values were placed firmly within a managerialist discourse, one that has needed to be re-evaluated in the current Covid-19 pandemic. Wider implications of the research suggest discussion of value conflict may be beneficial within nursing education and a truly local approach to strategy creation would potentially promote staff buy-in to strategy documents. (shrink)

“Because those who come after us may not be like us, or because those like us may not come after us, or because after a time there may be none to come after us, mankind must now set to work to insure that those who come after us will be more unlike us. In this there is at work the modern intellect’s penchant for species suicide.” With these words Paul Ramsey brings to a conclusion his provocative and surprising study (...) of the problems we are encountering – and will encounter – as scientific advances make the genetic control of man a real possibility. Now, increased knowledge of chromosome structure has taken the alteration of the human race out of the realm of science fiction and placed it in the hands of laboratory scientists. Ramsey sees this advance in science and technology as a mixed blessing. He examines the ramifications of genetic control, not only the now common measures of birth control and artificial insemination, but also the effect on the genetic pool of the increasing numbers of genetically poor individuals. His concern for humanistic values informs each argument as he tackles such issues as asexual reproduction of men, frozen semen banks, and the breeding of human beings for special purposes. No less than the future of man as we know him hangs on these issues. One must pay particular attention to this book. (shrink)

This paper interrogates Hölderlin's effort to deconstruct the speculative matrix of tragedy, with a particular focus on his "Remarks on Antigone," which are appended to his translation of the Sophoclean tragedy. In focus are, firstly, the separative force of the caesura, which stems tragic transport and is here analyzed, in terms of Hölderlin's understanding of Greece in relation to "Hesperia," as an incipiently Hesperian poetic gesture. Secondly, Hölderlin's key thought of the mutual "unfaithfulness" of God and man is at issue: (...) the god here is revealed as sheer time, while man is thrown back upon the bare moment. This "unfaithfulness" must be tempered by a striving that turns back from the quest for transcendence to the measures of fmitude and to this world. By attentiveness to the singular (which is not the particular), the tragic poet, unlike the speculative philosopher, reveals time's agonal spacing. (shrink)

In this paper my aim is to get clearer on what eliminative materialism actually does and does not entail. I look closely at one cluster of views that is often described as a form of eliminativism in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science and try to show that this characterization is a mistake. More specifically, I look at conceptions of eliminativism recently endorsed by writers such as Edouard Machery, Paul Griffiths, Valerie Hardcastle and others, and argue that although these views do (...) endorse the elimination of something, they offer only what I will call a sort of category dissolution, and should be treated as something altogether different from traditional eliminativism. Spelling out the main contrast between eliminative materialism proper and this alternative view, and defending the need to keep them distinct, is my primary objective. As I show, a central irony is that proponents of the problematic outlook often insist that divergent things should not be classified together under a single label. By characterizing their own views as a form of eliminativism, they commit a fundamental error that they themselves argue should not be made. While my focus here is on eliminative materialism, the error I intend to highlight appears across various discussions about alleged eliminativism of all sorts of things. (shrink)

Joseph G. Ramsey argues that Richard Wright’s 1940 novella “Bright and Morning Star” has been consistently misunderstood. What has been almost universally read as a narrative of communist heroism stages instead a heroic mistake. “Bright and Morning Star” is not a story primarily about heroic individual sacrifice, but about the ways collective struggle can fail.

Since both these readings of Tracing Expression converge on a number of focal issues, namely the diacriticity and creativity of expression, memory, temporality, and the trace, the relation of artistic creation to the proto-artistic creativity of nature, and the elemental or what Toadvine calls “the end of the world,” I enter into dialogue with both interlocutors on these issues.Given the differential character of expression and the silences that permeate the sedimentation that it draws upon, nothing is replicatively bodied forth by (...) it, and itsspontaneity remains intact. While Lawlor suggests that a fundamental negation is at the core of of manifestation, I call attention to the need to guard against absolutizing the negative or giving it a “secondary positivity.”I do not think that there is any fundamental tension, for Merleau-Ponty, between nascency and memory, given that sedimentation, as “the trace of the forgotten” remains efficacious as the exigency of a future. The basic character of the trace is not that of a mere residue but is akin to the archē-trace; and the past that it refers to iis immemorial. It is important, in this context, to bear in mind the event- and the field-character of institution.I do not think that my emphasis on the autonomy of art breaks the contitnuity between art and the proto-artistic creativity of nature. Firstly, Merleau-Ponty’s ownunderstanding of painting as a “secret science” interrogatively addresses, not perceptual configurations, but “wild being” and thus presencing itself, whereas the autonomy I call attention to is not a pure transcendence. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty, in “Cézanne’s Doubt,” stresses that Cézanne’s approach to his work undercuts conceptual dichotomies.As concerns an understanding of non-figurative painting as an initmation of “the end of the world,” understood as a return to the pure elements in a paroxysm of sheer materiality, I voice three reservations. These concern, firstly, any unitary understanding of “world,” secondly a reductive understanding of the primordial elements, and thirdly that there cannot be any genuine art in the absence of perceptual configuration, or in sheer formlessness. Notwithstanding these reservations, however, I am profoundly appreciative of Lawlor’s and Toadvine’s intellectually engaged and perceptive readings of Tracing Expression. (shrink)

There are three related criteria that a concept of fitness should be able to meet: it should render the principle of natural selection non-tautologous and it should be explanatory and predictive. I argue that for fitness to be able to fulfill these criteria, it cannot be a property that changes over the course of an individual's life. Rather, I introduce a fitness concept--Block Fitness--and argue that an individual's genes and environment fix its fitness in such a way that each individual's (...) fitness has a fixed value over its lifetime. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s abiding interest in the art and the enigmatic person of Paul Cézanne focuses importantly on both the pictorial expression of space, and on the freedom of artistic creation in the face of adversity. Examining these issues in relation to the art of Claude Monet (whom Merleau-Ponty neglected), together with Monet’s status as a precursor of painterly abstraction, one can follow the Merleau-Pontyan “indirect logic of institution” to confront the work of Joan Mitchell, within the parameters of gestural abstraction, so (...) as to consider both her perspective on spatiality and horizon and her artistic trans-substantiation of adversity, focusing on the almost ecstatic intensity of her 1983-1985 series, La grande vallée. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty’s abiding interest in the art and the enigmatic person of Paul Cézanne focuses importantly on both the pictorial expression of space, and on the freedom of artistic creation in the face of adversity. Examining these issues in relation to the art of Claude Monet, together with Monet’s status as a precursor of painterly abstraction, one can follow the Merleau-Pontyan “indirect logic of institution” to confront the work of Joan Mitchell, within the parameters of gestural abstraction, so as to consider (...) both her perspective on spatiality and horizon and her artistic trans-substantiation of adversity, focusing on the almost ecstatic intensity of her 1983-1985 series, La grande vallée. (shrink)

Bringing together Reichian psychoanalysis, the utopian Marxism of Ernst Bloch, and a rigorous phenomenology of communication following Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, Ramsey argues that studies of corporeality are a necessary component of a philosophy of communicative praxis directed toward ethical concerns. Ramsey's work, which includes a detailed description of communicative praxis in a world whose destiny is determined by technology, offers an original response to this situation by developing an "ethics of relief.".

This article rebuts Ramsey's earlier theory, in 'Universals of Law and of Fact', of how laws of nature differ from other true generalisations. It argues that our laws are rules we use in judging 'if I meet an F I shall regard it as a G'. This temporal asymmetry is derived from that of cause and effect and used to distinguish what's past as what we can know about without knowing our present intentions.

For the past 40 years, philosophers have generally assumed that a key to understanding mental representation is to develop a naturalistic theory of representational content. This has led to an outlook where the importance of content has been heavily inflated, while the significance of the representational vehicles has been somewhat downplayed. However, the success of this enterprise has been thwarted by a number of mysterious and allegedly non-naturalizable, irreducible dimensions of representational content. The challenge of addressing these difficulties has come (...) to be known as the “hard problem of content” (Hutto & Myin, 2012), and many think it makes an account of representation in the brain impossible. In this essay, I argue that much of this is misguided and based upon the wrong set of priorities. If we focus on the functionality of representational vehicles (as recommended by teleosemanticists) and remind ourselves of the quirks associated with many functional entities, we can see that the allegedly mysterious and intractable aspects of content are really just mundane features associated with many everyday functional kinds. We can also see they have little to do with content and more to do with representation function. Moreover, we can begin to see that our explanatory priorities are backwards: instead of expecting a theory of content to be the key to understanding how a brain state can function as a representation, we should instead expect a theory of neural representation function to serve as the key to understanding how content occurs naturally. (shrink)

The behavior of an organism, according to Merleau-Ponty, lays out a milieu through which significant phenomena of varying degrees of optimality elicit adjustment. This leads to the dialectical co-emergence of milieu and aptitude that is both the product and the condition of life. What is present as a norm soliciting optimization is species-specific, but it also depends on the needs of the organism and its prior experience. Although a rich entry point into biological phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty’s work does not adequately describe (...) milieu–aptitude development in interactions between organisms, but it can be assisted through employing Husserl’s three levels of analysis identified by Steinbock, extending all three modes into the biological world. In particular, generative analyses can address inter-organismal behavioral structures slighted in Merleau-Ponty’s work. Generative phenomenology is concerned with the cultural, historical, and intersubjective constitution of human experience and is generally thought to be solely of value in examining the structure of human phenomenality. However, the possibility of human generativity presupposes structures produced widely in the biological world. Ecological, embryogenic, and evolutionary development already depend on protocultural and historical processes creating and created through intercorporeal interaction. After developing the concept of biological generativity through a consideration of plant ecology, mammalian embryology, and insect mimicry, I conclude with implications for humans, who can participate in biological generativity not merely phenomenally, but phenomenologically. (shrink)