Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Ned Block argues that the higher-order (HO) approach to explaining consciousness is ‘defunct’ because a prominent objection (the ‘misrepresentation objection’) exposes the view as ‘incoherent’. What’s more, a response to this objection that I’ve offered elsewhere (Weisberg 2010) fails because it ‘amounts to abusing the notion of what-it’s-like-ness’ (xxx).1 In this response, I wish to plead guilty as charged. Indeed, I will continue herein to abuse Block’s notion of what-it’s-like-ness. After doing so, I will argue that the HO approach accounts (...) for the sense of what-it’s-like-ness that matters in a theory of consciousness. I will also argue that the only incoherence present in the HO theory is that generated by embracing Block’s controversial notion of what-it’s-like-ness, something no theorist of any stripe ought to do. Block is famous for (among other things) having introduced the notion of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ into contemporary philosophy of mind (Block 1995). This term is widely employed in the philosophical literature and it even appears in the empirical literature. But wide-speared usage has brought about divergent interpretations of the term. We can distinguish a ‘moderate’ and a ‘zealous’ reading of ‘phenomenal consciousness’. On the moderate reading, ‘phenomenal consciousness’ just means ‘experience’. Many people have embraced this sense of the term and use it to roughly pick out conscious experience involving sensory quality (states like conscious visual experiences or conscious pains, for example).2 On the zealous reading, however, phenomenal consciousness is held to be ‘distinct from any cognitive, intentional, or functional property’ (Block 1995: 234). That is, any explanation of phenomenal consciousness in exclusively cognitive, intentional, or functional terms will fail to capture, without remainder, what is really distinctive about phenomenal consciousness. Block, of course, is fully clear about embracing the zealous reading; indeed, his initial introduction of the notion is in those terms. The same ambiguity occurs with the much-used (and abused) idea of ‘what-it’s-like-ness’.. (shrink)

The schism between ‘ordinary’ and scientific perception and knowledge implies that we lack any total or systematic means of describing the world or identifying any framework -independent reality. Philosophers as diverse as Kant, Putnam, Strawson, Barthes, and Foucault have attempted to overcome this epistemological divide by constructing a unified, continuous theory of knowledge capable of accounting simultaneously for an allegedly primitive, unreflective, unmediated view of the world and an abstract, highly technical, scientific product. Rather than identifying analytic and continental epistemologies, (...) adverting to continental philosophy to resolve the analytic problems of defining knowledge or determining its necessary and sufficient conditions, as in Gettier problem cases, or homogenizing ordinary and scientific cognition, I assess diverse epistemological responses to the Cartesian problem of bridging perceptual experience and conceptual knowledge in order to catalog and validate the turn from a structuralist phenomenology to a historical deconstruction of isolated, ahistorical notions of subjectivity and objectivity. However, in place of Foucault’s closed, tripartite model of space, time, and power, I use certain late nineteenth-century, neo- Kantian scientific models to develop and justify an open, critical, pragmatically validated, historical heuristic for scientific explanation able to account nonreductively for ordinary experience, ordinary perception, and ordinary knowledge. (shrink)

To assess the ability of the disconnected cerebral hemispheres to recognize images of the self, a split-brain patient was tested using morphed self-face images presented to one visual hemifield at a time while making “self/other” judgments. The performance of the right and left hemispheres of this patient as assessed by a signal detection method was not significantly different, though a measure of bias did reveal hemispheric differences. The right and left hemispheres of this patient independently and equally possessed the ability (...) to self-recognize, but only the right hemisphere could successfully recognize familiar others. This supports a modular concept of self-recognition and other-recognition, separately present in each cerebral hemisphere. (shrink)

Telling a patient that the outcome of his illness is not good, or even hopeless, requires sensitivity and the ability to communicate with him in the setting of a hospital which is an unnatural environment divorced from family and friends. It is a task which must be taught and learned by doctors and nurses.

The existential analysis -- The death of dasein -- The timeliness of dasein -- The derivation of time -- The time of being.

The concept of the sublime was crucial to the thought of Immanuel Kant, who defined it as the experience of what is great in power, size, or number. From ancient times to the present, the aesthetic experience of the sublime has been associated with morality, but if we want to be able to exclude evil, fascistic, or terroristic uses of the sublime—the inescapable awe generated by the Nuremberg rallies, for example—we require a systematic justification of the claim that there are (...) internal moral constraints on the sublime. In _Kant on Sublimity and Morality_, Joshua Rayman argues that Kant alone provides the system by which we can bind sublimity to moral ideas, the exhibition of freedom, the production of respect, and violence towards inclinations. (shrink)

The achievements of the textile industry in Roman Britain are often underestimated as a result of the meagreness of our available evidence. The Edict on maximum prices issued by Diocletian in A.D. 301 shows that British capes commanded high prices on the markets of the Empire, and that in the late third century A.D. British rugs were the best in the world. In view of the competition from the traditional centres of rug manufacture in the East, this is an astonishing (...) achievement. (shrink)

The received translation and interpretation of many of the technical terms current in the textile industry of the Roman Empire are inaccurate, because lexicographers have either fought shy of being precise, or have thought that they recognized in the ancient world technical processes which originated at a much later date. The evidence is often equivocal or insufficient, but may still yield details that have been overlooked. The textile expression scutulatus, to take an example, deserves more attention than Blümner has devoted (...) to it. When it refers to the appearance of a garment, Lewis and Short, s.v. scutulatus, translate ‘diamond or lozenge-shaped, checkered’. It seems worth while to attempt a more precise translation, and, if possible, to estimate the significance in context of the goods so designated. (shrink)

Living out of silence, out of a fully functioning, lovingly attentive mind, and not just out of thought, out of a partially functioning mind, is requisite for depth or profundity in living or relating. A fully attentive, truly silent or meditative mind sees that there is real dualism of time and the timeless and that time and the timeless each has its own unique value. The timeless, or real silence, that which alone can make for depth in one's living and (...) relating, can be there only when, in one's awareness, time and all that is related to time, have come to an end. An examination of a wide variety of statements made by writers, both past and present, shows that these understandings are seldom there in contemporary writings, just as they were not there in writings that have come down to us from the past. 'Living beyond the One and the Many' invites readers to consider the possibility that what is presented in it can bring deep meaning to one's way of living in the world"--Publisher's description, back cover. (shrink)

If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.

Jeffrey Collins’ new book aims to presents Locke’s views on religious toleration in the light of Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy. At first blush, Hobbes seems an unusual choice as a point of co...

Nietzsche’s critique of causality is at the heart of his critiques of metaphysics and natural science, for causality is the mechanism by which metaphysical concepts are generated and nature is transformed into a system of universal laws. Yet the nature, variety, and radical entailments of his critique of causality have been insufficiently appreciated in the scholarship. By eliminating cause, he deals a death blow to the naturalism currently in vogue in Nietzsche studies,1 according to which Nietzsche is “engaged in giving (...) causal explanations of various human phenomena.”2 The mistake is to read his metaphysically deflationary views concerning nonnatural causality and his privileging of nature and philosophical .. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s 1873 fragment, the Zeitatomenlehre, posits a temporal conception of action at a distance where space is reduced to a single point and time consists only in a series of discrete atoms. Taken as a physical doctrine that destroys all spatial difference, this conception raises serious conflicts with the rest of his work. I describe and situate this theory within the historical context of debates over action at a distance in nineteenth-century physics, distinguish it from physical theories influential on Nietzsche, (...) and argue that these conflicts can be resolved only by viewing it in the anti-metaphysical phenomenalist and representational terms that he also expressed in his early work. (shrink)

The multiple sources and functions of Heraclitus in Nietzsche’s writings should not be underestimated. Nietzsche’s early readings of Heraclitus are steeped in the Greek fragments, the doxographical tradition, and in philological scholarship. Hence, they are largely either fair interpretations of the extant fragments, clear translations of a select group of fragments into his own language, or improvisations based in part on a narrow subset of the spurious remarks set down in the doxographical tradition. Nietzsche’s later departures from this tradition articulate (...) an anti-metaphysical Heraclitus that he found in the Heraclitean fragments, which he takes to prefigure and later parrot his doctrines of becoming, the child, strife, chance, and eternal recurrence. For this reason, Nietzsche’s Heraclitus is necessarily no objective, individual historical person, but at various times and to various degrees a copy, an appropriative invention, and a personal-philological-philosophical archetype filtered through the lenses of ancient Greek understandings of how he must have lived, given what he said and what philosophy is; nineteenth-century German philological reconstructions of Heraclitean thought; and Nietzsche’s own need for such a precursor to voice his own doctrines and thereby lend them heft against the Platonic tradition of metaphysical philosophy. (shrink)

Doctors’ strikes are legally permissible in the UK, with the situation differing in other countries. But are they morally permissible? Doug McConnell and Darren Mann have systematically attempted to dismiss the arguments for the moral impermissibility of doctors’ strikes and creatively attempted to provide further moral justification for them. Unfortunately for striking doctors, they fail to achieve this. Meanwhile, junior doctors’ strikes have continued in the UK through 2023 and have now extended into 2024. In this response, which focuses on (...) the UK situation and specifically junior doctors’ strikes in the National Health Service (NHS) in England, I will demonstrate a central problem with their arguments—namely that they underplay the harms caused by prolonged doctors’ strikes by ignoring the harms to patients with cancer. This weakens their conclusion that strikes are morally permissible in terms of the conditions and thresholds they set. I then provide a psychological critique of their justification for strikes in terms of the interests of the public. It follows that invoking the controversial concept of supererogatory action is ungrounded but also absurd when you consider time-critical cancer care. If those representing striking doctors wish to maintain a modicum of moral respectability, they should mitigate for patients with cancer and negotiate reasonably and with urgency. (shrink)

Nietzsche’s critique of causality has not been taken as seriously as it should be. Nietzschean naturalists such as Ken Gemes, Brian Leiter, and John Richardson carry on with their appeals to causal-scientific forms of explanation as if there were no such critique.1 For instance, Leiter claims that Nietzsche is a naturalist in that he sets forth “theories that explain various important human phenomena … [in scientific terms], but are also modeled on science in the sense that they seek to reveal (...) the causal determinants of these phenomena, typically in various physiological and psychological facts about persons”. But Nietzsche decisively rejects every element of this claim in many passages. For instance, he... (shrink)

Stereological techniques allow biologists to create quantitative, three-dimensional descriptions of biological structures from two- dimensional images of tissue viewed under the microscope. For example, they can accurately estimate the size of a particular organelle, the total length of a mass of capillaries, or the number of neurons or synapses in a particular region of the brain. This book provides a practical guide to designing and critically evaluating stereological studies of the nervous system and other tissues. It explains the basic concepts (...) behind design-based stereology and how to get started. Also included are detailed descriptions of how to prepare tissue appropriately, perform pilot studies and decide on the appropriate sampling strategy, and account for phenomena such as tissue shrinkage. Numerous examples of applications of stereological methods that are applicable to studies of the central system and a wide variety of other tissues are explained. The book is therefore essential reading for neurobiologists and cell biologists interested in generating accurate representations of cell and tissue architecture. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche expresses self-refuting claims to universal skepticism not only in his early writings on language, but also in his middle and later writings. But this is not the full story, for he simultaneously propounds alternative, relativistic, contextual, imperative, perspectival, and instinctual, drive- or need-based forms of knowledge throughout his career. Here, there is no straightforward answer to the question whether Nietzsche's skeptical accounts of knowledge and truth are self-refuting, since he determines knowledge, skepticism and truth in various ways. In (...) order to assess his accounts, then, it is necessary to articulate the linguistic, epistemological and metaphysical conditions under which Nietzsche could express a non self-refuting, universal skepticism.Friedrich Nietzsche formuliert selbstwiedersprüchliche Aussagen eines universellen Skeptizismus nicht nur in den frühen Schriften über Sprach, sondern auch in den mittleren und späteren Schriften. Darüber hinaus hat er während seines gesamten Schaffens gleichzeitig auch alternative, relativistische, kontextabhängige, auslegende, perspektivische, trieb- und bedürfnisorientierte Formen des Wissens verteidigt. Folglich gibt es keine einfache Antwort auf die Frage, ob Nietzsches skeptische Erklärungen des Wissens und der Warheit selbstwiderlegend sind, da er Wissen, Skeptizmus und Warheit in unterschiedlicher Weise bestimmt. Um seine Erklärungen zu beurteilen ist es daher notwendig, die linguistischen, epistemologischen und metaphysischen Bedingungen zu artikulieren, unter denen Nietzsche einen nicht-selbstwiderlegenden, universellen Skeptizismus formulieren konnte. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 27-29.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant claims that genius is a talent for art, but not for science. Despite his restriction of genius to the domain of fine art, several recent interpreters have suggested that genius has a role to play in Kant’s account of cognition in general and scientific practice in particular. In this paper, I explore Kant’s reasons for excluding genius from science as well as the reasons that one might nevertheless be tempted to think that his account (...) allows room for the scientific genius. I then argue that Kant’s concerns are not only epistemic, but also moral, and together, they give us good reason for resisting the veneration of genius. (shrink)

The main events of Theodor W. Adorno's American experience are so familiar that, as David Jenemann1 points out, Martin Jay's groundbreaking 1973 text, The Dialectical Imagination,2 which essentially introduced the Frankfurt School to an American audience, already describes these events as well-known. Max Horkheimer's Institut für Sozialforschung (the Institute, for short), which in its exile had been affiliated with Columbia University since 1935, arranged with the Austrian émigré sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld and the Rockefeller Foundation to bring Adorno to New York (...) in 1938 to direct the musical section of the Princeton Radio Research Project, in exchange for financial support. In…. (shrink)

The past forty years of world development have seen multiple operational frameworks, most notably, the neoliberal Washington Consensus or structural adjustment policies, the internation...

The conventional view is that analytic philosophy has dominated American philosophy departments since 1950 and that continental philosophy and pragmatism have been marginalized almost out of existence due to philosophical inferiority or McCarthyist persecution. But a precise historical treatment of transformations in the field shows that this is, in fact, the golden age of continental philosophy and pragmatist scholarship, that McCarthyism had nothing to do with pragmatism’s fall from dominance, and that the shape of the field depends more on larger (...) academic-historical trends. However, McCarthyism likely had lasting effects on analytic control of powerful qualifying institutions. (shrink)

Recently, philosophy of language has swept through the community of Hegel scholarship. Since the early 1980s, Hegel scholars, such as John McCumber, Willem De Vries, Rodney Coltman, John Russon, Frank Schalow, Irene Harvey, and Henry Sussman, have imputed to Hegel the notion that the problems of philosophy are problems of language. What these readings ignore is that theessential systematic obstacle in Hegel is representation, not language as such. Hence, any Hegelian resolution of philosophical problems involves the speculative overcoming of representation, (...) rather than the reformation of language, as is clear in the transition from “Revealed Religion” to “Absolute Knowing” in the Phenomenology. By tracing seriously the implications of the fact that the completion of revealed religion is “absolute knowing” and that the limiting form of revealed religion is representation, I will show that representation is the dominant problem throughout the Phenomenology. (shrink)

Despite Žižek’s privileging of politics over ethics, it is possible to reconstruct from his work a very significant, thoroughgoing reconception of ethics and metaethics. He sets forth accounts of the nature of ethics, action, freedom, the supreme moral principle, the fact-value split, the relation of the self to others, and the values that should determine our actions. He expresses a Kantian/Lacanian notion of law and freedom, an Hegelian critique of the subject-object distinction, a Lacanian subversion of the fact-value split, and (...) an Adornian quasi-formalist treatment of ethical imperatives. The most radical element within his ethics is arguably his notion of the passage à l’acte, according to which certain types of actions not only transgress extant norms, but challenge the very nature of the norms, transform the coordinates of the reality principle, and bring into being its conditions of value. (shrink)

Many well-known works in twentieth-century continental aesthetics, such as Martin Heidegger's “Origin of the Work of Art,” Jacques Derrida's The Truth in Painting, Michel Foucault's “Las Meninas,” and the two most influential Frankfurt School texts on aesthetics, Walter Benjamin's optimistic “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility”1 and Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer's pessimistic “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,”2 treat aesthetics as an occasion for a critique of metaphysics. Hence, it is reasonable to (...) assess these works by reference to whether they retain metaphysical categories, concepts, or methodologies. In this regard, the essays…. (shrink)