The Pythagorean tradition dominates the understanding of beauty up until the end of the 18th Century. According to this tradition, the experience of beauty is stimulated by certain relations perceived to be between an object/construct's elements. As such, the object of the experience of beauty is indeterminate: it has neither a determinate perceptual analogue (one cannot simply identify beauty as you can a straight line or a particular shape) nor a determinate concept (there are no necessary (...) and sufficient conditions for beauty at the semantic level). By the 13th Century in the West, the pleasure experienced in beauty is characterized as disinterested. Yet, on the basis that all cultural manifestations of the pythagorean theory of beauty recognize that judgments of beauty are genuine judgments, we would want to say that judgments of beauty are lawful. In addition, from ancient times, up until after Kant, philosophers of beauty within this tradition recognize two kinds of beauty: a universal, unchanging beauty coexisting with a relative, dynamic beauty. These two kinds of beauty and the tensions discussed above, are reconciled and dissolved respectively, according to the metaphysical/religious commitments of the particular author. As yet, however, these features of beauty have not been reconciled within a physicalist worldview. This is what I set out to do. (shrink)

Three of the great sources of meaning in life are the good, the true, and the beautiful, and I aim to make headway on the grand Enlightenment project of ascertaining what, if anything, they have in common. Concretely, if we take a (stereotypical) Mother Teresa, Mandela, Darwin, Einstein, Dostoyevsky, and Picasso, what might they share that makes it apt to deem their lives to have truly mattered? I provide reason to doubt two influential answers, noting a common flaw that supernaturalism (...) and consequentialism share. I instead develop their most plausible rival, a naturalist and non-consequentialist account of what enables moral achievement, intellectual reflection, and aesthetic creation to confer great meaning on a person's life, namely, the idea that they do so insofar as a person transcends an aspect of herself in some substantial way. I criticize several self-transcendence theories that contemporary philosophers have advanced, before presenting a new self-transcendence view and defending it as the most promising. (shrink)

What is love? Why do we idealize those whom we love? How do we choose whom to love? Are some kinds of love better than others? Each age returns to these questions with renewed perplexity. Gerasimos Santas examinees the two greatest theoretical architectures of love, side by side. It provides a thorough critical description and comparison of these theories, allowing a sophisticated dialogue to emerge between the two thinkers. In the first half of the book Professor Santas reconstructs and explains (...) Plato's theories of eros and philia: erotic love, familial love and friendship. He attempt to show that Plato's was a unified theory in which erotic love has a special connecion with creativity and beauty. He then discusses Freud's notion of love as distinct from, though based on, his general theory of sexuality. He discusses in detail Freud's explanations, before and after narcissism, of idealization and choice of beloved. Freud too, it emerges, had a unified theory of love: all love has its origins in the libidinal instincts of infancy and childhood. The book concludes by showing that, despite Freud's claim that his theory of love is 'Platonic', the two theories are instructively different. (shrink)

For Kant the definitive end of art is the expression of aesthetic ideas that are sensible counterparts of rational ideas. But there is another type of aesthetic idea: ‘Beauty can in general be called the _expression_ of aesthetic ideas: only in beautiful nature the mere reflection on a given intuition, without a concept of what the object ought to be, is sufficient for arousing and communicating the idea of which that object is considered as the _expression_.’ What are these (...) aesthetic ideas? I argue that Kant is drawing on the idealist conception of art, associated with Vasari, Bellori and Winckelmann, as presenting idealized spatial forms characteristic of natural kinds. He incorporates this conception into his analysis of the beauty of nature and adds that we have non-conceptual access to it. These idealized forms he names aesthetic normal ideas of natural species. §51 of Kant’s Critique of the Aesthetic Power of Judgment opens with an unexpected claim, described by readers as ‘puzzling’, ‘perplexing’ and even as a ‘notorious mystery’.1 1 Beauty can in general be called the _expression_ of aesthetic ideas: only in beautiful art this idea must be occasioned by a concept of the object, but in beautiful nature the mere reflection on a given intuition, without a concept of what the object ought to be, is sufficient for arousing and communicating the idea of which that object is considered as the _expression_. 2 2 I will argue that, in this passage, Kant states that there are two types of aesthetic ideas—namely, aesthetic ideas expressed in beautiful art and aesthetic ideas expressed by beautiful nature. This distinction is surprising for, before this juncture, there is no explicit claim that there are different types of aesthetic ideas. In fact, although Kant offers several seemingly general characterizations of aesthetic ideas, in none of them does he indicate that there is a subdivision of the genus. Noteworthy, too, is the claim that the distinct pleasure we take in beautiful nature is independent of concepts; for strikingly, it can be considered as the expression of what the passage above expressly calls ideas. In his analysis of fine art, Kant draws the distinction between natural and artistic beauty—a distinction that is succinctly repeated in the passage above.3 3 But when he goes on to explicate the notion of an aesthetic idea, he refers only to aesthetic ideas expressed in art. This fact is taken to support the assumption that aesthetic ideas are connected solely to art. This is the heart of the mystery of the passage, for in it, Kant explicitly talks about aesthetic ideas expressed by beautiful nature. This raises a crucial question: Does the explication of aesthetic ideas in the sections on art apply to aesthetic ideas of beautiful nature?I maintain that the answer is negative. Although, in the passage above, Kant uses the same term in relation to both kinds of beauty, he has a clear distinction in mind: Beauty in art is an aesthetically or sensuously unified expression of the conceptual richness of an idea of reason; beauty in nature is an expression of a purely aesthetically or sensuously unified richness. Obviously, this distinction is connected to other significant differences between the two kinds of beauty. But it is important to point out at the outset that the two types of aesthetic ideas have in common only the quality of being a sensuously unified richness. It is in this sense that they are both species of a single genus. But what more precisely does Kant mean by aesthetic ideas expressed by beautiful nature, and what unified richness do they express and how precisely do they express it? It is to the historical genealogy of this notion of aesthetic ideas of beautiful nature and its implications for Kant’s theory of beauty that this paper is devoted. This historical genealogy will reveal a sense of the notion of aesthetic ideas that we easily overlook but would have been familiar to Kant and his contemporaries. (shrink)

Our lives are flooded with value claims. We evaluate our breakfast and the weather. We evaluate the actions of our politicians and our spouse. We talk of good routes to work and good routes through life. Many of our evaluative claims are a matter of much dispute, and some of these disputes are the most important in our lives, particularly disputes about what is right and wrong, and what makes our lives good. To settle these disputes one must know what (...) is good. ;This dissertation is an attempt to answer that question. I argue that there is only one property of value and it is the property of being rich, of being a unified variety. Examples of richness are living creatures, artworks, ecosystems, societies and human relationships. I begin by developing a definition of richness. Richness turns out to be variety that suggests a unified nomic explanation. Then I argue that our desires are our basic evidence of value and that any good value theory must explain why we desire and value what we do. Given the variety of things we desire and value, one might think that there are a variety of valuable properties; so I give arguments for the claim that the final value theory should be a monistic one. ;Next, I look at several of the things widely held to be valuable and show that we find them valuable in virtue of their richness. I look at beauty, life, knowledge, consciousness, desire-satisfaction, persons and some values from environmental ethics. In addition, I argue that there is a tight connection between love and the good. The proper object of love is the good. But it turns out the proper object of love is also richness. This suggests that richness and the good are one and the same. Finally, I give a refutation of the most common theory of value: hedonism. I argue that proper understandings of pleasure, enjoyment, pain and suffering show that none of these states are intrinsically valuable or disvaluable. (shrink)

Kant describes the concept of freedom as "the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason, even of speculative reason." Kant's theory of freedom thus plays a foundational and unifying role in all aspects of his philosophy and is thus of significant interest to historians of Kant's philosophy. Kant's theory of freedom has also played a significant role in contemporary debates in metaphysics, normative ethics, and metaethics. This volume brings historians of Kant's philosophy into conversation (...) with contemporary metaphysicians and ethicists with the aim of representing the current state of scholarship on Kant's and Kantian accounts of freedom while at the same time opening new avenues of exploration. The Idea of Freedom includes papers by leading scholars on a range of historical and contemporary topics centrally related to the Kantian theory of freedom, including transcendental idealism, determinism, Kant's normative ethical theory, Kant's conception of cognition, Kant's theory of beauty, Kant's conception of logic, and many others. (shrink)

Beauty and the End of Art shows how a resurgence of interest in beauty and a sense of ending in Western art are challenging us to rethink art, beauty and their relationship. By arguing that Wittgenstein's later work and contemporary theory of perception offer just what we need for a unified approach to art and beauty, Sonia Sedivy provides new answers to these contemporary challenges. These new accounts also provide support for the Wittgensteinian realism (...) and theory of perception that make them possible. -/- Wittgenstein's subtle form of realism explains artworks in terms of norm governed practices that have their own varied constitutive norms and values. Wittgensteinian realism also suggests that diverse beauties become available and compelling in different cultural eras and bring a shared 'higher-order' value into view. With this framework in place, Sedivy argues that perception is a form of engagement with the world that draws on our conceptual capacities. This approach explains how perceptual experience and the perceptible presence of the world are of value, helping to account for the diversity of beauties that are available in different historical contexts and why the many faces of beauty allow us to experience the value of the world's perceptible presence. -/- Carefully examining contemporary debates about art, aesthetics and perception, Beauty and the End of Art presents an original approach. Insights from such diverse thinkers as Immanuel Kant, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Arthur Danto, Alexander Nehamas, Elaine Scarry and Dave Hickey are woven together to reveal how they make good sense if we bring contemporary theory of perception and Wittgensteinian realism into the conversation. (shrink)

What is love? Why do we idealize those whom we love? How do we choose whom to love? Are some kinds of love better than others? Each age returns to these questions with renewed perplexity. Gerasimos Santas examinees the two greatest theoretical architectures of love, side by side. It provides a thorough critical description and comparison of these theories, allowing a sophisticated dialogue to emerge between the two thinkers. In the first half of the book Professor Santas reconstructs and explains (...) Plato's theories of eros and philia: erotic love, familial love and friendship. He attempt to show that Plato's was a unified theory in which erotic love has a special connecion with creativity and beauty. He then discusses Freud's notion of love as distinct from, though based on, his general theory of sexuality. He discusses in detail Freud's explanations, before and after narcissism, of idealization and choice of beloved. Freud too, it emerges, had a unified theory of love: all love has its origins in the libidinal instincts of infancy and childhood. The book concludes by showing that, despite Freud's claim that his theory of love is 'Platonic', the two theories are instructively different. (shrink)

Recent feminist theory has attempted to bring considerations of women’s agency into analyses of the meaning and consequence of beauty norms in women’s lives. This article argues that these works have often been limited by their use of individualist frameworks or by their neglect of considerations of race and class. In this article I draw upon examples of African-American utilization of beauty discourse and practices in collective efforts to resist racism. I argue that there is no singular (...) beauty standard enforced by a unified male gaze. Instead, we should conceive of fields in which differently located individuals and groups invest in and promote particular ways of seeing beauty, producing both penalties and pleasures in women’s lives. (shrink)

In this book, Newell makes the case for unified theories by setting forth a candidate.

The sentences employed in semantic paradoxes display a wide range of semantic behaviours. However, the main theories of truth currently available either fail to provide a theory of paradox altogether, or can only account for some paradoxical phenomena by resorting to multiple interpretations of the language. In this paper, I explore the wide range of semantic behaviours displayed by paradoxical sentences, and I develop a unified theory of truth and paradox, that is a theory of truth (...) that also provides a unified account of paradoxical sentences. The theory I propose here yields a threefold classification of paradoxical sentences – liar-like sentences, truth-teller-like sentences, and revenge sentences. Unlike existing treatments of semantic paradox, the theory put forward in this paper yields a way of interpreting all three kinds of paradoxical sentences, as well as unparadoxical sentences, within a single model. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Should We Look for a Unified Theory of Pleasure? The Phenomenon of Sensate Pleasure and the Restoration Theory How Aristotle Refutes the Restoration Theory Two Objections to Aristotle's Refutation Actualizing Potentials and Acts of Power Levels of Completeness of Act Reply to First Objection: False Pleasure Reply to Second Objection Unforced Acts of Power Are Complete Human Acts Beauty in Act Impeded and Unimpeded Complete Human Acts Counterfeit Pleasure Complete (...) Acts Relative to the Agent's Nature Absolutely Complete Acts Pleasure as Flow Divine Act Conclusion Notes Bibliography. (shrink)

This thesis constructs an Interactive Theory of Beauty to change the way we think about beauty and aesthetic form, in order to resolve the conceptual discrepancies between the features that characterize the traditional concept of beauty and the features of the phenomenology of beauty. The assumptions that underlie these discrepancies are identified. I hypothesize an alternative assumption that would need to be the case to resolve the tensions between the traditional concept and the phenomenology. This (...) involves rejecting the idea that beauty is an objective property of the object, and instead considering the possibility that beauty is an awareness of a certain aspect of the perceptual processing of the object. As such, beauty would be neither purely subjective nor purely objective; but a relational property. This hypothesis is mapped out in terms of a computational model of perception. The argument relies on the explanatory power of this conception of beauty. I employ my central hypothesis to explain how beauty can be both universal and subjective; an experience of the aesthetic form of the object which can, in some cases, supervene on representational content; and a property which is experienced as inferred from more basic properties, yet ineffable. While I focus mainly on visual beauty, I suggest applications for musical beauty and haptic beauty, particularly in non-sighted persons. This Interactive Theory of Beauty also accounts for the instrumentality of beauty, which is a feature of scientific and mathematical beauty. If my central hypothesis is correct, then the experience of beauty may offer insights into the nature of creativity in all fields of enquiry. (shrink)

The text "A Unified Theory of Thought, Meaning, and Action" is translated here from Donald Davidson's book: Problems of Rationality.Oxford University Press, 2004. pp.151-166.

This research adopted the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology to emphasize the use of the PX Pay mobile payment app for PX Mart, the most popular supermarket in Taiwan, and examine the degree of involvement as a moderator. The influence of factors related to PX Mart’s target customer groups on their shopping intentions and usage behaviors were discussed, with subsequent benefits and optimization directions. This study indicated the following results. First, performance expectations, ease-of-use expectations, and (...) social impact enhance consumers’ behavioral intention and behavioral intention significantly influence usage behavior. Second, gender has no significant moderating effect on the proposed model. Third, age has a moderating effect from performance expectations and ease-of-use expectations, social influence on behavioral intention. Fourth, use is more significantly affected by perceived stakeholders for customers over age 50 than for those age 30–39. Fifth, the degree of involvement significantly affects the relationship between behavioral intention and usage behavior in terms of social influence and facilitating conditions effects. Finally, we provided academic and practical implications and make contributions to both the online payment industry and academia. (shrink)

This article proposes a unified theory of the relationship between corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP). The theory provides a framework for rationalizing the various and contradictory findings in past empirical research. The theory is based on the parallels between the business and CSR domains, and thus draws on models from economics.

The mind-body relationship has vexed philosophers of mind for quite a long time. Different theories of mind have offered different points of view about the interaction between the two, but none of them seem free of ambiguities and questions. This paper attempts to use a mathematical model for mind-body relationship. The model may generate some questions to think about this relationship from the viewpoint of operator theory.

Ever since the eighteenth century, when Kant opened the floodgates of subjectivism in aesthetics, common men and philosophers alike have despaired of finding a basis for judgments about beauty. This book provides a comprehensive theory that encompasses beauty in art and nature, as well as intellectual, utilitarian, and moral beauty. The author argues that the beauty of objects can be reduced to the beauty of properties of those objects, which in turn can be understood (...) in terms of "properties of qualitative degree." The theory, developed first with respect to color, is then extended to include all sensory and non-sensory qualities. The author shows how the theory explicates and resolves disagreements about what is beautiful and discusses its relevance to the traditional notions of harmony and sublimity. His is an objectivist theory of beauty, and it enables him, in conclusion, to demonstrate why we enjoy perceiving beauty. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

A new theory that naturalizes biological function is explained and compared with earlier etiological and causal role theories. Etiological theories explain functions from how they are caused over their evolutionary history. Causal role theories analyze how functional mechanisms serve the current capacities of their containing system. The new proposal unifies the key notions of both kinds of theories, but goes beyond them by explaining how functions in an organism can exist as factors with autonomous causal efficacy. The goal-directedness and (...) normativity of functions exist in this strict sense as well. The theory depends on an internal physiological or neural process that mimics an organism’s fitness, and modulates the organism’s variability accordingly. The structure of the internal process can be subdivided into subprocesses that monitor specific functions in an organism. The theory matches well with each intuition on a previously published list of intuited ideas about biological functions, including intuitions that have posed difficulties for other theories. (shrink)

A new theory that naturalizes biological function is explained and compared with earlier etiological and causal role theories. Etiological theories explain functions from how they are caused over their evolutionary history. Causal role theories analyze how functional mechanisms serve the current capacities of their containing system. The new proposal unifies the key notions of both kinds of theories, but goes beyond them by explaining how functions in an organism can exist as factors with autonomous causal efficacy. The goal-directedness and (...) normativity of functions exist in this strict sense as well. The theory depends on an internal physiological or neural process that mimics an organism’s fitness, and modulates the organism’s variability accordingly. The structure of the internal process can be subdivided into subprocesses that monitor specific functions in an organism. The theory matches well with each intuition on a previously published list of intuited ideas about biological functions, including intuitions that have posed difficulties for other theories. (shrink)

A unifying theory of general anesthetic-induced unconsciousness must explain the common mechanism through which various anesthetic agents produce unconsciousness. Functional-brain-imaging data obtained from 11 volunteers during general anesthesia showed specific suppression of regional thalamic and midbrain reticular formation activity across two different commonly used volatile agents. These findings are discussed in relation to findings from sleep neurophysiology and the implications of this work for consciousness research. It is hypothesized that the essential common neurophysiologic mechanism underlying anesthetic-induced unconsciousness is, as (...) with sleep-induced unconsciousness, a hyperpolarization block of thalamocortical neurons. A model of anesthetic-induced unconsciousness is introduced to explain how the plethora of effects anesthetics have on cellular functioning ultimately all converge on a single neuroanatomic/neurophysiologic system, thus providing for a unitary physiologic theory of narcosis related to consciousness. (shrink)

To unify rival theories is to combine their key insights into a single coherent framework. It is often achieved by integrating the theories and forging new connections between their explanatory fac...

Abstract: We propose a view of vagueness as a semantic property of names and predicates. All entities are crisp, on this semantic view, but there are, for each vague name, multiple portions of reality that are equally good candidates for being its referent, and, for each vague predicate, multiple classes of objects that are equally good candidates for being its extension. We provide a new formulation of these ideas in terms of a theory of granular partitions. We show that (...) this theory provides a general framework within which we can understand the relation between vague terms and concepts and the corresponding crisp portions of reality. We also sketch how it might be possible to formulate within this framework a theory of vagueness which dispenses with the notion of truth-value gaps and other artifacts of more familiar approaches. Central to our approach is the idea that judgments about reality involve in every case (1) a separation of reality into foreground and background of attention and (2) the feature of granularity. On this basis we attempt to show that even vague judgments made in naturally occurring contexts are not marked by truth-value indeterminacy. We distinguish, in addition to crisp granular partitions, also vague partitions, and reference partitions, and we explain the role of the latter in the context of judgments that involve vagueness. We conclude by showing how reference partitions provide an effective means by which judging subjects are able to temper the vagueness of their judgments by means of approximations. (shrink)

The truthmaker theory rests on the thesis that the link between a true judgment and that in the world to which it corresponds is not a one-to-one but rather a one-to-many relation. An analogous thesis in relation to the link between a singular term and that in the world to which it refers is already widely accepted. This is the thesis to the effect that singular reference is marked by vagueness of a sort that is best understood in supervaluationist (...) terms. In what follows we show that the supervaluationist approach to singular reference, when wedded to the truthmaker idea, yields a framework of surprising power, which offers a uniform set of solutions to a range of problems regarding identity, reference and knowledge, problems which have hitherto been dealt with on an ad hoc basis. (shrink)

This theoretical integration of social psychology’s main cognitive and affective constructs was shaped by 3 influences: (a) recent widespread interest in automatic and implicit cognition, (b) development of the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. K. Schwartz, 1998), and (c) social psychology’s consistency theories of the 1950s, especially F. Heider’s (1958) balance theory. The balanced identity design is introduced as a method to test correlational predictions of the theory. Data obtained with (...) this method revealed that predicted consistency patterns were strongly apparent in the data for implicit (IAT) measures but not in those for parallel explicit (self-report) measures. Two additional not-yet-tested predictions of the theory are described. (shrink)

G. W. F. Hegel’s theory of punishment has been most often thought to fit within a particular penal camp. The most popular interpretation is that this theory is retributivist because criminals should only be punished only where deserved in an effort to “annul” crime. Others believe this theory is a theory of moral education whereby criminals come to understand their crimes as wrongs in an effort to reform their behaviour. These interpretations all fail to acknowledge the (...) novelty of Hegel’s theory of punishment. Hegel’s originality consists in offering the first unified theory of punishment. A unified theory of punishment aspires to offer a single, coherent theory of punishment that brings together retributivist, deterrent, and rehabilitative elements without substantial conflict. We can find similar unified theories of punishment amongst Hegel’s earliest defenders, the British Idealists (or “British Hegelians”), who helped to popularize Hegel’s philosophical contributions in the late nineteenth century. Thus, Hegel’s novel theory of punishment marks the beginning of a new tradition concerning how we might think about punishment. (shrink)

De Neys offers a welcome departure from the dual-process accounts that have dominated theorizing about reasoning. However, we see little justification for retaining the distinction between intuition and deliberation. Instead, reasoning can be treated as a case of multiple-cue decision making. Reasoning phenomena can then be explained by decision-making models that supply the processing details missing from De Neys's framework.

Recent publications by several leading philosophers of chemistry have focused on the definition, scope, utility, and nomenclature of issues dealing with acidity and basicity. In this paper, molecular orbital theory is used to explain all acid–base reactions, concluding that the interaction of the highest occupied molecular orbital (HOMO) of one substrate, “the base,” with the lowest unoccupied molecular orbital (LUMO) of a second substrate, “the acid,” determines the reactivity of such systems. This paradigm provides an understanding of all acid–base (...) reactions as well as other reactions which, on the surface, may not seem like acid–base reactions but which have fundamental underpinnings of that kind of chemistry. Rather than being unable to determine a unified understanding of acidity and basicity as suggested in the philosophy of chemistry literature, we propose that acidity and basicity fit securely in a classification of many other reactions that, using classical chemistry knowledge, pre-quantum chemistry, would not be possible. We strongly support the use of all scientific knowledge and experience in the development of the ideas in the philosophy science. We further suggest increased interactions between philosophers of science and scientists, so that all scholars benefit from the values, knowledge, and perspectives of other disciplines. (shrink)

In his new book, Lewis D. Sargentich shows how two different kinds of legal argument - rule-based reasoning and reasoning based on principles and policies - share a surprising kinship and serve the same aspiration. He starts with the study of the rule of law in life, a condition of law that serves liberty - here called liberal legality. In pursuit of liberal legality, courts work to uphold people's legal entitlements and to confer evenhanded legal justice. Judges try to achieve (...) the control of reason in law, which is manifest in law's coherence, and to avoid forms of arbitrariness, such as personal moral judgment. Sargentich offers a unified theory of the diverse ways of doing law, and shows that they all arise from the same root, which is a commitment to liberal legality. (shrink)

Uriah Kriegel presents a rich exploration of the philosophy of the great nineteenth-century thinker Franz Brentano. He locates Brentano at the crossroads where the Anglo-American and continental European philosophical traditions diverged. At the centre of this account of Brentano's philosophy is the connection between mind and reality. Kriegel aims to develop Brentano's central ideas where they are overly programmatic or do not take into account philosophical developments that have taken place since Brentano's death a century ago; and to offer a (...) partial defense of Brentano's system as quite plausible and in any case extraordinarily creative and thought-provoking. Brentano's system grounds a complete metaphysics and value theory in a well-developed philosophy of mind, and accordingly the book is divided into three parts, devoted to Brentano's philosophy of mind, his metaphysics, and his moral philosophy. The book's fundamental ambition is to show how Brentano combines the clarity and precision of the analytic philosopher with the sweeping vision of the continental philosopher. Brentano pays careful attention to important distinctions, conscientiously defines key notions, presents precise arguments for his claims, judiciously considers potential objections, and in general proceeds very methodically - yet he does so not as an end in itself, but as a means only. His end is the crafting of a grand philosophical system in the classical sense, attempting to produce nothing less than a unified theory of the true, the good, and the beautiful. (shrink)

This paper presents a unified account of the meaning of the spatial relational terms right, left, in front of, behind, above and below. It claims that each term has three types of meanings, basic, deictic and intrinsic, and that the definitions of each type of meaning are identical in form for all six terms. Restrictions on the use of the terms, which are different for above and below than for the rest, are explained by a general constraint on all (...) uses of spatial relational terms, the framework vertical constraint. This constraint depends on the existence of a fourth type of meaning for above and below, one defined by the framework in which the related objects are located. It is argued that a theory centred on the framework vertical constraint is preferable to one centred on the principle of canonical orientation (Levelt, 1984). (shrink)

I develop a theory of social virtue around the concept of a "social opening" and argue that a range of contemporary terms track various modes of success and failure with respect to social openings: ‘awesome’, ‘down’, ‘chill’, ‘sucks’, ‘wack’, ‘lame’, ‘douchebag’, and others. A basic idea is that the normative character of contemporary social life cannot be fully understood in traditional philosophical terms: ‘obligation’, ‘demand’, ‘duty’, ‘right’, ‘just’, ‘requirement’. ‘Sucks’ and ‘awesome’ (and their ilk) capture a special mode of (...) interpersonal critique. Old modes of critique fall short because contemporary social life embodies a concern for cultivating, expressing, and appreciating individuality. This is partly an aesthetic affair, which flavors the modes of response and critique that constitute the normative framework. I detail how our interest in the "ethics of awesomeness" has influenced a range of post-’60s cultural practices, including art, charity, athletics, public life, and others. (shrink)

A book chapter (about 8,000 words, plus references) summarizing Part One of Reasons and Persons, with particular attention to the Self-interest Theory, Consequentialism, Common-Sense Morality, and how critical scrutiny of Consequentialism and Common-Sense Morality points the way toward a unified theory of morality.

Theoreticians of names are currently split into two camps: Fregean and Millian. Fregean theorists hold that names have referent-determining senses that account for such facts as the change of content with the substitution of co-referential names and the meaningfulness of names without bearers. Their enduring problem has been to state these senses. Millian theorists deny that names have senses and take courage from Kripke's arguments that names are rigid designators. If names had senses, it seems that their referents should vary (...) among possible worlds. However, the Millians have the enduring problem of explaining the apparent cognitive content of names. I argue that Mill's original theory, when purged of confusion, provides word-reflexive senses for names. Frege failed to notice senses of this particular sort. Moreover, it is these senses that account for names' rigid designation. When the views of Mill and Frege are understood as complementary, the problems that have faced the divided theorists of names vanish. (shrink)

The book presents the case that cognitive science should turn its attention to developing theories of human cognition that cover the full range of human perceptual, cognitive, and action phenomena. Cognitive science has now produced a massive number of high-quality regularities with many microtheories that reveal important mechanisms. The need for integration is pressing and will continue to increase. Equally important, cognitive science now has the theoretical concepts and tools to support serious attempts at unified theories. The argument is (...) made entirely by presenting an exemplar unified theory of cognition both to show what a real unified theory would be like and to provide convincing evidence that such theories are feasible. The exemplar is SOAR, a cognitive architecture, which is realized as a software system. After a detailed discussion of the architecture and its properties, with its relation to the constraints on cognition in the real world and to existing ideas in cognitive science, SOAR is used as theory for a wide range of cognitive phenomena: immediate responses ; discrete motor skills ; memory and learning ; problem solving ; language ; and development. The treatments vary in depth and adequacy, but they clearly reveal a single, highly specific, operational theory that works over the entire range of human cognition, SOAR is presented as an exemplar unified theory, not as the sole candidate. Cognitive science is not ready yet for a single theory – there must be multiple attempts. But cognitive science must begin to work toward such unified theories. (shrink)