The question I shall attempt to address in what follows is an essentially historical one, namely: Why did analytic philosophy emerge first in Cambridge, in the hands of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and as a direct consequence of their revolutionary rejection of the philosophical tenets that form the basis of British Idealism? And the answer that I shall try to defend is: it didn't. That is to say, the ‘analytic’ doctrines and methods which Moore and Russell (...) embraced in the very last years of the nineteenth century were not revolutionary, did not emerge first in Cambridge, were the creation of neither Russell nor Moore and cannot be explained by appeal to facts concerning British Idealism. The adoption of the doctrines and methods which characterised the earliest manifestations of British analytic philosophy are to be explained neither by reference to anything specifically British, nor by appeal to anything unproblematically philosophical. Or so I shall argue. (shrink)

A recent article in this journal described practical and conceptual difficulties faced by public health researchers studying scabies outbreaks in British residential care facilities. Their study population was elderly, decisionally incapacitated residents, many of whom lacked a legally appropriate decision-maker for healthcare decisions. The researchers reported difficulties securing Research Ethics Committee approval. As practicing healthcare ethicists working in a large Canadian research hospital, we are familiar with this challenge and welcomed the authors’ invitation to join the discussion of the ‘outstanding (...) ambiguities and further questions’ that their experience uncovered. We propose a Power of Attorney for Research as one substantive solution to help address the problems they identified. Although we acknowledge the familiar shortcomings associated with Advance Directives in the clinical context, we believe that Powers of Attorney for Research Participation, accompanied by Advance Research Directives, may increase the likelihood of gaining deeper understandings of potential participant’s values and priorities and how they might apply to foreseeable research opportunities. (shrink)

Introduction -- 1. Problem of the New -- 2. Problem of Relations -- 3. Problem of Emergence -- 4. Problem of One and Many -- 5. Plato and the Third Man Argument -- 6. Bradley and the Problem of Relations -- 7. Moore, Russell and the Birth of Analytic Philosophy -- 8. Russell and Deleuze on Leibniz -- 9. On Problematic Fields -- 10. Kant and Problematic Ideas -- 11. Armstrong and Lewis on the Problem of One and (...) Many -- 12. Determinables and Determinates -- 13. The Limits of Representational Thought -- 14. Learning from a Cup of Coffee -- 15. Carnap and the Fate of Metaphysics -- 16. Truth and Relevance -- Conclusion. (shrink)

This article reflects on context effects in the study of behavioral ethics and organizational justice. After a general overview, we review three key challenges confronting research in these two domains. First, we consider social scientific versus normative approaches to inquiry. The former aims for a scientific description, while the latter aims to provide prescriptive advice for moral conduct. We argue that the social scientific view can be enriched by considering normative paradigms. The next challenge we consider, involves the duality of (...) morally upright versus morally inappropriate behavior. We observe that there is a long tradition of categorizing behavior dichotomously rather than continuously. We conclude by observing that more research is needed to compare the dichotomous versus continuous perspectives. Third, we examine the role of “cold” cognitions and “hot” affect in making judgments of ethicality. Historically speaking, research has empathized cognition, though recent work has begun to add greater balance to affective reactions. We argue that both cognition and affect are important, but more research is needed to determine how they work together. After considering these three challenges, we then turn to our special issue, providing short reviews of each contribution and how they help in better addressing the three challenges we have identified. (shrink)

Were Russell alive and still with us, one could apologize to him for the degree of travesty and oversimplification which the present task has involved. But his inspiration is no longer a living one and it is still a live question in the philosophy of logic whether or not it makes sense to apologize to the shades of the departed. Perhaps the author in such a predicament can take some comfort from the possibility that what he has written may (...) interest some reader in that sort of question. (shrink)

Into the not so tranquil atmosphere of American race relations blew Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life proclaiming the emergence of a New Class of the “cognitive elite” and an underclass of the cognitively unfit. Public response has been both extensive and contradictory. Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman have compiled the most comprehensive anthology of these responses, which they appropriately describe as a “gale in the Zeitgeist.” Many of the (...) selections are critical because, as they point out, the book fairly reflects the weight of published opinion thus far. As for themselves, they feel the work “gives a sophisticated voice to a repressed and illiberal sentiment: a belief that ruinous divisions in society are sanctioned by nature itself (p. ix). (shrink)

This paper is concerned with Wittgenstein's early doctrine of the independence of elementary propositions. Using the notion of a free generator for a logical calculus–a concept we claim was anticipated by Wittgenstein–we show precisely why certain difficulties associated with his doctrine cannot be overcome. We then show that Russell's version of logical atomism–with independent particulars instead of elementary propositions–avoids the same difficulties.

One of the most familiar uses of the Russell paradox, or, at least, of the idea underlying it, is in proving Cantor's theorem that the cardinality of any set is strictly less than that of its power set. The other method of proving Cantor's theorem — employed by Cantor himself in showing that the set of real numbers is uncountable — is that of diagonalization. Typically, diagonalization arguments are used to show that function spaces are "large" in a suitable (...) sense. Classically, these two methods are equivalent. But constructively they are not: while the argument for Russell's paradox is perfectly constructive, (i.e., employs intuitionistically acceptable principles of logic) the method of diagonalization fails to be so. I describe the ways in which these two methods.. (shrink)

The Phantom Menace (TPM) is one of the most polarizing films in the Star Wars franchise. In short, the philosophy in TPM is to Daoism what Taco Bell is to Mexican food: TPM may not be most authentic example of Daoist philosophy, but it's got some of the same flavors. Daoist writings feature many stories where someone who may seem useless turns out to be successful, or something that seems to be worthless turns out to be invaluable. TPM features (...) many examples of those who are apparently useless and worthless triumphing over those who have better training, technology, or skills. Symbiosis is also a theme that runs through TPM. TPM's final victory is not the result of conscious intention. Victory comes, not through careful planning or heroic effort, but rather by Anakin being in the moment, acting without acting, just like Qui‐Gon told him to do. (shrink)

Over 40 years ago, Daniel Bell made the provocative claim that ideological polarization was diminishing in Western democracies, but new ideologies were emerging and driving politics in developing nations. This article tests the EndofIdeology thesis with a new wave of public opinion data from the World Values Survey (WVS) that covers over 70 nations representing more than 80 per cent of the world's population. We find that polarization along the Left/Right dimension is substantially greater in the less affluent and (...) less democratic societies than in advanced industrial democracies. The correlates of Left/Right orientations also vary systematically across regions. The twin pillars of economic and religious cleavages remain important in European states; cultural values and nationalism provide stronger bases of ideology in Asia and the Middle East. As Bell suggested, social modernization does seem to transform the extent and bases of ideological polarization within contemporary societies. (shrink)

Bernard Bolzano , one of the leading figures of the Bohemian Enlightenment, made important contributions both to mathematics and philosophy which were virtually unknown in his lifetime and are still largely unacknowledged today. As a mathematician, he was a pioneer in the clarification and rigorization of mathematical analysis; as a philosopher, he may be considered a forerunner of the analytic movement later to emerge with Frege and Russell.Rusnock's account of Bolzano's work is laid out in five chapters and two (...) appendices. The introductory first chapter consists of an overview of Bolzano's philosophy and his account of scientific theories. For Bolzano, the importance of such theories—as in mathematics—is their formal structure. Unlike his philosophical predecessors, Bolzano held that the goal of scientific presentation is not to maximize certainty, but rather to set out the objective order of truth.Chapter 2 is an analysis of Bolzano's early work, Contributions to a Better Founded Presentation of Mathematics, in which a number of his characteristic doctrines concerning mathematics are adumbrated. In sharp contradistinction to Kant, Bolzano thought that the methodology of mathematics is logic, and that mathematics should be founded independently of epistemology. In the Contributions Bolzano formulates a ‘thoroughgoing refutation of Kant's account of mathematical knowledge’, repudiating in particular …. (shrink)

This paper seeks to question the position of ZF as the dominant system of set theory, and in particular to examine whether there is any philosophical justification for the axiom of foundation. After some historical observations regarding Poincare and Russell, and the notions of circularity and hierarchy, the iterative conception of set is argued to be a semi-constructvist hybrid without philosophical coherence. ZF cannot be justified as necessary to avoid paradoxes, as axiomatizing a coherent notion of set, nor on (...) pragmatic grounds, and should be replaced by a system allowing non-well-founded sets. (shrink)

In a popular book and a widely anthologized article, Richard Taylor argues for a materialistic account of human nature based on considerations of common sense. While I do not argue against materialism, per se, I offer an extended critique of Taylor’s position that common sense unambiguously supports his version of materialism. I also argue that his account of the nature of psychological processes is of dubious philosophical value.

The concept of “representation” is used broadly and uncontroversially throughout neuroscience, in contrast to its highly controversial status within the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In this paper I first discuss the way that the term is used within neuroscience, in particular describing the strategies by which representations are characterized empirically. I then relate the concept of representation within neuroscience to one that has developed within the field of machine learning. I argue that the recent success of artificial neural (...) networks on certain tasks such as visual object recognition reflects the degree to which those systems exhibit inherent inductive biases that reflect the structure of the physical world. I further argue that any system that is going to behave intelligently in the world must contain representations that reflect the structure of the world; otherwise, the system must perform unconstrained function approximation which is destined to fail due to the curse of dimensionality, in which the number of possible states of the world grows exponentially with the number of dimensions in the space of possible inputs. An analysis of these concepts in light of philosophical debates regarding the ontological status of representations suggests that the representations identified within both biological and artificial neural networks qualify as legitimate representations in the philosophical sense. (shrink)

Cognitive neuroscience aims to map mental processes onto brain function, which begs the question of what “mental processes” exist and how they relate to the tasks that are used to manipulate and measure them. This topic has been addressed informally in prior work, but we propose that cumulative progress in cognitive neuroscience requires a more systematic approach to representing the mental entities that are being mapped to brain function and the tasks used to manipulate and measure mental processes. We describe (...) a new open collaborative project that aims to provide a knowledge base for cognitive neuroscience, called the Cognitive Atlas, and outline how this project has the potential to drive novel discoveries about both mind and brain. (shrink)

Berkeley’s passionate devotion to common sense and, hence, opposition to that most odious of doctrines, skepticism regarding the immediate data of experience, requires his acceptance of certain fundamental and common-sensical beliefs in both epistemology and metaphysics which, I shall argue, are together inconsistent. Epistemologically, he is often required to identify and reduce the physical world to the perceptual world. Metaphysically, he must often identify the perceptual world with what we ordinarily think of as the physical world—the everyday world of common (...) sense; this time the reduction works the other way. Since Berkeley is uniformly committed to common sense, both commitments are present in all of Berkeley’s writings, though both are not usually simultaneously dominant. For Berkeleian scholars convinced Berkeley is consistent, the results are predictable. Those who emphasize certain epistemological arguments tend to treat Berkeley as a relativist. Those who emphasize certain metaphysical arguments treat him as a believer in a public world that has a career of its own. Since any attempt consistently to articulate a common-sense view of things is going to run into difficulties, so also is Berkeley’s; his particular attempt runs into serious inconsistencies. (shrink)

The paradigm of a “new class” originated in socialist Eastern Europe among dissidents and other regime critics as a way to describe the ensconced stratum of managers, technocrats, and ideologues who controlled the levers of power. The rhetorical irony of the phrase depended on the implied contrast with an “old class” as well as the good old class theory of the orthodox Marxism that once served as the established dogma of half the world. The history of class struggle, which had (...) been history altogether, had culminated in the victory of a proletarian class that in turn had ushered in—or was…. (shrink)

Do we face a new rule of lawlessness? On the high seas, in matters of international law and human rights, and even in domestic prosecutorial practices, any grounds to place one's trust in the lawfulness of order seem increasingly elusive. The New World Order appears to be no order at all; the century of secular universalisms leaves us in the state of a general and all-encompassing nihilism. Still, rather than signaling a dead end rife with global despair, the collapse of (...) everything that went under the name of the New World Order could be a harbinger of ample opportunities for…. (shrink)

With the release of Laudato Si (2015) Pope Francis has introduced new conceptual language into Catholic social teaching (CST), what he has called "integral ecology." His intent appears to be grounded in the realization that "It is essential to seek comprehensive solutions which consider the interactions with natural systems themselves and with social systems" (LS, no. CXXXVIII). Pope Francis goes on to make the case that ''We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but (...) rather with one complex crisis with isboth social and environmental" (LS, no. CXXXVIII). Consequently, in order to solve this crisis we need to utilize "an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time pro­ tecting nature" (LS, no. CXXXVlll). This perspective represents a major development in CST whereby the encyclical connects the dots between ecology/environment, economics and society, three essential aspects of what many in the environmental community and elsewhere see as in­ dispensable for humanity to achieve a sustainable relationship with the Earth. While this is extremely important for articulating a Catholic vision of sustainability, that is not the direction we take in this article. Rather our intent is to use the concept of integral ecology to do three things:(1) examine a current case in the U.S. that has received signif­ icant media attention as well as notoriety-the water crisis in Flint, Michigan; (2) describe how our recent understanding of the epigenetic impacts of environmental toxins casts a new and ominous light on this crisis and on other instances of environmental toxin exposure, and (3) propose some ideas on how epigenetic research might enlarge our in­ terpretation of basic aspects of CST highlighted in Laudato Si such as human dignity, justice and the common good. (shrink)

It is difficult to start a discussion about religion. The topic irritates the modern public, especially the part that has been schooled in Critical Theory. Enlightenment hostility toward religion, which regularly goes far beyond skepticism, has profoundly shaped sensibilities and the habits of debate. Spoken or unspoken assumptions in the secular public sphere relegate religion to a fully private matter, and, therefore, not an appropriate topic for consideration, let alone a possible source for reflection on current theoretical or political matters. (...) The elaboration of theory within the project of modernity is taken to be fully separate from religion, or perhaps…. (shrink)

ExcerptAt its inception, Telos pursued a specific project as a journal: to serve as a bridge between the world of what was then often referred to as “European theory” and a U.S. intellectual world largely defined by quantitative methods in the social sciences. Over time, the terminology changed, and it is now more common to use the parlance of “analytic” and “continental” modes of philosophy, and if the latter term still clearly points toward Europe, there are representatives of both trends (...) in the university lives on both sides of the Atlantic. In retrospect, however, the question for Telos was never…. (shrink)

ExcerptIn the autumn of 1962, the philosopher Theodor Adorno, whose work is the topic of this special issue, wrote bluntly: “It would be advisable … to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies. It is not a progress of consciousness.” The invitation to crudeness may seem surprising, coming from Adorno, still (...) misrepresented as the pessimistic aesthete, consistently hostile to engaged activism, mass culture, and representational art. Such are the standard…. (shrink)

Since its beginnings in 1968, Telos has repeatedly turned to the work of Theodor Adorno, asking how his version of Critical Theory could cross the Atlantic and make sense in the United States. The extraordinary attention paid since to Adorno's American experience, like that of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gunnar Myrdal, derives in part from a constant fascination with the spectacle of the critical European intellectual's encounter with the antithetical culture of a resistant America. In this classic meeting of Old (...) World and New, misunderstandings abound. Americans regard the European intellectual as biased and arrogant, spinning grotesque caricatures of America…. (shrink)

Matthias Küntzel's account of the centrality of anti-Semitism within jihadist ideology appeared in German in 2002. The text has been expanded and updated for this translation. The volume includes a foreword by Jeffrey Herf, who highlights key aspects of the argument and the context. Heir to the tradition of Critical Theory—the website of the original publisher, Ça ira, carries a quotation by Hans-Jürgen Krahl, Adorno's student and antagonist—Küntzel's forcefully argued presentation stretches from the origins of twentieth-century Islamism, with the founding (...) of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, to the worldwide wave of anti-Semitism that followed the 9/11 attacks. Küntzel demonstrates…. (shrink)

ExcerptThe modern understanding of the public sphere is inseparable from criticism: the public is the space in which criticism can be articulated most effectively. The critical public emerged historically as a platform for individuals to call into question the decisions of state authority, especially when those decisions were taken outside the public view, as was typical for the premodern state—although the penchant for secrecy in government certainly lives on today. The public sphere stretches across multiple fields: individual discussion, journalistic reportage (...) and evaluation, and deliberative parliamentary institutions, no matter how much current legislatures fail on that score. In a broad…. (shrink)

In a popular book and a widely anthologized article, Richard Taylor argues for a materialistic account of human nature based on considerations of common sense. While I do not argue against materialism, per se, I offer an extended critique of Taylor’s position that common sense unambiguously supports his version of materialism. I also argue that his account of the nature of psychological processes is of dubious philosophical value.