Preliminary Remarks: Before entering into the subject matter of the paper, it may be useful to present American readers with a sketchy outline of present-day European philosophy of science, as it appeared to me at the International Congress of Philosophy of Science, held in Paris at the Sorbonne on October 15–22, 1949. The sections of which I can give a first hand impression and which are of particular interest for our subject, are those of physical science and of probability.

This is an important volume on a topic that has gained increasing traction in recent Nietzsche scholarship. In it, fourteen authors—trained philosophers and Germanists—discuss the related themes of contest, conflict, war, and the Greek agon in Nietzsche's works. Although the quality of the contributions varies, there are enough substantive essays in the volume to ensure that it will be essential reading for subsequent studies on the subject.In the introduction, the editors claim that although Nietzsche's reflections on fundamental ontology are distinct (...) from his interest in cultural institutions such as the Greek agon, they nevertheless provide important "background assumptions" for thinking about cultural... (shrink)

Book Three of George Santayana's letters covers a period of intense intellectual activity in Santayana's life, and the correspondence reflects the establishment of his mature philosophy. Santayana becomes more permanently established in Italy, but continues to travel in France, Spain, and England. The year 1927 marks the beginning of his long friendship with Daniel Cory, who became his literary secretary and eventually his literary executor. Also, with the death of Santayana's half-brother Robert, George Sturgis, Robert's son, becomes an important part (...) of Santayana's life and letters as his financial manager. Santayana continues to write to his sister Susana, as well as to numerous friends and fellow philosophers, including Bernard Berenson, Robert Seymour Bridges, Curt John Ducasse, John Erskine, Horace Meyer Kaller, Lewis Mumford, George Herbert Palmer, John Francis Stanley Russell, Herbert Wallace Schneider, Charles Augustus Strong, Paul Weiss, and Harry Austryn Wolfson. Other correspondents include Wendell T. Bush, Alys Gregory, Marianne Moore, John Middleton Murray, and Frederick J. E. Woodbridge. (shrink)

George Santayana published The Realm of Matter and The Genteel Tradition at Bay. He continued work on Book Three of Realms of Being, The Realm of Truth, and on his novel, The Last Puritan. Citing his commitment to his writing and his intention to retire from academia, he declined offers from Harvard University for the Norton Chair of Poetry and for a position as William James Professor of Philosophy, as well as offers for positions at the New School for Social (...) Research and Brown University. The deaths of his half sisters, Susan Sturgis de Sastre and Josephine Sturgis, in 1928 and 1930, respectively, were extremely distressing to him. Santayana and Charles Strong continued their epistolary debate over the nature and perception of reality and the problem of knowledge. The book also includes letters to Robert Bridges, Cyril Clemens, Morris R. Cohen, Curt John Ducasse, Sydney Hook, Horace Meyer Kallen, Walter Lippmann, Ralph Barton Perry, William Lyon Phelps, and Herbert W. Schneider. Santayana sent many letters with articles and reviews to journalists Wendell T. Bush, Henry Seidel Canby, Wilbur Cross, and John Middleton Murry. Discussion of his novel and continuing work on Realms of Being took place with Otto Kyllmann and John Hall Wheelock, his editors at Constable and Scribner's. Although Santayana now made the Hotel Bristol in Rome his permanent residence, he continued to travel in England, France, and Italy. (shrink)

The eight books of The Letters of George Santayana bring together over 3,000 letters, many of which have been discovered in the fifty years since Santayana's death. This sixth book covers four years of Santayana's life in Rome, his permanent residence since the late 1920s. During these years, Santayana, in his seventies, saw the publication of the remaining nine volumes of the Triton Edition of his work as well as the last two books of his Realms of Being: The Realm (...) of Truth and The Realm of Spirit. In 1938 the first book-length biography of Santayana was published, and in 1940 The Philosophy of George Santayana--a collection of critical essays that included Santayana's rejoinder, "Apologia pro Mente Sua"--was published as volume two of Northwestern University Press?s Library of Living Philosophers. In 1939, when war broke out in Europe and Swiss authorities denied him a long-term visa, Santayana decided to stay in Italy, where he was to remain for the rest of his life.The letters in this book are written to such correspondents as Van Meter Ames, Curt John Ducasse, Max Forrester Eastman, Max Fisch, Sidney Hook, Horace Meyer Kallen, Christopher Janus, Milton Munitz, William Lyon Phelps, and Ezra Pound, and include discussions of the work of Henri Bergson, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound, among others. (shrink)

In light of the recent Abu Ghraib prison scandal, this paper examines various works of literature to reveal that people who have prisoners in their power tend to torment their victims. Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville’s seafaring novels reveal how the captain and his mates assume brutal, godlike powers over the common sailors; T. E. Lawrence describes how the victim’s pain can become a masochistic pleasure; Franz Kafka imagines a state of universal guilt, where the victim, an average (...) man, suffers in the grip of an elaborate torture machine; Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jacobo Timerman, both political prisoners who survived to describe their terror, and George Orwell, meditating on contemporary totalitarian regimes as he suffered the agonies of medical treatment, transform their pain into art. Such literary works provide insights into the morally ambiguous depths of punishment. Every scene of torture, based on the authors’ experience, observation and imagination, has the same context as those vividly captured in the Abu Ghraib snapshots. (shrink)

Herman Cappelen investigates how language and other representational devices can go wrong, and how to fix them. We use language to understand and talk about the world, but what if our language has deficiencies that prevent it from playing that role? How can we revise our concepts, and what are the limits on revision?

The roots and evolution of two concepts usually thought to be Western in origin-musica mundana (the music of the spheres) and musica humana (music's relation to the human soul)-are explored. Beginning with a study of the early creeds of the Near East, Professor Meyer-Baer then traces their development in the works of Plato and the Gnostics, and in the art and literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Previous studies of symbolism in music have tended to focus on (...) a single aspect of the problem. In this book the concepts of musica humana and musica mundane are related to philosophy, aesthetics, and the history of religion and are given a rightful place in the history of civilization. Originally published in 1970. 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 paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback 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)

The standard view of philosophical methodology is that philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence. Herman Cappelen argues that this claim is false: it is not true that philosophers rely extensively on intuitions as evidence. At worst, analytic philosophers are guilty of engaging in somewhat irresponsible use of 'intuition'-vocabulary. While this irresponsibility has had little effect on first order philosophy, it has fundamentally misled meta-philosophers: it has encouraged meta-philosophical pseudo-problems and misleading pictures of what philosophy is.

Shaftesburys Dialog «The Moralists», ein Schlüsseltext der englischen Literatur und Ästhetik des frühen achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, ist bisher nur ideengeschichtlich interpretiert worden. Die vorliegende Studie zeichnet anhand weitgehend unbekannter Quellen aus dem Shaftesbury-Nachlass zum erstenmal die ebenso langwierige wie komplizierte Genese und Druckgeschichte des Textes nach. Shaftesburys hier erstmals veröffentlichte Briefe und Anweisungen an den Drucker und Verleger John Darby werfen neues Licht auf den Wandel der Typographie und der Buchgestaltung in der Epoche des englischen Neoklassizismus.

Current neuroimaging techniques with high spatial resolution constrain participant motion so that many natural tasks cannot be carried out. The aim of this paper is to show how a time-locked correlation-analysis of cerebral blood flow velocity (CBFV) lateralization data, obtained with functional TransCranial Doppler (fTCD) ultrasound, can be used to infer cerebral activation patterns across tasks. In a first experiment we demonstrate that the proposed analysis method results in data that are comparable with the standard Lateralization Index (LI) for within-task (...) comparisons of CBFV patterns, recorded during cued word generation (CWG) at two difficulty levels. In the main experiment we demonstrate that the proposed analysis method shows correlated blood-flow patterns for two different cognitive tasks that are known to draw on common brain areas, CWG, and Music Synthesis. We show that CBFV patterns for Music and CWG are correlated only for participants with prior musical training. CBFV patterns for tasks that draw on distinct brain areas, the Tower of London and CWG, are not correlated. The proposed methodology extends conventional fTCD analysis by including temporal information in the analysis of cerebral blood-flow patterns to provide a robust, non-invasive method to infer whether common brain areas are used in different cognitive tasks. It complements conventional high resolution imaging techniques. (shrink)

Cappelen and Dever present a forceful challenge to the standard view that perspective, and in particular the perspective of the first person, is a philosophically deep aspect of the world. Their goal is not to show that we need to explain indexical and other perspectival phenomena in different ways, but to show that the entire topic is an illusion.

We give a precis of our book Insensitive Semantics.

_Insensitive Semantics_ is an overview of and contribution to the debates about how to accommodate context sensitivity within a theory of human communication, investigating the effects of context on communicative interaction and, as a corollary, what a context of utterance is and what it is to be in one. Provides detailed and wide-ranging overviews of the central positions and arguments surrounding contextualism Addresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of language Defends a distinctive (...) and explanatorily powerful combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism Confronts core problems which not only run to the heart of philosophy of language and linguistics, but which arise in epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy as well. (shrink)

Meyers examines the question of personal autonomy. She observes the effects of childrearing practices and sexual biases, and reflects upon the results in women. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Cappelen and Hawthorne present a powerful critique of fashionable relativist accounts of truth, and the foundational ideas in semantics on which the new relativism draws. They argue compellingly that the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth and falsity.

Why are mistaken beliefs about COVID-19 so prevalent? Political identity, education and other demographic variables explain only part of the differences between people in their susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation. This paper focuses on another explanation: epistemic vice. Epistemic vices are character traits that interfere with acquiring, maintaining, and transmitting knowledge. If the basic assumption of vice epistemology is right, then people with epistemic vices such as indifference to the truth or rigidity in their belief structures will tend to be more (...) susceptible to believing COVID-19 misinformation. We carried out an observational study (US adult sample, n = 998) in which we measured the level of epistemic vice of participants using a novel Epistemic Vice Scale that captures features of the current competing analyses of epistemic vice in the literature. We also asked participants questions eliciting the extent to which they subscribe to myths and misinformation about COVID-19. We find overwhelming evidence to the effect that epistemic vice is associated with susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation. In fact, the association turns out to be stronger than with political identity, educational attainment, scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test, personality, dogmatism, and need for closure. We conclude that this offers evidence in favor of the empirical presuppositions of vice epistemology. (shrink)

Cappelen and Hawthorne present a powerful critique of fashionable relativist accounts of truth, and the foundational ideas in semantics on which the new relativism draws. They argue compellingly that the contents of thought and talk are propositions that instantiate the fundamental monadic properties of truth and falsity.

I call the activity of assessing and developing improvements of our representational devices ‘conceptual engineering’.¹ The aim of this chapter is to present an argument for why conceptual engineering is important for all parts of philosophy (and, more generally, all inquiry). Section I of the chapter provides some background and defines key terms. Section II presents the argument. Section III responds to seven objections. The replies also serve to develop the argument and clarify what conceptual engineering is.

The beginning of the twenty-first century saw something of a comeback for relativism within analytical philosophy. Relativism and Monadic Truth has three main goals. First, we wished to clarify what we take to be the key moving parts in the intellectual machinations of self-described relativists. Secondly, we aimed to expose fundamental flaws in those argumentative strategies that drive the pro-relativist movement and precursors from which they draw inspiration. Thirdly, we hoped that our polemic would serve as an indirect defence of (...) a traditional and natural picture concerning truth. According to this picture, what we call ‘Simplicity’, the fundamental structure of semantic reality is best revealed by construing truth as a simple monadic property of propositions that serve as the objects of belief, assertion, meaning and agreement. Our project was not a straightforward one. So-called relativists are not uniform in their key ideology, are often sloppy, casual, obscure or confused in their self-characterization, and differ in their argumentative emphasis among themselves and over time, thereby presenting a target that is both amorphous and shifty. This is an area where parties will frequently claim not to understand each other and where certain parties will sometimes accuse others of failing to make any sense at all. In such a situation, any effort to impose order will inevitably strike some parties as tendentious and unfair. That said, we felt that we had enough of …. (shrink)

This paper evaluates arguments presented by John Perry (and Ken Taylor) in favor of the presence of an unarticulated constituent in the proposition expressed by utterance of, for example, (1):1 1. It's raining (at t). We contend that these arguments are, at best, inconclusive. That's the critical part of our paper. On the positive side, we argue that (1) has as its semantic content the proposition that it is raining (at t) and that this is a location-neutral proposition. According to (...) the view we propose, an audience typically looks for a location when they hear utterances of (1) because their interests in rain are location- focused: it is the location of rain that determines whether we get wet, carrots grow, and roads become slippery. These are, however, contingent facts about rain, wetness, people, carrots, and roads – they are not built into the semantics for the verb 'rain'. (shrink)

Bundel met aanvullingen op colleges, gegeven aan de landbouwhogeschool te Wageningen, waarin de opvattingen worden besproken van ondermeer de Wiener Kreis (Carnap), Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos en Habermas.