An argument that the major metaphysical theories of facts give us no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world. -/- In this book Arianna Betti argues that we have no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world, at least as they are described by the two major metaphysical theories of facts. She claims that neither of these theories is tenable—neither the theory according to which facts are special structured building blocks of reality (...) nor the theory according to which facts are whatever is named by certain expressions of the form “the fact that such and such.” There is reality, and there are entities in reality that we are able to name, but, Betti contends, among these entities there are no facts. -/- Drawing on metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and linguistics, Betti examines the main arguments in favor of and against facts of the two major sorts, which she distinguishes as compositional and propositional, giving special attention to methodological presuppositions. She criticizes compositional facts (facts as special structured building blocks of reality) and the central argument for them, Armstrong's truthmaker argument. She then criticizes propositional facts (facts as whatever is named in “the fact that” statements) and what she calls the argument from nominal reference, which draws on Quine's criterion of ontological commitment. Betti argues that metaphysicians should stop worrying about facts, and philosophers in general should stop arguing for or against entities on the basis of how we use language. (shrink)

Betty Powell; XII*—Descartes' Machines, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 71, Issue 1, 1 June 1971, Pages 209–222, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristot.

Many of us, and I am no exception, have been led to assume, almost un-consciously, that Śankara is India's greatest philosopher and that the non-dualist philosophy he consolidated, Advaita Vedānta, is the supreme spiritual philosophy of India, if not of the whole world. Dualist opponents like Madhva, on the other hand, have usually been appreciated very little, if at all. Several of my colleagues think of Madhva as a reactionary, if brilliant, theist whose philosophy best serves as a foil to (...) Śankara's. Madhva, it almost seems, is studied not for his own philosophical virtues but as a means the better to appreciate Śankara's. I believe that we must weigh more carefully the dualist position, particularly its trenchant critique of non-dualism. We may discover in the process that Śankara, whatever else he was – brilliant stylist, mystic par excellence , deft polemicist – was not the originator or consolidator of anything like an internally consistent metaphysics. (shrink)

We propose a new method for the history of ideas that has none of the shortcomings so often ascribed to this approach. We call this method the model approach to the history of ideas. We argue that any adequately developed and implementable method to trace continuities in the history of human thought, or concept drift, will require that historians use explicit interpretive conceptual frameworks. We call these frameworks models. We argue that models enhance the comprehensibility of historical texts, and provide (...) historians of ideas with a method that, unlike existing approaches, is susceptible neither to common holistic criticisms nor to Skinner's objections that the history of ideas yields arbitrary and biased reconstructions. To illustrate our proposal, we discuss the so-called Classical Model of Science and draw upon work in computer science and cognitive psychology. (shrink)

Amongst the multiple key philosophers who have addressed critical issues pertaining to music education since the mid-1900s, Bennett Reimer was one voice that began a systematic examination of the nature and value of music and music education as a foundation for a philosophy of music education. With the musical experience at the center of his philosophy, Reimer sought to explain how music articulates feeling, a core of who we are as human beings. Over the sixty years of writing, Reimer’s thinking (...) continued to be influenced by other disciplines including the literature on creative thinking and cognitive neuroscience. The impact of his writing on the field is multifarious, including philosophy, advocacy, curriculum, and the role of music in school-based programs. (shrink)

Meaning addresses the fundamental question of human language interaction: what it is to mean, and how we communicate our meanings to others. Experienced textbook writer and eminent researcher Betty J. Birner gives balanced coverage to semantics and pragmatics, emphasizing interactions between the two, and discusses other fields of language study such as syntax, neurology, philosophy of language, and artificial intelligence in terms of their interfaces with linguistic meaning.

While it is widely assumed that greater diversity in corporate governance will enhance a firm’s corporate social performance, this study considers an alternative thesis which relates managerial control to corporate philanthropy. The study empirically evaluates both board diversity and managerial control of the board as possible predictors of corporate philanthropy. The demonstration of a positive relationship between managerial control and corporate philanthropy contributes to our understanding that corporate social performance results from a complex set of economic and social motives. Possible (...) future research and managerial implications are discussed. (shrink)

The step to e-research in philosophy depends on the availability of high quality, easily and freely accessible corpora in a sustainable format composed from multi-language, multi-script books from different historical periods. Corpora matching these needs are at the moment virtually non-existing. Within @PhilosTei, we have addressed this corpus building problem by developing an open source, web-based, user-friendly workflow from textual images to TEI, based on state-of-the-art open source OCR software, to wit Tesseract, and a multi-language version of TICCL, a powerful (...) OCR post-correction tool. We have demonstrated the utility of the tool by applying it to a multilingual, multi-script corpus of important eighteenth to twentieth-century European philosophical texts. (shrink)

In rhetoric, an orator needs both a large vocabulary and a stock of commonplaces and arguments. Erasmus put them together in his De duplici copia verborum ac rerum . In this sixth volume of the first Ordo of the Amsterdam edition of the Latin texts of Erasmus, Betty Knott has edited the Latin text and added an English introduction and commentary, providing philological and historical information which helps the reader to understand the text and identify its sources.

This paper is a contribution to the reconstruction of Tarski’s semantic background in the light of the ideas of his master, Stanislaw Lesniewski. Although in his 1933 monograph Tarski credits Lesniewski with crucial negative results on the semantics of natural language, the conceptual relationship between the two logicians has never been investigated in a thorough manner. This paper shows that it was not Tarski, but Lesniewski who first avowed the impossibility of giving a satisfactory theory of truth for ordinary language, (...) and the necessity of sanitation of the latter for scientific purposes. In an early article (1913) Lesniewski gave an interesting solution to the Liar Paradox, which, although different from Tarski’s in detail, is nevertheless important to Tarski’s semantic background. To illustrate this I give an analysis of Lesniewski’s solution and of some related aspects of Lesniewski’s later thought. (shrink)

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s failures in Black Orpheus have been widely and rightly explicated by a number of theorists, most notably Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. Sartre has rightly been criticized for imposing a white gaze onto his reading of colonized African poetry. It would seem that his work offers us no tools for anti-racist work today. For this article, I read his failures in the text alongside his work in The Imaginary and Being and Nothingness to argue that we can learn (...) from his failures and that his failures do offer us conceptual tools for anti-racist work today. I argue that Sartre’s main contribution ought to be understood as a provocation to white people. He is provoking white people to confront how whiteness works in their imaginary. The imaginary is nothing but what one puts into it, and what one puts into it is imbued with the historical, social and cultural. The image is imbued with the individual’s experiences within a historical, social and cultural situation. If this is the case, then the confrontation with and critique of the image is a political act. In confronting and critiquing the image, one is confronting and critiquing the situation in which the image emerges. The hope is that in doing so, white people could transcend the facticity of their whiteness in particular situations for the better, which in turn would have positive consequences for the larger sociopolitical situation. (shrink)

INDIAN AND WESTERN PHILOSOPHY- A Study in Contrasts By BETTY HEIMANN. Originally published in I937. Contents include: 1. INTRODUCTION 13 2. THEOLOGY 2Q 3. ONTOLOGY AND ESCHATOLOGY 46 4. ETHICS 63 5. LOGIC 79 6. AESTHETICS 98 7. HISTORY AND APPLIED SCIENCE Il6 8. THE APPARENT RAPPROCHEMENT BETWEEN WEST AND EAST 131 EPILOGUE 147 INDEX OF PROBLEMS TREATED 149. INDIAN AND WESTERN PHILOSOPHY. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION: ONE ceuvre dart est un coin de la creation vu d travers un temperament, (...) says Zola and we may be justified in applying this aphorism when we venture on a some what similar survey and attempt an artificial selection from World-Philosophy throughout the ages. My aim, however, is not to elaborate any finished outline of all the philosophical conceptions that have arisen in East and West up to the present day, but merely to indicate the essential and fundamental tendencies and principles. In tracing the sources of Western Philosophy to Plato and Aristotle, and still earlier to the pre-Socratics of ancient Greece, I became convinced that all translations are, to a greater or less degree, modes of interpretation. I studied the Classics, therefore, from the linguistic standpoint, and this procedure ultimately developed into a philosophical method intimately associated with the psychological aspects of Philology. In pursuing this task I discovered at the same time the specifically material basis of all Western thought. In other words in my regress from the history of modern Philosophy to the dawn of Greek speculation, or to repeat to the pre-Socratics, I found myself able to trace the main trends of Western Philosophy to the prior era of the Greek Sophists, whose outstanding role as the actual founders of Western thought is, in my opinion, too frequently underestimated. Their basic dogma which has held good in the West ever since was, Man is the Measure of all things. At this point an equally important feature must be emphasized for throughout this age of the Sophists there persists the profound contrast between the typically Western, and the equally distinctive Eastern, intellectual and spiritual atmospheres. In this connection, still further, I was deeply impressed by the far-reaching divergence of the Western anthropological tendency from the older cosmic out look upon Man as being part and parcel of the Universe And this radical antithesis is to be dis cerned in contemporary Greek drama. For Aeschylus, the Marathonomaches, creates all his immortal tragedies in the genuinely cosmic mood. Every in fraction of cosmic order, with no single exception, must generate its own inevitable reaction, and also its punishment, in order that the primal cosmic harmony may once more be restored... (shrink)

Betty Powell; XII*—Descartes' Machines, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 71, Issue 1, 1 June 1971, Pages 209–222, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristot.

The reach-to-grasp movement is ordinarily performed in everyday living activities and it represents a key behavior that allows humans to interact with their environment. Remarkably, it serves as an experimental test case for probing the multisensory architecture of goal-oriented actions. This review focuses on experimental evidence that enhances or modifies how we might conceptualize the “multisensory” substrates of prehension. We will review evidence suggesting that how reach-to-grasp movements are planned and executed is influenced by information coming from different sensory modalities (...) such as vision, proprioception, audition, taste, and olfaction. The review closes with some considerations about the predominant role of the multisensory constituents in shaping prehensile behavior and how this might be important for future research developments, especially in the rehabilitative domain. (shrink)

A new study entitled “Normal gut microbiota modulates brain development and behavior”, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, requires that we reconsider the notion that the brain is an immune‐privileged site. The authors demonstrate that intestinal microbiota must be present within a set time‐frame for normal synaptogenesis to occur in the brain. In the absence of intestinal microbiota, histopathological and behavioral abnormalities arise. These observations necessitate a new look at the many interconnections of the immune system (...) and the brain, suggesting new frontiers for research and new therapeutic strategies for neurodevelopmental diseases. (shrink)