In this essay, Bruce Maxwell, David Waddington, Kevin McDonough, Andrée‐ Anne Cormier, and Marina Schwimmer compare two competing approaches to social integration policy, Multiculturalism and Interculturalism, from the perspective of the issue of the state funding and regulation of conservative religious schools. After identifying the key differences between Interculturalism and Multiculturalism, as well as their many similarities, the authors present an explanatory analysis of this intractable policy challenge. Conservative religious schooling, they argue, tests a conceptual tension (...) inherent in Multiculturalism between respect for group diversity and autonomy, on the one hand, and the ideal of intercultural citizenship, on the other. Taking as a case study Québec's education system and, in particular, recent curricular innovations aimed at helping young people acquire the capabilities of intercultural citizenship, the authors illustrate how Interculturalism signals a compelling way forward in the effort to overcome the political dilemma of conservative religious schooling. (shrink)

In this essay, Bruce Maxwell, David Waddington, Kevin McDonough, Andrée-Anne Cormier, and Marina Schwimmer compare two competing approaches to social integration policy, Multiculturalism and Interculturalism, from the perspective of the issue of the state funding and regulation of conservative religious schools. After identifying the key differences between Interculturalism and Multiculturalism, as well as their many similarities, the authors present an explanatory analysis of this intractable policy challenge. Conservative religious schooling, they argue, tests a conceptual tension inherent (...) in Multiculturalism between respect for group diversity and autonomy, on the one hand, and the ideal of intercultural citizenship, on the other. Taking as a case study Québec's education system and, in particular, recent curricular innovations aimed at helping young people acquire the capabilities of intercultural citizenship, the authors illustrate how Interculturalism signals a compelling way forward in the effort to overcome the political dilemma of conservative religious schooling. (shrink)

Cet article considère la question de la légitimité du financement public des écoles dites ethnoreligieuses à la lumière du modèle interculturaliste de citoyenneté. La première section dresse un bref portrait historique du débat autour de cette question tel qu’il s’est présenté au Québec. Ensuite, elle explique en quoi cette problématique révèle une tension inhérente aux principes clés de l’interculturalisme. La seconde partie propose une critique de l’approche standard pour aborder l’enjeu du financement public des écoles ethnoreligieuses et défend une approche (...) alternative fondée sur une vision plus globale des finalités politiques de l’interculturalisme. La troisième et dernière section propose, en s’appuyant sur le modèle alternatif défendu, quatre mesures régulatrices visant à répondre aux difficultés que posent les politiques de financement public des écoles ethnoreligieuses. (shrink)

In this essay, David Waddington provides a basic outline of John Dewey's often‐overlooked views on technology education and explores how these ideas could be updated productively for use in contemporary contexts. Some of the shortcomings of Dewey's ideas are also examined—his faith in the scientific method may have been excessive, and some critics have charged that his aspirations for a technology‐infused citizenship education were overly ambitious. However, Waddington contends in this analysis that by combining Dewey's ideas with (...) the insights of contemporary thinkers such as Bruno Latour, it is possible to update the notion of technological transparency to create a fresh approach to science and technology education. This new approach, which Waddington calls “critical transparency,” aims to help citizens develop a healthy skepticism toward science and technology. (shrink)

The extremely high level of simulated violence in certain recent video games has made some people uneasy. There is a concern that something is wrong with these violent games, but, since the violence is virtual rather than real, it is difficult to specify the nature of the wrongness. Since there is no proven causal connection between video-game violence and real violence, philosophical analysis can be particularly helpful in locating potential sources of wrongness in ultra-violent video games. To this end, this (...) paper analyzes video game violence through the lens of utilitarian, Kantian, and post-modern perspectives. Through these analyses, several explanations of the wrongness in violent video games emerge. (shrink)

This essay serves as a guide for scholars, especially those in education, who want to gain a better understanding of Heidegger's essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. The paper has three sections: an interpretive summary, a critical commentary, and some remarks on Heidegger scholarship in education. Since Heidegger's writing style is rather opaque, the interpretive summary serves as a map with which to navigate the essay. The critical commentary offers a careful analysis of some of the central concepts in the essay. (...) These concepts, which include bringing‐forth, challenging‐forth, and gestell, are intriguing but problematic. The problems and possibilities of these ideas are analyzed, and an overall assessment of Heidegger's ideas on technology is offered. In the final section, the work of several scholars in education is examined. Some of this work is excellent, but there is also a significant amount of confused and confusing scholarship. (shrink)

This essay serves as a guide for scholars, especially those in education, who want to gain a better understanding of Heidegger's essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. The paper has three sections: an interpretive summary, a critical commentary, and some remarks on Heidegger scholarship in education. Since Heidegger's writing style is rather opaque, the interpretive summary serves as a map with which to navigate the essay. The critical commentary offers a careful analysis of some of the central concepts in the essay. (...) These concepts, which include bringing‐forth, challenging‐forth, and gestell, are intriguing but problematic. The problems and possibilities of these ideas are analyzed, and an overall assessment of Heidegger's ideas on technology is offered. In the final section, the work of several scholars in education is examined. Some of this work is excellent, but there is also a significant amount of confused and confusing scholarship. (shrink)

In this essay, David Waddington and Noah Weeth Feinstein explore how Dewey's conception of science can help us rethink the way science is done in schools. The authors begin by contrasting a view of science that is implicitly accepted by many scientists and science educators — science as a search for truth — with Dewey's instrumentalist, technological, and nonrealist conception of science. After demonstrating that the search-for-truth conception is closely linked to some ongoing difficulties with science curricula that (...) students find particularly alienating, they then analyze some of the educational opportunities that Dewey's vision opens up. Ultimately, Waddington and Weeth Feinstein argue that Dewey offers a humble and humanistic vision of science and science education practice that captures the power of science by connecting it clearly to everyday human activities and challenges. (shrink)

Critics like Leonard Waks argue that video games are, at best, a dubious substitute for the rich classroom experiences that John Dewey wished to create and that, at worst, they are profoundly miseducative. Using the example of Fate of the World, a climate change simulation game, David Waddington addresses these concerns through a careful demonstration of how video games can recapture some of the lost potential of Dewey's original program of education through occupations. Not only do simulation games (...) realize most of the original goals of education through occupations, but they also solve some of the serious practical problems that Dewey's curriculum generated. Waddington concludes the essay with an analysis of Waks's critiques and some cautionary notes about why it is important to be temperate in our endorsement of educational video gaming. (shrink)

In 1926, C. E. Ayres, a young assistant editor of The New Republic, had completed a draft of his first book, Science: The False Messiah. His publishers, Bobbs-Merrill, were enthusiastic but also somewhat worried—the book, which was a blistering critique of the public understanding of science, was engagingly written and eminently readable, but it was also provocative. Bobbs-Merrill were concerned that Ayres’ “very saucy” approach might damage sales, especially given that he was a complete unknown as far as the general (...) public was concerned; and in order to boost Ayres’ credibility and, hence, future sales of the book, they felt that he needed an endorsement.1 Ayres thus dutifully set about writing to his friendly .. (shrink)

One of the interesting aspects of Dewey’s early educational thought is his apparent hostility toward children’s imaginative pursuits, yet the question of why this antipathy exists remains unanswered. As will become clear, Dewey’s hostility towards imaginative activities stemmed from a broad variety of concerns. In some of his earliest work, Dewey adopted a set of anti-Romantic criticisms and used these concerns to attack what one might call “runaway” imaginative and emotional tendencies. Then, in his early educational writings, these earlier concerns (...) were augmented by several other factors, including problematic trends in progressive education, new developments in psychology, and Dewey’s own educational aims. This analysis explores the roots of these criticisms, and explains how they culminate in the stance on the imagination that Dewey eventually outlined in the early educational writings. Notably, these findings have some important implications for certain prominent contemporary critics of progressivism. (shrink)

Scholars agree that Hegel had an important influence on John Dewey's early work.1 Unfortunately, the precise nature of this influence is not always easy to discern; in his early works, Dewey mentions Hegel only rarely, and seldom refers to him. However, in his letters and in his later works, Dewey concedes that Hegel had a strong influence on his philosophy. For example, in a 1930 essay, "From Absolutism to Experimentalism," Dewey acknowledges the influence of Hegel, noting that "acquaintance with Hegel (...) has left a permanent deposit in my thinking."2This paper is dedicated to the investigation of an important but not particularly well known, connection between the work of Hegel and Dewey's early educational ideas.3 .. (shrink)

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

We review some of the main implications of the free-energy principle (FEP) for the study of the self-organization of living systems – and how the FEP can help us to understand (and model) biotic self-organization across the many temporal and spatial scales over which life exists. In order to maintain its integrity as a bounded system, any biological system - from single cells to complex organisms and societies - has to limit the disorder or dispersion (i.e., the long-run entropy) of (...) its constituent states. We review how this can be achieved by living systems that minimize their variational free energy. Variational free energy is an information theoretic construct, originally introduced into theoretical neuroscience and biology to explain perception, action, and learning. It has since been extended to explain the evolution, development, form, and function of entire organisms, providing a principled model of biotic self-organization and autopoiesis. It has provided insights into biological systems across spatiotemporal scales, ranging from microscales (e.g., sub- and multicellular dynamics), to intermediate scales (e.g., groups of interacting animals and culture), through to macroscale phenomena (the evolution of entire species). A crucial corollary of the FEP is that an organism just is (i.e., embodies or entails) an implicit model of its environment. As such, organisms come to embody causal relationships of their ecological niche, which, in turn, is influenced by their resulting behaviors. Crucially, free-energy minimization can be shown to be equivalent to the maximization of Bayesian model evidence. This allows us to cast natural selection in terms of Bayesian model selection, providing a robust theoretical account of how organisms come to match or accommodate the spatiotemporal complexity of their surrounding niche. In line with the theme of this volume; namely, biological complexity and self-organization, this chapter will examine a variational approach to self-organization across multiple dynamical scales. (shrink)

Most land plants associate with mycorrhizal fungi that can connect roots of neighboring plants in common mycelial networks (CMNs). Recent evidence shows that CMNs transfer warning signals of pathogen and aphid attack between plants. However, we do not know how defence‐related signaling via CMNs operates or how ubiquitous it is. Nor do we know what the ecological relevance and fitness consequences are, particularly from the perspective of the mycorrhizal fungus. Here, we focus on the potential fitness benefits for mycorrhizal fungi (...) and outline hypothetical scenarios in which signal transfer via CMNs is modulated in order to acquire the most benefit for the fungus (i.e. acquisition of carbon) for minimal cost. We speculate that the signal may be quantitative and may elicit plant defence responses on different levels depending on the distance the signal is transferred. Finally, we discuss the possibility of practical applications of this phenomenon for crop protection. (shrink)

We argue that current discussions of criteria for actual causation are ill-posed in several respects. (1) The methodology of current discussions is by induction from intuitions about an infinitesimal fraction of the possible examples and counterexamples; (2) cases with larger numbers of causes generate novel puzzles; (3) “neuron” and causal Bayes net diagrams are, as deployed in discussions of actual causation, almost always ambiguous; (4) actual causation is (intuitively) relative to an initial system state since state changes are relevant, but (...) most current accounts ignore state changes through time; (5) more generally, there is no reason to think that philosophical judgements about these sorts of cases are normative; but (6) there is a dearth of relevant psychological research that bears on whether various philosophical accounts are descriptive. Our skepticism is not directed towards the possibility of a correct account of actual causation; rather, we argue that standard methods will not lead to such an account. A different approach is required. Once upon a time a hungry wanderer came into a village. He filled an iron cauldron with water, built a fire under it, and dropped a stone into the water. “I do like a tasty stone soup” he announced. Soon a villager added a cabbage to the pot, another added some salt and others added potatoes, onions, carrots, mushrooms, and so on, until there was a meal for all. (shrink)

Gauge invariance of a manifestly covariant relativistic quantum theory with evolution according to an invariant time τ implies the existence of five gauge compensation fields, which we shall call pre-Maxwell fields. A Lagrangian which generates the equations of motion for the matter field (coinciding with the Schrödinger type quantum evolution equation) as well as equations, on a five-dimensional manifold, for the gauge fields, is written. It is shown that τ integration of the equations for the pre-Maxwell fields results (...) in the usual Maxwell equations with conserved current source. The analog of the O (3, 1) symmetry of the usual Maxwell theory is found to be O (3, 2) or O (4, 1), depending on the space-time Fourier spectrum of the field. We argue that the structure that is relevant to the description of radiation in interaction with matter evolving in a timelike sense is that of O (3, 2). The noncovariant form of the field equations is given; there are two fields of electric type and one (divergenceless) magnetic type field. The Noether currents are studied, and some remarks are made on second quantization. (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 lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual BiographyBruce KuklickDavid S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual BiographyChicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xxiv+291 pp. Notes, Bibliographic Essay, Sources, Students of Richard Hofstadter, Index. $27.50.In the mid-twentieth century Richard Hofstadter was one the finest historians of the United States. Uncommitted to work in primary sources, he was perhaps not at the level of Perry Miller, Vann Woodward, and Edmund Morgan. But Hofstadter had (...) a greater range and wider influence than these men, and the combination of intellectual and political history that he wrote was unique, as was the penetration of his intellect and his appealing sensibility.Hofstadter was born in Buffalo, New York, the son of a Lutheran mother and a father who was a secular Jew. The son went to the local University of Buffalo. While not as impoverished as this biography is inclined to make him, Dick Hofstadter "married up" after he fell in love with Felice Swados, the daughter of a Buffalo Jewish doctor who was also a student at the University. Swados introduced Hofstadter to the Marxist intellectual left of the 1930s, although he was himself a successful and intelligent student leader. In the years after their graduation, the couple had a tempestuous start to their marriage, but over the next several years they built a life in New York City. Felice became the medical columnist for Time; Dick productively completed a doctoral degree in history at Columbia University. They both continued their radical activities. In the late 1930s he was briefly a member of the American Communist Party, although Dick quickly resigned because of the authoritarian nature of the organization. Even then, however, he was more removed and skeptical than Felice, with more of an historian's impartiality and sense of the tragic. Felice's unambiguous commitments moved him, but Dick was, literally, only half-inclined to the Jewish left.Swados died of cancer in 1945, after they had moved to Washington, D.C., where Hofstadter was teaching at the University of Maryland. But a year later the devastated young man obtained a position at Columbia. At the same time he met and married Beatrice Kevitt, another capable woman with literary and editorial talent.In 1948 Hofstadter published what I still think is his masterwork, The American Political Tradition. A series of sharp portraits of leading politicians, [End Page 574] the book owed much to Hofstadter's leftist background. It was indebted to Marxist analyses, or at least to those of the sort promulgated by the great historian, Charles Beard, who saw economics as central to the study of national life. But Hofstadter did not see a clash between capitalists and their opponents in the United States. He viewed the entire tradition of American politicians as committed to a certain kind of exploitative social system, although his book did not quite have the edge suggested by this last phrase. Hofstadter became known as a "consensus" historian who had a monolithic sense of the American experience, although this monolith was not benign as was that of other practitioners of consensus.In the 1950s Hofstadter, now a prominent Columbia faculty member, moved away from some of the economic preconceptions of The American Political Tradition. Instead, in his two other important books, The Age of Reform (1955) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1965), he brought to bear on the American experience a group of concepts that he took from his study of the social sciences. Overall, these two books undermined his previous materialist interpretation of politics. Instead, Hofstadter found that irrational fears, psychological maladjustments, and concerns about status might motivate leaders and movements more than a rational appraisal of self-interest. In retrospect, this 1950s social science does not appear very enlightening, and so Hofstadter's absorption of it is not to be praised. On the other side, so many of his fellow historians attacked him for his interdisciplinary bent that his generous outreach looks more than daring. Hofstadter's own personal politics shifted, too. He became a staunch if critical defender of the social democratic liberalism of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and its impulses in the 1950s and 1960s.In... (shrink)

I reply to David Basinger who, in an article printed in the same issue, develops objections to my original argument (IPQ XIX, 203-212) that it makes no sense to inquire whether God could create the best possible world since the concept of a best possible world is a meaningless notion. I argue that if the number of possible worlds is infinite, there cannot be an upper limit to this order, and without an upper limit, there can be no best (...) possible world. (shrink)

This morning, as I ate breakfast, I started David Foster Wallace's short story "Good People."1 I began. … Wait a minute! Damn it! Why not Wallace's, or David Wallace's short story? I've never seen nor heard his name other than as a trio; the same is so with others, such as Louisa May Alcott, William Carlos Williams, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Louis Stevenson, Katherine Anne Porter, et al. One finds it even in operas—for example, in Giacomo Puccini's Turandot (...) we have Ping, Pang, and Pong, who rarely solo or sing duets. And consider the Christian or Hindu trinities as being clearly acknowledged as further instances of the power of three names, as well as the three ancient Greek gods of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades; the... (shrink)

"Understanding Scientific Progress constitutes a potentially enormous and revolutionary advancement in philosophy of science. It deserves to be read and studied by everyone with any interest in or connection with physics or the theory of science. Maxwell cites the work of Hume, Kant, J.S. Mill, Ludwig Bolzmann, Pierre Duhem, Einstein, Henri Poincaré, C.S. Peirce, Whitehead, Russell, Carnap, A.J. Ayer, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Paul Feyerabend, Nelson Goodman, Bas van Fraassen, and numerous others. He lauds Popper for advancing (...) beyond verificationism and Hume’s problem of induction, but faults both Kuhn and Popper for being unable to show that and how their work could lead nearer to the truth." —Dr. LLOYD EBY teaches philosophy at The George Washington University and The Catholic University of America, in Washington, DC "Maxwell's aim-oriented empiricism is in my opinion a very significant contribution to the philosophy of science. I hope that it will be widely discussed and debated." – ALAN SOKAL, Professor of Physics, New York University "Maxwell takes up the philosophical challenge of how natural science makes progress and provides a superb treatment of the problem in terms of the contrast between traditional conceptions and his own scientifically-informed theory—aim-oriented empiricism. This clear and rigorously-argued work deserves the attention of scientists and philosophers alike, especially those who believe that it is the accumulation of knowledge and technology that answers the question."—LEEMON McHENRY, California State University, Northridge "Maxwell has distilled the finest essence of the scientific enterprise. Science is about making the world a better place. Sometimes science loses its way. The future depends on scientists doing the right things for the right reasons. Maxwell's Aim-Oriented Empiricism is a map to put science back on the right track."—TIMOTHY McGETTIGAN, Professor of Sociology, Colorado State University - Pueblo "Maxwell has a great deal to offer with these important ideas, and deserves to be much more widely recognised than he is. Readers with a background in philosophy of science will appreciate the rigour and thoroughness of his argument, while more general readers will find his aim-oriented rationality a promising way forward in terms of a future sustainable and wise social order."—David Lorimer, Paradigm Explorer, 2017/2 "This is a book about the very core problems of the philosophy of science. The idea of replacing Standard Empiricism with Aim-Oriented Empiricism is understood by Maxwell as the key to the solution of these central problems. Maxwell handles his main tool masterfully, producing a fascinating and important reading to his colleagues in the field. However, Nicholas Maxwell is much more than just a philosopher of science. In the closing part of the book he lets the reader know about his deep concern and possible solutions of the biggest problems humanity is facing."—Professor PEETER MŰŰREPP, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia “For many years, Maxwell has been arguing that fundamental philosophical problems about scientific progress, especially the problem of induction, cannot be solved granted standard empiricism (SE), a doctrine which, he thinks, most scientists and philosophers of science take for granted. A key tenet of SE is that no permanent thesis about the world can be accepted as a part of scientific knowledge independent of evidence. For a number of reasons, Maxwell argues, we need to adopt a rather different conception of science which he calls aim-oriented empiricism (AOE). This holds that we need to construe physics as accepting, as a part of theoretical scientific knowledge, a hierarchy of metaphysical theses about the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe, which become increasingly insubstantial as we go up the hierarchy. In his book “Understanding Scientific Progress: Aim-Oriented Empiricism”, Maxwell gives a concise and excellent illustration of this view and the arguments supporting it… Maxwell’s book is a potentially important contribution to our understanding of scientific progress and philosophy of science more generally. Maybe it is the time for scientists and philosophers to acknowledge that science has to make metaphysical assumptions concerning the knowability and comprehensibility of the universe. Fundamental philosophical problems about scientific progress, which cannot be solved granted SE, may be solved granted AOE.” Professor SHAN GAO, Shanxi University, China . (shrink)

I EXAMINE VARIOUS SUGGESTED PRINCIPLES FOR WEIGHING TESTIMONY TO PAST EVENTS AND IDENTIFY ONE WHICH SEEMS TO BE BOTH TRUE AND ROUGHLY IN THE SPIRIT OF DAVID HUME’S ESSAY. I ARGUE THAT HUME FAILS TO PROVIDE GOOD REASONS FOR SAYING THAT THIS PRINCIPLE, WHEN APPLIED TO REPORTS OF MIRACLES PURPORTING TO SUPPORT RELIGIOUS BELIEFS, WILL ALWAYS LEAD US TO REJECT THE OCCURRENCE OF THE MIRACLE.

Aribiah David Attoe’s central question in this book is the idea of what he calls in his subtitle “predeterministic historicity,” which I want to focus on here. There is a lot else we could discuss, but it seems like a good idea to focus on the book’s central project.

Salomon Maimon's Versuch über die Transzendentalphilosophie [Essay in Transcendental Philosophy] (1790) challenges and reworks Kant's arguments in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft [Critique of Pure Reason] (1785, 2nd ed. 1787) about the foundations of natural science and of Newtonian physics in particular. Kant himself was impressed both with Maimon's grasp of his critical project and also with the force of his challenge to it. While Maimon's significance on the later development of German Idealism is now widely acknowledged, another aspect of (...) Maimon's Versuch has not been fully appreciated, namely, its engagement with the central questions of the Spinozastreit [Spinoza Quarrel] that erupted in 1785 with the publication of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn [Concerning the Doctrine of Spinoza in Letters to Moses Mendelssohn]. The Spinoza Quarrel centered on whether and to what extent philosophy's rational understanding of God needs to be grounded in an unmediated and suprarational revelatory experience. This paper is the first extended effort at placing Maimon's Versuch into the context of the Spinoza Quarrel. I argue that the Spinoza Quarrel and Maimon's self-proclaimed philosophical mission in response to it—the replacement of revealed faith by reason—deeply inform the goals he pursues in his Versuch. I show how Maimon's Versuch can be read as not only a response to Kant, but also to Jacobi's defense of the revelatory nature of sense experience in David Hume über den Glauben (1787), the book in which Jacobi offers his own skeptical challenge to Kant's Kritik. Situating Maimon's Versuch as a response to Friedrich Jacobi's David Hume allows us to understand how one of Maimon's objectives in his Versuch is to keep Jacobian Glaube [faith] at bay by demonstrating, using a revised Kantian framework, the conditions of the impossibility of experiencing miracles. (shrink)

This paper is a critique of David Wiggins's treatment of essentialism in his book Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Blackwell 1967). I argue in detail that he has not provided an adequate account either of the concept of a sortal term or of the concept of a substance-concept, even though both concepts play important roles in his case for essentialism. I also discuss Wiggins's views on how substance-concepts are related to judgments of identity through time.

For three decades I have expounded and defended aim-oriented empiricism, a view of science which, l claim, solves a number of problems in the philosophy of science and has important implications for science itself and, when generalized, for the whole of academic inquiry, and for our capacity to solve our current global problems. Despite these claims, the view has received scant attention from philosophers of science. Recently, however, David Miller has criticized the view. Miller’s criticisms are, however, not valid.

I hear the patter of little feet around the house, I expect Bruce. What I expect is a cat, a particular cat. If I heard such a patter in another house, I might expect a cat but no particular cat. What I expect then seems to be a Meinongian incomplete cat. I expect winter, expect stormy weather, expect to shovel snow, expect fatigue---a season, a phenomenon, an activity, a state. I expect that someday mankind will inhabit at least five (...) planets. This time what I expect is a state of affairs. If we let surface grammar be our guide, the objects of expectation seem quite a miscellany. The same goes for belief, since expectation is one kind of belief. The same goes for desire: I could want Bruce, want a cat but no particular cat, want winter, want stormy weather, want to shovel snow, want fatigue, or want that someday mankind will inhabit at least five planets. The same goes for other attitudes to the extent that they consist partly of beliefs or desires or lacks thereof. But the seeming diversity of objects might be an illusion. Perhaps the objects of attitudes are uniform in category, and it is our ways of speaking elliptically about these uniform objects that are diverse. That indeed is our consensus. We mostly think that the attitudes uniformly have propositions as their objects. That is why we speak habitually of "propositional attitudes.". (shrink)

Three big philosophical problems about consciousness are: Why does it exist? How do we explain and understand it? How can we explain brain-consciousness correlations? If functionalism were true, all three problems would be solved. But it is false, and that means all three problems remain unsolved (in that there is no other obvious candidate for a solution). Here, it is argued that the first problem cannot have a solution; this is inherent in the nature of explanation. The second problem is (...) solved by recognizing that (a) there is an explanation as to why science cannot explain consciousness, and (b) consciousness can be explained by a different kind of explanation, empathic or “personalistic” explanation, compatible with, but not reducible to, scientific explanation. The third problem is solved by exploiting David Chalmers“principle of structural coherence”, and involves postulating that sensations experienced by us–visual, auditory, tactile, and so on–amount to minute scattered regions in a vast, multi dimensional “space” of all possible sensations, which vary smoothly, and in a linear way, throughout the space. There is also the space of all possible sentient brain processes. There is just one, unique one-one mapping between these two spaces that preserves continuity and linearity. It is this which provides the explanation as to why brain processes and sensations are correlated as they are. I consider objections to this unique-matching theory, and consider how the theory might be empirically confirmed. (shrink)

I reply to critical discussion of my work by Copthorne Macdonald, Steve Fuller, John Stewart, Joseph Agassi, Margaret Boden, Donald Gillies, Mathew Iredale, David Hodgson, Karl Rogers, and Leemon McHenry.

Introduction -- Part I: The meaning of life -- Richard Taylor, The meaning of life -- Thomas Nagel, The absurd -- Richard Hare, Nothing matters -- W.D. Joske, Philosophy and the meaning of life -- Robert Nozick, Philosophy and the meaning of life -- David Schmidtz, The meanings of life -- Part II: Creating people -- Derek Parfit, Whether causing someone to exist can benefit this person -- John Leslie, Why not let life ecome extinct? -- James Lenman, On (...) becoming extinct -- David Benatar, Why it is better never to come into existence -- Part III: Death -- Stephen E. Rosenbaum, How to be dead and not care : a defense of epicurus -- GeorgePpitcher, The misfortunes of the dead -- Steven Luper, Annihilation -- Fred Fldman, Some puzzles about the evil of death -- Frederick Kaufman, Pre-vital and post-mortem non-existence -- David B. Suits, Why death is not bad for the one who died -- Part IV: Suicide -- David Hume, Of suicide -- Immanuel Kant, Suicide and duty -- David Benatar, Suicide : a qualified defence -- Part V: Immortality -- James Lenman, Immortality : a letter -- Bernard Williams, The Makropulos case : reflections on the tedium of immortality -- John Martin Fischer, Why immortality is not so bad -- Christine Overall, from here to eternity : is it good to live forever? -- Part VI: Optimism and pessimism -- Margaret A. Boden, Optimism -- Michaelis Michael and Peter Caldwell, The consolations of optimism -- Bruce N. Waller, The sad truth : optimism, pessimism, and pragmatism -- Arthur Schopenhauer, On the suffering of the world. (shrink)

"My work has had nothing to do with gay liberation," Michel Foucault reportedly told an admirer in 1975. And indeed there is scarcely more than a passing mention of homosexuality in Foucault's scholarly writings. So why has Foucault, who died of AIDS in 1984, become a powerful source of both personal and political inspiration to an entire generation of gay activists? And why have his political philosophy and his personal life recently come under such withering, normalizing scrutiny by commentators as (...) diverse as Camille Paglia, Richard Mohr, Bruce Bawer, Roger Kimball, and biographer James Miller? David M. Halperin's Saint Foucault is an uncompromising and impassioned defense of the late French philosopher and historian as a galvanizing thinker whose career as a theorist and activist will continue to serve as a model for other gay intellectuals, activists, and scholars. A close reading of both Foucault and the increasing attacks on his life and work, it explains why straight liberals so often find in Foucault only counsels of despair on the subject of politics, whereas gay activists look to him not only for intellectual inspiration but also for a compelling example of political resistance. Halperin rescues Foucault from the endless nature-versus-nurture debate over the origins of homosexuality ("On this question I have absolutely nothing to say," Foucault himself once remarked) and argues that Foucault's decision to treat sexuality not as a biological or psychological drive but as an effect of discourse, as the product of modern systems of knowledge and power, represents a crucial political breakthrough for lesbians and gay men. Halperin explains how Foucault's radical vision of homosexuality as a strategic opportunity for self-transformation anticipated the new anti-assimilationist, anti-essentialist brand of sexual identity politics practiced by contemporary direct-action groups such as ACT UP. Halperin also offers the first synthetic account of Foucault's thinking about gay sex and the future of the lesbian and gay movement, as well as an up-to-the-minute summary of the most recent work in queer theory. "Where there is power, there is resistance," Michel Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality, Volume I. Erudite, biting, and surprisingly moving, Saint Foucault represents Halperin's own resistance to what he views as the blatant and systematic misrepresentation of a crucial intellectual figure, a misrepresentation he sees as dramatic evidence of the continuing personal, professional, and scholarly vulnerability of all gay activists and intellectuals in the age of AIDS. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that ‘global’ symmetries, such as the boost invariance of classical mechanics and special relativity, can give rise to direct empirical counterparts such as the Galileo-ship phenomenon. However, conventional wisdom holds that ‘local’ symmetries, such as the diffeomorphism invariance of general relativity and the gauge invariance of classical electromagnetism, have no such direct empirical counterparts. We argue against this conventional wisdom. We develop a framework for analysing the relationship between Galileo-ship empirical phenomena on the one hand, and (...) physical theories that model such phenomena on the other, that renders the relationship between theoretical and empirical symmetries transparent, and from which it follows that both global and local symmetries can give rise to Galileo-ship phenomena. In particular, we use this framework to exhibit an analogue of Galileo’s ship for the local gauge invariance of electromagnetism. 1 Introduction2 Analogues of Galileo’s Ship? Faraday’s Cage and t’Hooft’s Beam-Splitter2.1 Faraday’s cage2.2 t’Hooft’s beam-splitter3 A Framework for Symmetries I: Systems and Subsystems4 An Example: Coulombic Electrostatics5 A Framework for Symmetries II: The Relationship between Theoretical and Empirical Symmetries6 Newtonian Gravity7 Local Symmetries that Are Not Boundary-Preserving: Classical Electromagnetism and Faraday’s Cage8 Local Boundary-Preserving Symmetries: Klein-Gordon-Maxwell Gauge Theory and t’Hooft’s Beam-Splitter9 Summary10 Conclusions. (shrink)

I explore the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics by treating the former as a control theory: a theory of which transitions between states can be induced on a system by means of operations from a fixed list. I recover the results of standard thermodynamics in this framework on the assumption that the available operations do not include measurements which affect subsequent choices of operations. I then relax this assumption and use the framework to consider the vexed questions of (...) class='Hi'>Maxwell's demon and Landauer's principle. Throughout I assume rather than prove the basic irreversibility features of statistical mechanics, taking care to distinguish them from the conceptually distinct assumptions of thermodynamics proper. (shrink)

In the 1687 Principia, Newton gave a solution to the direct problem (given the orbit and center of force, find the central force) for a conic-section with a focal center of force (answer: a reciprocal square force) and for a spiral orbit with a polar center of force (answer: a reciprocal cube force). He did not, however, give solutions for the two corresponding inverse problems (given the force and center of force, find the orbit). He gave a cryptic solution to (...) the inverse problem of a reciprocal cube force, but offered no solution for the reciprocal square force. Some take this omission as an indication that Newton could not solve the reciprocal square, for, they ask, why else would he not select this important problem? Others claim that ``it is child's play'' for him, as evidenced by his 1671 catalogue of quadratures (tables of integrals). The answer to that question is obscured for all who attempt to work through Newton's published solution of the reciprocal cube force because it is done in the synthetic geometric style of the 1687 Principia rather than in the analytic algebraic style that Newton employed until 1671. In response to a request from David Gregory in 1694, however, Newton produced an analytic version of the body of the proof, but one which still had a geometric conclusion. Newton's charge is to find both ``the orbit'' and ``the time in orbit.'' In the determination of the dependence of the time on orbital position, t(r), Newton evaluated an integral of the form ∫dx/xn to calculate a finite algebraic equation for the area swept out as a function of the radius, but he did not write out the analytic expression for time t = t(r), even though he knew that the time t is proportional to that area. In the determination of the orbit, θ (r), Newton obtained an integral of the form ∫dx/√(1−x2) for the area that is proportional to the angle θ, an integral he had shown in his 1669 On Analysis by Infinite Equations to be equal to the arcsin(x). Since the solution must therefore contain a transcendental function, he knew that a finite algebraic solution for θ=θ(r) did not exist for ``the orbit'' as it had for ``the time in orbit.'' In contrast to these two solutions for the inverse cube force, however, it is not possible in the inverse square solution to generate a finite algebraic expression for either ``the orbit'' or ``the time in orbit.'' In fact, in Lemma 28, Newton offers a demonstration that the area of an ellipse cannot be given by a finite equation. I claim that the limitation of Lemma 28 forces Newton to reject the inverse square force as an example and to choose instead the reciprocal cube force as his example in Proposition 41. (shrink)

Many of the younger generation of intellectuals, highly critical of the increasing penetration of the market into every sphere of daily life, nevertheless bristle at the merest suggestion that Talking Heads, Bruce Springsteen or whoever else that manifests their irrefutably good taste be subject to the same critical attention. Rock music, it seems, in the United States at least, is one of those social phenomena most impermeable to critical discussion. Decidedly, my article (Telos 57) touched a raw nerve in (...) Scudder. The frenzied tone of his reply and the almost wilfully obtuse misreading of my arguments (never did I argue for a conspiracy of capitalist interests - quite the contrary) suggests that something is badly wrong. (shrink)

We discuss presupposition, the phenomenon whereby speakers mark linguistically the information that is presupposed or taken for granted, rather than being part of the main propositional content of a speech act. Expressions and constructions carrying presuppositions are called “presupposition triggers”, forming a large class including definites and factive verbs. The article first introduces the range of triggers, the basic properties of presuppositions such as projection and cancellability, and the diagnostic tests used to identify them. The reader is then introducedto major (...) models of presupposition from the last 50 years, separated into three classes: Frege-Strawson derived semantic models, pragmaticmodels such as that offered by Stalnaker, and dynamic models. Finallywe discuss some of the main current issues in presupposition theory. These involve accommodation, which occurs when a hearer's knowledge state is adjusted to meet the speaker's presuppositions; presupposition failure, which occurs when a presupposition is false; the interaction between presuppositions and attitudes; and the triggering problem, i.e., the problem of explaining why presuppositions occur in the first place. (shrink)

Sense and Sensitivity explores the semantics and pragmatics of focus in natural language discourse, advancing a new account of focus sensitivity which posits a three-way distinction between different effects of focus. Makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing research in the field of focus sensitivity Discusses the features of QFC, an original theory of focus implying a new typology of focus-sensitive expressions Presents novel cross-linguistic data on focus and focus sensitivity Concludes with a case study of exclusives (like “only”), arguing (...) that the entire existing literature (reviewed in detail) has missed crucial generalizations, and that the focus sensitivity of these expressions must be understood in terms of their meaning and discourse function. (shrink)