The volume documents, and makes an original contribution to, an astonishing period in twentieth-century philosophy—the progress of Arne Naess's ecophilosophy from its inception to the present. It includes Naess's most crucial polemics with leading thinkers, drawn from sources as diverse as scholarly articles, correspondence, TV interviews and unpublished exchanges. The book testifies to the skeptical and self-correcting aspects of Naess's vision, which has deepened and broadened to include third world and feminist perspectives. Philosophical Dialogues is an essential addition to the (...) literature on environmental philosophy. (shrink)

“It ain't nuthin' until I call it.”Bill Guthrie, UmpireNumerous criticisms of Adolf Grünbaum's account of conventions in physics have been published, and he has replied to most of them. Nonetheless, there seem to me to be good reasons for offering further criticism. In the first place Grünbaum's philosophy seems to me at least partly an extrapolation of one aspect of the views on conventions developed by Reichenbach and others. Since I think many of the issues which Reichenbach attempted to (...) settle in his various discussions of conventions in physics are genuine and important, and I also think that those aspects of his views on which Grünbaum has focused are among the least satisfactory, it seems important to suggest questions and answers about conventions in physics which may develop more satisfactory Reichenbachian themes. Secondly, Grünbaum's philosophy centers on a distinction, that between extrinsic and intrinsic properties and relations, which has never been made satisfactorily clear either by Grünbaum or by his critics. Until it is clarified we will remain unsure of just what he is claiming and why we should think it true or think it false. Finally, Grünbaum's replies to his critics, especially his most recent reply, [9], involve unusually important claims which fail to be buttressed by the arguments he gives. I have in mind such claims as that we can learn something important about the ontological status of properties and relations by examining descriptions of them, that on the most straightforward and literal interpretation, the general theory of relativity is inconsistent, and that the foremost advocates of geometrodynamics, Clifford and Wheeler, were and are enmeshed in contradiction. My own view is that all of these claims are dubious or false, but I shall be less concerned with establishing their falsity than with discrediting the arguments offered for them. (shrink)

Objectives: To analyse legislation and medical professional positions concerning the doctor’s role in assisted dying in western Europe, and to discuss their implications for doctors.Method: This paper is based on country-specific reports by experts from European countries where assisted dying is legalised , or openly practiced , or where it is illegal .Results: Laws on assisted dying in The Netherlands and Belgium are restricted to doctors. In principle, assisted suicide is not illegal in either Germany or Switzerland, but a doctor’s (...) participation in Germany would violate the code of professional medical conduct and might contravene of a doctor’s legal duty to save life. The Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill proposed in the UK in 2005 focused on doctors, whereas the Proposal on Assisted Dying of the Norwegian Penal Code Commission minority in 2002 did not.Professional medical organisations in all these countries except The Netherlands maintain the position that medical assistance in dying conflicts with the basic role of doctors. However, in Belgium and Switzerland, and for a time in the UK, these organisations dropped their opposition to new legislation. Today, they regard the issue as primarily a matter for society and politics. This “neutral” stance differs from the official position of the Royal Dutch Medical Association which has played a key role in developing the Dutch practice of euthanasia as a “medical end-of-life decision” since the 1970s.Conclusion: A society moving towards an open approach to assisted dying should carefully identify tasks to assign exclusively to medical doctors, and distinguish those possibly better performed by other professions. (shrink)

I'm very happy here to be sandwiched between Lycan and Millikan, two of the living philosophers from whom I've probably learned the most, and to whom I am the most grateful. Plus the intermediary position is appropriate for someone commenting on intermediary representations in vision. There's much to like in Bill 's account of "layering" in visual representation. For one, it makes explicit and publicizes the notion that there are multiple layers of representation involved even in the seemingly simple (...) achievement of. (shrink)

You and I reach for a dollar bill on the floor, each saying “I saw it first.” The content of what we say is identically the same. How then is your claim referred to you and mine to me? We argue that the reference of self-ascriptions is effected by the occasion of the occurrence of the first-person indexical rather than by the content of the thought or assertion which then occurs. That this is true has further implications for exotic, (...) self-fulfilling self-ascriptions, like the Cartesian Cogito ; for views like those of Geach and Anscombe, who hold that ‘I’ is not a singular referring expression at all; and for views which hold that the first-person indexical is a singular referring expression with a very special, “systematically ambiguous” content. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Authenticity, Antiquity, and Authority: Dares Phrygius in Early Modern EuropeFrederic ClarkDares Phrygius, “First Pagan Historiographer”In his Etymologies, Isidore of Seville—the seventh-century compiler whose cataloguing of classical erudition helped lay the groundwork for medieval and early modern encyclopedism—offered a seemingly straightforward definition of historiography, with clear antecedents in Cicero, Quintilian, and Servius.1 Before identifying historical writing as a component of the grammatical arts, and distinguishing histories from poetic fables, Isidore (...) confirmed that “history is a narration of deeds [narratio rei gestae], through which things done in the past are discerned.”2 Thereafter, he equated historical writing with eyewitness observation, insisting that “among the [End Page 183] ancients, no one wrote history unless he had been present and seen those things to be recorded.”3 But Isidore’s further treatment of historiography grew more perplexing. Upon affirming that “among us, Moses first composed a history, on the beginning of the world,” he unexpectedly declared that “among the pagans, Dares Phrygius first composed a history, concerning Greeks and Trojans.”4 Only later did the encyclopedist mention more well-known Greek historians (to modern audiences at least) like Herodotus. 5Isidore’s invocation of his “first pagan historiographer” referred most likely to the De excidio Troiae historia (henceforth DET), a fifth- or sixth-century Latin pseudo-history billed as an eyewitness account of the Trojan War. Conveyed in sparse, dry, and inelegant language, the DET was long thought to have been the war diary of one Dares Phrygius, purportedly a Trojan participant in the conflict.6 In reality, the Latin DET was a two-part forgery, as its spurious dedicatory epistle—supposedly from the Augustan-era biographer Cornelius Nepos to the historian Sallust—claimed that “Nepos” had discovered the work in an Athenian archive and rendered it “truly and simply” (vere et simpliciter) from Greek into Latin.7 While potentially derived from a Greek antecedent, perhaps composed as an anti-Homeric jeu d’esprit during the Second Sophistic, the Latin Dares was assuredly not an accurate and verbatim translation of any lost Greek original. 8Notwithstanding its uncertain origins, Isidore’s pagan counterpart to Moses would go on to achieve canonical status in the medieval Latin West, and survives today in approximately 200 manuscripts. Moreover, Dares’s authority was extended through practices of compilation integral to medieval [End Page 184] textual culture.9 This compilatory impulse—which spawned countless multi-text anthologized codices and similarly animated Isidore’s encyclopedism—encouraged the Phrygian’s codicological pairing with numerous sources both ancient and medieval. Not only did the DET serve, codicologically, as a prologue to Trojan origin narratives like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, but it was also integrated into the structure of universal history, utilized as a means of augmenting the Chronicon of Eusebius-Jerome.10 Throughout the Middle Ages, Dares served not only as a name to invoke, but also as a source to appropriate and rework: to insert into universal chronicles, append to Trojan genealogies, or render into epic verse. Moreover, the pseudo-author’s status as “first pagan historiographer” was hardly lost on medieval sources: for instance, when William of Malmesbury inserted the DET into his anthology of ancient Roman histories, he made sure to include Isidore’s endorsement directly before the text’s incipit.11 For nearly a millennium, Dares’s fabricated claims of antiquity and autopsy constituted airtight guarantors of textual auctoritas.Between Criticism and Credulity: Dares in Early Modern ScholarshipBut Dares did not remain undisturbed in the canon. Instead, the DET saw its first recorded challenge with the advent of the early Renaissance. Writing in 1400 in his De tyranno, the Florentine Chancellor Coluccio Salutati turned to the Phrygian when debating a favored subject of nascent Italian humanism—the history of early Rome. Here Salutati sought to counter the long-held claim, attested in the DET, that Aeneas was not a pious hero driven from Troy, but rather a duplicitous traitor who had himself betrayed the city to the Greeks.12 The Florentine Chancellor correctly acknowledged that Aeneas’s treason was alleged by “the most ancient historians Dares [End Page 185] Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis” (Dictys, another late antique... (shrink)

Although historians of addiction have long debated whether an oral culture of “sharing” or “Big Book”-based reading practices are foundational to 12-step recovery culture, the role other types of media have played in the development of contemporary recovery discourse has remained largely unexplored. This essay compares the production, reception and formal elements of the films The Lost Weekend and Smash Up in relation to the popularization of the disease concept of alcoholism. Through an analysis of archival sources, addiction narratives, and (...) nascent alcoholism research, this paper argues that, by emphasizing the importance of popular representations of alcoholics above scientific inquiry, early recovering “experts” successfully promulgated the disease concept of alcoholism, but the testimonials of later recovering alcoholics became relegated to the sphere of popular culture. (shrink)

In "Mathematical Truth", Paul Benacerraf articulated an epistemological problem for mathematical realism. His formulation of the problem relied on a causal theory of knowledge which is now widely rejected. But it is generally agreed that Benacerraf was onto a genuine problem for mathematical realism nevertheless. Hartry Field describes it as the problem of explaining the reliability of our mathematical beliefs, realistically construed. In this paper, I argue that the Benacerraf Problem cannot be made out. There simply is no intelligible problem (...) that satisfies all of the constraints which have been placed on the Benacerraf Problem. The point generalizes to all arguments with the structure of the Benacerraf Problem aimed at realism about a domain meeting certain conditions. Such arguments include so-called "Evolutionary Debunking Arguments" aimed at moral realism. I conclude with some suggestions about the relationship between the Benacerraf Problem and the Gettier Problem. (shrink)

All these specialist aspects of one life are different facets of the intellectual diamond which scintillates in the huge quarry of The Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario. This is the quintessential man, the bundle of contradictions passionately dedicated to intellect, at times carrying the rational argument to irrational extremes; the natural-born emotional adventurer forever hampered by orphaned youth and too-early marriage. This Russell in the round is greater than the sum of his constituent parts, a man of (...) epic proportions, struggling through a lifetime beset with frustration and near-disaster; in youth the constitutional sceptic, in old age the sometimes splendid figure with "courage never to submit or yield.". (shrink)

Many recent decisions in tort law attempt to combine two conceptually incommensurable features: a traditional 'but for' test of factual causation, and the scientific or medical evidence that is required to explain how some injury occurred. Even when applied to macroscopic objects, the 'but for' test fails to identify causes, because it merely rephrases in the language of possible worlds what may be inferred from what is inductively known about the actual world. Since scientific theories explain the occurrence of events (...) without reference to causes, this test of causation is not only ineffectual but also inapplicable to scientific or medical evidence. Tort law, therefore, should abandon the 'but for' test; when scientific or medical evidence is required in a tort case, the courts should rely on the explanatory strategies that function within the theories from which they borrow such evidence. (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to the Classical Greek sophists, placing them afresh in their cultural context. These public figures, such as Protagoras and Gorgias, were wide-ranging experts before discipline-specialization, and represent the flourishing of linguistic, historical, and philosophical reflection in the time of Socrates.

Conference Report for Toward a Science of Consciousness Tucson Conference, April 4- 8, 2006.

Early modern empiricists thought that the nature of perceptual experience is given by citing the object presented to the mind in that experience. Hallucination and illusion suggest that this requires untenable mind-dependent objects. Current orthodoxy replaces the appeal to direct objects with the claim that perceptual experience is characterized instead by its representational content. This paper argues that the move to content is problematic, and reclaims the early modern empiricist insight as perfectly consistent, even in cases of illusion, with the (...) realist contention that these direct objects of perception are the persisting mind-independent physical objects we all know and love. (shrink)

John Dupr argues that 'scientific imperialism' can result in 'misguided' science being considered acceptable. 'Misguided' is an explicitly normative term and the use of the pejorative 'imperialistic' is implicitly normative. However, Dupr has not justified the normative dimension of his critique. We identify two ways in which it might be justified. It might be justified if colonisation prevents a discipline from progressing in ways that it might otherwise progress. It might also be justified if colonisation prevents the expression of important (...) values in the colonised discipline. This second concern seems most pressing in the human sciences. (shrink)

In the Transcendental Aesthetic (TA), Kant is typically held to make negative assertations about “things in themselves,” namely that they are not spatial or temporal. These negative assertions stand behind the “neglected alternative” problem for Kant’s transcendental idealism. According to this problem, Kant may be entitled to assert that spatio-temporality is a subjective element of our cognition, but he cannot rule out that it may also be a feature of the objective world. In this paper, I show in a new (...) way how Kant’s view (focusing on his conclusions about space) is not subject to this objection, by showing that he does not make the denial about mind-independent reality that he is typically held to make. The argument develops consequences of a new reading of Kant’s expression “an sich selbst” (‘in itself’; ‘in themselves’). I argue that “an sich selbst” or “per se” has a special, judgment-level role, so that this expression does not form new noun-terms adjectivally. It follows that the conceptual unit of Kant’s “Conclusions” in the TA is simply “things” (Dinge), since “things in themselves” is not a nominal expression; Kant adopts the Wolffian ontological use of “thing” as the basic kind-term for any existent. The arguments that things per se are not in space are arguments that space cannot be a necessary property or relations of things as a kind. I show that this does not involve the positive claim about mind-independent reality that inspires the neglected alternative objection. (shrink)

A month ago, I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain. It has replaced part of my memory, storing phone numbers and addresses that I once would have taxed my brain with. It harbors my desires: I call up a memo with the names of my favorite dishes when I need to order at a local restaurant. I use it to calculate, when I need to figure out bills and tips. (...) It is a tremendous resource in an argument, with Google ever present to help settle disputes. I make plans with it, using its calendar to help determine what I can and can’t do in the coming months. I even daydream on the iPhone, idly calling up words and images when my concentration slips. Friends joke that I should get the iPhone implanted into my brain. But if Andy Clark is right, all this would do is speed up the processing, and free up my hands. The iPhone is part of my mind already. Clark is a connoisseur of the myriad ways in which the mind relies on the world to get its work done. The first part of this marvelous book explores some of these ways: the extension of our bodies, the extension of our senses, and crucially, the use of language as a tool to extend our thought. The second part of the book defends the thesis that in at least some of these cases, the world is not serving as a mere instrument for the mind. Rather, the relevant parts of the world have become parts of my mind. My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me. This is the thesis of the extended mind: when parts of the environment are coupled to the brain in the right way, they become parts of the mind. The thesis has a long history: I am told that there are hints of it in Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. But no-one has done as much to give life to the idea as Andy Clark. In a series of important books and articles—Being There, Natural-Born Cyborgs, “Magic words: How language augments human computation”, and many others—he has explored the many ways in which the boundaries between mind and world are far more flexible than one might have thought.. (shrink)

What is the role of conscious experience in the epistemology of perceptual knowledge: how should we characterise what is going on in seeing that o is F in order to illuminate the contribution of seeing o to their status as cases of knowing that o is F? My proposal is that seeing o involves conscious acquaintance with o itself, the concrete worldly source of the truth that o is F, in a way that may make it evident to the subject (...) that o is an instance of ‘x is F’ as she understands this, and hence evident that o is F. Seeing that o is F is thus a way of its being evident that o is F and is therefore a way of knowing that o is F. (shrink)

The public forum has been connected to the functioning of democracy, expressive freedom, and the media's role in society. While the public forum's legal contours have been examined, the ethical foundation of the public forum has not. Relying on archival research, this article argues that ideas about the public forum can be traced to the pragmatism of Grenville Clark, who influenced ideas about the public forum through his work on the American Bar Association's Bill of Rights Committee.

A timely new edition of the classic journalism guide, now featuring updated material on the importance of reporting in the age of media mistrust and fake news--and how journalists can use technology while also navigating its challenges. More than two decades ago, the Committee of Concerned Journalists gathered some of America's most influential newspeople to ask the question "What is journalism for?" Through exhaustive research, surveys, interviews, and public forums, they identified the essential elements that define journalism and its role (...) in our society. The result is one of the most important books on the media ever written, winner of the Goldsmith Book Prize from Harvard, the Society of Professional Journalists Award, and the Bart Richards Award from Penn State University. Updated with new material covering the ways journalists can deftly leverage technology to their advantage, especially given the shifting revenue architecture--with "clickbait" fading away and consumers paying a higher premium for quality reporting--this fourth edition of The Elements of Journalism is an essential read for journalists, students, and anybody hoping to stay informed in contentious times. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed an escalation in corporate social reporting (CSR) by UK companies (Gray, Kouhy and Lavers 1995). Whilst some elements of CSR reporting are required by law, much of it represents voluntary reporting. By investigating the non‐mandatory reporting of two aspects of social responsibility, corporate community involvement (CCI) and environmental impact, this paper seeks to explore why companies choose to make such disclosures. It specifically asks whether companies are primarily motivated by the strategic need to manage their reputation (...) and legitimacy rather than by the recognition of their ethical accountability, which is the stated purpose of reports produced by cutting edge companies (Clarke 1998). (shrink)

The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation argues for the philosophical importance of the notion of need and for an ethical framework through which we can determine which needs have moral significance. In the volume, Sarah Clark Miller synthesizes insights from Kantian and feminist care ethics to establish that our mutual and inevitable interdependence gives rise to a duty to care for the needs of others. Further, she argues that we are obligated not merely to meet others’ needs but (...) to do so in a manner that expresses "dignifying care," a concept that captures how human interactions can grant or deny equal moral standing and inclusion in a moral community. She illuminates these theoretical developments by examining two cases where urgent needs require a caring and dignifying response: the needs of the elderly and the needs of global strangers. Those working in the areas of feminist theory, women’s studies, aging studies, bioethics, and global studies should find this volume of interest. (shrink)

Introduction -- What is journalism for? -- Truth: the first and most confusing principle -- Who journalists work for -- Journalism of verification -- Independence from faction -- Monitor power and offer voice to the voiceless -- Journalism as a public forum -- Engagement and relevance -- Make the news comprehensive and proportional -- Journalists have a responsibility to conscience -- The rights and responsibilities of citizens.

Psychiatry is unique in medicine in being on the border between science and the humanities. Science provides insight into the 'causes' of a problem, enabling us to formulate an 'explanation', while the humanities provide insight into its 'meanings' and helps with our 'understanding'. The new interdisciplinary field of 'philosophy of psychiatry' has developed to explore the range of issues relevant to this border country. The Oxford Textbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry is a unique textbook which provides a detailed introduction to (...) the field, a framework for study and skill development, and an overview of current research. It focuses on case studies in 5 key topic areas. Each case study is supported by selected readings from both philosophy and mental health, thinking skills exercises, self-test questions, key learning points and detailed guides to further reading. (shrink)

The first truly introductory text on Lyotard, this book situates Lyotard's interventions in the postmodern debate in the wider context of his rethinking of the politics of representation. Bill Readings examines Lyotard's relationship to structuralism, Marxism and semiotics, and contrasts his work with the literary deconstruction of Paul de Man; he positions Lyotard's work so as to draw out the implications of poststructurlaism's attention to _difference_ in reading. Lyotard's willingness to question the political and examine the relationship between art (...) and politics is shown to undermine the charge that deconstruction abdicates political and social articulation. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss a number of different relationships between two kinds of obligation: those which have individuals as their subject, and those which have groups of individuals as their subject. I use the name collective obligations to refer to obligations of the second sort. I argue that there are collective obligations, in this sense; that such obligations can give rise to and explain obligations which fall on individuals; that because of these facts collective obligations are not simply reducible (...) to individual obligations; and that collective obligations supervene on individual obligations, without being reducible to them. The sort of supervenience I have in mind here is what is sometimes called ‘global supervenience’. In other words, there cannot be two worlds which differ in respect of the collective obligations which exist in them without also differing in respect of the individual obligations which exist in them. (shrink)

How do legal texts determine legal content? A standard answer to this question—sometimes called “the standard picture”—is that legal texts communicate something and what they communicate is identical to legal content. Mark Greenberg criticizes the standard picture and offers in its place his own “moral impact theory.” My goal here is to respond to Greenberg by showing how the standard picture better explains legal practice than the moral impact theory does. To that end, I first clarify certain aspects of the (...) moral impact theory. I then critique the theory, focusing on its inability to explain (i) why practitioners reason about legal content as they do and (ii) why they agree on legal content as often as they do. Finally, I refine the standard picture and demonstrate how it explains what the moral impact theory cannot. (shrink)

Many authors hold that collectives, as well as individuals can be the subjects of obligations. Typically these authors have focussed on the obligations of highly structured groups, and of small, informal groups. One might wonder, however, whether there could also be collective obligations which fall on everyone – what I shall call ' global collective obligations '. One reason for thinking that this is not possible has to do with considerations about agency : it seems as though an entity can (...) only be the subject of obligations if it is an agent. In this paper, I try to show that the argument from agency is not a good reason for being sceptical about the existence of global collective obligations : it derives whatever plausibility it has from the idea that claims about obligation need to be addressable to some agent. My suggestion is that we should accept this principle about the addressability of obligations, but deny that the addressee of an obligation need be the subject of that obligation. The collective obligations of unstructured collections of individuals, including global collective obligations, meet the addressability requirement insofar as they require something of the individuals who make up the collective. (shrink)

I take it for granted that sense experiential states provide reasons for empirical beliefs; indeed this claim forms the first premise of my central argument for (CC). 1 The subsequent stages of the argument are intended to establish that a person has such a reason for believing something about the way things are in the world around him only if he is in some mental state or other with a conceptual content: a conceptual state. Thus, given that sense experiential states (...) do provide reasons for empirical beliefs, they must have conceptual content. (shrink)

We perceive a world of mind-independent macroscopic material objects such as stones, tables, trees, and animals. Our experience is the joint upshot of the way these things are and our route through them, along with the various relevant circumstances of perception; and it depends on the normal operation of our perceptual systems. How should we characterise our perceptual experience so as to respect its basis and explain its role in grounding empirical thought and knowledge? I offered an answer to this (...) question in Perception and its objects. Here I aim to clarify some of my central arguments and to develop and defend the position further in the light of subsequent critical discussion. (shrink)

Extant theoretical work on the political resource curse implies that dependence on resource revenues should decrease autocracies’ likelihood of democratizing but not necessarily affect democracies’ chances of survival. Yet most previous empirical studies estimate models that are ill-suited to address this claim. We improve upon earlier studies, estimating a dynamic logit model that interacts a continuous measure of resource dependence with an indicator of regime type using data from 166 countries, covering the period from 1816-2006. We find that an increase (...) in resource dependence at time t - 1 increases the likelihood of autocratic persistence at t, but has no appreciable effect on democratic survival. We go beyond existing empirical studies to show that increases in resource dependence have persistent and substantial cumulative effects on autocracies' likelihood of becoming democratic over the long-term, showing that the total effect of resource dependence on regime type is much larger than the short-term (one period) effect indicates. (shrink)

It is sometimes argued that non-agent collectives, including what one might call the ‘global collective’ consisting of the world’s population taken as a whole, cannot be the bearers of non-distributive moral obligations on pain of violating the principle that ‘ought implies can’. I argue that one prominent line of argument for this conclusion fails because it illicitly relies on a formulation of the ‘ought implies can’ principle which is inapt for contexts which allow for the possibility of non-distributive plural predications (...) of agency, which are precisely the contexts in which we might expect non-agents to be obligation-bearers. (shrink)

Several philosophers think there are important analogies between emotions and perceptual states. Furthermore, considerations about the rational assessibility of emotions have led philosophers—in some cases, the very same philosophers—to think that the content of emotions must be propositional content. If one finds it plausible that perceptual states have propositional contents, then there is no obvious tension between these views. However, this view of perception has recently been attacked by philosophers who hold that the content of perception is object-like. I shall (...) argue for a view about the content of emotions and perceptual states which will enable us to hold both that emotional content is analogous to perceptual content and that both emotions and perceptual states can have propositional contents. This will involve arguing for a pluralist view of perceptual content, on which perceptual states can have both contents which are proposition-like and contents which are object-like. I shall also address two significant objections to the claim that emotions can have proposition-like contents. Meeting one of these objections will involve taking on a further commitment: the pluralist account of perceptual content will have to be one on which the contents of perception can be non-conceptual. (shrink)

The question how to account for illusion has had a prominent role in shaping theories of perception throughout the history of philosophy. Prevailing philosophical wisdom today has it that phenomena of illusion force us to choose between the following two options. First, reject altogether the early modern empiricist idea that the core subjective character of perceptual experience is to be given simply by citing the object presented in that experience. Instead we must characterize perceptual experience entirely in terms of its (...) representational content. Second, retain the early modern idea that the core subjective character of experience is simply constituted by the identity of its direct objects, but admit that these must be mind-dependent entities, distinct from the mind-independent physical objects we all know and love. I argue here that the early modern empiricists had an indispensable insight. The idea that the core subjective character of perceptual experience is to be given simply by citing the object presented in that experience is more fundamental than any appeal to perceptual content, and can account for illusion, and indeed hallucination, without resorting to the problematic postulation of any such mind-dependent objects. (shrink)

From time to time we explain what people do by referring to their habits. We explain somebody’s putting the kettle on in the morning as done through “force of habit”. We explain somebody’s missing a turning by saying that she carried straight on “out of habit”. And we explain somebody’s biting her nails as a manifestation of “a bad habit”. These are all examples of what will be referred to here as habit explanations. Roughly speaking, they explain by referring to (...) a pattern of a particular kind of behaviour which is regularly performed in characteristic circumstances, and has become automatic for that agent due to this repetition. (shrink)

Written by five scholars whose expertise extends across the disciplines of biblical, historical, systematic, and philosophical theology, this is a careful and ...

The standard paradigm for mental causation is a person’s acting for a reason. Something happens - she intentionally φ’s - the occurrence of which we explain by citing a relevant belief or desire. In the present context, I simply take for granted the following two conditions on the appropriateness of this explanation. First, the agent φ’s _because_ she believes/desires what we say she does, where this is expressive of a _causal_ dependence.1 Second, her believing/desiring this gives her a _reason_ for (...) φ-ing: recognizing that she has this belief/desire makes her φ-ing intelligible as rational in the light of her other attitudes and circumstances. A further condition must be met, though, if this is to be a genuine psychological explanation, a case of her acting _for_ the reason in question. Consider the following example of Davidson’s (1973, p. 79). An exhausted climber is desperate to rid herself of the weight and danger of holding her partner on a rope; and her sudden realization that simply letting go would achieve this so unnerves her that her grip loosens slightly and he falls. Her releasing him causally depends upon her having this belief and desire, which provide _a_ reason for doing what she does. But this is not _why_ she does it: it would be at best misleading to say that she dropped him, intentionally, because she was fed up with holding his weight, or because she thought that she might otherwise fall. Her letting go does not depend upon her having these reasons in the right way. The reason-giving relation is causally irrelevant. If we are to explain a person’s acting _for_ a reason, then her doing. (shrink)