48 found
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  1. Naturalism and Normativity.Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.) - 2010 - Cambridge University Press.
    Normativity concerns what we ought to think or do and the evaluations we make. For example, we say that we ought to think consistently, we ought to keep our promises, or that Mozart is a better composer than Salieri. Yet what philosophical moral can we draw from the apparent absence of normativity in the scientific image of the world? For scientific naturalists, the moral is that the normative must be reduced to the nonnormative, while for nonnaturalists, the moral is that (...)
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  2. Liberal naturalism and the scientific image of the world.David Macarthur - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (5):565-585.
    ABSTRACTThis paper distinguishes between the theoretical scientific image and the practical scientific image. The popular idea that there is a conceptual clash between the scientific and manifest images of the world is revealed as largely illusory. From the perspective of a liberal naturalism, the placement problem for ‘problematic’ entities or truths is not solved but dissolved. Persons, say, are not posits of any explanatory science, but beings acknowledged as rational agencies in second-personal space. Core elements of the manifest image are (...)
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  3. Introduction - the nature of naturalism.David Macarthur & Mario De Caro - 2004 - In Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism in Question. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. pp. 1-20.
    The critical concern of the present volume is contemporary naturalism, both in its scientific version and as represented by newly emerging hopes for another, philosophically more liberal, naturalism.1 The papers collected here are state-of-the-art discussions that question the appeal, rational motivations, and presuppositions of scientific naturalism across a broad range of philosophical topics. As an alternative to scientific naturalism, we offer the outlines of a new non- reductive form of naturalism and a more inclusive conception of nature than any provided (...)
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  4.  60
    The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism.Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.) - 2022 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    This is the first collection to present a comprehensive overview of liberal naturalism. Essential reading for students and researchers in all areas of philosophy it will be of particular interest for those studying philosophical naturalism, philosophy of science, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and ethics.
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  5. Introduction: Science, naturalism, and the problem of normativity.Mario de Caro & David Macarthur - 2010 - In Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism and Normativity. Cambridge University Press.
     
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  6. Taking the Human Sciences Seriously.David Macarthur - 2010 - In Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism and Normativity. Cambridge University Press.
     
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  7.  24
    Introduction.David Macarthur - 2017 - In Hilary Putnam & Ruth Anna Putnam (eds.), Pragmatism as a Way of Life: The Lasting Legacy of William James and John Dewey, D. Macarthur (ed.). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. pp. 1-10.
  8. Pragmatism, Metaphysical Quietism, and the Problem of Normativity.David Macarthur - 2008 - Philosophical Topics 36 (1):193-209.
    There has always existed in the world, and there will always continue to exist, some kind of metaphysics, and with it the dialectic that is natural to pure reason. It is therefore the first and most important task of philosophy to deprive metaphysics, once and for all, of its injurious influence, by attacking its errors at their source. - Kant CPR:B xxxi..
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  9. Naturalism in Question.Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.) - 2004 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
    This volume presents a group of leading thinkers who criticize scientific naturalism not in the name of some form of supernaturalism, but in order to defend a ...
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  10.  44
    Does Rorty have a Blindspot about Truth?David Macarthur - 2020 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 12 (1).
    Criticisms of Rorty’s view of truth are so frequent and from such sagacious sources that it is reasonable to suspect that there must be some truth in them. But what? In this paper I consider perhaps the strongest form of such criticism, Huw Price’s claim that without a distinct norm of truth Rorty is unable to make sense of how someone, justified by her own lights (say, local communal standards), could improve her commitments by reference to another better informed community. (...)
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  11. McDowell, scepticism, and the 'veil of perception'.David Macarthur - 2003 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81 (2):175-190.
    McDowell has argued that external world scepticism is a pressing problem only in so far as we accept, on the basis of the argument from illusion, the claim that perceiving that p and hallucinating that p involve a highest common factor.
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  12.  88
    Naturalizing the human or humanizing nature: Science, nature and the supernatural.David Macarthur - 2004 - Erkenntnis 61 (1):29-51.
    The present paper challenges the narrow scientistic conception of Nature that underlies current projects of naturalization involving, say, evaluative or intentional discourse. It is more plausible to hold that science provides only a partial characterization of the natural world. I consider McDowell's articulation of a more liberal naturalism, one which recognizes autonomous normative facts about reasons, meanings and values, as genuine constituents of Nature on a more liberal conception of it. Several critics have claimed that this account is vitiated by (...)
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  13. Liberal Naturalism and Second-Personal Space: A Neo-Pragmatist Response to “The Natural Origins of Content”.David Macarthur - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (3):565-578.
    Reviewing the state of play in the attempt to naturalise content a quarter of a century after John Haugeland’s survey paper “The Intentionality All-Stars”, Dan Hutto and Glenda Satne propose a new naturalistic account of content that supposedly synthesizes what is best in the three failed programs of neo-Cartesianism, neo-Behaviourism and neo-Pragmatism. They propose to appeal to a Relaxed Naturalism, a non-reductive genealogical form of explanation and a primitive notion of contentless ur-intentionality. In this paper I argue that the authors’ (...)
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  14.  41
    Remarks on Gallagher’s Enactivist Philosophy of Nature.David Macarthur - 2018 - Australasian Philosophical Review 2 (2):179-183.
    Shaun Gallagher’s [2019] ‘Rethinking Nature’ is an attempt to make conceptual space for the relevance of the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, etc., to cognitive scientific explanation within an embodied enactivist approach to cognition. Since cognitive science currently presupposes orthodox scientific naturalism—for which nature is nothing over and above the objective posits of successful (typically natural) science—it makes no allowance for the lived first-person experiences or intersubjective agency that are central to phenomenology; and so, renders them unavailable to Gallagher’s enactivism. (...)
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  15. Quinean Naturalism in Question.David Macarthur - 2008 - Philo 11 (1):5-18.
    This paper is a critical discussion of Quine’s naturalist credos: (1) physicalism; (2) there is no first philosophy; (3) philosophy is continuous with science; and (4) the only responsible theory of the world as a whole is scientific theory. The aim is to show that Quine’s formulations admit of two readings: a strong reading (often Quine’s own) which is compatible with reductive forms of naturalism but implausible; and a mild reading which is plausible but suggestive of more liberal forms of (...)
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  16. (1 other version)Wittgenstein and expressivism.David Macarthur - 2009 - In Daniel Whiting (ed.), The later Wittgenstein on language. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
    From his first publication, the Tractatus, to the posthumous publication of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein draws attention to the way in which surface grammatical similarities mask underlying grammatical diversity. In the Tractatus he writes.
     
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  17. (2 other versions)Pragmatism, quasi-realism, and the global challenge.David Macarthur & Huw Price - 2007 - In Cheryl Misak (ed.), New pragmatists. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 91.
    William James said that sometimes detailed philosophical argument is irrelevant. Once a current of thought is really under way, trying to oppose it with argument is like planting a stick in a river to try to alter its course: “round your obstacle flows the water and ‘gets there just the same’”. He thought pragmatism was such a river. There is a contemporary river that sometimes calls itself pragmatism, although other titles are probably better. At any rate it is the denial (...)
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  18. Between Philosophy and Art.Jennifer A. McMahon, Elizabeth B. Coleman, David Macarthur, James Phillips & Daniel von Sturmer - 2016 - Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 5 (2/3):135-150.
    Similarity and difference, patterns of variation, consistency and coherence: these are the reference points of the philosopher. Understanding experience, exploring ideas through particular instantiations, novel and innovative thinking: these are the reference points of the artist. However, at certain points in the proceedings of our Symposium titled, Next to Nothing: Art as Performance, this characterisation of philosopher and artist respectively might have been construed the other way around. The commentator/philosophers referenced their philosophical interests through the particular examples/instantiations created by the (...)
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  19.  77
    Living our Skepticism of Others through Film: Remarks In Light of Cavell.David Macarthur - 2016 - Substance 45 (3):120-136.
    In Stanley Cavell’s ethical universe, no concept is of more moment than that of acknowledgement. In Cavell’s view, the question of acknowledgement is not a matter of choice but is at issue whenever we confront, or are confronted by, others. To acknowledge is to admit or confess or reveal to someone, typically another, those things about oneself and one’s relations to the world and others that one, being human, cannot fail to know – except that “nothing is more human than (...)
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  20.  45
    (1 other version)Review of Possibilities of Perception by Jennifer Church.David Macarthur - 2015 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 93 (1):178-182.
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  21.  20
    Richard Rorty and (the End of) Metaphysics (?).David Macarthur - 2020 - In Alan R. Malachowski (ed.), A companion to Rorty. Hoboken: Wiley. pp. 163–177.
    A poeticized or post‐metaphysical culture is one in which the imperative that is common to religion and metaphysics – to find an ahistorical, transcultural matrix for one's thinking, something into which everything can fit, independent of one's time and place – has dried up and blown away. Richard Rorty's neo‐pragmatism aims to replace the hopeless and ancient metaphysical search for “an ahistorical transcultural matrix” – key exemplars of which are Plato's Forms and Immanuel Kant's transcendental conditions of knowledge – with (...)
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  22.  98
    A Vision of Blindness: Blade Runner and Moral Redemption.David Macarthur - 2017 - Film-Philosophy 21 (3):371-391.
    Despite its oft-noted ambiguities, critical reception of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner ; Director's Cut ; Final Cut ) has tended to converge upon seeing it as a futuristic sci-fi film noir whose central concern is what it means to be human, a question that is fraught given the increasingly human-like replicants designed and manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation for human use on off-world colonies. Within the terms of this way of seeing things a great deal of discussion has been devoted (...)
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  23. Putnam's natural realism and the question of a perceptual interface.David Macarthur - 2004 - Philosophical Explorations 7 (2):167-181.
    In his Dewey Lectures,1 Hilary Putnam argues that contemporary philosophy cannot solve nor see its way past the traditional problem of how language or thought hooks on to.
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  24.  3
    Wittgenstein and Poetry: A Reading of Czeslaw Milosz’s “Realism”.David Macarthur - 2024 - Philosophies 9 (4):128.
    In this paper I hope to cast light on Wittgenstein enigmatic remark, “one should really only create philosophy poetically”. I discuss Wittgenstein’s ambition to overcome metaphysics by way of an appeal to ordinary language. For this purpose I contrast “realism” in philosophy (i.e., metaphysical realism, particularly its modern scientific version) with “realism” in poetry. My theme is the capacity of poetry to provide a model for Wittgenstein’s resistance to the inhumanity unleashed in metaphysics—exemplified by two distinct forms of skepticism—which obliterates (...)
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  25. The Handbook of Liberal Naturalism.Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.) - 2022 - Routledge.
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  26. Introduction: Skepticism as a Way of Thinking.Stephen Hetherington & David Macarthur - 2022 - In Stephen Cade Hetherington & David Macarthur (eds.), Living Skepticism. Essays in Epistemology and Beyond. Boston: BRILL.
     
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  27.  29
    Living Skepticism. Essays in Epistemology and Beyond.Stephen Cade Hetherington & David Macarthur (eds.) - 2022 - Boston: BRILL.
    _Living Skepticism_ challenges the philosophical orthodoxy that dismisses skepticism as an intellectual embarrassment or overreaction. In this original collection of adventurous and engaging papers, skepticism is demonstrated to be true or insightful enough to form the core of an enlightened philosophy.
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  28. Aesthetics (analytic).David Macarthur - 2010 - In N. N. Trakakis (ed.), A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand. Clayton, Vic.: Monash University Publishing.
    If Western philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato, then aesthetics is a series of footnotes to Kant. This is as true of the analytic tradition as of the Continental. But there has been an important change of emphasis in the object of inquiry of analytic aesthetics, which predominantly concerns theorising about the experience and criticism of works of art. Kant’s idea of aesthetics as primarily concerned with beauty, or heightened or intensified perceptual experiences of natural phenomena, has largely (...)
     
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  29.  41
    Exploding the Realism-Antirealism Debate: Putnam contra Putnam.David Macarthur - 2020 - The Monist 103 (4):370-380.
    Putnam is famous for often changing his allegiance between various forms of realism and antirealism. In this paper I want to use Putnam’s own reflections and insights on the realism-antirealism issue to provide a powerful case for skepticism about the entire debate—in spite of the fact that that is not Putnam’s own ultimate attitude. From this skeptical perspective, I shall argue that Putnam has helped us see that the realism-antirealism debate faces a dilemma: either it resolves into existence questions about (...)
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  30.  30
    Hilary Putnam: Quantum Philosopher.David Macarthur - 2017 - The Harvard Review of Philosophy 24:135-141.
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  31.  9
    6 Naturalism and Skepticism.David Macarthur - 2004 - In Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism in Question. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. pp. 106-124.
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  32. Putnam, pragmatism and the fate of metaphysics.David Macarthur - 2008 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 4 (2):33-46.
    In Renewing Philosophy (1992), having surveyed a number of metaphysical programs in contemporary analytic philosophy, including Bernard Williams’ appeal to an absolute conception of the world, Ruth Millikan’s attempt to reduce intentionality to biological function, and Nelson Goodman’s irrealism, Putnam concludes as follows: I have argued that the decision of a large part of contemporary analytic philosophy to become a form of metaphysics is a mistake. Indeed, contemporary analytic metaphysics is in many ways a parody of the great metaphysics of (...)
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  33.  58
    Reflections on “Architecture is a Gesture” (Wittgenstein).David Macarthur - 2014 - Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 23 (1):88-100.
  34. Skepticism as Nihilism : Sartre's Nausea reads Cavell.David Macarthur - 2023 - In Talia Morag (ed.), Sartre and Analytic Philosophy. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Stanley Cavell's writings on external world skepticism (which he speaks of as “the repudiation of criteria” and "an attack on the ordinary") are profound but also widely misunderstood. Part of the reason for this is Cavell's commitment to the claim that his understanding of skepticism is continuous with that of the epistemological skepticism of Descartes, Hume and Kant. Another is the painful ambiguity of his pronouncements on the "truth" in skepticism. In this paper I argue that key passages in Sartre's (...)
     
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  35.  32
    Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups.David Macarthur - 2017 - Educational Theory 67 (2):215-224.
  36. Skepticism & Naturalism of Other Minds: Remarks on the (In)visibility of Other Minds.David Macarthur - 2022 - In Stephen Cade Hetherington & David Macarthur (eds.), Living Skepticism. Essays in Epistemology and Beyond. Boston: BRILL.
     
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  37. Skeptical Reason and Inner Experience: A Re-Examination of the Problem of the External World.David Macarthur - 1999 - Dissertation, Harvard University
    In contrast to the recent trend of taking external world skepticism as a narrow problem for a demanding conception of "objective" or "certain" knowledge about the world, my thesis offers a re-examination of the distinctively perceptual basis of the skeptical problem. On my view the skeptic challenges the very possibility of rationally justifying beliefs in so far as they are based on sense experience, a characterization that helps to explain the continuity into the modern period of the ancient skeptical challenge (...)
     
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  38. Skepticism, Self-knowledge and Responsibility.David Macarthur - 2006 - In Stephen Cade Hetherington (ed.), Aspects of Knowing: Epistemological Essays. Elsevier Science. pp. 97.
    Modern skepticism can be usefully divided into two camps: the Cartesian and the Humean.1 Cartesian skepticism is a matter of a theoretical doubt that has little or no practical import in our everyday lives. Its employment concerns whether or not we can achieve a special kind of certain knowledge – something Descartes calls “scientia” 2—that is far removed from our everyday aims or standards of epistemic appraisal. Alternatively, Humean skepticism engages the ancient skeptical concern with whether we have good reason, (...)
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  39. The Commitments of Naturalism – A Dialog.David Macarthur - unknown
    As a worldview, naturalism depends on a set of cognitive commitments from which flow certain propositions about reality and human nature. These propositions in turn might have implications for how we live, for social policy, and for human flourishing. But the presuppositions, basis, and implications of naturalism are not uncontested, and indeed there’s considerable debate about them among naturalists themselves.
     
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  40.  96
    What Goes Without Seeing: Marriage, Sex and the Ordinary in The Awful Truth.David Macarthur - 2014 - Film-Philosophy 18 (1):92-109.
    This paper offers a reading of The Awful Truth in order to meditate further on Stanley Cavell's articulation of the themes of the ordinary and perfectionist marriage as exemplified in the genre of films he calls the Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage in Cavell and . I explore different ways in which this film and the medium of film generally are capable of making the unseen visible: revealing the ordinary that is hidden behind its very familiarity; making available an awareness that (...)
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  41. Review of Wittgenstein and Scepticism - Edited by Denis Mcmanus. [REVIEW]David Macarthur - 2007 - Philosophical Books 48 (2):168-170.
    Wittgenstein has been likened to a Pyrrhonian sceptic, one who employs dialectical skills to avoid rather than defend doctrine, but it is his role in exposing and excavating the sands upon which modern scepticisms have been built that is the subject of this new volume of largely original essays. The first three chapters, by Crispin Wright, Akeel Bilgrami and Michael Williams find inspiration in On Certainty for singling out key moves in the initial set-up of external world scepticism; the next (...)
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  42.  37
    Gavin Kitching, Capitalism and Democracy in the 21st Century: A Global Future Beyond Nationalism (London: Routledge, 2020)☆. [REVIEW]David Macarthur - 2021 - Philosophical Investigations 45 (1):98-104.
    Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 1, Page 98-104, January 2022.
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  43. Review of Nigel Warburton, The Art Question. [REVIEW]David Macarthur - 2010 - Literature and Aesthetics 20 (2):147.
     
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  44.  77
    (1 other version)Review of Jejj Malpas, Place and experience: A philosophical topography. [REVIEW]David MacArthur - 2001 - Philosophical Review 110 (4):632-634.
    This is an ambitious work that attempts to elucidate the nature of place and the way in which we are, in part, at least, constituted by and complexly embedded within it. The central claim of the book is that “place is integral to the very structure and possibility of experience”, where experience is understood in a broad sense that is not restricted to perception but also includes thought and action. More generally, “place is... that within which and with respect to (...)
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  45. Review of Richard H. Popkin and Avrum Stroll, Skeptical Philosophy for Everyone. [REVIEW]David Macarthur - 2003 - Philosophy in Review 23 (4):272-274.
  46.  40
    Review of jack Ritchie, Understanding Naturalism[REVIEW]David Macarthur - 2009 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (11).
  47.  45
    Review of Paul Horwich, Reflections on Meaning[REVIEW]David Macarthur - 2007 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (3).
  48.  44
    Vanishing into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition by Barry Allen: Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015, pp. viii + 298, US$45. [REVIEW]David Macarthur - 2017 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (4):807-810.
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