Contemporary theories of consciousness are based on widely different concepts of its nature, most or all of which probably embody aspects of the truth about it. Starting with a concept of consciousness indicated by the phrase “the feeling of what happens” (the title of a book by Antonio Damásio), we attempt to build a framework capable of supporting and resolving divergent views. We picture consciousness in terms of Reality experiencing itself from the perspective of cognitive agents. Each conscious experience is (...) regarded as composed of momentary feeling events that are combined by recognition and evaluation into extended conscious episodes that bind cognitive contents with a wide range of apparent durations (0.1 secs to 2 or more secs, for us humans, depending on circumstances and context). Three necessary conditions for the existence of consciousness are identified: a) a ground of Reality, envisaged as an universal field of potentiality encompassing all possible manifestations, whether material or 'mental'; b) a transitional zone, leading to; c) a manifest world with its fundamental divisions into material, 'informational' and quale-endowed aspects. We explore ideas about the nature of these necessary conditions, how they may relate to one another and whether our suggestions have empirical implications. (shrink)

Kaum ein Zeitabschnitt war von solch grundlegenden technischen, politischen und philosophischen Umbruchen gepragt wie die 100 Jahre bis zur Jahrtausendwende - vom Kaiserreich zur globalen Weltgesellschaft, vom Idealismus zum Werterelativismus. Die juristische Grundlagenforschung - auch die Rechtsphilosophie - ist gegenwartig in keiner guten Verfassung: Ihr fehlt die gesellschaftliche Resonanz, und damit einhergehend der qualifizierte wissenschaftliche Nachwuchs. Der Band mochte einen Anstoss geben, durch eine Ruckbesinnung auf die grossen Leistungen in der Rechtsphilosophie des letzten Jahrhunderts an diese anzuknupfen, Problemlosungen fur die (...) Zukunft zu suchen und die Unverzichtbarkeit der Rechtsphilosophie dabei wieder ernst zu nehmen. (shrink)

I explain why, from the perspective of knowledge-centric anti-luck epistemology, objective act consequentialist theories of ethics imply skepticism about the moral status of our prospective actions and also tend to be self-defeating, undermining the justification of consequentialist theories themselves. For according to knowledge-centric anti-luck epistemology there are modal anti-luck demands on both knowledge and justification, and it turns out that our beliefs about the moral status of our prospective actions are almost never able to satisfy these demands if objective act (...) consequentialism is true. This kind of applied moral skepticism introduces problematic limits on our ability to use objective act consequentialism’s explanatory power as evidence for its truth. This is, in part, a product of higher-order defeat as I explain in the final section. There is, however, a silver lining for objective act consequentialists. For there is at least one type of objective act consequentialism, prior existence consequentialism, that is poised to avoid at least some of the epistemic problems discussed in this paper. (shrink)

Charles Griswold has written a comprehensive philosophical study of Smith's moral and political thought. Griswold sets Smith's work in the context of the Enlightenment and relates it to current discussions in moral and political philosophy. Smith's appropriation as well as criticism of ancient philosophy, and his carefully balanced defence of a liberal and humane moral and political outlook, are also explored. This 1999 book is a major philosophical and historical reassessment of a key figure in the Enlightenment that will be (...) of particular interest to philosophers and political and legal theorists, as well as historians of ideas, rhetoric, and political economy. (shrink)

In earlier work, the author has studied the economic role of planning horizons in making a case for complementarity as the predominant feature of social interdependence. This paper compares the different choice strategies implied by substitution, opposition and conflicts of interest in an economics of fear with those arising from horizon effects, economic complementarity and concerts of interest in an economics based on love. The contrasting implications of a psychological literature on negative vs. positive emotions and their health effects, along (...) with the findings in neurophysiological research about how humans are hard-wired for empathy and compassion leads to some fundamental changes in how we might address and revise social problems through economic analysis. The aim of this paper is to extend a horizonal case for complementarity in the author's previous work into its psychological links to research findings on healthy cognitive function and its emotional basis. An economics of substitution yields quite different conclusions about optimal institutional forms and how we address and frame social relations than are implied by an explicitly horizonal economics of complementary social relations. Recent psychological and neurophysiological studies support a horizonal case for complementarity in social relations, showing that our orthodox substitution assumptions and models of competitive equilibrium should be rejected for a renewed economic analysis based on horizonal models of complementarity and cooperation as a means to achieve greater social well-being in a healthier and more integrative form of social organization. The issues to be explored are not entertained within the currently existing frame of orthodox economics, so we must step beyond our standard habitual assumptions. (shrink)

Interpreting Figurative Meaning critically evaluates the recent empirical work from psycholinguistics and neuroscience examining the successes and difficulties associated with interpreting figurative language. There is now a huge, often contradictory literature on how people understand figures of speech. Gibbs and Colston argue that there may not be a single theory or model that adequately explains both the processes and products of figurative meaning experience. Experimental research may ultimately be unable to simply adjudicate between current models in psychology, linguistics and philosophy (...) of how figurative meaning is interpreted. Alternatively, the authors advance a broad theoretical framework, motivated by ideas from 'dynamical systems theory', that describes the multiple, interacting influences which shape people's experiences of figurative meaning in discourse. This book details past research and theory, offers a critical assessment of this work and sets the stage for a new vision of figurative experience in human life. (shrink)

Expressions of the form 'S is aware of the fact that p' are commonplace. This book provides a systematic exploration of the relation between knowledge and factual awareness, arguing that knowledge is but one species of factual awareness and that we can understand the possession of objective reasons, the normativity of knowledge, and the nature of knowledge in terms of factual awareness. In this way, the state of factual awareness is, structurally and substantively, a more basic type of state than (...) knowledge. If correct, this undermines a number of ways in which knowledge has been regarded as ‘first’ in recent epistemology. (shrink)

_Addresses of the Mississippi Philosophical Association_ is a collection of presidential and invited addresses from the members of the Mississippi Philosophical Association (MPA). Papers date from the inception of the association in the mid-1940s and continue through 1999. The common thread in these addresses is the authors' service to or leadership in the MPA. The content and methods in the chapters are diverse, including addresses on ethics, political philosophy, history of philosophy, epistemology, aesthetics, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, philosophy (...) of science, and philosophical theology. Some unique features of this book are a history of the MPA, biographical sketches and photographs of each contributor, and the inclusion of the unpublished 1988 Dunbar Lectures from Millsaps College and the unpublished 1992 Akin Lecture from Mississippi College. These essays and lectures reveal the vitality of philosophy in the colleges and universities of Mississippi. As part of the special series, Histories and Addresses of Philosophical Societies in the larger Value Inquiry Book Series, this book documents - in a unique historical format - the value and vitality of a state philosophical organization. “There has been no attempt to mold these addresses into a unity; rather, the addresses offer a glimpse of the pluralistic philosophical reflection among the philosophical faculties of the private colleges and public universities in the state of Mississippi. To the surprise of some people, philosophy is alive, well, diverse, and flourishing in Mississippi!” (from the Preface). (shrink)

When a belief is self-fulfilling, having it guarantees its truth. When a belief is self-defeating, having it guarantees its falsity. These are the cases of “self-impacting” beliefs to be examined below. Scenarios of self-defeating beliefs can yield apparently dilemmatic situations in which we seem to lack sufficient reason to have any belief whatsoever. Scenarios of self-fulfilling beliefs can yield apparently dilemmatic situations in which we seem to lack reason to have any one belief over another. Both scenarios have been used (...) independently to challenge Evidentialism, on which what we may rationally believe is all and only what fits our current evidence. Here we tie the two scenarios together and explore what a knowledge-sensitive evidentialist approach to one implies for the other. (shrink)

This essay is a defense of the social construction of racialism. I follow a standard definition of “racialism” which is the belief that “there are heritable characteristics, possessed by members of our species, that allow us to divide them into a small set of races, in such a way that all the members of these races share certain traits and tendencies with each other that they do not share with other members of any other race”. In particular I want to (...) defend the “radical” social-constructive thesis that holds “the concept of race is exclusively the product of historical and cultural causes. It claims that humans do not tend to classify people into races when groups with different phenotypes meet, save for particular historical circumstances”. The quoted position is the consensus view among historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists who study racialism but has recently been criticized by philosophical defenders of cognitive/evolutionary psychological approaches to racialism. Drawing on developmental studies as well as historical and contemporary cross-cultural research, CEP philosophers point to similarities of racialism across time and space. They hold that social constructionist approaches to racialism cannot explain these similarities. I hold that SC approaches do explain these similarities and that such similarities actually pose a significant challenge to the proposed CEP research program on racialism. (shrink)

The philosophical implication that guides the issue addressed here is the following: how does the principle of the common constitute a frontal apophasis to the principle of property in contemporary democracies? I do not pretend to offer an exhaustive answer to this problem. However, I use the argumentative strategy of dividing this paper into three sections: (i) theoretically investigate the dialectical tension between the principle of the common and the principle of property; (ii) analytically observe the premise that the behavioral (...) practices of exacerbated individualism contribute as an act of aversion to the principle of the common and (iii) dwell on the articulation of the notion of the principle of the common as a factor that is present on the threshold between the philosophical vulgar and philosophical universal. Finally, I form some considerations that problematize the naturalized notion of the principle of property in current democracies, in view of the constituent power that the principle of the common holds in the perspective of achieving the well-being of human agents in contemporary community life. (shrink)

[This is a paper that was originally written in 2017 and doesn't represent Silva's current thinking about degrees of confidence, conviction, and rationality.] Can there be knowledge and rational belief in the absence of a rational degree of confidence? Yes, and cases of "mistuned knowledge" demonstrate this. In this paper we leverage this normative possibility in support of advancing our understanding of the metaphysical relation between belief and credence. It is generally assumed that a Lockean metaphysics of belief that reduces (...) outright belief to degrees of confidence would immediately effect a unification of coarse-grained epistemology of belief with fine-grained epistemology of confidence. Scott Sturgeon has suggested that the unification is effected by understanding the relation between outright belief and confidence as an instance of the determinable-determinate relation. But determination of belief by confidence would not by itself yield the result that norms for confidence carry over to norms for outright belief unless belief and high confidence are token identical. We argue that this token-identity thesis is incompatible with the neglected phenomenon of “mistuned knowledge”—knowledge and rational belief in the absence of rational confidence. We contend that there are genuine cases of mistuned knowledge and that, therefore, epistemological unification must forego token identity of belief and high confidence. We show how partial epistemological unification can be secured given determination of outright belief by degrees of confidence even without token-identity. Finally, we suggest a direction for the pursuit of thoroughgoing epistemological unification. (shrink)

One legacy of post-Enlightenment dualism in the universe of academic discourse is the presence of two approached to notions of duality championed by two differing camps. One camp might arbitrarily be called debunkers; the other might be labeled rationalists. The strategies of the camps are conditioned by traditional notions of inside and outside. Debunkers consider themselves outsiders, beyond a deceptive show filled with tricky mirrors. Rationalists, by contrast, spend a great deal of time among mirrors, listening to explanations from the (...) overseers, attempting to absorb sideshow language, hoping to provide acceptable analytical accounts. If debunkers are intent on discovering generative and, presumably, hidden ideological inscriptions of a given discourse—its situation on what Amiri Baraka calls the “real side” of economic exchange and world exploitative power—rationalists are concerned to study discursive products, to decode or explain them according to forms and formulas that claim to avoid general views or judgments of ideology. Differentiating the camps also is what might be called a thermal gradient: the heat of the debunker’s passion is palpable. It is unnecessary to command him, in the manner of the invisible man’s tormentor, to “Get hot, boy! Get hot!” Rationalists, by contrast, do not radiate. They appear to have nothing personal at stake and remain coolly instructive and intelligently unflappable in their analyses.This tale of an Enlightenment legacy, as I have told it, contrasts a debunking body and rationalist soul. As I have suggested in my opening sentence, however, what is at issue is not so much two actual and substantially distinctive camps as two metonyms for dual approaches to a common subject—namely, notions of duality. My claim is that the Enlightenment reflexivity of academic discourse, devoted to, say, “the Other” and conceived in dualistic terms of self-and-other, expresses itself as an opposition. Thos whom I have called debunkers gladly accept the Other’s sovereignty as a bodily and aboriginal donnée; rationalists work to discover the dynamics of “othering” engaged in by a self-indulgent Western soul. The difficulty of producing usefully analytical or political results for either camp is occasioned by their joint situation within a post-Enlightenment field. Houston A. Baker, Jr. is the Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a poet whose recent volume Blues Journeys Home appeared in 1985. He is also the author of a number of studies of Afro-American literature and culture, including the forthcoming Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. (shrink)

The study of metaphor is now firmly established as a central topic within cognitive science and the humanities. We marvel at the creative dexterity of gifted speakers and writers for their special talents in both thinking about certain ideas in new ways, and communicating these thoughts in vivid, poetic forms. Yet metaphors may not only be special communicative devices, but a fundamental part of everyday cognition in the form of 'conceptual metaphors'. An enormous body of empirical evidence from cognitive linguistics (...) and related disciplines has emerged detailing how conceptual metaphors underlie significant aspects of language, thought, cultural and expressive action. Despite its influence and popularity, there have been major criticisms of conceptual metaphor. This book offers an evaluation of the arguments and empirical evidence for and against conceptual metaphors, much of which scholars on both sides of the wars fail to properly acknowledge. (shrink)

Copyright © 2015 by the Society of Criti. Objective: Global lung stress varies considerably with low tidal volume ventilation for acute respiratory distress syndrome. High stress despite low tidal volumes may worsen lung injury and increase risk of death. No widely available parameter exists to assess global lung stress. We aimed to determine whether the volume delivered during a recruitment maneuver is inversely associated with lung stress and mortality in acute respiratory distress syndrome. Design: Substudy of an acute respiratory distress (...) syndrome clinical trial on esophageal pressure-guided positive end-expiratory pressure titration. Setting: U.S. academic medical center. Patients: Forty-two patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome in whom airflow, airway pressure, and esophageal pressure were recorded during the recruitment maneuver. Interventions: A single recruitment maneuver was performed before initiating protocol-directed ventilator management. Recruitment maneuvers consisted of a 30-second breath hold at 40 cm H2O airway pressure under heavy sedation or paralysis. VRM was calculated by integrating the flow-time waveform during the maneuver. End-inspiratory stress was defined as the transpulmonary pressure during end-inspiratory pause of a tidal breath and tidal stress as the transpulmonary pressure difference between end-inspiratory and end-expiratory pauses. Measurements and Main Results: VRM ranged between 7.4 and 34.7 mL/kg predicted body weight. Lower VRM predicted high end-inspiratory and tidal lung stress. After adjusting for Pao2/Fio2 and either driving pressure, tidal volume, or plateau pressure and positive end-expiratory pressure, VRM remained independently associated with both end-inspiratory and tidal stress. In unadjusted analysis, low VRM predicted increased risk of death. VRM remained significantly associated with mortality after adjusting for study arm. Conclusions: Low VRM independently predicts high lung stress and may predict risk of death in patients with acute respiratory distress syndrome. (shrink)

First published in 1978. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.