Richard Rorty's discussions of "romanticism," a term by which he means a set of general philosophical themes, not merely a body of literary and philosophical work of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, are not univocal in their approach. Rorty endorses romanticism within an overall antirealistic view that he interprets as "pragmatism." In some respects, Richard Rorty's view of romanticism is diametrically opposed to Shelley's, for although Rorty invokes Shelley's appeal to poetry as "center and circumference," he has no interest in (...) providing any access to a noumenal world. With logical positivism of the twentieth century, Rorty seems to presuppose that "eliminating metaphysics," where metaphysics would be any appeal to a reality beyond appearances, is not only possible, but highly desirable from an intellectual point of view. Given Rorty's ultimate aim, it is not surprising that Rorty's romantic idol will have his metaphysics up his sleeve. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to characterize the professional good served by the humanities as various academic disciplines, particularly in relation to the general academic good, namely, the pursuit of knowledge in theoretical and scholarly research, and to evaluate the public and ethical dimension of that professional good and the constraints it imposes upon practitioners. My argument will be that the humanities aim at both knowledge of objective facts and acknowledgement of the human status of their subject matter, and (...) that there are facts about human life and society that are inaccessible except through such humanistic acknowledgement. As such, the humanities require the adoption of evaluative, other-oriented points of view, and they serve the public by advancing a reflective view of the very conditions of the public’s own constitution. In short, the humanities incorporate the view that practical and evaluative wisdom is not only essential for the full pursuit of truth, but that it is also an essential public good in any well-ordered society, especially in contemporary democracies. The discussion proceeds by examining various examples of both the professional and the public good in question, and focuses particularly on cases of excessive acknowledgement in the form of uncritical apologetics and excessive objectification in various forms of reductionism. (shrink)

In this paper I draw on Davidson's work to generate counter examples to his claim that since there are no untranslatable languages there are also no alternative conceptual schemes. I argue that Davidson's argument to that effect is based upon an equivocation.

This paper contrasts the religiosity ihai is expressed by the mysticism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which moves away from ihe traditional “narratives” of revealed religion, with Wittgenstein’s later expressions of religiosity, which endorse those “narratives” and take place within them. The paper discusses the importance of this development in Wittgenstein’s religious experience in relation to the developments in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Both religious and philosophical developments are placed in the context of Wittgenstein’s self-directed anti-Semitism, which is interpreted in terms of the anomalies (...) of Jewish assimilation and acculturation in the inhospitable environment of European anti-Semitism. The outcome is an account of Wittgenstein as a historical figure, which can shed light on many aspects of his philosophy. To gain credibility, the account proceeds by means of a close exegesis of some Wittensteinian passages that were not adequately explained before. (shrink)

This paper contrasts the religiosity ihai is expressed by the mysticism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which moves away from ihe traditional “narratives” of revealed religion, with Wittgenstein’s later expressions of religiosity, which endorse those “narratives” and take place within them. The paper discusses the importance of this development in Wittgenstein’s religious experience in relation to the developments in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Both religious and philosophical developments are placed in the context of Wittgenstein’s self-directed anti-Semitism, which is interpreted in terms of the anomalies (...) of Jewish assimilation and acculturation in the inhospitable environment of European anti-Semitism. The outcome is an account of Wittgenstein as a historical figure, which can shed light on many aspects of his philosophy. To gain credibility, the account proceeds by means of a close exegesis of some Wittensteinian passages that were not adequately explained before. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to highlight an individualist streak in both Davidson’s conception of language and Chomsky’s. In the first part of the paper, I argue that in Davidson’s case this individualist streak is a consequence of an excessively strong conception of what the compositional nature of linguistic meaning requires, and I offer a weaker conception of that requirement that can do justice to both the publicity and the compositionality of language. In the second part of the paper, (...) I offer a comparison between Davidson’s position on the unreality of public languages, and Chomsky’s position regarding the epiphenomenal status of “externalized” languages. In Chomsky’s case, as in Davidson’s, languages are individuated in terms of the formal theories that serve to account for their systematic structure, and this assumption rests upon a similarly strong and similarly questionable understanding of what it is to employ finite means in pursuit of an infinite task. The alternative, at which I can only hint, is a view of language as a social and historical reality, i.e., a realm of social fact that cannot be exhausted by any formal theory and cannot be reduced to properties of individual speakers. (shrink)

Quine's thesis of holism is justly regarded as the cornerstone of his naturalized epistemology. It is, to use Quine's own image, the crucial milestone in the development of post-Humean empiricism. Quine's holism constitutes a transition from the individual sentence to the organized system of sentences as the basic unit of empirical meaning. This system-centered approach allows him to dispense with theoretical reductions by dispensing not with the empiricist rejection of non-empirical facts, but with traditional assumptions concerning uniqueness and determinacy in (...) matters of scientific theory. It allows the holist to affirm, rather than abandon, the empiricist commitment to science without having to secure this position on some a priori, neutral foundation. (shrink)

In this paper I draw on Davidson's work to generate counter examples to his claim that since there are no untranslatable languages there are also no alternative conceptual schemes. I argue that Davidson's argument to that effect is based upon an equivocation.

Following the argument wherever it leads is a piece of well-known and time-honored advice we give to students in philosophy. Using three instances drawn from the history of philosophy, we look at reasons for both adhering to this principle and for sometimes putting it aside in favor of other considerations. We find that the requirement of following the argument where it leads is not a simple demand of logic, but rather a complex norm that is sensitive to various considerations. Some (...) of these have to do with the fact that consistency may be restored to one’s system of beliefs only at a price that one may judge, on cognitive or moral grounds, as too high. Following the argument wherever it leads is thus a norm about the place of reason in our intellectual and practical lives and is therefore a norm that must be evaluated in the context of various extra-logical considerations. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to highlight an individualist streak in both Davidson’s conception of language and Chomsky’s. In the first part of the paper, I argue that in Davidson’s case this individualist streak is a consequence of an excessively strong conception of what the compositional nature of linguistic meaning requires, and I offer a weaker conception of that requirement that can do justice to both the publicity and the compositionality of language. In the second part of the paper, (...) I offer a comparison between Davidson’s position on the unreality of public languages, and Chomsky’s position regarding the epiphenomenal status of “externalized” languages. In Chomsky’s case, as in Davidson’s, languages are individuated in terms of the formal theories that serve to account for their systematic structure, and this assumption rests upon a similarly strong and similarly questionable understanding of what it is to employ finite means in pursuit of an infinite task. The alternative, at which I can only hint, is a view of language as a social and historical reality, i.e., a realm of social fact that cannot be exhausted by any formal theory and cannot be reduced to properties of individual speakers. (shrink)

In this work I bring a conception of language and meaning as a shared institution to bear upon rule-following scepticism, i.e., upon the sceptical problem concerning the semantic determinacy of expressions involving infinite or indefinitely large and open extensions. Such scepticism proceeds from the observation that the extensions of expressions of this kind are not uniquely determined by epistemically accessible facts, to conclude that the expressions in question are indeterminate in point of extension, and that their meaning must consist in (...) their use. ;In the first chapter of this work, I argue that rule-following considerations by themselves do not suffice to establish these conclusions, and that additional premises are needed. I consider both internalist and extensionalist schemes to supplement the sceptical argument. I find such schemes lacking in persuasive support. Chapter 2, in particular, concentrates on Kripke's well known exegesis of Wittgenstein's argument, and on the internalist requirements upon which it is based. ;In Chapter 3, I offer an externalist account of the normative aspect in rule following. On the account I give, the rule one is projecting is determined extensionally by one's position in a community in which his projections would be corrected and evaluated by other members, and from which one has acquired the rule in the first place through a chain of communication, rather than by one's own projections, taken in isolation, which constitute only a partial understanding of the rule in question. This account is not designed to refute scepticism; rather its aim is to account for the normativity of rule-following in ways which do not invoke the internalist requirement upon which rule following scepticism is based. (shrink)

Words and Life (= WL) is a bulky collection of 29 essays, edited and introduced by James Conant. Pragmatism: An Open Question (= P) is a much thinner collection, dedicated to Conant, of just three lectures. Taken together, the two books constitute an argument for pragmatism as a viable option in contemporary philosophy, and a new (pragmatic) basis for what remains viable in the philosophical and political ideals of the Enlightenment. As in a previous collection of essays (Putnam 1990), Conant’s (...) role appears to be more than just editorial. In his own lengthy introductions, he gives Putnam’s work an interpretive ‘spin’, of which Putnam, for his part, seems to approve. Together, Putnam and Conant develop a strain of pragmatism which is well worth looking into.1 Putnam’s pragmatism is best captured by the quote from Cavell (1979: p. 125) which appears as the motto on the title page of the 1994 collection, and from which its title – ‘Words and Life’ – is derived. It is the view that although philosophy is an open ended practice of reflection, rather than a purely contemplative theory of one kind or another, the practice in question is at one and the same time a part of culture (immanence) and a step beyond it (transcendence). In Cavell’s language, the task of such reflection (‘philosophizing’) is ‘to confront culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets in me’, where the self in question – the individual qua philosopher – appears to be engulfed by culture even as he is confronting it from the outside. On this interpretation, Putnam’s appeal to practice in philosophy is part of an attempt to keep its transcendent, or critical, dimension alive, even while recognizing philosophy’s radical embeddedness in culture and tradition, and the futility of seeking some God’s-eye view from which reality as such is to be viewed.2 The question is whether, and how, these two perspectives can be held together. If our standards of rational criticism transcend any particular culture in terms of their scope and authority, how can they also be embedded in culture and immanent to it? Can pragmatism offer a coherent synthesis of these two dimensions.. (shrink)

Place is a key concept in environmental studies and criticism. However, it is often overlooked as a dimension of situatedness in social studies of information. Rather, situatedness has been defined primarily as embodiment or social context. This paper explores place attachments in Big Data by adapting close and distant approaches for reading texts to examine the accessions data of the Arnold Arboretum, a living collection of trees, vines and shrubs established by Harvard University in 1872. Although it is an early (...) and unconventional example of the phenomenon, there are several reasons that the Arboretum is a useful site for investigating the relationship between Big Data and place. First, the category of place is embedded in a range of data fields used in the Arboretum’s records. Second, the Arboretum has long sought to be a place in which scientists and citizens alike can encounter large collections of data firsthand. Third, the place has shaped fluctuations in the daily production of data over the course of the Arboretum’s 144 year history. Furthermore, Arboretum data can help us see place in ways not necessarily tied to geolocation. Each of these place attachments suggests a different way in which data can be environmental: by being about, in, from, or generative of place. Taken together, these attachments offer a model for examining other data in relation to their environments. Moreover, the paper contends that rather than being detached from place, as prevailing discourses suggest, Big Data bring together more and further reaching place attachments than data sets of smaller sizes. (shrink)

In this paper, I give an argument for the view that non-fact entities – such as physical objects, abstract objects, events and so on – can ground other entities. Roughly put, the argument is as follows: those who accept this view can provide a more plausible account of the grounds of identity facts than those who deny this view.

I show that centered propositions—also called de se propositions, and usually modeled as sets of centered worlds—pose a serious problem for various versions of Lewis's Principal Principle. The problem, put roughly, is that in scenarios like Elga's `Sleeping Beauty' case, those principles imply that rational agents ought to have obviously irrational credences. To solve the problem, I propose a centered version of the Principal Principle. My version allows centered propositions to be objectively chancy.

Globalism endowed us with McDonald's, 'the world’s local bank’, English football teams without English players and an irrepressible desire for more as enough is never good enough – the blanket is always too short. Our personal world as much as our social and political realities seem to have blithely surrendered to the madness of a civilization which views anything from corporate greed and global warming to military adventures and religious fundamentalism as normal as a door banging in the wind. The (...) destructive capabilities of our age have run too far ahead of our wisdom. However, the process is not irreversible if our thinking can postpone its retirement. _In Bed with Madness_ is ‘a well-argued, powerful and profound indictment of contemporary culture’, stylishly written – a reviewer said he would have bought it just for its humour! (shrink)

This paper will take up the work of Charles Baudelaire, poetic and critical, in order to present the Baudelairean aesthetic and to make a case for its relevance in our judgments about art today. Baudelaire was the first poet of the modern built environment and is known as the father of modern poetry. While his poetry is still admired, his aesthetic has been historicised: deemed to belong to that time and place in which Baudelaire wrote. This paper will argue that (...) this historicisation by subsequent aesthetic theory and philosophy is a suppression of something integral to art and artists, without which art is liable to lose what is true about it and sink into a morass of irrelevance and triviality, or (as will be argued has partly happened) may become devoid of any value beyond the business interests that control it. In this regard, it will be suggested, Baudelaire’s aesthetic has important redeeming qualities. (shrink)

The paradoxes about truth are the subject of extensive research. Developing an original approach, this book argues that we should diverge from classical logic and presents a number of formal theories of truth. Also included is a beginner-friendly introduction to semantic paradoxes, and a discussion of alternative non-classical theories.

When artificial intelligence (AI) is used to make high-stakes decisions, some worry that this will create a morally troubling responsibility gap—that is, a situation in which nobody is morally responsible for the actions and outcomes that result. Since the responsibility gap might be thought to result from individuals lacking knowledge of the future behavior of AI systems, it can be and has been suggested that deploying explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques will help us to avoid it. These techniques provide humans (...) with certain forms of understanding of the systems in question. In this paper, I consider whether existing XAI techniques can indeed close the responsibility gap. I identify a number of significant limits to their ability to do so. Ensuring that responsibility for AI-assisted outcomes is maintained may require using different techniques in different circumstances, and potentially also developing new techniques that can avoid each of the issues identified. (shrink)

There are two links that stand in the foreground of Deleuze’s treatment of Epicurus and Lucretius: the themes of immanent naturalism and of the externality of ontological relations. However, the links are problematised in Difference and Repetition, which presents an important critique of the concept of the atom. I will argue that this critique reveals the limits of the intellectual affinity between ancient atomism and Deleuzian metaphysics; in particular, that Deleuze’s notions of relationality and spatium respond to problems raised by (...) the relations between atoms and by the not-being of the atomists’ vacuum. In this sense, Deleuze’s treatment of atomism is significant because it makes clear Deleuze’s aim in shifting the mereological vocabulary from points to lines; it shows what, in Deleuze’s sense, it means to unfound and sets down the conditions for a successful Deleuzian critique of essentialist varieties of the metaphysics of structure. (shrink)

I propose a `stage theory’ of groups: a group is a fusion of group-stages, where a group-stage is a plurality of individuals at a world and a time. The stage theory consists of existence conditions, identity conditions, and parthood conditions for groups.

Suppose that, for reasons of animal welfare, it would be better if everyone stopped eating chicken. Does it follow that you should stop eating chicken? Proponents of the “inefficacy objection” argue that, due to the scale and complexity of markets, the expected effects of your chicken purchases are negligible. So the expected effects of eating chicken do not make it wrong. -/- We argue that this objection does not succeed, in two steps. First, empirical data about chicken production tells us (...) that the expected effects of consuming *many* chickens are not negligible. Second, this implies that the expected effect of consuming one chicken is ordinarily not negligible. *Parity* between your purchase and other counterfactual purchases and *uncertainty* about others’ consumption behavior each tend to pull the expected effect of a single purchase toward the average large scale effect. While some purchases do have negligible expected effects, many do not. (shrink)

We present a model for genome evolution, comprising biologically plausible events such as transpositions inside the genome and insertions of exogenous sequences. This model attempts to formulate a minimal proposition accounting for key statistical properties of genomes, avoiding, as far as possible, unsupportable hypotheses for the remote evolutionary past. The statistical properties that are observed in genomic sequences and are reproduced by the proposed model are: (i) deviations from randomness at different length scales, measured by suitable algorithms, (ii) a special (...) form of size distribution (power law distribution) characterising different levels of genome organisation in the non‐coding, and (iii) extensive resemblance in the alternation of coding and non‐coding regions at several length scales (self‐similarity) in long genomic sequences of higher eukaryotes. BioEssays 23:647–656, 2001. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The critique of the dominant image of thought bears important consequences for pedagogical theory and practice. I discuss how Deleuze can help us think about the role of the teacher, the teaching of thinking and the relationship between knowledge and learning. Reading Deleuze's Difference and Repetition as a treatise on thinking and its education, I argue that Deleuze's philosophy challenges and deepens our understanding of what teachers do, how pupils learn and how they learn to think. I show that Deleuze's (...) philosophy can contribute towards the articulation of sceptical but also creative pedagogical responses to the question of teaching, learning and thinking. (shrink)

In Logic, Watts address proper thinking under the four basic functions of the human mind: perception, judgment, reasoning, and disposition. In part one, Watts addresses human perception, the cultivation of ideas, and how we associate them with words. In part two, Watts treats human judgment and its ability to construct various kinds of propositions, while giving guidance for avoiding the formation of bad judgments. Part three covers our ability to reason, giving instruction on the use of syllogisms for constructing a (...) good argument. Part four discusses the mind's disposition as a method of arranging our thoughts for better understanding and memory. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to consider the nature of the philosophical task and of the conditions of its possibility according to Parmenides and Plato. With these thinkers, the task of the philosopher necessitates a propaedeutic activity that makes the doing of philosophy possible; that is, both Parmenides and Plato identify the need for a philosophical education that would alleviate the obstacles that would make philosophy impossible to practise, ensuring and accounting for the possibility of philosophical practice. The impossibility (...) of philosophical practice concerns the philosopher’s claim and obligation to occupy a place (τόπος) from which to contemplate being. The problem becomes conspicuous, for the first time, in the first lines of the first fragment of the first text of pure ontology: in the proemium of Parmenides’ poem. I will argue that the proemium has a crucial philosophical function that binds it integrally to the argument of the poem. This function consists in the implementation of a philosophical propaedeutic that makes possible the articulation of the goddess’s critique. The need for a propaedeutic stems from the nature of the project that lies ahead, that is, the project of the youth’s education. Such education takes the form of the delimitation of the realm of the beings that νοῦς can concern itself with. (shrink)

This essay describes and evaluates the conception of mereological structure that underpins Deleuze’s account of ontogenesis in Difference and Repetition. A theory of mereology is a theory of composition: it asks what it is to be a part making a whole, what it is to be a whole collecting its parts; in short, in what the relation of making or composing consists. The locus classicus for modern mereology is the third of Husserl’s Logical Investigations (‘On the Theory of Wholes and (...) Parts’), which deduces the definitions, axioms and principles governing the relation of parthood and associated notions, such as wholeness, separation, simplicity and complexity. My question is this: what happens to these notions when they are no longer the terms of a ‘calculus of individuals’ and, instead, become the terms of a differential calculus of individuation? (shrink)

The authors present their experience and practices of introducing cloud services, as a means to simplify the adoption of ICT in education, using Free/Open Source Software. The solution creates a hybrid cloud infrastructure, in order to provide a pre-installed virtual machine, acting as a server inside the school, providing desktop environment based on the Software as a Service cloud model, where legacy PCs act as stateless devices. Classroom management is accomplished using the application “Epoptes.” To minimize administration tasks, educational software (...) is provided accordingly, either on-line or through repositories to automate software installation. The advantages of the hybrid cloud implementation, include services that are not completely dependent on broadband connections’ state, minimal cost, reusability of obsolete equipment, ease of administration, centralized management, patches and educational software provisioning and, above all, facilitation of the educational procedure. (shrink)

Moral perception is typically understood as moral properties perception, i.e., the perceptual registration of moral properties such as wrongness or dignity. In this article, I defend a view of moral perception as a process that involves imaginative apprehension of reality. It is meant as an adjustment to the dominant view of moral perception as moral properties perception and as an addition to existing Murdochian approaches to moral perception. The view I present here builds on Iris Murdoch’s moral psychology and holds (...) that moral perception is an imaginative exploration of the particularity of concrete objects of moral reality (e.g., persons, situations, and events), rather than a registration of moral properties. I argue that such imaginative apprehension includes direct and reflective uses of imagination and that this process grounds experiential moral knowledge that serves the ultimate role of moral perception: getting a better grip on concrete objects of moral reality. (shrink)

There have been several recent attempts to think about psychological kinds as homologies. Nevertheless, there are serious epistemic challenges for individuating homologous psychological kinds, or cognitive homologies. Some of these challenges are revealed when we look at competing claims of cognitive homology. This paper considers two competing homology claims that compare human anger with putative aggression systems of nonhuman animals. The competition between these hypotheses has been difficult to resolve in part because of what I call the boundary problem: boundaries (...) between instances of psychological kinds (e.g., anger and fear) cannot be directly observed. Thus, there are distinctive difficulties for individuating psychological kinds across lineages. I draw four conclusions from this case study: First, recent evidence from the neuroscience of fear suggests that one of the proposed homologies involves a straightforward conflation of anger and fear. Second, this conflation arises because of the boundary problem. Third, there is an implicit constraint on the operational criteria that is easy to overlook in the psychological case. In this case, ignoring the constraint is part of the problem. Fourth, this is a clear case in which knowledge of homology cannot be accumulated piecemeal. Identifying homologs of human anger requires identifying homologs of fear. (shrink)

Motus quidem veros corporum singulorum cognofcere , & ab apparentibus actu diícriminare, difficillimum est ; propterca quod partes ípatij illius immobilis in quo corpora vere moventur, non incurrunt in sensus.