Cognitive Science is a single-source undergraduate text that broadly surveys the theories and empirical results of cognitive science within a consistent computational perspective. In addition to covering the individual contributions of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence to cognitive science, the book has been revised to introduce the connectionist approach as well as the classical symbolic approach and adds a new chapter on cognitively related advances in neuroscience. Cognitive science is a rapidly evolving field that is characterized by considerable contention (...) among different views and approaches. Cognitive Science presents these in a relatively neutral manner. It covers many new orientations theories and findings, embedding them in an integrated computational perspective and establishing a sense of continuity and contrast with more traditional work in cognitive science. The text assumes no prerequisite knowledge, introducing all topics in a uniform, accessible style. Many topics, such as natural language processing and vision, however, are developed in considerable depth, which allows the book to be used with more advanced undergraduates or even in beginning graduate settings. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Judith Still offers a comprehensive discussion of Derrida's contribution to the long-standing philosophical and political debate which insists on defining 'man' against 'the animal'. She makes extensive reference to the two volumes recently published, in French and English, of Derrida's seminar series The Beast and the Sovereign, with particular attention to his source texts such as Defoe, Hobbes, La Fontaine, Rousseau, Agamben and Heidegger.

This paper examines Aquinas’s epistemological treatment of the disembodied soul in order to reveal (1) its relationship to the person it once was, and (2) the nature and extent of its self-knowledge. I argue first that disembodiment entails not only loss of personhood, but severe restriction of one’s concept of self. Consequently, individual self-consciousness is minimized. By contrast, I argue that the soul’s knowledge of its nature is likely to be realized more perfectly in the separated state, not (...) so much because of freedom from the body as the infusion of pure intelligibles. Thus, the roles of these two types of self-knowledge (particular and universal) are reversed from the case of the embodied soul, where self-consciousness is an effortless concomitant to thought and self-knowledge requires a painstaking labor. I conclude by wondering whether the cognition enjoyed in the separated state has some utility for the soul’s future, re-embodied existence. (shrink)

This paper examines Aquinas’s epistemological treatment of the disembodied soul in order to reveal (1) its relationship to the person it once was, and (2) the nature and extent of its self-knowledge. I argue first that disembodiment entails not only loss of personhood, but severe restriction of one’s concept of self. Consequently, individual self-consciousness is minimized. By contrast, I argue that the soul’s knowledge of its nature is likely to be realized more perfectly in the separated state, not (...) so much because of freedom from the body as the infusion of pure intelligibles. Thus, the roles of these two types of self-knowledge (particular and universal) are reversed from the case of the embodied soul, where self-consciousness is an effortless concomitant to thought and self-knowledge requires a painstaking labor. I conclude by wondering whether the cognition enjoyed in the separated state has some utility for the soul’s future, re-embodied existence. (shrink)

It has long been the habit of philosophers, and is still a common failing of ordinary playgoers, to see tragedy through the coloured spectacles of an acquired philosophical or religious outlook, and to commend or condemn rather from the standpoint of partiality for a certain view about life in general than from that of one assessing the intrinsic merits of a work of art. Because we all, whether laymen or specialists, theorize about the nature and destiny of that mysterious (...) universe which, for a brief span, our minds illumine, and because the working hypothesis so engendered is inevitably tinged by our personal idiosyncrasies of temperament and taste, there have been—and, building on such a foundation, there must be—almost as many different theoretical explanations of the tragic as theoreticians speculating on this high theme. Besides introducing that personal equation which has always been anathema to science, the distorted vision for which philosophical preconceptions are responsible brings with it minor illusions that are scarcely less injurious; the reading into a play or a novel of notions that had never entered the poet's brain, or the interpolation of history with incidents that never really occurred, the discarding of much that is genuinely tragic because it happens not to fit into the mould shaped by our own ideas, and the acceptance of much that is not merely untragic, but actually inartistic—pacifist, or communist, or feminist, or religious propaganda—because it happens to display the native hue of our own convictions. (shrink)

The formation of the discourse of Neo-Confucianism 1 in the Song period was a result of the interactions between many social and cultural trends. In the development of the Neo-Confucian discourse, the Cheng brothers (Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi) played key roles with their charismatic thoughts and impelling personalities, while Zhu Xi pushed Neo-Confucian thought and discourse to a pinnacle with his broad knowledge and precise reasoning. In the warm discussions and debates between different schools and thoughts, the Neo-Confucian discourse (...) proceeded towards completion and perfection, and evolved as contemporary topics and thinking modes changed. The essay argues that “ ding xing 定性 (stilling the nature)” was an important Neo-Confucian topic during the Song period. The doctrine of “stilling the nature” involves much central Neo-Confucian discourse such as the definition of xing 性 (human nature), the interior and exterior aspects of human nature, nature and qing 情 (feelings, sentiments), nature and xin 心 (mind, heart), nature and ren 仁 (benevolence, humanity, humaneness) and yi 义 (righteousness), nature and shi 事 (affair) or wu 物 (thing, object), the practice of preservation and cultivation, etc. Therefore, an examination of the formation, development and evolution of Neo-Confucianism is of great importance to the study of its early history. (shrink)

"Ever Since This World Began" from Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013) by Masha Tupitsyn continent. The audio-essay you've recorded yourself reading for continent. , “Ever Since the World Began,” is a compelling entrance into your new multi-media book, Love Dog (Success and Failure) , because it speaks to the very form of the book itself: vacillating and finding the long way around the question of love by using different genres and media. In your discussion of the face, one of the (...) themes of Love Dog , I think there is something to be said about the surfaces media create and how you constantly manipulate them in your work. This seems important for thinking also about your book LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film ; a book on film written in tweets, interposing already three sets of expectations and pushing the boundaries of each medium's faciality, it's surface tension. In Love Dog , is there another kind of facial interaction? Perhaps the discursive faces of approaching love as topic and love as method? If so, how did/do these intersect for you, do/did they drive the creation of this book? MASHA TUPITSYN With LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to pay homage to the work modernism has done on subjective time and chronological time by carrying that experiment over into the digital economy. Because LACONIA is a time-based work of cultural criticism that employs the aphorism to look at 21 st century American culture, it is also an archival work of cultural mourning and memory. And in Love Dog , which is also a work about mourning as it relates to love, I wanted to think with all my senses, and to reflect that in the writing itself by using a multi-media form. LACONIA tackled the sound bite and the promotional image--the everyday language of consumer culture--which often wants to communicate ideological agendas through the repetition of a single image or reductive phrase. I had always been interested in the approaches of artists like Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer and essayistic, typographical filmmakers, like Chris Marker and Godard. In both cases, I felt it was important to try to compose a book in which deep—critical—thinking happens in so-called immediate, informal, and disposable contexts. That is, in places where you are either not supposed to be serious or are not required to take things seriously. To me the most intervention is needed in every day instances of culture and representation. In order to do that, I had to utilize and interrogate the very structures I was critiquing. In other words, the writing had to materialize in that live, digital, public space. It couldn’t simply happen at home on a piece of paper or in a word document on my computer that no one could see until it was finished. It had to unfold in real time, amidst everything else. And it had to literally be surrounded by the cultural landscape I wanted to assess. In both LACONIA and Love Dog , I wanted to know how and if we can get away from what we cannot get away from? From which there is no respite. Given this, I don’t think hypertexts can really be called hypertexts anymore. Hypertexts are simply the world today. This is not only the way we read the world now. It is the way the world reads. Likewise, interfaciality, as you put it, works on a number of levels for me, both on and off the page. There is my relation to epistemological and phenomenological surfaces—the screen, the body, the face, the voice, gender; the official story. Then there is the way this dovetails formally, and to which the digital adds yet another dimension. It’s also where sound comes into Love Dog (giving the book a sound; giving tonality to the book’s ideas and feelings). As Anne Carson pointed out in her essay “The Gender of Sound,” the two are connected, and of course so are love and gender. In “Ever Since This World Began,” I wanted to think about the phenomenology of the voice, which is why I visualize the sonic in the book and why in my writing about faces, I look at the tonal aspects (the things a face voices and a voice faces) of a face. This was standard to do when images and faces were “silent” in the silent era. Those images/faces were extraordinarily audible. The greatest screen face, to me, is still Falconetti’s in Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc . We can hear her face—even though there is no actual sound on screen of her speaking. The internet is a similarly “silent” space where actual voices are lacking. So intertextuality goes with interfaciality. I’ve also talked a lot about how categorization worked when it came to the reception of my first book, Beauty Talk & Monsters . How despite the fact that Beauty Talk is a text that crisscrosses form and content in a variety of ways, not pinpointing its exact genre—choosing one genre over another—only made things worse. Fiction was the category people were most adverse to me using, even though of course there is a lot of fiction in the book. Part of how fiction works in Beauty Talk is in the reader not knowing exactly where the fiction resides. In Godard’s 1967 film, Weekend , for example, everything matters. Everything is political, whether it’s real or imaginary, film or reality. In Weekend , life is not a game and neither is the game a game. The game is really life. Either everything is important or nothing is. But many people want clear answers and demarcations so that they can decide what is important and what is not important. My use of the “I,” subjective criticism, made everything “real” in Beauty Talk . But fiction is in the construction. It is in the blending. This is why I perforate the movie screen and connect the onscreen and the offscreen; the official story and the backstory. Although I don’t think there is a difference between onscreen and offscreen anymore. Nor is there a dialectic. It’s all screen all the time now. Non-fiction, on the other hand, was more tolerated as a moniker. Unlike Love Dog , Beauty Talk wasn’t explicitly or tangibly (what is tangible is a question in all these books) working with digital forms or within this digital economy, so some people resisted the book’s hypertextuality or intertextuality because they couldn’t see its other forms, if that makes sense. It was a problem of invisibility; of how to make something appear (this is where Nietzsche, big presence in Love Dog , comes in—the nature of appearances). Something people don’t necessarily want to see. Some readers couldn’t see the way forms were interfacing in that book. On the surface, Beauty Talk was simply a text about media culture—the domination of entertainment as a mode of being and knowing—and most readers could only see that one side of the book. But as Godard puts it in Wim Wenders’ documentary about the future of cinema, Room 666 , “Films are made, images are made, when there’s no one looking. That’s what the invisible is, that which we don’t see. That’s what the incredible is, that which we don’t see. And cinema shows you that which we don’t see, the incredible.” We are living in the aftermath of narrative and temporal collapse, which means we don’t read or feel in the same way. I began to use digital forms in my writing because I don’t see us as traditional book people anymore. I would add that power also resides in the invisible, in the things we make invisible by making them visible. Or it did for a long time. The new face of power is quickly becoming so-called transparency, which is even more corrupt because even though we now live in a behind-the-scenes culture, and see and know how the mechanisms of power and corruption operate, we still don't change. The world still doesn't change. Finally, another important thing that Godard says in Room 666 that relates to Love Dog is: “I’m here in front of the camera, and yet in my body and in my head, I’m behind it. My world is the imaginary and the imaginary is a journey between forwards and backwards.” This idea of visible/invisible, foresight and hindsight , backwards and forwards is an important dialectic in relation to time and the idea of the destinal. This is why I wanted Love Dog to travel, literally, figuratively, and discursively. You have to be open to not knowing. To epistemological, geographical, chronological, and emotional aporias. In Love Dog my story is both visible and invisible to me. Sometimes I could see where I was going. Other times I was completely in the dark existentially. Truth procedure, which love is, as bell hooks and Badiou tell us, requires expedition and openness to possibility. Unless you want a story you already know, but that is not truth procedure. So I tried to create this backwards and forwards journey in the book—this sense of travel and motion, hope and doubt—by jumping between forms, media, time; traveling to different places, texts, and emotional registers. The book’s “Time-Jump series,” which mostly takes the form of music—songs—but also a series of “green” videos that I shot, is the most obvious tribute to this idea of subjective and chronological time. continent. Your work aligns with writers that play with the form of their language, or have assumed the role of performance artist at some point: Kathy Acker, Chris Kraus, Avital Ronell, and Anne Carson to name a few representing varied approaches that show up in Love Dog . At the risk of ossifying the work, or missing the point—as these experimental modes of writing stack-up in piles of published works, do they approach a genre? MASHA As I noted in my book Life As We Show It , in Chelsea Girls the poet Eileen Myles points out, “You can’t get money without a category.” More importantly, you can’t get a category—or respect, rank—without a clear genre. This makes genre and gender an obvious pair. The two words are even linked etymologically and both genre and gender concern taxonomies of legitimacy—of sorting through what and who is valuable. So the words share common prejudices. The things one does not want to read is often synonymous with who one doesn't want to read about. Therefore a break-up of or with genre is maybe the genre or anti-genre that could be said to link these writers. Avital Ronell breaks up with philosophical tradition and modes of inquiry. Like Nietzsche, she revaluates methods of evaluation, testing out things you are not supposed to use philosophy to test (and, by the same token, testing philosophy in ways it’s not supposed to be tested), like drugs and stupidity—where philosophy fails and we fail philosophy. And Chris Kraus does something similar in her experimental fiction, using different forms to put female subjectivity “to the test,” so to speak. All these female writers and thinkers have tried to destabilize the systems that have been set up in (and against) writing. Thus missing the mark with genre, even intentionally, means that we have missed the point in some sense as writers and thinkers. And that to me is a good thing, however difficult. We’ve started at the wrong point and gone somewhere else instead. We’ve acknowledged that writing and thinking are also about failure, and that failure is always embedded in the act of writing and in our reasons for writing. So that missing the point is also the point. Derrida insisted: “We must invent a name for those ‘critical’ inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits.” But how can you give something that resists and deforms, a name? Wouldn’t the name also be deformed? Isn't this why the aforementioned writers get hyphenated descriptors like ficto-criticism? Do we need a proper name to be able to read something carefully? I don’t think so. I don’t need it as a reader. I’ve always taken a work on its own terms. But for most people, if you don’t have an address, people don’t know how to find you. A lot of time, they won’t even know how to look. And in some cases, they’ll think you’re not even worth finding. You are not on the map because you have to literally make the map in order to exist. In her essay, “The Gender of Sound” Carson asks, “Why is female sound bad to hear?” I think for the same reason something uncategorizable (pedagogically, creatively, racially, and sexually)—Other—is hard to read. *For an audio recording of Florida , read by Masha Tupitsyn click here . continent. : We're also curious to hear know how you see the significance of 'performance' (and why the label sticks to the shoes of these authors like toilet paper) in describing this kind of writing work? MASHA I think I responded to the parenthetical portion of this question in my previous answer. As far as how performance relates to Love Dog , in Acker’s Don Quixote , which is another big presence in the book, she writes, “there is no other reality than anthropomorphism.” In Don Quixote , the dog is human and the human is dog. Which brings us to the title of Love Dog and the totemic function of the dog in the book: giving human things animal characteristics and animal things human characteristics. Rather than investing all our human love ideals into dogs, which we do constantly as a culture of dog lovers, I wanted to put the dog into love. It is the difference between the consumption of love as a patriarchal institution or status position and the essence of a type of radical and liberatory relation that would benefit humans in their bonds with other humans. So the dog in Love Dog is not simply the book’s cover or performative affect, so to speak. Love has always needed the dog, which is why the dog is the very embodiment of belief in love . Recall Argos The Great Dog and Odysseus. Argos is the only one who remembers and recognizes the ragged and old Odysseus even after his 20-year absence. So love is the high ideal and the dog, both common and dependable, is the bridge between the sacred and the profane. The dog is the house of love. And because Love Dog is a digital project, it seemed impossible to think about the post-human, technology, the virtual, or difference (which Badiou says is essential to love in In Praise of Love ) without thinking about animal-being and being-animal. Instead of simply “performing” these ideas and characteristics as literary affects, I’m interested in being-becoming. Which means the book’s tropes, leitmotifs, series, and even its titles are in service of that truth procedure. In other words, I actually want to live this way, not just write this way. And, more importantly, I want to live this way not just think this way. So Love Dog became both my totem animal and my autobiographical animal. This made the book organic, anthropomorphic—beyond literary. See the trailer to Masha Tupitsyn's new book available now from Penny Ante Editions. (shrink)

What is attention? Attention is often seen as a subject matter for the hard sciences of cognitive and brain processes, and is understood in terms of sub-personal mechanisms and processes. Correspondingly, there still is a stark contrast between the central role attention plays for the empirical investigation of the mind in psychology and the neurosciences, and its relative neglect in philosophy. Yet, over the past years, several philosophers have challenged the standard conception. A number of interesting philosophical questions concerning the (...) nature of attention arise. This article provides an introduction to contemporary debates concerning these questions. In particular, it discusses the question of how the pre-theoretic conception of attention might be reconciled with a scientific conception, arguments that provide support for an anti-reductivist theory of attention, and sketches several recent anti-reductivist theories and their inter-relations. (shrink)

The performance of natural behavior is commonly used as a criterion in the determination of animal welfare. This is still true, despite many authors having demonstrated that it is not a necessary component of welfare – some natural behaviors may decrease welfare, while some unnatural behaviors increase it. Here I analyze why this idea persists, and what effects it may have. I argue that the disagreement underlying this debate on natural behavior is not one about which conditions affect welfare, but (...) a deeper conceptual disagreement about what the state of welfare actually consists of. Those advocating natural behavior typically take a “teleological” view of welfare, in which naturalness is fundamental to welfare, while opponents to the criterion usually take a “subjective” welfare concept, in which welfare consists of the subjective experience of life by the animal. I argue that as natural functioning is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding welfare, we should move away from the natural behavior criterion to an alternative such as behavioral preferences or enjoyment. This will have effects in the way we understand and measure welfare, and particularly in how we provide for the welfare of animals in a captive setting. (shrink)

The performance of natural behavior is commonly used as a criterion in the determination of animal welfare. This is still true, despite many authors having demonstrated that it is not a necessary component of welfare –some natural behaviors may decrease welfare, while some unnatural behaviors increase it. Here I analyze why this idea persists, and what effects it may have. I argue that the disagreement underlying this debate on natural behavior is not one about which conditions affect welfare, but a (...) deeper conceptual disagreement about what the state of welfare actually consists of. Those advocating natural behavior typically take a “teleological” view of welfare, in which naturalness is fundamental to welfare, while opponents to the criterion usually take a “subjective” welfare concept, in which welfare consists of the subjective experience of life by the animal. I argue that as natural functioning is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding welfare, we should move away from the natural behavior criterion to an alternative such as behavioral preferences or enjoyment. This will have effects in the way we understand and measure welfare, and particularly in how we provide for the welfare of animals in a captive setting. (shrink)

I argue against current deflationary trends in Schelling scholarship that positive philosophy is not negative philosophy by other means but exceeds it in content and form. While nature-philosophy gives to positive philosophy the means to think the positive, the latter is not “natural” but revealed. I situate the turn to the positive in Schelling’s 1809 Freedom essay, which introduces the possibility of a real distinction between nature and God for the first time in Schelling’s thought, a possibility which (...) becomes actual in the positive philosophy as the difference between creation and its creator. Without this distinction revelation is a meaningless concept. (shrink)

In philosophy of science two questions become central in the discussion of the nature of empirical science: 1) What is a theory, i.e. how is it built up, how does it work? And: 2) How does a theory relate to its corresponding experiential basis? To deal with these two questions modern philosophy of science has devised various ‘models’ on the nature and working of scientific theories. Some aspects of these models are widely held within the community of philosophers (...) of science, but others are still being discussed quite controversially. In this paper, we will consider both kinds of aspects. Particularly, we will analyze how the meaning of scientific concepts is determined; the axiomatic construction of a scientific theory; the idea of model building views as a bridge between theory and experience; the holistic semantic thesis of science; the question about the true of scientific theories; and, finally, the hierarchic structure of theories.En filosofía de la ciencia, dos cuestiones resultan centrales en la discusión acerca de la naturalezade la ciencia empírica: 1) ¿qué es una teoría ?, es decir, ¿cómo estáconstituida y cómo funciona? y 2) ¿cómo se relaciona una teoría con su correspondientebase experiencial? Para tratar estas dos cuestiones, la moderna filosofía de la ciencia ha desarrolladovarios “modelos” sobre la naturaleza y el funcionamiento de lasteorías científicas. Algunos aspectos de estos modelos son ampliamente aceptados por lacomunidad de filósofos de la ciencia, mientras que otros son todavía discutidos de manerabastante controvertida. En este trabajo, consideraremos ambos tipos de aspectos. En particular,analizaremos cómo se determina el significado de los conceptos teóricos, la construcción axiomática de una teoría científica, la idea de las concepciones sobre la construcción de modelos como puente entre la teoría y la experiencia, la tesis semántica holista de la ciencia, la cuestión acerca de la verdad de las teorías científicas y, finalmente, la estructura jerárquica de las teorías. (shrink)

In this response to eight commentaries on my article “Kelsen, Hart, and legal normativity” I clarify some points in my original analysis and agree with some comments regarding work that still needs to be done. In particular, I attempt to distinguish my position from both Berkeleyan idealism and mere subjective perception. I agree with the commentators who urge that more must be done to analyze the nature of normativity in general, and legal normativity in particular.

Why does time appear to run in only one direction? We remember the past- but why not the future? We can influence the future- but could we, even theoretically, influence the past? Generations of philosophers and theologians, physicists and mathematicians have puzzles and speculated about these and the many other questions that surround the concept of time. Recent scientific work is said to explain the directionality of time. But time still contains many mysteries- black holes and big bangs, asymmetries and (...) relativities, arrows and loops - that will doubtless continue to occupy us for centuries to come. In this impressive collection of original articles ten internationally known scholars explore and explains the nature of time, apace and now space-time. Founded on the latest developments in thermodynamics, quantum theory and cosmology, their ideas will fascinate anyone interested in Einstein's theory of relativity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Nature of Space by Milton SantosDave McLaughlinThe Nature of Spaceby milton santos (trans. by brenda baletti) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021When asked to review Milton Santos’s The Nature of Space, I was interested mostly in the book’s core theme. As a literary geographer, my own research focuses heavily on space as an analytical concept and a lived experience; I was keen to read (...) and understand a fresh perspective on this topic. Little did I know that opening this book would connect me to a world of geography scholarship for the most part ignored, actively or otherwise, in the Anglophone academy. For my sins, I was not alone in this ignorance. In 2017, for example, one scholar felt confident in writing that:The English-speaking geographical community knows very little about the theoretical work in geography being produced in the so-called [End Page 147] “global South.” They are unaware, for example, of the work of Brazilian geographer Milton Santos.1It is not my place here to write about the reasons why this is such a mistake. Others, better qualified than me, have already done so.2 My aim here is to do three things. First, to put Santos’s arrival into English-language geography in context; second, to consider briefly his key contribution to defining the nature of space; and finally, to touch on what Santos’s book offers us more broadly.Published in 2021, Brenda Baletti’s translation of Santos’s great work arrived on the crest of a wave of discussions, debates, and scholarly interventions around decoloniality in Western geography. This movement emphasizes uncovering “still colonising frames of knowledge”3—frames “through which the world is apprehended and explained and modelled for the future”—and “craft[ing] ways of thinking harder about and against them.”4 Others have argued that the long wait for an English translation of Santos’s The Nature of Space is evidence of just such modes of thought continuing, unreflectively, among Anglophone academia. In 2019, an English-language translation of Santos’s For a New Geography was published by the University of Minnesota Press, followed by The Nature of Space in 2021. Hopefully, publications indicate that some publishers, at least, are following Stephen Legg’s call to think hard against certain predominant Western frames.The Nature of Space, despite its mere 280 pages, is an opus of sorts. Santos’s style eschews narrow conceptualization in favor of building a solid theory of space on a remarkably broad foundation of thinkers, including Braudel, Merleau-Ponty, Habermas, Latour, and many, many others. This broad foundation is a result not only of his long career and his own widely travelled life; it is necessary due to the slippery and almost-undefinable nature of space itself. In a wonderful section of For a New Geography, Santos lays out the problem facing geographers in defining this concept around which our discipline revolves:I understand why geographers have spent more time defining geography than space as the latter is extremely hard to do. The same could be said of space as Saint Augustine said of time: “if I ask myself if I know [End Page 148] what it is, I respond that I do; but, if I ask myself to define it, I respond that I do not know how.”5Part of this complication, recognized by Santos, is that “space” is a word with many meanings outside academia.6 Yet, geographers also face no simple task in defining this core concept for our own needs. Doreen Massey’s definition from For Space is one of my favorites, not only because it well illustrates the complexity of the term “space,” but also due to the range of reactions it produces in my first-year undergraduate students when I introduce it: Space is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality.7 This is a very crunchy sentence! But it gets to the heart of a conceptually complex truth: that space is the dimension in which things happen, a dimension in which we must live at all times, as well as... (shrink)

One persisting problem in political philosophy today is explaining clearly enough for effective remedies the problematic notion of “the lack of political will.” Failures of political will underestimate a cardinal element in the basically contested notion of so-called political will, namely social egoisms. This is what the founder of Eco-ethics, Tomonobu Imamichi, described by analogy with “egoism” as “nosism.” I try to elaborate here Imamichi’s analogy of individual egoism and social “nosism” in terms of the still elusive fundamental notion not (...) only of human nature itself but of the nature at issue in human nature. My basic claim will be that most political talk today of “the lack of political will” makes insufficient allowance for what we might call tentatively “the nature of human nature.” That is, the nature of human nature, I argue, involves necessarily an always present, and largely negative, major element of social and not just individual egoism. The nature in post-essentialist human nature is neither exclusively physical nor exclusively cultural. Rather, the nature in human nature is a dynamic, interacting mixture of both material and non-material aspects, including very powerful individual and social egoisms. (shrink)

"In this concluding volume of his impressive study of the history of Western thought about the nature of love, Irving Singer reviews the principal efforts that have been made by 20th-Century thinkers to analyze the phenomenon of love.... [T]he bulk of the book is taken up with critical accounts of the modern thinkers who have systematically called into question the possibility itself of love as a union of distinct human selves. For the most part, these critiques are effectively executed, (...) and they bring a high level of critical acumen to bear on skeptical theses about love that are now too often accepted as truisms."—Frederick A. Olafson, _Los Angeles Times Book Review_ "Irving Singer... has developed a method of historical analysis flexible enough to deal with all kinds of love, from Greek homosexual love in Plato, to the _philia_ and _agape_ of the New Testament, to the courtly love of medieval romance, to the Romantics, for whom love was magic.... [This] final volume brings us to the present. In 'The Modern World,' Singer offers readings of Freud, Proust, and Sartre, among others. He shows how their work was formed in reaction to the 19th-century ideal of 'merging' of the identities of lover and beloved. More often than not, the great modern writers portray love as impossible, as a field of failure and regret.... This masterpiece of critical thinking is a timely, eloquent, and scrupulous account of what, after all, still makes the world go round."—Thomas D'Evelyn, _Christian Science Monitor_ "This is the third of a three-volume history of the philosophy of love. It begins with Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche in the nineteenth century and treats Freud, Proust, Bergson, D. H. Lawrence, G. B. Shaw, Santayana, Sartre, and others in the twentieth. Although the author's approach is primarily historical, he intersperses critical remarks throughout. Most of the major themes which are discussed by philosophers of love make their way into this history, including friendship, sexual love, and the distinction between love that is based on the value of the beloved and love that bestows value on the beloved. Singer devotes a number of pages to his own views on falling in love, being in love, and staying in love.... Singer's exposition is lucid and organized; his criticisms are insightful."—_Ethics_ "In this third volume of historical overview of the development of the Western conception of love, Singer uses writers, philosophers, and psychologists to provide the reader with an overview of love in the late 19th and 20th century.... Analyzing authors such as Tolstoy, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, and Shaw and philosophers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and Santayana, as well as Freud, Singer... links each contributor's thoughts to the influence of previous writers and also provides some psycho-historical insight into their personal lives that might have been either a source or direct result of their views. In this final volume, Singer proceeds to look at not just the 'great men' influence but also provides a chapter overviewing scientific contributions to our understanding of love.... Singer's work is a significant contribution to understanding the social construction of important, abstract social and personal values. By tracing love through different historical periods through a variety of voices, Singer has created a rich history of the struggle between the ideal and the real, between the dreams of what love should provide and the reality of what relationships have been in each historical period. By personalizing the voice through psychohistorical analysis, Singer also provides insight into the shaping of ideas through the intimate struggles of the shapers."—Mark V. Chaffee, _Contemporary Psychology_. (shrink)

Perceptual constancies have been studied by psychologists for decades, but in recent years, they have also become a major topic in the philosophy of mind. One reason for this surge of interest is Tyler Burge’s (2010) influential claim that constancy mechanisms mark the difference between perception and mere sensitivity, and thereby also the difference between organisms with genuine representational capacities and ‘mindless’ beings. Burge’s claim has been the subject of intense debate. It is becoming increasingly clear, however, that we cannot (...) hope to settle this debate (as well as related debates in the philosophy of mind) without a clear and substantive theoretical account of what perceptual constancies are. In the first part of this paper, I argue that the standard definitions in the literature fall short of providing such an account. Still, as I aim to show in the second part of the paper, by taking a closer look at some of the paradigm examples, it is possible to construct a plausible general account of perceptual constancies that is both clear and substantive, and that can serve as a firm foundation for settling debates like the dispute about Burge’s ‘constancy mechanism criterion’ for perception. (shrink)

Using the method of Descriptive Experience Sampling, some subjects report experiences of thinking that do not involve words or any other symbols [Hurlburt, R. T., and C. L. Heavey. 2006. Exploring Inner Experience. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Hurlburt, R. T., and S. A. Akhter. 2008. “Unsymbolized Thinking.” Consciousness and Cognition 17 : 1364–1374]. Even though the possibility of this unsymbolized thinking has consequences for the debate on the phenomenological status of cognitive states, the phenomenon is still insufficiently examined. This paper analyzes (...) the main properties of unsymbolized thinking and advances an explanation of its origin. According to our analysis, unsymbolized thoughts appear as propositional states, that is, they are experienced as compositional conceptual phenomena, with semantic and syntactic features analogous to those of the contents of utterances. Based on this characterization, we hypothesize that UT is continuous with the activity of inner speech, in particular, it i... (shrink)

In what follows, I examine three main points which may help us to understand the deep nature of Einstein's objections to quantum mechanics. After having played a fundamental pioneer role in the birth of quantum physics, Einstein was, as is well known, far less enthusiastic about its constitution as a quantum mechanics and, since 1927, he constantly argued against the pretention of its founders and proponents to have settled a definitive and complete theory. I emphasize first the importance of (...) the philosophical climate, which was dominated by the Copenhagen orthodoxy and Bohr's idea of complementarity: What Einstein was primarily reluctant to was to accept the fundamental character of quantum mechanics as such, and to modify for it the basic principles of knowledge. I thus stress the main lines of Einstein's own programme in respect to quantum physics, which is to be considered in relation to his other contemporary attempts and achievements. Finally, I show how Einstein's arguments, when dealing with his objections, have been fruitful and some of them still worthy, with regard to recent developments concerning local nonseparability as well as concerning the problems of completeness and accomplishment of quantum theory. (shrink)

This paper examines several recent positions on the nature of testimony and argues that all are unsatisfactory. The first section argues against narrow, broad, and moderate views. The second section argues against Jennifer Lackey's recent analysis of testimony. Her position is supposed to avoid the problems of the prior accounts, but still suffers from two problems. After discussing those problems, this paper offers and defends an alternative analysis of testimony.

First published in 1848, Frederick Grimke's book, in the words of the editor, "deserves comparison with Tocqueville's justly famous work, Democracy in America, and is in certain ways superior. It is the single best book written by an American in the nineteenth century on the meaning of our political way of life." A second edition of Grimke's work was published in 1856, and a third edition appeared posthumously in 1871, but since then this classic in American thought has been almost (...) completely lost to sight. Grimke was born in South Carolina in 1791, and later moved to Ohio where he became a judge. He remained a bachelor, led a rich and cosmopolitan intellectual life, and accumulated an excellent library. His sisters Angelina (wife of the abolitionist Theodore Weld) and Sarah were both famous for deserting their South Carolina heritage and becoming active in the abolition and woman suffrage movements. In 1842 Grimke retired from the bench to devote the remainder of his life to study and writing, setting himself the task of educating his contemporaries in the nature of their society. His major achievement was The Nature and Tendency of Free Institutions. Grimke's range of topics includes the right of the majority, the character and operation of elective governments, the function of political parties, the American contrasted with the English and French constitutions, and the separation of powers in the American political systems. He sees governmental institutions as the expression of the general structure of society which calls them into being. In his Introduction, Mr. Ward points to Grimke's thesis "that the separation of powers in the frame of the American constitution works not because power is distributed within the government but because all branches of the government are, directly or indirectly, responsible to the will of the majority of the people outside the doors of government." As a result of the party system, Grimke wrote, "we may vary the paraphernalia of government as much as we please, but it still obstinately persists in every one of its departments to be a government based upon the popular will." Mr. Ward calls attention to Grimke's passionate belief that "freedom is its own justification" and that its ultimate value is that "it created the kind of character which made freedom possible." He held that "the only way to make a man fit for freedom is to give him freedom." Yet, unlike his sisters, he shared a view of race that was pervasive in his time and was unable to imagine the extension of freedom to the slave. In contradiction to his views of government and freedom, he upheld Negro slavery even to the extent of sanctioning secession to protect it. To him, "the open affirmation of the right of secession would serve to maintain the Union, not destroy it.". (shrink)

Science, and with it our understanding of evolutionary processes, is itself undergoing evolution. The evolutionary framework still most frequently used by the general public to describe and guide processes of societal development is erroneously grounded in Darwinian perspectives or, at the very least, draws facile analogies from biological evolution. The present inquiry incorporates fresh insights on the general systemic nature of developmental dynamics from the most recent advances in the transdisciplinary realm of the sciences of complexity (e.g., general evolution (...) theory, cybernetics, information and communication theory, chaos theory, dynamical systems theory, and nonequilibrium thermodynamics). The description of the evolutionary trajectory of complex dynamical systems as irreversible, periodically chaotic, and strongly nonlinear agrees with certain features of the historical processes of societal development. But there are additional features of the evolutionary dynamic of natural systems that are seldom portrayed as part of human developmental deportment. These features include elements such as the convergence of existing systems at progressively higher levels of organization, the increasingly efficient utilization of environmental energy, and the complexification of system structures in states that are progressively further removed from chemical and thermodynamic equilibria. The sciences of complexity offer insight into the laws and dynamics that govern the evolution of complex systems across a variety of disciplinary areas of investigation. Through a study of the isomorphisms across disciplinary constructs in the theoretical analyses of the principles governing the evolution of human societies, it is possible to enrich the account of developmental dynamics at the socio-civilizational level. Such an account would further our understanding of the phenomenon of societal development and provide the means for the purposeful guidance of this phenomenon in accordance with general evolutionary principles. This article sets forth the type of considerations, and outlines a general research agenda, for inquiry toward an operational model of the evolutionary development of social systems. (shrink)

Methods available for the axiomatization of arbitrary finite-valued logics can be applied to obtain sound and complete intelim rules for all truth-functional connectives of classical logic including the Sheffer stroke and Peirce’s arrow. The restriction to a single conclusion in standard systems of natural deduction requires the introduction of additional rules to make the resulting systems complete; these rules are nevertheless still simple and correspond straightforwardly to the classical absurdity rule. Omitting these rules results in systems for intuitionistic versions of (...) the connectives in question. (shrink)

The present investigation brings into view the philosophy of nature of German Idealism, a philosophical movement which emerged around the beginning of the nineteenth century. German Idealism appro- priated certain motivations of the Kantian philosophy and developed them further in a "speculative" manner (Engelhardt 1972, 1976, 2002). This powerful philosophical movement, associated above all with the names of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel - and moreover having nothing whatsoever to do with the "subjective idealism" of George Berkeley - was replaced (...) by philosophical positions designated roughly as metaphysics of the will, Marxism, life-philosophy, phenomenology and existentialism, as well as positivism, empiricism, philosophy of science, the linguistic turn, and analytic philosophy. These philosophical positions more or less still shape us today. German Idealism amounts to a virtual intellectual-historical antithesis to these movements and thus presents itself in retrospect as a striking alternative. The basis of Idealism - in its various respective forms - is the ideal <Ideelle>, and thus the opposite of that which is real. It continually takes as its task explaining the real in terms of the ideal, and this is especially true of the Idealists' philosophy of nature.' Is this a hopeless undertaking? Does Idealism not lack an empirical basis? Can one secure any solid ground whatsoever in the ether of the ideal? In what follows, I explain how, more than anyone else, Schelling and Hegel sought to handle this problem and to cope with it. By way of anticipation, a clear preference for the Hegelian philosophy of nature will emerge in what follows, a preference which may come as some surprise considering how much controversy has surrounded the significance of that view. The project of renewing a thoroughgoing philosophy of nature can meaningfully begin here. (shrink)

The history of human culture records diverse notions about possible forms of existence of the soul or analogous substances after the disintegration of the corporeal shell. Even where investigators of primitive cultures conclude that some community is at such a low level of development that it has elaborated no ideas concerning the existence of gods, demons, spirits, and so forth—even there, a cautious attitude toward such evidence is necessary. Actually, the conviction that "savages" do not have such beliefs may be (...) less a reflection of the real state of affairs than, let us say, the reluctance of members of that community to familiarize Europeans with elements of their culture that bear on spheres of life activity that are most meaningful for the tribe. Thus the anthropologist W.R. Trevathan mentions particular difficulties arising from attempts to study the actions and rituals associated with the birth of a child . Even where there is a friendly attitude toward the investigator, there still remain spheres of life to which representatives of the tribe were reluctant to allow Europeans access. For example, there is the well-known case where one anthropologist, who had lost hope of "officially" learning about the character of the rituals accompanying the birth of an infant, attempted to sneak a look at what was happening in the hut. This curiosity almost cost him his life, despite the recent goodwill of his host. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE 'NATURALNESS' OF NATURAL RELIGION Among Hume's philosophical works the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is unquestionably the easiest to read. One can easily imagine a precocious fifteen-year-old like Miss Jane Austen — who set herself to write her own History of England only a decade or so after Hume's death — coming upon the little volume that nephew David published, reading it with great excitement (and a steadily rising (...) intellectual fury), and recording the same verdict that Pamphilus offers us, but in much more 2 trenchant terms. we can also imagine her reading it again twenty years later, armed with an explanatory commentary like the one that Stanley Tweyman has now given us, and maintaining her position (this time in the more temperate terms of Pamphilus himself). For Miss Jane Austen at thirty-five had one of the most critically commonsensical minds of her time; and she was also a person of deep religious feeling. It is in defence of her feelings, rather than of my own, that this essay is written. For she was close enough to what I take to have been Hume's position to have agreed with it once she had understood it; I, on the other hand, am not. To claim that a meeting of minds between the Rector of Steventon' s daughter and the Scottish apostle of infidelity is even conceivable may seem ridiculous. Hume himself would never have thought it likely. But even if my estimate is unduly optimistic, it serves at least to underline the importance of Tweyman' s constructive commentary. For without Tweyman 's commentary, Jane Austen's reaction to the Dialogues would have been one of morally indignant, and quite categorical rejection at any age. With it to guide her, she would have been appreciative and sympathetic, even if she was still ultimately dissatisfied. (I hope to persuade those who admire them both, as I do, that David Hume and Jane Austen belonged to the same 'invisible Church'). To read the Dialogues is still relatively easy. We only have to know that we are listening to a conversation between educated men in a society where everyone professes (at least) to believe that the world they were born into was created by a God who is all-knowing and all-powerful, infinitely wise, infinitely just and good, and, above all, infinitely loving towards the only creatures in his world who are capable of recognizing what he has done for them. The Rector of Steventon's daughter would have had difficulty in appreciating the discussion properly, because she had some further, more specific, beliefs about God's relations with his beloved children. We have some (smaller) difficulties now, because we are far from believing so much (and many of us believe nothing of the sort at all). But to grasp what we are supposed to believe is not difficult; and once we know that, the conversation itself is easy to follow. Only once does it seem to get out of hand to the point of actual implausibility; and there are only three things about it that are genuinely puzzling. The conversation does not reach any conclusion — at least none that convinces us. We are not convinced because the obvious solution for the most pervasive of our three puzzles is the assumption that Philo, the speaker who appears to state an agreed conclusion, is only pretending. That he should pretend is quite right and proper for a modern philosophical dialogue. Augustine may have written straightforward expository (or 'dogmatic') dialogues; and Berkeley, following in the wake of some of Augustine's medieval imitators, may have managed to raise this form into the best imitation of a live discussion that has been achieved for the dogmatic dialogue in English. But the religious doctrine of these 'dogmatists' was orthodox. One glance at the fortunes of the great Italian dialogue writers — Bruno, Galileo, Campanella — is enough to teach us that it was not prudent to let one's own doctrine win openly when one was teaching against the Church. Jane Austen would certainly have adopted the hypothesis that Philo's professions of religious feeling are hypocritical throughout the discussion. She would have assumed that Cleanthes... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE 'NATURALNESS' OF NATURAL RELIGION Among Hume's philosophical works the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is unquestionably the easiest to read. One can easily imagine a precocious fifteen-year-old like Miss Jane Austen — who set herself to write her own History of England only a decade or so after Hume's death — coming upon the little volume that nephew David published, reading it with great excitement (and a steadily rising (...) intellectual fury), and recording the same verdict that Pamphilus offers us, but in much more 2 trenchant terms. we can also imagine her reading it again twenty years later, armed with an explanatory commentary like the one that Stanley Tweyman has now given us, and maintaining her position (this time in the more temperate terms of Pamphilus himself). For Miss Jane Austen at thirty-five had one of the most critically commonsensical minds of her time; and she was also a person of deep religious feeling. It is in defence of her feelings, rather than of my own, that this essay is written. For she was close enough to what I take to have been Hume's position to have agreed with it once she had understood it; I, on the other hand, am not. To claim that a meeting of minds between the Rector of Steventon' s daughter and the Scottish apostle of infidelity is even conceivable may seem ridiculous. Hume himself would never have thought it likely. But even if my estimate is unduly optimistic, it serves at least to underline the importance of Tweyman' s constructive commentary. For without Tweyman 's commentary, Jane Austen's reaction to the Dialogues would have been one of morally indignant, and quite categorical rejection at any age. With it to guide her, she would have been appreciative and sympathetic, even if she was still ultimately dissatisfied. (I hope to persuade those who admire them both, as I do, that David Hume and Jane Austen belonged to the same 'invisible Church'). To read the Dialogues is still relatively easy. We only have to know that we are listening to a conversation between educated men in a society where everyone professes (at least) to believe that the world they were born into was created by a God who is all-knowing and all-powerful, infinitely wise, infinitely just and good, and, above all, infinitely loving towards the only creatures in his world who are capable of recognizing what he has done for them. The Rector of Steventon's daughter would have had difficulty in appreciating the discussion properly, because she had some further, more specific, beliefs about God's relations with his beloved children. We have some (smaller) difficulties now, because we are far from believing so much (and many of us believe nothing of the sort at all). But to grasp what we are supposed to believe is not difficult; and once we know that, the conversation itself is easy to follow. Only once does it seem to get out of hand to the point of actual implausibility; and there are only three things about it that are genuinely puzzling. The conversation does not reach any conclusion — at least none that convinces us. We are not convinced because the obvious solution for the most pervasive of our three puzzles is the assumption that Philo, the speaker who appears to state an agreed conclusion, is only pretending. That he should pretend is quite right and proper for a modern philosophical dialogue. Augustine may have written straightforward expository (or 'dogmatic') dialogues; and Berkeley, following in the wake of some of Augustine's medieval imitators, may have managed to raise this form into the best imitation of a live discussion that has been achieved for the dogmatic dialogue in English. But the religious doctrine of these 'dogmatists' was orthodox. One glance at the fortunes of the great Italian dialogue writers — Bruno, Galileo, Campanella — is enough to teach us that it was not prudent to let one's own doctrine win openly when one was teaching against the Church. Jane Austen would certainly have adopted the hypothesis that Philo's professions of religious feeling are hypocritical throughout the discussion. She would have assumed that Cleanthes... (shrink)

What do modern academic economists do? What currently is mainstream economics? What is neoclassical economics? And how about heterodox economics? How do the central concerns of modern economists, whatever their associations or allegiances, relate to those traditionally taken up in the discipline? And how did economics arrive at its current state? These and various cognate questions and concerns are systematically pursued in this new book by Tony Lawson. The result is a collection of previously published and new papers distinguished in (...) providing the only comprehensive and coherent account of these issues currently available. The financial crisis has not only revealed weaknesses of the capitalist economy but also highlighted just how limited and impoverished is modern academic economics. Despite the failings of the latter being more widely acknowledged now than ever, there is still an enormous amount of confusion about their source and true nature. In this collection, Tony Lawson also identifies the causes of the discipline's failings and outlines a transformative solution to its deficiencies. Amongst other things, Lawson advocates for the adoption of a more historical and philosophical orientation to the study of economics, one that deemphasizes the current focus on mathematical modelling while maintaining a high level of analytical rigour. In so doing Lawson argues for a return to long term systematic and sustained projects, in the manner pursued by the likes of Marx, Veblen, Hayek and Keynes, concerned first and foremost with advancing our understanding of social reality. Overall, this forceful and persuasive collection represents a major intervention in the on-going debates about the nature, state and future direction of economics. (shrink)

Logic is the science of correct reasoning in any field whatever. But what are the foundations of its laws? Are they, as some have claimed, best viewed as "the laws of thought", laws grounded in facts about human psychology? Do they have their warrant merely in the conventions for linguistic behavior? Are they, as others have claimed, grounded in facts about reality more generally? Or are they, as still others would say, grounded in facts about how this and any other (...) possible world must be? Let's take a brief look at each of these four views. (shrink)

It is not known whether consciousness can affect the physical world, as a result of a free will action or in some other way. To do so, it must be able to produce physical changes that cannot be accounted for by physical laws, an ability we will refer to as causal action, and several issues relevant to this possibility are discussed. 1) Until recently it was thought that the conservation laws of physics would prohibit causal action. It has now been (...) found that such is not the case, but other problems remain. 2) Observations of brain activity show that most of the process for determining a decision is done by the brain. However, the question of whether the final determination is done by mind or the brain is still open. The issue then arises that given the large amount of processing the brain can do, why would mind do this final step and if it does, why would the amount done by mind be so small? (shrink)

There was a time when moral philosophy -- particularly Christian, and even more particularly Roman Catholic, moral philosophy -- was happily conceived of as a 'science' in which virtually everything could be deduced from a limited number of absolutes. There are moral philosophers who still spend a lifetime doing just this, but their philosophy becomes increasingly inadequate to cope with the new human understandings that have broken in on the world. Absolutist language and ethics can no longer be accepted with (...) the easy assurance they once were. The author discusses the leading moral philosophers of the Anglo-Saxon School, setting out their views clearly and fairly, and criticizing always in a positive and constructive manner. Among those he discusses are A.J. Ayer, Kurt Baier, R.M. Hare, P.H. Nowell-Smith, C.L. Stevenson, Stephen Toulmin and J.O. Urmson. (shrink)

There was a time when moral philosophy -- particularly Christian, and even more particularly Roman Catholic, moral philosophy -- was happily conceived of as a 'science' in which virtually everything could be deduced from a limited number of absolutes. There are moral philosophers who still spend a lifetime doing just this, but their philosophy becomes increasingly inadequate to cope with the new human understandings that have broken in on the world. Absolutist language and ethics can no longer be accepted with (...) the easy assurance they once were. The author discusses the leading moral philosophers of the Anglo-Saxon School, setting out their views clearly and fairly, and criticizing always in a positive and constructive manner. Among those he discusses are A.J. Ayer, Kurt Baier, R.M. Hare, P.H. Nowell-Smith, C.L. Stevenson, Stephen Toulmin and J.O. Urmson. (shrink)

Although material value-ethics was introduced into philosophy at least a century ago, confusion still persists as to what it implies. This article offers some clarification. It states how material value-ethics stands opposed to formalistic ethics, commonly – though perhaps wrongly – attributed to Kant. The resulting analysis allows us to establish a combination of features that give material value-ethics an advantage over deontological, consequentialist and other perspectives, regardless of the hermeneutics issue.

This volume is a study of the development of the idea that human social behaviour is governed by laws comparable to the laws of natural science. The author sets out to provide a clear account of the arguments put forward from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries about the nature and possibility of social laws. Although analytical rather than historical in approach, the discussions are always informed by a knowledge of the relevant context and sufficient detail is provided to (...) characterise the views in question accurately. The critical expositions of the views are presented elegantly and succinctly, in a way which reveals their bearing on the problems involved - problems which are still the subject of lively debate today. The book, which is written with great clarity and balance, will be of interest to students and specialists in the history of ideas, philosophy, law, religion and the histories and methodologies of the different social sciences. (shrink)

A conjecture on the metaphysical nature of Tractatus objects is put forward and its interpretative adequacy is tested. The clarification of the true import of the metaphor of logical space and the recognition of the theoretical role played by Wittgenstein's explicit claim that the emptiness of logical space is conceivable enable us to account for the thesis that objects are the substance of the world. Once objects are identified with those universal abstract entities which are qualia, and complexes or (...) states of affairs with their concrete instances, some statements of the Tractatus become liable to a consistent reading: that objects are colourless ; that space, time and colour are forms of objects ; that Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, though still holding for complexes, does not apply to objects . Lastly, it is shown how the interpretation of objects as qualia sheds a vivid light on the theme of the relation between objects and time. (shrink)

This chapter examines how the cognitive science of religion (CSR) relates to naturalism, as both a methodological and a metaphysical principle. CSR is heir to a rich tradition of natural histories of religion that provide integrated causal accounts of religion, based on anthropological, historical, and psychological observations. Natural histories of religion traditionally had a strong antitheistic agenda. This in part explains why CSR is still regarded as a project that has mainly negative implications for the rationality of religious beliefs. The (...) question of whether CSR challenges religious beliefs nevertheless remains a subject of enduring debate. To approach this question, I examine how naturalness is developed as a concept in CSR, exploring McCauley's claim that religion is natural. I conclude that the naturalness of religion does not challenge the epistemic standing of religious beliefs. Notably, this is a result of CSR's self‐imposed methodological constraints, in particular its attempts to reduce religious phenomena to nonreligious cognitive dispositions. (shrink)

Truth is one of the main concepts of Philosophy, some even consider it the most important of all (W. Künne). This concept is also a foundation for other philosophical concepts. Some of them even depend intrinsically on it, such as the concepts of belief (to believe in something is to believe this something is true), knowledge (if you know something then that something is true), fact (facts are what make our statements true), existence (true reality is the external world that (...) exists) and modality (there are propositions that can be true in all possible worlds), among many others. Truth is also a crucial concept for other domains. Science is said to be the search for the truth of the Natural World and the good life is said to be the pursuit of the good (Aristotle). If one considers that the good and the just are objects of knowledge (R. Campbell), then, there could be no good or justice without truth, insofar as knowledge needs truth. Also, our confidence in the robustness of western political and social institutions has always rested on truth. Unfortunately, this basis, which is the foundation of trust and, therefore, of the robustness of our institutions, is being eroded by external forces, deniers and nihilists, by undermining the concept of Truth, endangering in that way the democratic model (H. Frankfurt). The troubled events we have recently experienced – the raise of populisms, conspiracy theories, pandemic skepticism, the conflict in Ukraine not only in the battleground but also in the info space – could, to some extent, make us question whether, in fact, there is still any theoretical interest in “truth”. As several authors have noted, it seems that today we live in a society of “post-truth” (A. Szakolczai) or “veritophobia” (A. Goldman), where lies are tolerated and facts ignored. Also, for this reason, understanding what truth is by reflecting on its nature and function, from the most sophisticated conceptual schemes to its most everyday uses, seems to be a philosophical task of the utmost importance. This is why the Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia has decided to dedicate this special issue to the subject of truth. (shrink)

Does anyone still believe in romantic love? The enormous number of romance novels consumed by American women would seem to indicate that the faith lives on . ...

The problem of the individual has had both logical and metaphysical interest and is as old as Plato in the West and Gautama and Kanäda in the East. It is still a controversial problem for logicians and metaphysicians alike, and is now-a-days complicated by the change in meaning and also by the inherent ambiguity of the terms individual and particular.

The stock of natural law has risen in recent years. It is partly due to growing dissatisfaction with the elucidations offered by the legal positivists, and partly because sceptical arguments have lost their edge. In the heyday of logical positivism it was easy to say ``I don't understand what you mean by `right' . . .'' and break off discussion without more ado; but, as the bounds of unintelligibility increased and came to encompass almost the whole of human knowledge, an (...) inability to understand became not so much a boast as a confession. Many people may still be unclear about the metaphysical foundations of the moral sciences; but we are disinclined to doubt that they are serious disciplines, or to think that they need to be, or even could be, reconstructed without any moral element. Moreover, the events of this century have begun to penetrate the academic consciousness. Having witnessed the terrible tyrannies of the Nazis, the Communists and the Third World, we find it difficult to divorce our thinking about law from our thinking about morals. Although 'duty' is still an unfashionable word, people are constantly talking about the rights that are being denied them and the wrongs being inflicted on them. And these rights claimed and wrongs resented are grounded not on some existing legal enactment or a one-time social contract, but on the nature of man and the nature of the state, and are therefore, although very different from their mediaeval articulation, arguments of natural law. (shrink)

Many philosophers have endorsed G. E. Moore’s principle of organic unities – according to which the value of a whole must not be assumed to be the same as the sum of the values of its parts – claiming this principle to be of fundamental importance to ethics. In this paper, I cast doubt on the principle. In Section 1, I provide a provisional reformulation of the principle of organic unities and contrast such unities with mere sums of value. In (...) Section 2, I do some groundwork in order to arrive at an account of the part–whole relation with which the principle of organic unities is concerned. In so doing, I provide some further reformulations of that principle. In Section 3, I discuss the isolation method that Moore proposes for determining the value of something, and then, in Section 4, I begin an extended discussion of a particular example of an alleged organic unity, namely, Schadenfreude. I explain why some philosophers claim that such pleasure constitutes an organic unity, but I also present reasons for denying this claim. In Section 5, I pursue one of these reasons in particular, a reason that appeals to the concept of what I call evaluative inadequacy, and, in Section 6, I seek to motivate this appeal by drawing on the relation between value and fitting attitudes. In so doing, I provide still further reformulations of the principle of organic unities. In Section 7, I entertain objections to my account of Schadenfreude, one of which requires one final reformulation of the principle of organic unities, and then, in Section 8, I discuss the more general objection that, even if my reasons for denying that Schadenfreude constitutes an organic unity are cogent, these reasons do not extend to other alleged organic unities, such as the related phenomenon of Mitleid. In the final section, I address the significance of the debate about whether the principle of organic unities is true. (shrink)

G. E. Moore was a central figure in twentieth-century philosophy. Along with Russell and Wittgenstein, he pioneered analytic philosophy, and his Principia Ethica shaped the contours of twentieth-century ethics. Indeed, until the publication of Rawls's A Theory of Justice, no single book in moral philosophy was to equal Principia's influence. Unfortunately, however, Principia Ethica has so dominated critical discussions of Moore's work that even experts on his moral philosophy have tended to ignore his Ethics, which he published eight years later. (...) But Ethics is Moore's only other book on moral philosophy, and one of only a handful of post-Principia publications dealing with ethics. Its detailed discussions of utilitarianism, free will, and the objectivity of moral judgements find no real counterpart in Principia while its account of right and wrong and of the nature of intrinsic value deepen our understanding of his moral philosophy. The republication of Ethics thus rounds out our understanding of Moore's ethical thought. But the book's value goes beyond its historical or scholarly interest. A short but philosophically rich text, Ethics stands independent of Principia and repays careful study in its own right. By raising a number of fundamental questions in ethics, questions that remain live today, by proffering clear, credible, and often innovative answers to them, and by doing so with a philosophical skill that is still impressive, Moore's short book is a minor classic. Almost a century after its original publication, it still amply rewards those who read it.This new edition of Moore's Ethics includes his essay 'The Nature of Moral Philosophy' as well as editorial notes, an introduction, and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

As I understood it, the general aim of the symposium was exploratory. Is there need of cooperation between the two divisions? And in what respects? Granting the fullest measure of autonomy, in what way, if any, can there still be mutual assistance?

Conclusions reached using common sense reasoning from a set of premises are often subsequently revised when additional premises are added. Because we do not always accept previous conclusions in light of subsequent information, common sense reasoning is said to be nonmonotonic. But in the standard formal systems usually studied by logicians, if a conclusion follows from a set of premises, that same conclusion still follows no matter how the premise set is augmented; that is, the consequence relations of standard logics (...) are monotonic. Much recent research in AI has been devoted to the attempt to develop nonmonotonic logics. After some motivational material, we give four formal proofs that there can be no nonmonotonic consequence relation that is characterized by universal constraints on rational belief structures. In other words, a nonmonotonic consequence relation that corresponds to universal principles of rational belief is impossible. We show that the nonmonotonicity of common sense reasoning is a function of the way we use logic, not a function of the logic we use. We give several examples of how nonmonotonic reasoning systems may be based on monotonic logics. (shrink)

The standard analysis of quantification says that determiner quantifiers (such as every) take an NP predicate and create a generalized quantifier. The goal of this paper is to subject these beliefs to crosslinguistic scrutiny. I begin by showing that in St'á'imcets (Lillooet Salish), quantifiers always require sisters of argumental type, and the creation of a generalized quantifier from an NP predicate always proceeds in two steps rather than one. I then explicitly adopt the strong null hypothesis that the denotations of (...) quantifiers should be crosslinguistically uniform. Since the Salish data cannot be captured by the usual analysis of English, I pursue the idea that English is reducible to the Salish pattern. Reanalysis of many English constructions is required. I argue that the reanalysis has advantages over the standard analysis for partitives, as well as for non-partitive all- and most-phrases, which I analyze as containing bare plurals of argumental type. Even where the new analysis faces some challenges (for example, with every), the attempt still leads to fruitful results. It forces us to view familiar constructions in a new light, and to redefine, I believe correctly, which quantificational constructions are ‘basic’ and which stand in need of further explanation. (shrink)

The role that trust plays in blockchain-based systems is understood and portrayed in various manners. The blockchain technology is said to enable and establish trust as well as to redirect it, to substitute for it, and to make it obsolete. Furthermore, there is disagreement on whom or what users have to trust when using the blockchain technology: code, math, algorithms, and machines, or still human actors. This paper hypothesizes that the divergences of the depictions largely rest on implicitly adhering to (...) different accounts of trust. Thus, the goal of this paper is to outline how the current lack of a shared understanding of the term “trust” leads to diverging interpretations of the blockchain technology’s core features. Furthermore, it shows how this lack of common understanding obstructs scholars from referring to one another meaningfully in the discourse on blockchain technology. To do so, this paper outlines the most prominent depictions of the setup of relevant trust relationships within blockchain-based systems and traces their roots to different underlying assumptions on the nature of trust. (shrink)

The quest for finding the right interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is as old as QM and still has not ended, and may never end. The question what an interpretation of QM is has hardly ever been raised explicitly, let alone answered. We raise it and answer it. Then the quest for the right interpretation can continue self-consciously, for we then know exactly what we are after. We present a list of minimal requirements that something has to meet in order to (...) qualify as an interpretation of QM. We also raise, as a side issue, the question how the discourse on the interpretation of QM relates to hermeneutics in Continental Philosophy. (shrink)