In Chapters 6 and 7 of Language, Truth and Poetry I attempted to solve the ancient problem of fictional reference by claiming that a fictional construct ‘points’ or refers to certain features of reality in rather the same way as an abstraction like ‘gravitation’ or ‘cruelty’ does. I now believe that this theory of mine is unsatisfactory; and I should like to propose a new solution to the problem.

School-aged children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) are at greater risk for physical inactivity, lower global self-worth, and internalizing problems, such as depression and anxiety. Based on the Environmental Stress Hypothesis (ESH), recent research has shown that physical inactivity and lower global self-worth sequentially mediate the relationship between DCD and internalizing problems, suggesting that DCD leads to lower levels of physical activity, which in turn, leads to lower levels of global self-worth, and ultimately, a greater amount of internalizing problems. However, (...) physical activity and global self-worth may also buffer (i.e., moderate) the adverse effect of DCD on internalizing problems. To date, this has yet to be tested. Participants were 1206 children aged 12-14 years (611 boys, 79 with probable DCD (pDCD)). All children received assessments of motor coordination, physical activity, global self-worth, and internalizing problems. Children with pDCD were less physically active, had lower self-worth, and experienced more internalizing problems compared to typically developing (TD) children (p’s <.05). Furthermore, the moderated moderating effect (three-way interaction) of physical activity and global self-worth was also evident (p <.05), indicating that internalizing problems in both TD and pDCD groups decreased with concurrent increases in physical activity and global self-worth. Importantly, when compared to TD children, increases in physical activity and global self-worth were associated with a greater reduction in internalizing problems among children with pDCD. The findings support several pathways in the ESH and highlight that, in addition to improving motor skills, interventions should also target both physical activity and global self-worth to mitigate potential mental health issues for children with motor difficulties. (shrink)

The paper discusses Dr. Floris Tomasini's paper “What Is Bioethics: Notes toward a New Approach?”. Based on Tomasini's account of methodological and ethical pluralism, the paper explores the demarcation problem of bioethics and suggests a full methodological laissez-faire.

This article contends that the central principle of modern philosophy is obscured by a side-debate between two opposed camps that are united in accepting a deeper flawed premise. Consider the powerful critiques of Kantian philosophy offered by Quentin Meillassoux and Bruno Latour, respectively. These two thinkers criticize Kant for opposite reasons: Meillassoux because Kant collapses thought and world into a permanent “correlate” without isolated terms, and Latour because Kant tries to purify thought and world from each other rather than realizing (...) that they are always combined in “hybrid” form. What both critiques tacitly accept is the notion that “thought” and “world” are the two major poles of the universe. I claim that this stems from the post-Cartesian assumption that thought and world are the two basic kinds of things that exist. The name “onto-taxonomy” is introduced for this view. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Some Sources for Hume's Opening Remarks to Treatise LIVJII Graham Solomon Hume opens Book I, Part IV, Section III of the Treatise with these remarks: Several moralists have recommended it as an excellent method ofbecoming acquainted with our own hearts, and knowing our progress in virtue, to recollect our dreams in a morning, and examine them with the same rigour, that we wou'd our most serious and deliberate (...) actions. Our character is the same throughout, say they, and appears best where artifice, fear, and policy have no place, and men can neither be hypocrites with themselves nor others. The generosity, or baseness of our temper, our meekness or cruelty, our courage or pusilanimity, influence the fictions of the imagination with the most unbounded liberty, and discover themselves in the mostglaring colours. Who were these moralists? One looks in vain in the work of Malebranche, Locke, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson for such a recommendation. Did anyone make that recommendation? One moralist who did was "John Shadow," in a letter to Joseph Addison published in The Spectator, no. 586, 27 August 1714. Addison introduces Shadow's letter with the remark that it "is built upon a thought that is new, and very well carried on; for which Reasons I shall give it to the Publick without Alteration, Addition, or Amendment." I quote at length, for easy comparison with Hume: Sir, It was a good Piece of Advice which Pythagoras gave to his Scholars. That every Night before they slept they should examine what theyhad been a doing that Day, and so discover what Actions were worthy of Pursuit to Morrow, and what little Vices were to be prevented from slipping unawares into a Habit. If I might second the Philosopher's Advice, it should be mine, That in a morning before my Scholar rose, he should consider what he had been about that Night, and with the Volume XVI Number 1 57 GRAHAM SOLOMON same Strictness, as if the Condition, he has believed himself to be in, was real. Such a Scrutiny into the Actions ofhis Fancy must be of considerable Advantage, for this Reason, Because the Circumstances which a Man imagines himself in during Sleep, are generally such as entirely favour his Inclinations good or bad, and give him imaginary Opportunities of pursuingthem to the utmost; so thathis Temper will lye fairly open to his View, while he considers howitis moved when free from those Constraints which the Accidents ofreal Life put it under. Dreams are certainly the Result of our waking Thoughts, and our daily Hopes and Fears are what give the mind such nimble Relishes of Pleasure, and such severe Touches ofPain, in its Midnight Rambles. AMan that murders his Enemy, or deserts his Friend in a Dream, had need to guard his Temper against Revenge and Ingratitude, and take heed that he be not tempted to do a vile thing in Pursuit of false, or the Neglect of true Honour... I think it has been observed in the Course of your Papers, how much one's Happiness or Misery may depend upon the Imagination: ofwhich Truth those strange Workings ofFancy in Sleep are no inconsiderable Instances; so that not only the Advantage a Man has ofmaking Discoveries ofhimself, but a Regard to his own Ease or Disquiet, may induce him to accept ofmy Advice... Shadow has been identified as the poet John Byrom by various of the later editors of The Spectator? Of these, D. F. Bond footnotes Byrom's reference to Pythagoras, noting the publication in English of André Dacier's The Life ofPythagoras, with his Symbolism and Golden Verses; together with the Life ofHierocles, and his Commentaries upon the Verses. Bond notes Hierodes' comments on the following Verses: Never suffer Sleep to close thy Eye-lids, after thy going to Bed, Till thou hast examin'd by thy Reason all thy Actions of the Day Wherein have I done amiss? What have I done? What have I omitted that I ought to have done? If in this Examination, thou find that thou hast done amiss, reprimand thy self severely for it: And if thou has done any Good, rejoice. Dacier cites Porphyry and Marcus Aurelius... (shrink)

This paper criticizes two forms of philosophical materialism that adopt opposite strategies but end up in the same place. Both hold that individual entities must be banished from philosophy. The first kind is ground floor materialism, which attempts to dissolve all objects into some deeper underlying basis; here, objects are seen as too shallow to be the truth. The second kind is first floor materialism, which treats objects as naive fictions gullibly posited behind the direct accessibility of appearances or relations; (...) here, objects are portrayed as too deep to be the truth. One major thesis of this paper is that these two forms of materialism are parasitical on one another and need each other's resources to make sense of the world. The second major thesis is that both forms of materialism thereby stand condemned, and that philosophy must be rebuilt from the individual objects that the two forms of materialism disdain. These points are made through a detailed consid- eration of the book Every Thing Must Go by the analytic structural realists James Ladyman and Don Ross, which has gained a surprising following among some speculative realists in continental philosophy. Ladyman and Ross claim to preserve objects by treating them as ``real patterns'', but they do so at the price of destroying their autonomous reality. Furthermore, they are unable to tell us whether the mathematical structures they see as the basis of human knowledge are also the basis of reality itself. In short, their ontology is scientism for scientism's sake (or `Bunsen burner realism') and must be eliminated in favor of a genuine realist metaphysics of objects. (shrink)

Part I: The Life of Cognitive Science:. William Bechtel, Adele Abrahamsen, and George Graham. Part II: Areas of Study in Cognitive Science:. 1. Analogy: Dedre Gentner. 2. Animal Cognition: Herbert L. Roitblat. 3. Attention: A.H.C. Van Der Heijden. 4. Brain Mapping: Jennifer Mundale. 5. Cognitive Anthropology: Charles W. Nuckolls. 6. Cognitive and Linguistic Development: Adele Abrahamsen. 7. Conceptual Change: Nancy J. Nersessian. 8. Conceptual Organization: Douglas Medin and Sandra R. Waxman. 9. Consciousness: Owen Flanagan. 10. Decision Making: J. Frank (...) Yates and Paul A. Estin. 11. Emotions: Paul E. Griffiths. 12. Imagery and Spatial Representation: Rita E. Anderson. 13. Language Evolution and Neuromechanisms: Terrence W. Deacon. 14. Language Processing: Kathryn Bock and Susan M. Garnsey. 15. Linguistics Theory: D. Terence Langendoen. 16. Machine Learning: Paul Thagard. 17. Memory: Henry L. Roediger III and Lyn M. Goff. 18. Perception: Cees Van Leeuwen. 19. Perception: Color: Austen Clark. 20. Problem Solving: Kevin Dunbar. 21. Reasoning: Lance J. Rips. 22. Social Cognition: Alan J. Lambert and Alison L. Chasteen. 23. Unconscious Intelligence: Rhianon Allen and Arthur S. Reber. 24. Understanding Texts: Art Graesser and Pam Tipping. 25. Word Meaning: Barbara C. Malt. Part III: Methodologies of Cognitive Science:. 26. Artificial Intelligence: Ron Sun. 27. Behavioral Experimentation: Alexander Pollatsek and Keith Rayner. 28. Cognitive Ethology: Marc Bekoff. 29. Deficits and Pathologies: Christopher D. Frith. 30. Ethnomethodology: Barry Saferstein. 31. Functional Analysis: Brian Macwhinney. 32. Neuroimaging: Randy L. Buckner and Steven E. Petersen. 33. Protocal Analysis: K. Anders Ericsson. 34. Single Neuron Electrophysiology: B. E. Stein, M.T. Wallace, and T.R. Stanford. 35. Structural Analysis: Robert Frank. Part IV: Stances in Cognitive Science:. 36. Case-based Reasoning: David B. Leake. 37. Cognitive Linguistics: Michael Tomasello. 38. Connectionism, Artificial Life, and Dynamical Systems: Jeffrey L. Elman. 39. Embodied, Situated, and Distributed Cognition: Andy Clark. 40. Mediated Action: James V. Wertsch. 41. Neurobiological Modeling: P. Read Montague and Peter Dayan. 42. Production Systems: Christian D. Schunn and David Klahr. Part V: Controversies in Cognitive Science:. 43. The Binding Problem: Valerie Gray Hardcastle. 44. Heuristics and Satisficing: Robert C. Richardson. 45. Innate Knowledge: Barbara Landau. 46. Innateness and Emergentism: Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey L. Elman, Mark H. Johnson, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett. 47. Intentionality: Gilbert Harman. 48. Levels of Explanation and Cognition Architectures: Robert N. McCauley. 49. Modularity: Irene Appelbaum. 50. Representation and Computation: Robert S. Stufflebeam. 51. Representations: Dorrit Billman. 52. Rules: Terence Horgan and John Tienson. 53. Stage Theories Refuted: Donald G. Mackay. Part VI: Cognitive Science in the Real World:. 54. Education: John T. Bruer. 55. Ethics: Mark L. Johnson. 56. Everyday Life Environments: Alex Kirlik. 57. Institutions and Economics: Douglass C. North. 58. Legal Reasoning: Edwina L. Rissland. 59. Mental Retardation: Norman W. Bray, Kevin D. Reilly, Lisa F. Huffman, Lisa A. Grupe, Mark F. Villa, Kathryn L. Fletcher, and Vivek Anumolu. 60. Science: William F. Brewer and Punyashloke Mishra. Selective Biographies of Major Contributors to Cognitive Science: William Bechtel and Tadeusz Zawidzki. (shrink)

SummaryIn this article I react to dismissive remarks made about my Jacob Vernet, Geneva and the philosophes (1994) in a recent book by David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment (2008). Vernet, a distinguished Genevan pastor and theologian, who fell foul of d'Alembert, Voltaire and Rousseau, is one of six figures studied by Sorkin, who claims that the religious dimension of the Enlightenment has been much underestimated and that the philosophes were considerably less significant than has usually been thought. Reacting to the (...) accusation that my treatment of Vernet's theology was superficial and unreliable, I reconsider the latter's major theological works (including his Traité de la vérité de la religion chrétienne, Instruction chrétienne, and Pièces fugitives sur l'eucharistie) in an attempt to validate my previous interpretation, and illustrate that Vernet refused to acknowledge ideas that he had actually published. The second part of the article draws more general conclusions, pointing out spectacular errors in Sorkin's depiction of eighteenth-century Geneva and arguing that he has a clear agenda, which, in my opinion, is wrong-headed, easy to refute and—above all—often based on gratuitous accusations and statements lacking any evidence. (shrink)

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityMy deepest condolences to Pepe, Dom and Marcus and to Jim’s grandchildren. Tina and I spent a lot of time at the Marshall family home, often attending dinn...

In this paper, I argue that the performance stories in the Zhuangzi, and the Butcher Ding story, emphasize an activity meditation practice that places the performer in a mindfulness flow zone, leading to graceful, efficacious, selfless, spontaneous, and free action. These stories are metaphors showing the reader how to attain a meditative state of focused awareness while acting freely in a flow experience. From my perspective, these metaphors are not about developing practical or technical skills per se. My argument challenges (...) a strict instrumental reading. Although instrumental reasoning can easily lead one to focus on the pragmatic outcomes depicted in these stories (See Eno, “Cook Ding’s Dao;” Callahan, “Cook Ding’s Life;” and Robins, “Beyond Skill”), the proposed pragmatic outcomes are merely a kind of collateral result of effortless, free actions, in the flow experience. The metaphors of Butcher Ding, the Lüliang rapids swimmer, the Wheelwright Bian, the Woodcarver Qing, the cicada catcher, the naked artist and so on are used to show the reader a way to engage in free and graceful action in the flow experience. Zhuangzi is not concerned about developing labour skills. He criticizes such skills; seen below when the Butcher claims to have “… left skill behind …” (進乎技矣) (Graham, Chuang-tzu, 63), and chapter five notes that “… skill is a peddler” (工為商) (Watson, Complete, 75). (shrink)

According to the influential Plato-Aristotle account, Parmenides advocates holistic monism (‘all things are one’), and Xenophanes anticipated him by advocating some version of monotheism. Over the last half-century or so, Parmenides studies have disputed this vulgate by arguing that Parmenides’ focus is on the nature of ‘what is’ (to eon), rather than on ‘the One’. Correspondingly, there has developed a tendency to minimize the philosophical importance of Xenophanes, by viewing him primarily as a reformer of Greek religious beliefs and as (...) social critic. I argue that a close study of Xenophanes shows that he had developed a coherent naturalist or physicalist world-view. And this also allows us to gain deeper insights into Parmenides, by viewing the latter as generalizing Xenophanes’ critique of peculiarly ‘anthropist’ (or anthropomorphist) bias in our approach to the universe.Dedication: to Dan Graham. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:In, Out Me, You Mental, Moral Where Do I Begin?Mark D. Rego (bio)I once attended a Buddhist meditation retreat, led by an American meditation teacher. The instructor had studied and practiced is Asia for many years and was well versed in the practices and teachings of Buddhism. Among his opening remarks was something along the line of the following: "One question that is asked on every retreat is, 'if (...) there is no true self, then who is it who has come here to become free of the illusion of a self?' The answer is, I don't know, but we can start anyway."This sense of practicality in the face of unanswerable questions is built into Buddhism, as is the relationship among the particularities of each individual, a process akin to externality, mental well-being, and morality.I raise Buddhism both because of its central interest into the nature of the self (an obviously germane consideration in the papers under discussion) and because of this second feature noted, namely the comfortable integration of individuality, character building, ethical action, and mental well-being (the issue of the true self will, thankfully, have to wait). It is this theme that I raise via the discussion of externality.The commentaries of Talmadge and Graham, unintentionally I think, pull me toward a beguiling observation in my daily practice of psychiatry. Namely, patients commonly report their clinical improvements in terms of how they deal better with others, how they are more thoughtful and even handed (with themselves included), and how they better cope with the demands of their individual lives. In senses both highly individual and highly principled, and in ways both explicit and implicit, when patients feel better they often feel that they are better people (all the kinds of treatment mentioned in my paper equally apply; there is no exclusivity in this result).There is also an interesting consistency in a dual manner in which this is expressed. In one way people report the improved coping, handling, and so on mentioned. In the next breath the same person commonly says, "I feel like myself."The meditation instructor would be pleased; it appears that through a process of becoming aware of and letting go of some form of negativity an individual feels better, acts better, and feels more unified. (As the instructor was psychologically sophisticated, he would not mistake the "like myself" sentiment as a Buddhist heresy. Rather, he would understand it as a reflection of being more at ease with and aware of disparate parts of himself.) And all this without figuring out who the real self is. [End Page 331]I mention these observations about Buddhism and clinical care because when I consider the processes of evaluating, deciding, and forging identity and volition it seems to me that somewhere between the lines the individual is aligning himself with some sense of what is good. The resultant experience of volition and cohesive identity is, often but not always, experienced as good both psychologically and morally.Change, Others, and ValuesIn the two commentaries that follow my paper on Frankfurtian externality and therapeutic change (Rego 2004), Talmadge (2004) and Graham (2004) highlight different aspects of externality and therapeutics. Talmadge, an addiction psychiatrist, expands the theme of volitional change in recovery from addiction. For Talmadge, as for most in the field, the question of when and how an addict has truly committed to change (hitting "rock bottom"? accepting the first of the twelve steps?) is perennially in the air. Such knowledge would be invaluable in guiding addicts along their rocky paths.Although still far short of the mark, Talmadge finds some illustrative guidance in Frankfurt. The shift that takes place within the addict to place him on the road to recovery is not necessarily "rock bottom," or conformity to a program's dictates or a state of new knowledge. Rather, it is a shift in will. By whatever process (and Talmadge is quite aware that there seem to be many paths) the addict has come to care about sobriety in a way he or she did not before. He or she now cares in a way that is part of him or her... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How Philosophers Trivialize Art: Bleak House, Oedipus Rex, "Leda and the Swan"Michael D. HurleyIIt is a Perverse but unsurprising irony that answers to the question of whether art can give us knowledge characteristically trivialize that which draws us to individual artworks in the first place. The experience of art is sidelined in favor of the apparent after-effect of that experience. Even those writing against each other tend to converge (...) on this. In an essay contesting Nelson Goodman's epistemic claims for art, Gordon Graham nonetheless agrees that, "The question to be asked of such a work is not, 'Does this effectively capture the scene portrayed?', but 'Does this make us see this sort of occasion differently?'"1 Even attempts to distinguish art as "gift" as opposed to commodity predictably figure its value in terms of what might be taken away: "I went to see a landscape painter's works, and that evening, walking among pine trees near my home, I could see the shapes and the colors I had not seen the day before."2This state of affairs is perversely ironic for two reasons. Firstly, because the possibility of art's cognitive content is only prompted at all by the immediate experience it offers: without this, art would not excite us the way it does and there would be no debate to be had. Secondly, and more significantly, because a defining part of what constitutes an interest in art is, I should like to suggest, an experience of knowledge; or, more accurately, an experience of knowing. This irony is unsurprising because it is merely another expression of a recalcitrant prejudice in western epistemology that idealizes knowledge as an objectively true, justified belief—perforce excluding the possibility of knowing as a subjective [End Page 107] experience of believing. No wonder the author of Theætetus elsewhere finds poets incapable of offering anything but lies.Plato's lingering legacy assures that the cognitive content of art be assized according to what might be extracted from the artwork—cashed in like so many casino chips—when we are done with our experience of it. This applies whether the knowledge-bearing being argued for, or against, is conceptual or propositional (e.g., Putnam, Novitz, John),3 or imaginative (e.g., Goodman, Robinson, Currie),4 as well as for the claim that art can offer us moral instruction (e.g., Beardsmore, Eldridge, Nussbaum, Sharpe, Kieran, John).5 There is less consensus as to whether the capacity of art to give us knowledge enriches the aesthetic value of that artwork, but those who would advance this position have been on the back-foot in recent years following a wave of criticisms from, among others, Beardsley, Lamarque and Olsen, Diffey, and Gaut.6This article addresses art's capacity to give us knowledge as well as the conjunct of whether such knowledge might inform its value qua art. In so doing, it presses a case that has already been disallowed by the terms in which the question of the relationship between art and knowledge is typically put. Whatever efferent knowledge art might offer, it also provides the conditions for a kind of knowing that cannot be translated beyond itself. Only such an experience of knowledge-as-knowing, which is realized through the untranslatable singularity of an artwork, may be considered constitutive of art's aesthetic value. Couched another way: epistemology meets aesthetics not where it has most often been located, in the perfective, at the congruence of the thought and the felt, but in the present continuous, in the engagement of thinking and feeling. Connecting the epistemic and the aesthetic in this way is, then, exactly the opposite proposition to that presented by Douglas Morgan, for whom, "although many words in many arts can and do give us knowledge of many kinds, nonetheless if this knowledge were the key and limit to the love of art, the world of art would be even sorrier than it now is."7IILiterature has generated by far the greatest volume of commentary in the debate on art and knowledge. This is to be expected given the bias towards categorizing knowledge as something like data... (shrink)

D I Lloyd; I Experientially Remember, Therefore I Exist? A reply to R. D. Smith, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 97–1.

Education; Islamic ethics; Arab countries.

D I Lloyd; I Experientially Remember, Therefore I Exist? A reply to R. D. Smith, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 17, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 97–1.

A. Raghuramaraju has curated and edited this volume, which proposes a major breakthrough in the field of philosophical studies. The volume reproduces not only Desire and Liberation and Kalidas Bhattacharyya's introduction to it, but also the letters that Bhattacharyya wrote to Chandidas, and Chandidas's own commentary on his text. In Desire and Liberation Vaddera Chandidas creates a new metaphysical system. The author rejects major convergences inphilosophy from both India and the West, especially on the ontological primacy of non-being that results (...) in permanence. He is especially opposed to the idea of permanence, which renders unreliable anything that is not permanent but changing. Chandidas points out that contradictoriness is the structural 'tinge' ofreality. (shrink)

On the pedagogic views of Muslim theologians, and their influence in individual and societal development.