One of the most peculiar features of the belief in God is the accompanying claim that God is an indescribable mystery, an object of faith but never an object of knowledge. In certain contexts – in worship, for example – this claim undoubtedly serves a useful purpose; and so I do not want to dismiss the idea altogether. But when pious remarks about the ineffable nature of God are taken out of context and turned into philosophy, the result is usually (...) an epistemological muddle. The trouble, of course, is that those who insist on God's mysteriousness still manage to say all sorts of things about him; he is an incorporeal spirit, he created the world, he loves his creatures, and so on. To assert these things is to presume some understanding of God, but no understanding is possible if God is completely incomprehensible. So if that is how it is, if the object of religious belief is utterly incomprehensible, then it makes no sense to say – or believe – anything about God. (shrink)

Remarkable in the range that it covers, The Possibilities of Sense testifies to an equally remarkable philosopher. In essays on ethics and thephilosophy of religion, on literature and education, the contributors displaynot only the breadth of D.Z. Phillips's work but also its power. This powercomes largely from Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose significance as a moral and religious philosopher rivals his reputation as a philosopher of language.

Despite the tendency to think that the justification of revealed truths depends on a verifiable contact with divine reality, this essay argues that the authoritative status of revelations is due to their role in defining a distinctively religious order of judgment. Rather than being immediately apparent to everyone, this kind of authority is local to particular forms of judgment that depend on the principles that frame these ways of thinking. Revelatory claims are logically exempted from the normal demands of justification (...) because of this role they have as definitive judgments, and they share their immunity from ordinary forms of justification with other axiomatic principles. Yet their authority can in certain cases be challenged, and it is a secondary purpose of this essay to bring the various ways of challenging their truth to light. (shrink)

The Middle Platonic tradition forms the main focus of these studies, many of which derive from Professor Whittaker's work on the writings of Alcinous (formerly attributed to Albinus) and their place and importance in that tradition. He follows the transmission of different texts, and the development of the commentaries upon them, from Classical times through the Byzantine world up to the Renaissance and beyond. Most of the articles, however, deal with the evolution of Platonic thought in the first centures (...) A.D., its interaction with other schools of thought, such as Neopythagoreanism, and the influence of Hellenistic philosphy upon the growth of Early Christian thought and theology. Additional notes and references have now been supplied. (shrink)

Kierkegaard occasionally mentions a type of belief which he calls an “existence communication,” and his discussion of such beliefs parallels his discussion of subjective truths (in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript). Existence communications include religious beliefs. I suggest that it is less misleading to focus on this term than it is to wrestle with the difficult and overworked notion of subjective truths; ultimately, his view of religious beliefs can be seen more clearly.His view does not fully emerge, however, without the assistance (...) of some other concepts. My thesis is that existence communications are comparable in their resistance to objective forms of adjudication to first principles, and comparable in their “self-involving” characteristics to teleological principles about the “raison d’etre of existence.This account not only helps to clarify Kierkegaard’s discussion, but it also offers two important hints about modern problems regarding religious belief. It suggest that religious claims may indeed be truth claims, and it suggests that there is more to the justification than comes out in a consideration of evidence. (shrink)

As an illustration of what Phillips called the "heterogeneity of sense," this essay concentrates on differences in what is meant by a "reason for belief." Sometimes saying that a belief is reasonable simply commends the belief's unquestioned acceptance as a part of what we understand as a sensible outlook. Here the standard picture of justifying truth claims on evidential grounds breaks down; and it also breaks down in cases of fundamental moral and religious disagreement, where the basic beliefs that we (...) hold affect our conception of what counts as a reliable ground of judgment. Phillips accepts the resultant variations in our conceptions of rational judgment as a part of logic, just as Wittgenstein did. All objective means of determining the truth or falsity of an assertion presume some underlying conceptual agreement about what counts as good judgment. This means that the possibility of objective justification is limited. But no pernicious relativism results from this view, for as Wittgenstein said, "After reason comes persuasion." There is, moreover, a non-objective criterion of sorts in the moral and religious requirement that one be able to live with one's commitments. In such cases, good judgment is still possible, but it differs markedly from the standard model of making rational inferences. (shrink)

God, the sacred, is radically indwelling and immanent; therefore, nature is enough to satisfy our thirst for transcendence. The transcendent is the radically indwelling capacity of love to bring new life and a sense of being at home in the universe to us and to the people of the world. The epic of evolution, the scientific story of evolution understood as cosmogenesis, is the foundation of this position. However, my primary focus is on one particular practice of internalizing the transforming (...) power of the scientific story of evolution—that of story. Here the practice of story is understood as framing moments of our encounters with matters of faith and love, creating narratives out of these moments, embracing these narratives as a kind of personal scripture, and telling these narratives as a source of inspiration and of guidance about how we are to be of use in the world. (shrink)

One persistent element of Wittgenstein’s philosophical work is his insistence on self-honesty as a condition for doing logical or sense-oriented philosophy.This gives his work a spiritual weight that is not often appreciated. Yet the connection between self-honesty and logical insights is unclear, and this paper attemptsto clarify it. The paper includes brief introductions to Wittgenstein’s earlier and later thought, along with some religiously relevant examples.

To see how one can unselfishly pursue his moral obligations for the sake of being happy, we need to distinguish between the universal, unchosen, unfocused desire for happiness and the particular, variable desire for that in which we invest our larger interest in being happy. Only the latter form of the desire for happiness threatens to reduce morality to a menial status.

This chapter contains sections titled: Works cited Additional recommended readings.

What conclusions do the facts of cosmic and organic evolution require or permit on the origin and destiny of the world and the individual? From 1881 to 1925 Thomas Whittaker, an Oxford-trained scientist turned philosopher, grappled with this question, which he tried to answer by metaphysical interpretation of the sciences. The majority of the essays in this volume first appeared in Mind, and a few in other journals, while three had not been previously published. Whittaker ranges widely over (...) some of the most daring theories of the past, from the early centuries of the common era (including Apollonius of Tyana and Origen), to the middle ages (including John Scotus Erigena and Nicholas of Cusa), the renaissance (Giordano Bruno, Shakespeare) and the early modern period. Whittaker's own view is that hypothesis and imagination are legitimate aids in the search for truth in both science and philosophy in a new synthesis. (shrink)

The two thinkers who have been brought together as the subject of this volume spring out of what is broadly the same movement of modern thought. Both, on the intellectual side, were adherents of the philosophy called in general experimental. For both alike the whole effort of thought was inspired by a social aim. The difference is that by the younger of the two the experience regarded as the ground of knowledge was supposed to be explicable by impressions on the (...) individual mind whereas the elder had transcended individualism in this sense and conceived of knowledge as fundamentally a social product. (shrink)

The paper is a study of the logic of existence, negation, and order in the Neoplatonic tradition. The central idea is that Neoplatonists assume a logic in which the existence predicate is a comparative adjective and in which monadic predicates function as scalar adjectives that nest the background order. Various scalar predicate negations are then identifiable with various Neoplatonic negations, including a privative negation appropriate for the lower orders of reality and a hyper-negation appropriate for the higher. Reversion to the (...) One can then be explained as the logical inference of hyper-negations from mundane knowledge. Part I develops the relevant linguistic and logical theory, and Part II defends Wolfson and the scalar interpretation against the more traditional Aristotelian understanding of Whittaker and others of reversion as intensional abstraction. (shrink)

"The world's leading expert on the unconscious mind reveals the hidden mental processes that secretly govern every aspect of our behavior. For more than three decades, Dr. John Bargh has been conducting revolutionary research into the unconscious mind--not Freud's dark, malevolent unconscious but the new unconscious, a helpful and powerful part of the mind that we can access and understand through experimental science. Now Dr. Bargh presents an engaging and enlightening tour of the influential psychological forces that are at (...) work as we go about our daily lives--checking a dating app, holding a cup of hot coffee, or getting a flu shot. Dr. Bargh takes you into his labs at New York University and Yale where his ingenious experiments have shown how the unconscious guides our actions, goals and motivations in areas like race relations, parenting, business, consumer behavior, and addiction. He reveals the pervasive influence of the unconscious mind on who we choose to date or vote for, what we buy, where we live, how we perform on tests and in job interviews, and much more. Before You Know It is full of surprising and entertaining revelations as well as tricks to help you remember to-do items, shop smarter, and sleep better. Before You Know It will profoundly change the way you understand yourself by introducing you to a fascinating world only recently discovered, the world that exists below the surface of your awareness and yet is the key to unlocking new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving."--Jacket. (shrink)

The notion of Simulative Reasoning in the study of propositional attitudes within Artificial Intelligence (AI) is strongly related to the Simulation Theory of mental ascription in Philosophy. Roughly speaking, when an AI system engages in Simulative Reasoning about a target agent, it reasons with that agent’s beliefs as temporary hypotheses of its own, thereby coming to conclusions about what the agent might conclude or might have concluded. The contrast is with non-simulative meta-reasoning, where the AI system reasons within a detailed (...) theory about the agent’s (conjectured) reasoning acts. The motive within AI for preferring Simulative Reasoning is that it is more convenient and efficient, because of a simplification of the representations and reasoning processes. The chapter discusses this advantage in detail. It also sketches the use of Simulative Reasoning in an AI natural language processing system, ATT-Meta, that is currently being implemented. This system is directed at the understanding of propositional attitude reports. In ATT-Meta, Simulative Reasoning is yoked to a somewhat independent set of ideas about how attitude reports should be treated. Central here are the claims that (a) speakers often employ commonsense (and largely metaphorical) models of mind in describing agents’ attitudes, (b) the listener accordingly needs often to reason within the terms of such models, rather than on the basis of any objectively justifiable characterization of the mind, and (c) the commonsense models filter the suggestions that Simulative Reasoning comes up with concerning target agents’ reasoning conclusions. There is a yet tighter connection between the commonsense models and the Simulative Reasoning. It turns out that Simulative Reasoning can be rationally reconstructed in terms of a more general type of reasoning about the possibly-counterfactual “world” that the target agent believes in, together with an assumption that that agent has a faithful representation of the world. In the ATT-Meta approach, the reasoner adopts that assumption when it views the target agent through a particular commonsense model (called IDEAS-AS-MODELS). (shrink)

Qualitative Complexity offers a critique of the humanist paradigm in contemporary social theory. Drawing from sources in sociology, philosophy, complexity theory, 'fuzzy logic', systems theory, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, the authors present a new series of interdisciplinary perspectives on the sociology of complex, self-organizing structures.

Reconciling paraphrases, this chapter states, are intended to show that two apparently inconsistent claims are in fact consistent. A growing number of philosophers have come to doubt the legitimacy of reconciling paraphrases due to the lack of ‘respectable’ evidence that can be provided on their behalf. Specifically, these critics think that in order to be plausible, reconciling paraphrases must be accompanied by evidence that would be of interest to linguists, semanticists, or philosophers of language. Since reconciling paraphrases are almost never (...) offered with such evidence, these critics maintain that such paraphrases can be dismissed as mere wishful thinking. This chapter argues that this concern is mistaken: for many paraphrases, a lack of such evidence is not even a concern, much less a condemnation. (shrink)

Written as companion texts, the Bendō 弁道 and the Benmei 弁名 present Ogyū Sorai’s most mature and comprehensive expression of his philosophical thought. Sorai modestly spoke of the texts in a letter to a student, Uno Shirō 宇野士朗, calling them “my humble achievements”. In another letter to a student, Yamagata Shūnan 山県周南, Sorai related that after a prolonged bout with ill-health, he feared passing like the morning dew. Therefore, he took up his writing brush and completed the two works. Sorai (...) added that while more than a millennium had passed since Confucius’ death, the Way had only been clarified in recent times. Yet rather than boast of this, Sorai suggested that his hand in the process had been by heaven’s decree. With the two works, he added that even if he passed away soon, his life would not have been wasted. (shrink)

This paper explores Ogyū Sorai’s 荻生徂徠 thinking on the most sensational and controversial incident of eighteenth-century Japan, and perhaps the most well-known in all Japanese history, the forty-seven rōnin incident of 1701–1703. Viewed in relation to his lifework, Sorai’s views on the incident are significant insofar as they reveal the extent to which his philosophical thinking was occasionally shaped decisively by neither ancient Chinese nor later Confucian texts, Neo- or otherwise, but instead by formative life-experiences he had as a youth (...) living in exile. No doubt, Confucian and Neo-Confucian notions, which Sorai knew in-depth, helped him filter, epistemologically, events, issues, and most importantly what he understood to be righteous and just behaviour in a polity. Yet ironically enough, Sorai’s thinking on the rōnin incident shows that however philosophically erudite, cosmopolitan, and urbane he was as an intellectual, his appraisals of things sometimes harked back to rural experiences he had early on with some of the most primitive and foundational expressions of human agency, civilization, and socio-political ethics in early-eighteenth century Japan. In the process, Sorai’s essay reveals, through its later resonance with some Meiji thought, how his views on those same primitive expressions remained relevant even in modern contexts. (shrink)

On the life and philosophy of Ramana Maharshi and his views on Advaita and epistemology.

I present considerations surrounding pre-reflective self-consciousness, arising in work I am conducting on a new physicalist, process-based account of [phenomenal] consciousness. The account is called the meta-causal account because it identifies consciousness with a certain type of arrangement of meta-causation. Meta-causation is causation where a cause or effect is itself an instance of causation. The proposed type of arrangement involves a sort of time-spanning, internal reflexivity of the overall meta-causation. I argue that, as a result of the account, any conscious (...) process has PRSC. Hence, PRSC does not need to be taken as a stipulation or argued for on purely phenomenological grounds or as a necessary support for reflective consciousness. I also show how it is natural to the account that PRSC is not an additional, peripheral, sort of consciousness, but is intrinsic to all consciousness, thereby fitting claims about self-intimation and co-constitution by various authors, and also being amenable to an adverbial account. As part of this, consciousness of an external object is just the form that current self-consciousness takes, the meta-causal constitution of it being inextricably modulated by the causal relationship with the object. The article also discusses how MCA helps explore issues of for-me-ness, transparency of perceptual consciousness, and possible immediacy and non-relationality of self-consciousness. (shrink)

[Edited from Conclusion section:] We have looked at various challenging issues to do with getting connectionism to cope with high-level cognitive activities such a reasoning and natural language understanding. The issues are to do with various facets of generalization that are not commonly noted. We have been concerned in particular with the special forms these issues take in the arena of propositional attitude processing. The main problems we have looked at are: (1) The need to construct explicit representations of generalizations, (...) not just generalize correctly to individual cases; (2) The need to be able to match two or more complex short-term information structures, to enable rapid generalization from recent examples rather than from long-term memories; (3) The need to represent and reason with anomalous combinations of concepts; (4) The need to perform embedded reasoning. This presents special problems for systems using non-concatenative representations (as in mainstream connectionist approaches). We also touched on vague quantification in attitude report complements. Neither this topic nor that of analogies between short-term structures (point 2) has been adequately addressed in the symbolic framework, let alone in connectionism. -/- The opportunities and problems covered are put forward as things worth being optimistic about or pessimistic about, respectively. They are not put forward as decisive arguments for or against connectionism. The hope is that this chapter contributes to a greater understanding of the connectionist/symbolist gap by presenting some unusual issues and by throwing new light on some well known ones. (shrink)

This article arises indirectly out of the development of a particular approach, called ATT-Meta, to the understanding of some types of metaphorical utterance. However, the specifics of the approach are not the focus of the present article, which concentrates on some general issues that have informed, or arisen from, the development of the approach. The article connects those issues to the questions of metaphorical meaning and truth. -/- A large part of the exploration of metaphor in fields such as Cognitive (...) Linguistics and natural language Pragmatics takes metaphor to rest on complex mappings between a target subject matter and a source subject matter (see, e.g., Lakoff 1993, 2008). This is one main way in which some aspects of the source, generally including some structural aspects, can have parallels in the target. It is typical for much, and perhaps the whole, of the meaning of a metaphorical expression to be explained by means of these parallels. We will talk about “parallelism” rather than “isomorphism,” or even “analogy,” because “isomorphism” implies a strict one-to-one correspondence between items in the source scenario and items in the target scenario, and analogy theorists often hold that analogy rests on isomorphism. We wish not to prejudge the question of whether looser, messier forms of parallelism are sometimes needed. Also, we will talk about parallels rather than mappings, because our discussion will embrace the question of parallelism that may be discernible, albeit implicitly, in accounts of metaphor that are not presented as being based on mappings. Three main cases of such accounts are Relevance Theory (RT: e.g., Sperber & Wilson 2008, Wilson & Carston 2006), the categorization-based or "class-inclusion“ approach (Glucksberg 2008), and Ritchie’s (2006) CLST account (Context-Limited Simulation Theory). -/- One main issue we will address is that of substantial non-parallelism that can exist between source and target subject-matters in metaphor: more precisely, the issue that there may be source aspects that are exploited by the utterance and have a deep effect on metaphorical interpretation but that do not themselves have a natural parallel in the target subject-matter (although we will point out that artificial parallels can generally be created). This is part of a broader point that the content of metaphorical discourse should often be seen as being derived in a rather holistic way from several metaphorical bits of the discourse, which conspire to describe some source-domain scenario, rather than being derived by putting together metaphorical meanings of each metaphorical bit (even if each bit could in principle be assigned its own separate metaphorical meaning). As a result, we suggest that it is misguided to think of the propositions making up the content (or, if you like, "meaning“) about the target scenario that is being described is a matter of metaphorical meaning of specific grammatical units such as sentences, clauses or other constituents that a traditional semantic theory would assign propositional meaning to. Rather, grammatical units (that are to be taken metaphorically) have meanings in source-domain terms; content in target-domain terms is derived from the source-domain scenario depicted by those units and fleshed out through inference; and the target-domain content is only (in general) fuzzily relatable to particular grammatical units. This view is on a spectrum at whose extreme point we could place Davidson’s (1984) view that metaphors only have literal (i.e., source-domain) meanings, with other effects on the understander not being a matter of propositional content. However, on our view it is proper to take metaphorical discourse as having non-literal meaning, couched as a collection of propositions, among other things possibly; it is just that the propositions are not to be thought of (in general) as meaning of specific sentences, clauses or other grammatical units rather than of a possibly only fuzzily delineated piece of discourse. -/- A second main concern of the article is the question of how much, and what types of, inference are involved in the derivation of metaphorical meaning. While our own ATT-Meta approach accords with, amongst other accounts, Relevance Theory (RT) as to the centrality of inference in metaphor interpretation, we disagree with RT on its claim that metaphor interpretation is a matter of (a relatively high degree of) concept "broadening“ and (often) "narrowing“. We argue that almost all inference can in fact be theoretically re-described as concept broadening and/or narrowing, and what is left over should be included in the metaphor interpretation process anyway. Thus, the RT claim about broadening and narrowing really just says that inference, of unrestricted type, is involved in metaphor understanding, in accord with what ATT-Meta claims. (shrink)

This study examines Itō Jinsai’s 伊藤仁斎 (1627–1705) criticisms of the Great Learning (C: Daxue 大學 J: Daigaku). Three primary sources are considered: Jinsai’s Shigi sakumon 私擬策問 (Personal Essays, 1668); the Daigaku teihon 大學定本 (The Definitive Text of the Great Learning, manuscript 1685); and his essay, “Daigaku wa Kōshi no isho ni arazaru no ben” 大學非孔氏之遺書辨 (The Great Learning is not a Writing Confucius Transmitted, 1705), appended to his Gomō jigi 語孟字義. The study suggests that Jinsai’s critical inclinations grew from his (...) acceptance of Zhu Xi’s views about the value of doubt for progress in learning. The study also suggests that Jinsai’s thinking on the Great Learning had political implications derived in many respects from Jinsai’s overall approach to philosophizing via analysis of words and their meanings. (shrink)

Closure is the epistemological thesis that if S knows that P and knows that P implies Q, then if S infers that Q, S knows that Q. Fred Dretske acknowledges that closure is plausible but contends that it should be rejected because it conflicts with the plausible thesis: Conclusive reasons (CR): S knows that P only if S believes P on the basis of conclusive reasons, i.e., reasons S wouldn‘t have if it weren‘t the case that P. Dretske develops an (...) analysis of knowing that centers on CR, and argues that the requirement undermines skepticism by implying the falsity of closure. We develop a Dretske-style analysis of knowing that incorporates CR, and we argue that this analysis not only accords with closure, but also implies it. In addition, we argue that the analysis accounts for the prima facie plausibility of closure-invoking skeptical arguments, and nonetheless implies that they are fallacious. If our arguments turn out to be sound, the acceptability of Dretske‘s analysis of knowing will be significantly enhanced by the fact that, despite implying closure, it undermines closure-based skepticism. (shrink)

This volume is a state-of-the-art review of the evidence and theory supporting the existence and significance of automatic processes in our daily lives, with chapters by the leading researchers in this field today.

GUM is a linguistically-motivated ontology originally developed to support natural language processing systems by offering a level of representation intermediate between linguistic forms and domain knowledge. Whereas modeling decisions for individual domains may need to be responsive to domain-specific criteria, a linguistically-motivated ontology offers a characterization that generalizes across domains because its design criteria are derived independently both of domain and of application. With respect to this mediating role, the use of GUM resembles the adoption of upper ontologies as tools (...) for mediating across domains and for supporting domain modeling. This paper briefly introduces the ontology, setting out its origins, design principles and applications. The example cases for this special issue are then described, illustrating particularly some of the principal differences and similarities of GUM to non-linguistically motivated upper ontologies. (shrink)