This article challenges the neo-Darwinist physicalist position assumed by currently prevalent naturalizing accounts of consciousness. It suggests instead an evolutionary understanding of cognitive emergence and an acceptance of mental capacity as a phenomenon in its own right, differing qualitatively from, although not independent of, the physical and material world. I argue that if we accept that consciousness is an adaptation enabling survival through immediate individual intuition of the world, we may accept this metaphysics as a given. Methodological focus can then (...) shift to investigating the, as yet untheorized, nature of consciousness itself as capacity/interconnectivity/potential. The article accepts Joseph Margolis's recent advocacy of a pragmatist approach that is "natural but not naturalizable" , that is, an anti-reductionist as opposed to an eliminativist position, but it seeks to develop this position further and to give it new direction. (shrink)

The point of Hegel's dissatisfaction with Kant -- Rethinking Peirce's fallibilism -- Pragmatism's future : a touch of prophecy.

The Conceptual Mind’s twenty-four newly commissioned essays cover the most important recent theoretical developments in the study of concepts, identifying and exploring the big ideas that will guide further research over the next decade. Topics include concepts and animals, concepts and the brain, concepts and evolution, concepts and perception, concepts and language, concepts across cultures, concept acquisition and conceptual change, concepts and normativity, concepts in context, and conceptual individuation.

This paper provides a sketch of a fresh conception of the “metaphysics” of culture and a sense of its conceptual power and advantages, based on a post-Darwinian account of the artifactual, hybrid nature of a person, chiefly in terms of (what I treat as terms of art) Bildung (“external” and “internal”), Sittlichkeit (both descriptive and normative), and interpretation (diversely manifested in different sectors of inquiry). I consider the (“metaphysical”) relationship between membership in the species Homo sapiens sapiens and functioning as (...) a person the generic distinction of human cultures (enlanguaged cultures), which I call Intentionality (that is, whatever is culturally significant or significative); and the bearing of the thesis on familiar philosophical quarrels and theory of the sciences. (shrink)

"It is well to remind ourselves, from time to time, that "Ethics" is but another word for "righteousness," that for which many men and women of every generation have hungered and thirsted, and without which life becomes meaningless. Certain forms of personal righteousness have become to a majority of the community almost automatic. But we all know that each generation has its own test, the contemporaneous and current standard by which alone it can adequately judge of its own moral achievements. (...) To attain individual morality in an age demanding social morality, to pride one's self on the results of personal effort when the time demands social adjustment, is utterly to fail to apprehend the situation. This book is a study of various types and groups who are being impelled by the newer conception of Democracy to an acceptance of social obligations involving in each instance a new line of conduct."--. (shrink)

In Paradigms and Barriers Howard Margolis offers an innovative interpretation of Thomas S. Kuhn's landmark idea of "paradigm shifts," applying insights from cognitive psychology to the history and philosophy of science. Building upon the arguments in his acclaimed Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, Margolis suggests that the breaking down of particular habits of mind—of critical "barriers"—is key to understanding the processes through which one model or concept is supplanted by another. Margolis focuses on those revolutionary paradigm shifts— such as the switch (...) from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican worldview—where challenges to entrenched habits of mind are marked by incomprehension or indifference to a new paradigm. Margolis argues that the critical problem for a revolutionary shift in thinking lies in the robustness of the habits of mind that reject the new ideas, relative to the habits of mind that accept the new ideas. Margolis applies his theory to famous cases in the history of science, offering detailed explanations for the transition from Ptolemaic to cosmological astronomy, the emergence of probability, the overthrow of phlogiston, and the emergence of the central role of experiment in the seventeenth century. He in turn uses these historical examples to address larger issues, especially the nature of belief formation and contemporary debates about the nature of science and the evolution of scientific ideas. Howard Margolis is a professor in the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and in the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Selfishness, Altruism, and Rationality and Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, both published by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

Joseph Margolis, known for his considerable contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, pragmatism, and American philosophy, has focused primarily on the troublesome concepts of culture, history, language, agency, art, interpretation, and the human person or self. For Margolis, the signal problem has always been the same: how can we distinguish between physical nature and human culture? How do these realms relate? _The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism_ identifies a conceptual tendency that can be (...) drawn from the work of the twentieth century's best-known analytic philosophers of art: Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, Kendall Walton, Nelson Goodman, Monroe Beardsley, Noël Carroll, and Jerrold Levinson, among others. This trend threatens to impoverish our grasp and appreciation of the arts by failing to do justice to the culturally informed nature of the arts themselves. Through his analysis, Margolis sets out to retrieve an adequate picture of the essential differences between physical nature and human culture—particularly through language, history, meaning, significance, the emergence of the human self or person, and the essential features of human life—all to explain how such difference bears on our perception of paintings and literature. Clearly argued and provocatively engaging, Margolis's work reestablishes what is essential to a productive encounter with art. (shrink)

The Emergence of Word-Meaning in Early China makes an innovative contribution to studies of language by historicizing the Chinese notion that words have "meaning" (content independent of instances of use). Rather than presuming that the concept of word-meaning had always existed, Jane Geaney explains how and why it arose in China. To account for why a normative term (yi, "duty, morality, appropriateness") came to be used for "meanings" found in dictionaries, Geaney examines interrelated patterns of word usage threading through (...) and across a wide range of genres. These patterns show that by the first millennium, as textual production exploded—and as radically different writing forms (in Buddhist sutras) were encountered—yi already functioned as an externally accessible "model" for semantic interpretation of texts and sayings. The book has far-reaching implications. Because the idea of word-meaning is fundamental to theorizing, the book illuminates not only semantic ideas and the normativity of language in Early China, but also aspects of early Chinese philosophy and intellectual history. As the internet supplants one form of media (print), thereby reducing knowledge to vast digital databases, so too, this book explains, two thousand years ago a culture that prized oral and visual balance became an "empire of the text.". (shrink)

In _Vibrant Matter_ the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we (...) to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the_ _effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy. (shrink)

What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the (...) pioneers of modern abstraction—"confronting them and within a common system, a figure at once opposed and complementary." Foucault's brief but extraordinarily rich essay offers a startling, highly provocative view of a painter whose influence and popularity continue to grow unchecked. _This is Not a Pipe_ also throws a new, piquantly dancing light on Foucault himself. (shrink)

Tensions Regarding Epistemic Concepts The paper argues that there is no logic of scientific discovery, but there is an inference-like pattern that we can model as a "logic," retrospectively, once a discovery has been successfully made. While accepting a kind of epistemological pluralism and opportunism, the claim will be advocated that a convergent and reasonably wide-ranging normative "logic" might be constructed, one that might even work reasonably well in selected applications and might (therefore) also lead us to make congruent judgments (...) of irrationality or illogicality wherever it seems not to yield the "normatively appropriate" outcomes in otherwise comparable specimen cases. (shrink)

We examine a proposal for dealing with perhaps the chief difficulty facing holistic theories of meaning—meaning instability. The problem is that, given a robust holism, small changes in a representational system are likely to lead to meaning changes throughout the system. Consequently, different individuals are likely never to mean the same thing. Eric Lormand suggests that holists can avoid this problem—and even secure more stability than non-holists—by positing that symbols have multiple meanings. We argue that the proposal doesn't work, however, (...) since multiple meanings are unstable for much the same reason that single meanings are. (shrink)

Firms and industries increasingly subscribe to voluntary codes of conduct. These self-regulatory governance systems can be effective in establishing a more sustainable and inclusive global economy. However, these codes can also be largely symbolic, reactive measures to quell public criticism. Cross-sector alliances (between for-profit and nonprofit actors) present a learning platform for infusing participants with greater incentives to be socially responsible. They can provide multinationals new capabilities that allow them to more closely ally social responsibility with economic performance. This paper (...) examines learning facilitators in cross-sector alliances that enrich corporate understanding of stakeholder concerns. It suggests that these organizational learning experiments can translate into globally responsible practices and processes that improve the content and effectiveness of voluntary corporate codes. (shrink)

The Aesthetics of Design offers the first full treatment of design in the field of philosophical aesthetics, challenging the discipline to broaden its scope to include the quotidian objects and experiences of our everyday lives and concerns ...

Philosophers, psychologists, economists and other social scientists continue to debate the nature of human well-being. We argue that this debate centers around five main conceptualizations of well-being: hedonic well-being, life satisfaction, desire fulfillment, eudaimonia, and non-eudaimonic objective-list well-being. Each type of well-being is conceptually different, but are they empirically distinguishable? To address this question, we first developed and validated a measure of desire fulfillment, as no measure existed, and then examined associations between this new measure and several other well-being measures. (...) In addition, we explored associations among all five types of well-being. We found high correlations among all measures of well-being, but generally correlations did not approach unity, even when correcting for unreliability. Furthermore, correlations between well-being and related constructs (e.g., demographics, personality) depended on the type of well-being measured. We conclude that empirical findings based on one type of well-being measure may not generalize to all types of well-being. (shrink)

This is part of a complete set of Jane Austen's novels collating the editions published during the author's lifetime and previously unpublished manuscripts. The books are illustrated with 19th century plates and incorporate revisions by experts in the light of subsequent research.

Ducks lay eggs' is a true sentence, and `ducks are female' is a false one. Similarly, `mosquitoes carry the West Nile virus' is obviously true, whereas `mosquitoes don't carry the West Nile virus' is patently false. This is so despite the egg-laying ducks' being a subset of the female ones and despite the number of mosquitoes that don't carry the virus being ninety-nine times the number that do. Puzzling facts such as these have made generic sentences defy adequate semantic treatment. (...) However complex the truth conditions of generics appear to be, though, young children grasp generics more quickly and readily than seemingly simpler quantifiers such as `all' and `some'. I present an account of generics that not only illuminates the strange truth conditions of generics, but also explains how young children find them so comparatively easy to acquire. I then argue that generics give voice to our most cognitively primitive generalizations and that this hypothesis accounts for a variety of facts ranging from acquisition patterns to cross-linguistic data concerning the phonological articulation of operators. I go on to develop an account of the nature of these cognitively fundamental generalizations and argue that this account explains the strange truth-conditional behavior of generics. (shrink)

In LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited, Jerry Fodor argues that concept learning of any kind—even for complex concepts—is simply impossible. In order to avoid the conclusion that all concepts, primitive and complex, are innate, he argues that concept acquisition depends on purely noncognitive biological processes. In this paper, we show (1) that Fodor fails to establish that concept learning is impossible, (2) that his own biological account of concept acquisition is unworkable, and (3) that there are in fact (...) many promising general models for explaining how concepts are learned. (shrink)

Jane Duran's Worlds of Knowing begins to fill an enormous gap in the literature of feminist epistemology: a wide-ranging, cross-cultural primer on worldviews and epistemologies of various cultures and their appropriations by indigenous feminist movements in those cultures. It is the much needed epistemological counterpart to work on cross-cultural feminist social and political philosophy. This project is absolutely breath-taking in scope, yet a manageable read for anyone with some background in feminist theory, history, or anthropology. Duran draws many comparisons (...) and connections to Western philosophical and feminist ideas, yet avoids facile or imperialistic over-universalization. Her book is powerful, comprehensive, and brave. It will prove an enormously useful resource for scholars in women's studies, philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, and history. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, and: Anne Conway: A Woman PhilosopherJane DuranWomen Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century, by Jacqueline Broad; 204 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. $65.00. Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, by Sarah Hutton; 280 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. $75.00.Recent work on women philosophers has, in general, approached the topic from two vantage points: on the one hand, a number of anthologies have (...) been published, wherein commentators present a small portion of the woman thinker's work, often without the background necessary for a fuller understanding. On the other hand, some few women philosophers have been the subject of full-length works, but these have tended, by and large, to be women thinkers of the twentieth century, with whose work we are already familiar. Two recent books, one by Jacqueline Broad and the other by Sarah Hutton, go a long way toward improving the situation.Work by Eileen O'Neill, Sarah Hutton and Margaret Atherton, among others, has helped familiarize us with the notion that the seventeenth century—that era so commonly associated with Descartes and the rise of modern philosophy—was also a time of rich theorizing by women philosophers. Jacqueline Broad's book possesses many virtues: it has the finely-tuned style of the careful historian, while at the same time not failing to demonstrate acquaintance with a range of contemporary feminist commentary. Part of the problem in addressing women thinkers of the past is another version of what we are now tempted to call the essentialism problem: does it make sense to think that there is a style that might be demarcated as "feminine," or that might, in some way, pertain uniquely to women theorists? These are difficult issues, but a partial response to the question is to try to remember that it is not for no reason that women thinkers have, indeed, been left out of the canon. As Broad herself says, women philosophers "are now mere footnotes to the standard historical-intellectual accounts of the early modern period" (p. 1).Broad does a superb job of navigating between the need to set out the plain tenets of the thinker's philosophy, and the desire to try to tie it into these larger questions. In six chapters, she addresses the work of Elizabeth of Bohemia, [End Page 200] Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham and Catharine Trotter Cockburn The chapters on Elizabeth, Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell are particularly strong—here part of the difficulty is that we do have familiar commentaries addressing the work of these women, and it is hard to try to see them in a new light. We are accustomed, for example, to think of Elizabeth merely as Descartes's correspondent. As is the case with information that is currently coming to bear on the question of Harriet Taylor Mill's input into the work of John Stuart Mill, it is difficult for us to see Elizabeth as a thinker in her own right, or, indeed, to give her the credit that Descartes himself gave her; as Broad notes, he had described her as "the only person I have so far found who has completely understood all my previous works" (p. 13). Margaret Cavendish's reputation has suffered from the somewhat scattered approach of her writings, and Broad cites her "reputation for eccentricity" (p. 38). Nevertheless, the sheer volume of her work and its allusion to the problems addressed by the Cambridge Platonists (areas also worked on by Anne Conway) demands that she be taken far more seriously than she has in the past. Astell has become known largely for her more overtly feminist works, such as A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, but she was also the author of several other pieces addressing issues in metaphysics, and again the amount of her work and its citation during her own time would militate against the notion that it should not receive thorough examination.Broad does a wonderful job of setting out the main philosophical questions found in these theorists' works, and she excels at pitting their views against those of the various male philosophers whose work—according to... (shrink)

This paper sets out to launch a challenge to the usual ‘modernist’ view of the relationship between ecology and ethics. Two ‘post-modern’ interpretations of this relationship are considered. The first ‘deep’ interpretation holds that ecology reveals that nature has intrinsic value. The second interpretation derives from the work of Michel Foucault. The aim of his critique is to reveal how certain values are taken for granted by the acceptance of certain scientific models, and how the acceptance of those models as (...) true makes it impossible to articulate alternative values. I end by suggesting, contra Foucault, that phenomenological enquiry could serve to articulate alternative and perhaps more eco-friendly values. (shrink)