In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 89 To fill the gap between the two worlds seems to have been one of the most important of their problems. Philo filled it with angels and powers, the Gnostics, whatever their individual differences, filled it with other supernatural creatures begotten by their chief god. Origen filled it with Intelligences, created and corporeal spirits who rose or fell according to their sinfulness (p. 437). The discrepancy between (...) the two worlds remains to be bridged by the later Greek philosophers not by reason but by the appeal to myth, imagination and authority. Only in Plotinus, among the late Greek philosophers, does Boas find a significant remainder of rationalism. Plotinus's problem is similar, to be sure, to that of the other late thinkers: to bridge the metaphysical gap. Appeals to myth and to the authority of earlier Greek thinkers are quite as irrational here as in the earlier thinkers. And the resort to powerful metaphors is as pronounced in Plotinus as in any other philosopher one can name. All this is brought out very well. Yet Boas finds it important to try to expound Plotinus's philosophy as "... a sample of rationalism with axioms and inferences, with dialectical distinctions, with the Law of Contradiction utilized to produce consistency" (p. 455). He doesn't claim to have succeeded in doing this; on the contrary, his account gives little ground on which to justify the attempt, and one wonders why it was undertaken. This is not to deny that Plotinus uses rational arguments and logical inferences, but rather to say that the semblance of a "rational structure" depends instead on poetical and metaphorical elements. Nevertheless, the discussion of Plotinus's thought as a "sample of rationalism" is of interest because it serve to bring out an element in the conception of rationalism which emerges only too rarely in the book? Boas pays special attention to Plotinus's "full fledged hierarchy of being," and his attempt to derive (or "deduce"?) the degrees of being from the One. This rests on the "principle of plenitude," or on the notion that all possible being must be exemplified in existence. This in turn is suggested by one or more powerful metaphors. Plotinus's speculative imagination, in other words, was still unfettered to a considerable degree by authority, revelation, or other restrictions. Kegardless of how adequate one might judge Plotinus's system to be in terms of axioms, definitions and consistency (and surely it is very inadequate), Boas's interest in him as a "sample of rationalism" derives from this freedom in speculation and in choice of "assumptions." This does not mean that logical criteria are not the proper tools of the critic nor that they can be disregarded by the speculative philosopher. It means only that Greek rationalism rested on considerably more; a magnificently free and speculative strain of mind. This is one matter that Boas's discussion makes amply clear. JOHN D. GOHEEN Stanford University Origbne et la Philosophie. By Henri Crouzel. (l~tudes Publi6es sous la Direction de la Facult6 de Th6ologie SJ de Lyon-Fourvi~re; Aubier, 1962. Pp. 238.) This is a painstaking and important essay set between fairly narrow limits. It deliberately stays short of becoming a study of Origenism rather than Origen, and thus avoids the mistake made by so many books about Origen. The field is quite difficult of course. We are still a long way from proper evaluation of the Christian-Hellenist synthesis in 4 However, explicitly stated on pp. 355-356. 90 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the thinking of many Christian figures from the second century to the fourth. Could not the same be said perhaps, rnutatis mutandis, of some Hellenist writers, Celsus, Porphyry, Plotinus? Origen, as well as being more important, is considerably more complicated than most. Is he the first great Christian sumrnator, ~ la Aquinas? Is he a Platonist masquerading as a Christian? Or a Christian masquerading as a Hellenist? In the rough phrase that used to be applied in the schools of theology, auctores scinduntur, sometimes with extreme acrimony. He has been receiving a good deal of attention over the past fifty years, from Bohringer, De Faye, Koch--the list is awfully long-right... (shrink)

This volume of essays, contributed for the most part by professional Episcopalian theologians who are members of Duodecim society, may be taken I suppose as the official commemoration by American Protestants of the fifteenth Augustinian centenary, which had so much notice in the learned world. It would be idle to pretend that it represents any major contribution in the field of Augustinian philosophy, and the essays are naturally uneven in quality and attitude; but the book fulfils very well indeed its (...) professed purpose, to provide a sort of vademecum for the student or educated person who wishes to read Saint Augustine for himself. (shrink)

This article applies the Kantian doctrine of respect for persons to the problem of sweatshops. We argue that multinational enterprises are properly regarded as responsible for the practices of their subcontractors and suppliers. We then argue that multinationalenterprises have the following duties in their off-shore manufacturing facilities: to ensure that local labor laws are followed; to refrain from coercion; to meet minimum safety standards; and to provide a living wage for employees. Finally, we consider and reply to the objection that (...) improving health and safety conditions and providing a living wage will cause greater harm than good. (shrink)

There has recently been much interest in the role of attention in controlling action. The role has been mischaracterized as an element in necessary and sufficient conditions on agential control. In this paper I attempt a new characterization of the role. I argue that we need to understand attentional control in order to fully understand agential control. To fully understand agential control we must understand paradigm exercises of agential control. Three important accounts of agential control—intentional, reflective, and goal-represented control—do not (...) fully explain such exercises. I argue that understanding them requires understanding how deployments of visual attention implement flexible occurrent control, or a capacity to flexibly adjust the degree of control that individuals exercise over their actions. While such deployments of attention are neither necessary nor sufficient for exercising agential control, they constitute an attentional skill for controlling action, understanding which is central to fully understanding agential control. We can appreciate its centrality if we appreciate that this attentional skill for controlling action is plausibly crucial to acting non-negligently. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among philosophers of memory in the questions of how to characterize and to account for the temporal phenomenology of episodic memory. One prominent suggestion has been that episodic memory involves a feeling of pastness, the elaboration of which has given rise to two main approaches. On the intentionalist approach, the feeling of pastness is explained in terms of what episodic memory represents. In particular, Fernández has argued that it can be explained (...) in terms of memory representing itself as being caused by a past perceptual experience. On the metacognitive approach, which we have recently developed in, the feeling of pastness results from the monitoring and interpretation of the processing features of episodic remembering. In this paper, we show that the metacognitive approach should be preferred over the intentionalist approach. We argue that intentionalism, and Fernández’ causal self-referential view in particular, ultimately fail as accounts of the feeling of pastness. The difficulties faced by intentionalism allows us to single out three constraints that any satisfactory account of the temporal phenomenology of episodic remembering needs to meet. We conclude by arguing that the metacognitive view satisfies those constraints in a neat way, and as such, that it should be preferred over intentionalism. (shrink)

How do individuals guide their activities towards some goal? Harry Frankfurt once identified the task of explaining guidance as the central problem in action theory. An explanation has proved to be elusive, however. In this paper, I show how we can marshal empirical research to make explanatory progress. I contend that human agents have a primitive capacity to guide visual attention, and that this capacity is actually constituted by a sub-individual psychological control-system: the executive system. I thus illustrate how we (...) can explain exercises of individual-level guidance by appeal to its sub-individual constitution. This opens up a new avenue for explicating agency. (shrink)

In this paper, we demonstrate (1) how harnessing stochasticity can be the basis of creative agency; (2) that such harnessing can resolve the apparent conflict between reductionist (micro-level) accounts of behaviour and behaviour as the outcome of rational and value-driven (macro-level) decisions; (3) how neurophysiological processes can instantiate such behaviour; (4) The processes involved depend on three features of living organisms: (a) they are necessarily open systems; (b) micro-level systems therefore nest within higher-level systems; (c) causal interactions must occur across (...) all the boundaries between the levels of organization. The higher levels constrain the dynamics of lower levels. The experimental evidence and theoretical arguments are shown to be consistent with previous research on the neuronal mechanisms of conscious choice, and with the interconnected multi-level processes by which organisms harness stochasticity, whether conscious or unconscious. (shrink)

Most shoppers like bargains. Do bargains come at the expense of workers in sweatshops around the world? The authors argue that many large multinational corporations are running the moral equivalents of sweatshops and are not properly respecting the rights of persons. They list a set of minimum standards of safety and decency that they claim all corporations should meet (and that many are not). Finally, they defend their call for improved working conditions by replying to objections that meeting improved conditions (...) will cause greater harm than good, even to the workers themselves. They consider many specifi c corporations and name names and point the finger at various forms of disrespect for persons, along the way. (shrink)

The standard relation of logical consequence allows for non-standard interpretations of logical constants, as was shown early on by Carnap. But then how can we learn the interpretations of logical constants, if not from the rules which govern their use? Answers in the literature have mostly consisted in devising clever rule formats going beyond the familiar what follows from what. A more conservative answer is possible. We may be able to learn the correct interpretations from the standard rules, because the (...) space of possible interpretations is a priori restricted by universal semantic principles. We show that this is indeed the case. The principles are familiar from modern formal semantics: compositionality, supplemented, for quantifiers, with topic-neutrality. (shrink)

La théologie a de tous temps eu des problèmes avec l’anthropologie au sens de la définition de ce qu’il faut entendre par « être humain ». Bruno Latour a tenté de développer une « anthropologie des modernes ». Il se pourrait donc que Latour apporte quelques lumières à la théologie, d’autant qu’il s’affichait chrétien et n’a pas rechigné à intégrer à son anthropologie le « mode d’existence religieux ». L’anthropologie de Latour juxtapose 15 modes d’existence qui se croisent selon des (...) modalités qui excluent la possibilité pour l’un d’eux de devenir dominant sous peine de sombrer dans ce qu’il appelle le « fondamentalisme ». Cette exigence pose problème au théologien. Celui-ci affirme, en effet, que notre relation à Dieu représente un fondement pour toute authentique compréhension de soi. L’anthropologie empiriste de Latour est-elle donc compatible avec la théologie et donc informative pour elle? Et à quelles conditions? (shrink)

Recently, there has been much interest in epistemic roles of attention, especially in whether visual attention is necessary for warranting (basic) visual belief. Arguably it is not. But attention nevertheless has important roles to play in our warrant from vision. I argue that we must appeal to a competence for shifting visual attention in explaining transsaccadic vision and our epistemic warrant from it. So even if it is not necessary for visual warrant or vision, visual attention plays a central role (...) in both. (shrink)

This study is about Brentano’s criticism of a version of phenomenalism that he calls “mental monism” and which he attributes to positivist philosophers such as Ernst Mach and John Stuart Mill. I am interested in Brentano’s criticism of Mill’s version of mental monism based on the idea of “permanent possibilities of sensation.” Brentano claims that this form of monism is characterized by the identification of the class of physical phenomena with that of mental phenomena, and it commits itself to a (...) form of idealism. Brentano argues instead for a form of indirect or hypothetical realism based on intentional correlations. (shrink)

In This Paper, I Identify a Problem, which the project that I will refer to as the ‘Being and Time Project’ (or ‘BTP’ for short) aimed to solve; this is the project within which Heidegger reinterpreted his early thought—and which he unsuccessfully attempted to bring to fruition—in, roughly speaking, the years 1925–28. The problem in question presents several faces: viewed from one angle, it concerns the unity of the concept of “Being in general,” from another, the integrity of the notion (...) of “Dasein,” and from another, the possibility of the perspective from which the philosopher does her work. The solution that the BTP would have offered turns on the claim that time is “the possible horizon for any understanding .. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to propose the inclusion of the expertise of a prudent agent in the reflective equilibrium procedure, adding a disposition to identify reasonable beliefs that would be seen as the starting point of the method, which could avoid the criticism of conservatism and subjectivism. To do so, I will begin by analyzing the central characteristics of the method and its main faults. Afterwards, I will investigate the characteristics of prudence as a disposition to identify (...) the adequate means to achieve a good end. With this in mind, I will apply prudence to the procedure, so that it will be carried out by an agent who deliberates well, identifying reasonable moral beliefs and, then, we must justify them based on their consistency with ethical principles and with the factual beliefs of relevant scientific theories. Finally, I will argue that this deliberative process is consistent with ethical pluralism and democracy, and can be taken as a kind of moral knowledge. (shrink)

The Enchantment of Words is a study of Wittgenstein's early masterpiece, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Recent years have seen a great revival of interest in the Tractatus. McManus's study of the work offers novel readings of all its major themes and sheds light on issues in metaphysics, ethics and the philosophies of mind, language, and logic.

The standard semantic definition of consequence with respect to a selected set X of symbols, in terms of truth preservation under replacement (Bolzano) or reinterpretation (Tarski) of symbols outside X, yields a function mapping X to a consequence relation ⇒x. We investigate a function going in the other direction, thus extracting the constants of a given consequence relation, and we show that this function (a) retrieves the usual logical constants from the usual logical consequence relations, and (b) is an inverse (...) to—more precisely, forms a Galois connection with—the Bolzano-Tarski function. (shrink)

In “Sweatshops and Respect for Persons” we argued on Kantian grounds that managers of multinational enterprises (MNEs) have the following duties: to adhere to local labor laws, to refrain from coercion, to meet minimum health and safety standards, and to pay workers a living wage. In their commentary on our paper Sollars and Englander challenge some of our conclusions. We argue here that several of their criticisms are based on an inaccurate reading of our paper, and that none of the (...) remaining criticisms successfully challenge our main arguments. By highlighting the shortcomings of their arguments we hope to advance discussion of the ethical treatment of workers in global supply chains. (shrink)

This paper supersedes an ealier version, entitled "A Non-Standard Semantics for Inexact Knowledge with Introspection", which appeared in the Proceedings of "Rationality and Knowledge". The definition of token semantics, in particular, has been modified, both for the single- and the multi-agent case.

Executive functioning has been said to bear on a range of traditional philosophical topics, such as consciousness, thought, and action. Surprisingly, philosophers have not much engaged with the scientific literature on executive functioning. This lack of engagement may be due to several influential criticisms of that literature by Daniel Dennett, Alan Allport, and others. In this paper I argue that more recent research on executive functioning shows that these criticisms are no longer valid. The paper clears the way to a (...) more fruitful philosophical engagement with findings on the central executive system. (shrink)

Cet article traite de la question méta-sémantique de ce qui permet au souvenir épisodique d’avoir le contenu sémantique qui est le sien. Il adopte une position singulariste quant au contenu du souvenir et critique la justification méta-sémantique relationnaliste de cette position. Selon celle-ci, le contenu du souvenir est singulier parce que le souvenir consiste en une relation d’accointance avec l’événement passé. L’article oppose un argument causal et un argument sémantique à cette analyse puis montre que les deux traits du souvenir (...) que l’idée d’accointance est censée expliquer – la phénoménologie et la singularité du souvenir – peuvent l’être au moyen de modèles singularistes non fondés sur l’accointance. (shrink)

Comment penser la métaphysique en protestant? Le parent pauvre de la Réforme et de la modernité méritait qu'on s'y attarde. Pour la première fois, et de manière originale et profonde, Denis Müller, expert reconnu de l'éthique, vient lui donner ses lettres de noblesse. Cette pensée exhumée par le biographe intellectuel de Calvin et de Barth se découvre alors terrestre, proche de la création et de la vie pratique ; elle anime d'un feu nouveau les notions d'existence, de raison et (...) de transcendance. Ce sont elles qui, dans cette nouvelle approche, s'en trouvent explorées, questionnées et revisitées. Avec pour paradoxale pierre angulaire, la tristesse. Quel trésor cache en effet la mélancolie? Convoquant tour à tour les figures de Vincent Van Gogh, d'Arthur Rimbaud, de James Joyce, puisant dans les productions artistiques le ressort de cette métaphysique subversive, cet ouvrage est une invitation à l'introspection pour penser l'expérience universelle de l'existence. Et s'ouvrir à son secret. Un immense traité de vie."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Most shoppers like bargains. Do bargains come at the expense of workers in sweatshops around the world? The authors argue that many large multinational corporations are running the moral equivalents of sweatshops and are not properly respecting the rights of persons. They list a set of minimum standards of safety and decency that they claim all corporations should meet (and that many are not). Finally, they defend their call for improved working conditions by replying to objections that meeting improved conditions (...) will cause greater harm than good, even to the workers themselves. They consider many specifi c corporations and name names and point the finger at various forms of disrespect for persons, along the way. (shrink)

Providing a principled characterization of the distinction between logical and non-logical expressions is a longstanding issue in the philosophy of logic. In the Logical Syntax of Language, Carnap proposes a syntactic solution to this problem, which aims at grounding the claim that logic and mathematics are analytic. Roughly speaking, his idea is that logic and mathematics correspond to the largest part of science for which it is possible to completely specify by "syntactic" means which sentences are valid and which are (...) not. Despite a renewed interest in the philosophical benefits of analyticity, both inside and outside of Carnap scholarship, Carnap's definition of logical expressions seems to have drawn too little attention. I shall argue that it is worth a second look. More precisely, my aim will be to defend this idea against some technical problems faced by Carnap's way of implementing it and against Quinean attacks on syntax-based conventionalism. Section 1 presents Carnap's definition in the context of Logical Syntax of Language, that is, how exactly the definition works, and why Carnap needs it. In section 2, I review three challenges that have been raised in the literature, and I propose to revise the definition accordingly. I argue that its modified version is immune to the previous challenges, and, to some extent, immune to new challenges as well. In the last section, I suggest that the definition has a philosophical interest of its own, because standard Quinean objections are not as conclusive as one might think when attention is paid to the fact that Carnap requires complete syntactic specification of validities. (shrink)

After providing a brief history of global climate change, we consider and reject the influential position that free markets and responsive democracies relieve corporations of obligations to protect the environment. Five main objections to the free market view are presented, focusing in particular on the roles of business organizations in the transportation and electricity generation sectors. Ethically grounded management and public policy recommendations are offered.

The dual character of invariance under transformations and definability by some operations has been used in classical works by, for example, Galois and Klein. Following Tarski, philosophers of logic have claimed that logical notions themselves could be characterized in terms of invariance. In this article, we generalize a correspondence due to Krasner between invariance under groups of permutations and definability in L∞∞ so as to cover the cases that are of interest in the logicality debates, getting McGee’s theorem about quantifiers (...) invariant under all permutations and definability in pure L∞∞ as a particular case. We also prove some optimality results along the way, regarding the kinds of relations which are needed so that every subgroup of the full permutation group is characterizable as a group of automorphisms. (shrink)

Global climate change is one of the most daunting ethical and political challenges confronting humanity in the twenty-first century. The intergenerational and transnational ethical issues raised by climate change have been the focus of a significant body of scholarship. In this new collection of essays, leading scholars engage and respond to first-generation scholarship and argue for new ways of thinking about our ethical obligations to present and future generations. Topics addressed in these essays include moral accountability for energy consumption and (...) emissions, egalitarian and libertarian perspectives on mitigation, justice in relation to cap and trade schemes, the ethics of adaptation and the ethical dimensions of the impact of climate change on nature. (shrink)

Emotion regulation (i.e. either up- or down-regulating affective responses to emotional stimuli) has been shown to modulate long-term emotional memory formation. Further, research has demonstrated that the emotional aspects of scenes are preferentially remembered relative to neutral aspects (known as the emotional memory trade-off effect). This trade-off is often enhanced when sleep follows learning, compared to an equivalent period of time spent awake. However, the interactive effects of sleep and emotion regulation on emotional memory are poorly understood. We presented 87 (...) participants with pictures of neutral or negative objects on neutral backgrounds paired with instructions to either increase or decrease their emotional response by altering personal relevance, or to passively view the stimuli. Following a 12 h period of sleep or wakefulness, participants were tested for their memory of objects and backgrounds separately. Although we replicated the emotional memory trade-off effect, no differences in the magnitude of the trade-off effect were observed between regulation conditions. Sleep improved all aspects of memory, but it did not preferentially benefit memory for emotional components of scenes. Irrespective of a period of sleep or wake following encoding, findings suggest emotion regulation during encoding did not influence memory for emotional items at a 12-hour delay. (shrink)

La pensee de Ludwig Wittgenstein est animee, tout au long des annees 1930 et 1940, par une meditation de la question du temps. C'est un de ses aspects les plus mal connus. Ce livre vise a restituer cette meditation dans sa force et sa singularite, afin d'etablir la contribution qu'elle apporte a la tradition qui s'est consacree a cette question majeure de la philosophie. Il montre d'abord comment la tentation d'accorder un privilege au present constitue un element essentiel du projet (...) phenomenologique wittgensteinien de 1929, avant d'explorer le travail critique auquel Wittgenstein soumet ce projet au cours des deux decennies suivantes, et qui le conduit a situer dans un certain rapport a notre langage l'origine de notre facon de penser la temporalite. Une analyse originale du langage ordinaire permet ainsi de reevaluer les theories classiques du temps que proposent la phenomenologie, la philosophie de la psychologie et la philosophie du langage. (shrink)

This chapter explores the notion of an authentic affective life by examining three models of Heideggerian authenticity in light of his remarks on emotion. In addition to the familiar “decisionist model,” the chapter examines what I call the “standpoint model” and the “all things considered judgment model”. Each of these models suggests a distinctive picture of what authenticity in one’s affective life might be, and considering the plausibility of these pictures provides an interesting way to re-consider the plausibility of those (...) models. The chapter argues that authentic affect as the decisionist model understands it requires a level of control over our emotions that is inherently implausible and incompatible with Heidegger’s understanding of them, and that the standpoint model’s understanding of authentic affect requires a uniformity in our emotions which should be rejected on the same grounds. Ultimately, the chapter argues in favor of the AJM on the grounds that its picture of affective authenticity—an openness to the many ways in which my situation matters to me, touches me and moves me whether I like it or not—is both truer to our actual emotional lives and more harmonious with Heidegger’s own understanding of these matters. (shrink)

Contre l’herméneutique « philosophique », qui affirme le caractère contraignant de la structure du « préjugé », l’herméneutique « critique » entend réhabiliter la fonction du jugement et revendique la légitimité d’une méthode. Cette correction est appelée par un double constat : les herméneutiques particulières, en privilégiant l’adhérence à l’objet, se sont engagées dans diverses formes de positivisme où la question du sens était suspendue au profit de savoirs historiques « objectifs » ; l’herméneutique philosophique, en tant que théorie générale (...) de la compréhension, s’est détournée de la question de l’interprétation et de sa validité au profit d’une enquête sur les conditions ontologiques de toute compréhension. À partir de la proposition de Peter Szondi d’opposer à l’« herméneutique philosophique » une « herméneutique matérielle » (§1) et de l’effort de Jean Bollack pour réhabiliter le questionnement herméneutique dans la philologie et réciproquement (§2), on s’interrogera sur la possibilité de constituer une herméneutique critique (§3) dans laquelle l’interprétation s’accomplit dans l’exercice d’un jugement. (shrink)

Einstein’s theory of Special relativity is founded on an error made by Hendrick Lorentz. It is not necessary to expose the mathematical inconsistencies of special relativity, since the theory collapses by simply exposing the error made by Lorentz. In doing so, it not only causes special relativity to collapse, but also general relativity, and the many theories built upon these two deceptive theories. There are many claims of tests made which supposedly prove SR or GR, such as the eclipse of (...) 1919, the Hafele-Keating experiment, GPS, the orbit of Mercury, and muons. The error of these will also be shown as well as an area of astronomy which has been negatively impacted by SR. The epistemology approach to special relativity: you can know it is a false theory when the theory requires deceiving the student for acceptance and the tests which support the theory can be proven false. (shrink)

Pour certains interprètes des Recherches philosophiques , Wittgenstein souscrit à l'idée que l'emploi d'un langage est une institution sociale et que suivre une règle est nécessairement une pratique partagée ; d'autres estiment au contraire — à mon avis avec raison — qu'il admet la possibilité d'un langage parlé par un seul individu et des règles non communes. Je défends l'interprétation selon laquelle la question importante dans les Recherches n'est pas tellement de savoir si un idiolecte est possible que de savoir (...) ce qui découle, pour nos concepts de signification, de compréhension linguistique et de « suivre une règle », du fait que la communication verbale soit — comme c'est normalement le cas — une pratique commune.According to some interpreters of the Philosophical Investigations , Wittgenstein thinks that language-use is a social institution and that rule following is a shared practice. Others hold the opposite view and rightly so. They argue that Wittgenstein thinks there could be a language which is spoken by only one individual and unshared rules. In this paper I defend the following interpretation: The important question raised in the Investigations is not whether or not an idiolect is possible , it is rather what follows with respect to our concepts of meaning , understanding and rule-following from the fact that verbal communication is indeeed a shared practice. (shrink)