Unusual atmospheric phenomena (UAPs) were observed in daylight by multiple observers on board two civil aircraft in widely separated locations. We summarise results of an investigation based on radio communications reporting events in real time to Air Traffic Control (ATC), ATC radar and weather radar recordings, Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) documents, witness interviews and statements, and other sources. We describe attempts to explain the phenomena with the help of expert specialist advisers and professional resources in the fields of meteorology, atmospheric (...) optics, oceanography and geophysics. We are able to show that widespread media stories describing enormous phenomena up to a mile wide and detected by radar were based on speculation and misunderstandings. Many news reports were grossly exaggerated and inaccurate. However, we are unable to conclusively identify the UAPs observed. It proves possible to eliminate a number of theories with a fairly high level of confidence, leaving us with two types of phenomena—a rare atmospheric-optical effect or an earthquake precursor—both of which have the potential to explain at least some, although not all, features of the reports. We highlight certain features that appear to leave open the possibility of unusual physical processes. Keywords: UAP—atmospheric optics—anomaly—mirage—earthquake lights—EQL. (shrink)

Desmond M. Clarke presents new translations, from French and Latin, of three of the first feminist tracts to support explicitly the equality of men and women: Marie le Jars de Gournay's The Equality of Men and Women, Anna Maria van Schurman's Dissertation, and François Poulain de la Barre's Physical and Moral Discourse concerning the Equality of Both Sexes. These works transformed the language and conceptual framework in which questions about women's equality were subsequently discussed. This edition includes new translations, (...) from French and Latin, of these three feminist authors, excerpts from their related writings, together with an extensive introduction to the religious and philosophical context within which they argued against the traditional view of women's natural inferiority to men. (shrink)

The purpose of this book is to advance responsible rehabilitation of the speculative philosophy of history. It challenges the idea popularized by thinkers such as and Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean-François Lyotard that historical meta-mythology and meta-narrative are philosophically obsolete. As long as humanity, viewed anthropologically, lives by over-arching narrative, the quest for a version that survives rational criticism remains vital. Here human rights serve as the key to unlock such a version. Despite the fact that the Hegelian philosophy of history (...) has often been derided, something very similar currently functions as the official ideology of the world community: the idea of history as the story of freedom. This book does not retell the world-historical story of freedom. Rather, it uncovers it, beginning with the current age of human rights and working backward through the great role-model civilizations of history. Its conclusion is that a forward retelling of the story of freedom as the story of human rights can be justified by dewesternizing the story. The book contains critical responses from specialized scholars and re-presentative of selected world cultures. The volume includes illustrations, and a guest Afterword by Donald Phillip Verene. It is a companion-volume to the author's _Hegel's Logic: Between History and Dialectic_ (North-western University Press, 1996). (shrink)

After the seminal work of Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor (formally known as the KLM approach) on conditionals and preferential models, many aspects of defeasibility in more complex formalisms have been studied in recent years. Examples of these aspects are the notion of typicality in description logic and defeasible necessity in modal logic. We discuss a new aspect of defeasibility that can be expressed in the case of temporal logic, which is the normality in an execution. In this contribution, we take (...) Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) as case study for this defeasible aspect. LTL has found extensive applications in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, notably as a formal framework for representing and verifying computer systems that vary over time. However, some systems may presents exceptions at some innocuous time points where they can be tolerated, or conversely, exceptions at other crucial time points where they need to be addressed. In order to ensure the reliability of such systems, we study a preferential extension of LTL, called defeasible linear temporal logic (LTL ~ ). In the first part of this paper, we show how semantics of KLM's preferential models can be integrated with LTL. We also discuss the addition of non-monotonic temporal operators as a way to formalise defeasible properties of these systems. The second part of this paper is a study of the satisfiability problem of LTL ~ sentences. Based on Sistla and Clarke's work on the complexity of the classical LTL language, we show the bounded-model property of two fragments of LTL ~ language. Moreover, we provide a procedure to check the satisfiability of sentences in both of these fragments. (shrink)

Originally published in 2005, the 2018 translation of François Caradec’s Dictionary of Gestures provides the Anglophone public with a rich, idiosyncratic, amusing and informative collection of gest...

A survey of theories on the passions and action in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and western Europe reveals that few, if any, of the major writers held the view that reason in any of its functions executes action without a passion. Even rationalists, like Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth and English clergyman Samuel Clarke, recognized the necessity of passion to action. On the other hand, many of these intellectuals also agreed with French philosophers Jean-François Senault, René Descartes, and Nicolas Malebranche (...) that, for passions to be useful or to become virtues, they must be governed by reason. Without the moderation of reason, passions will be unruly, distort our notions of good, and disrupt our rational volitions. In response to these popular early modern perspectives, Enlightenment thinker David Hume offered a now-famous argument that reason without passion cannot motivate, drawing the further conclusion that reason cannot govern the passions, either. Given that no one in Hume’s era seemed to defend the claim that reason alone can motivate action, what was Hume’s intention? (shrink)

This comprehensive study offers a balanced assessment of libertarian accounts of free will. Bringing to bear recent work on action, causation, and causal explanation, Clarke defends a type of event-causal view from popular objections concerning rationality and diminished control. He subtly explores the extent to which event-causal accounts can secure the things for the sake of which we value free will, judging their success here to be limited. Clarke then sets out a highly original agent-causal account, one that (...) integrates agent causation and nondeterministic event causation. He defends this view from a number of objections but argues that we should find the substance causation required by any agent-causal account to be impossible. Clarke concludes that if a broad thesis of incompatibilism is correct--one on which both free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with determinism--then no libertarian account is entirely adequate. (shrink)

To what extent are the subjects of our thoughts and talk real? This is the question of realism. In this book, Justin Clarke-Doane explores arguments for and against moral realism and mathematical realism, how they interact, and what they can tell us about areas of philosophical interest more generally. He argues that, contrary to widespread belief, our mathematical beliefs have no better claim to being self-evident or provable than our moral beliefs. Nor do our mathematical beliefs have better claim (...) to being empirically justified than our moral beliefs. It is also incorrect that reflection on the "genealogy" of our moral beliefs establishes a lack of parity between the cases. In general, if one is a moral antirealist on the basis of epistemological considerations, then one ought to be a mathematical antirealist as well. And, yet, Clarke-Doane shows that moral realism and mathematical realism do not stand or fall together -- and for a surprising reason. Moral questions, insofar as they are practical, are objective in a sense that mathematical questions are not. Moreover, the sense in which they are objective can be explained only by assuming practical anti-realism. One upshot of the discussion is that the concepts of realism and objectivity, which are widely identified, are actually in tension. Another is that the objective questions in the neighborhood of questions of logic, modality, grounding, and nature are practical questions too. Practical philosophy should, therefore, take center stage. (shrink)

On a now orthodox view, humans and many other animals possess a “number sense,” or approximate number system, that represents number. Recently, this orthodox view has been subject to numerous critiques that question whether the ANS genuinely represents number. We distinguish three lines of critique – the arguments from congruency, confounds, and imprecision – and show that none succeed. We then provide positive reasons to think that the ANS genuinely represents numbers, and not just non-numerical confounds or exotic substitutes for (...) number, such as “numerosities” or “quanticals,” as critics propose. In so doing, we raise a neglected question: numbers of what kind? Proponents of the orthodox view have been remarkably coy on this issue. But this is unsatisfactory since the predictions of the orthodox view, including the situations in which the ANS is expected to succeed or fail, turn on the kind of number being represented. In response, we propose that the ANS represents not only natural numbers, but also non-natural rational numbers. It does not represent irrational numbers, however, and thereby fails to represent the real numbers more generally. This distances our proposal from existing conjectures, refines our understanding of the ANS, and paves the way for future research. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there are two kinds of epistemic justification: one is objective and the other, subjective. Internalists are interested in the subjective variety of justification. Externalists are interested in the objective notion of justification. A paper by Stewart Cohen fails to distinguish these two varieties of epistemic justification and, as a result, criticizes externalists for failing to address the internalist, subjective notion of epistemic justification. But, since that notion is not the one that externallists care about, (...) I argue that his evil demon example fails to be a counterexample against externalists. (shrink)

The similarities between the United States and South Africa with respect to race, power, oppression and economic inequities are striking, and a better understanding of these parallels can provide educational gains for students and educators in both countries. Through shared experiences and perspectives, this volume presents scholarly work from U.S. and South African scholars that advance educational practice in support of social justice and transformative learning. It provides a comprehensive framework for developing transformational learning experiences that facilitates leadership for social (...) justice, and a deeper understanding of the factors influencing personal, national and global identity. (shrink)

In this defense of Reliabilism, I argue that there has been 'selection for' accurate indexical beliefs. I offer empirical evidence and examples to suggest that Steve Stich's defense of the opposite claim in The Fragmentation of Reason is misguided.

Jerry Fodor deemed informational encapsulation ‘the essence’ of a system’s modularity and argued that human perceptual processing comprises modular systems, thus construed. Nowadays, his conclusion is widely challenged. Often, this is because experimental work is seen to somehow demonstrate the cognitive penetrability of perceptual processing, where this is assumed to conflict with the informational encapsulation of perceptual systems. Here, I deny the conflict, proposing that cognitive penetration need not have any straightforward bearing on the conjecture that perceptual processing is composed (...) of nothing but informationally encapsulated modules, the conjecture that each and every perceptual computation is performed by an informationally encapsulated module, and the consequences perceptual encapsulation was traditionally expected to have for a perception-cognition border, the epistemology of perception and cognitive science. With these points in view, I propose that particularly plausible cases of cognitive penetration would actually seem to evince the encapsulation of perceptual systems rather than refute/problematize this conjecture. (shrink)

The distinction between perception and cognition frames countless debates in philosophy and cognitive science. But what, if anything, does this distinction actually amount to? In this introductory article, we summarize recent work on this question. We first briefly consider the possibility that a perception-cognition border should be eliminated from our scientific ontology, and then introduce and critically examine five positive approaches to marking a perception–cognition border, framed in terms of phenomenology, revisability, modularity, format, and stimulus-dependence.

It is often claimed that pre-attentive vision has an ‘iconic’ format. This is seen to explain pre-attentive vision's characteristically high processing capacity and to make sense of an overlap in the mechanisms of early vision and mental imagery. But what does the iconicity of pre-attentive vision amount to? This paper considers two prominent ways of characterising pre-attentive visual icons and argues that neither is adequate: one approach renders the claim ‘pre-attentive vision is iconic’ empirically false while the other obscures its (...) ability to do the explanatory work, which motivates positing pre-attentive visual icons in the first place. With this noted, I introduce the notion of an ‘Analogue Map’ and argue that it provides a superior characterisation of pre-attentive vision's iconicity. I then argue that this forces a reassessment of debates which have traditionally presupposed the iconicity of pre-attentive vision, emphasising ramifications for the viability of a format-based perception-thought border. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) makes use of explicit procedures for grading evidence for causal claims. Normally, these procedures categorise evidence of correlation produced by statistical trials as better evidence for a causal claim than evidence of mechanisms produced by other methods. We argue, in contrast, that evidence of mechanisms needs to be viewed as complementary to, rather than inferior to, evidence of correlation. In this paper we first set out the case for treating evidence of mechanisms alongside evidence of correlation in (...) explicit protocols for evaluating evidence. Next we provide case studies which exemplify the ways in which evidence of mechanisms complements evidence of correlation in practice. Finally, we put forward some general considerations as to how the two sorts of evidence can be more closely integrated by EBM. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the self-referential component which Searle rightly detects in the truth-conditions of perceptual judgments comes from the perceptual ‘mode' and is not an aspect of the ‘content' of the judgment, contrary to Searle's claim.

I argue that analogue mental representations possess a canonical decomposition into privileged constituents from which they compose. I motivate this suggestion, and rebut arguments to the contrary, through reflection on the approximate number system, whose representations are widely expected to have an analogue format. I then argue that arguments for the compositionality and constituent structure of these analogue representations generalize to other analogue mental representations posited in the human mind, such as those in early vision and visual imagery.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

This collection emphasizes a cross-disciplinary approach to the problem of scale, with essays ranging in subject matter from literature to film, architecture, the plastic arts, philosophy, and scientific and political writing. Its contributors consider a variety of issues provoked by the sudden and pressing shifts in scale brought on by globalization and the era of the Anthropocene, including: the difficulties of defining the concept of scale; the challenges that shifts in scale pose to knowledge formation; the role of scale in (...) mediating individual subjectivity and agency; the barriers to understanding objects existing in scalar realms different from our own; the role of scale in mediating the relationship between humans and the environment; and the nature of power, authority, and democracy at different social scales. (shrink)

Descartes is possibly the most famous of all writers on the mind, but his theory of mind has been almost universally misunderstood, because his philosophy has not been seen in the context of his scientific work. Desmond Clarke offers a radical and convincing rereading, undoing the received perception of Descartes as the chief defender of mind/body dualism. For Clarke, the key is to interpret his philosophical efforts as an attempt to reconcile his scientific pursuits with the theologically orthodox (...) views of his time. (shrink)

There is a long tradition comparing moral knowledge to mathematical knowledge. In this paper, I discuss apparent similarities and differences between knowledge in the two areas, realistically conceived. I argue that many of these are only apparent, while others are less philosophically significant than might be thought. The picture that emerges is surprising. There are definitely differences between epistemological arguments in the two areas. However, these differences, if anything, increase the plausibility of moral realism as compared to mathematical realism. It (...) is hard to see how one might argue, on epistemological grounds, for moral antirealism while maintaining commitment to mathematical realism. But it may be possible to do the opposite. (shrink)

Abstract Following Clarke (2002), a Lakatosian approach is used to account for the epistemic development of conspiracy theories. It is then argued that the hypercritical atmosphere of the internet has slowed down the development of conspiracy theories, discouraging conspiracy theorists from articulating explicit versions of their favoured theories, which could form the hard core of Lakatosian research pro grammes. The argument is illustrated with a study of the “controlled demolition” theory of the collapse of three towers at the World (...) Trade Center on September 11, 2001. (shrink)

In his influential book, The Nature of Morality, Gilbert Harman writes: “In explaining the observations that support a physical theory, scientists typically appeal to mathematical principles. On the other hand, one never seems to need to appeal in this way to moral principles.” What is the epistemological relevance of this contrast, if genuine? This chapter argues that ethicists and philosophers of mathematics have misunderstood it. They have confused what the chapter calls the justificatory challenge for realism about an area, D—the (...) challenge to justify our D-beliefs—with the reliability challenge for D-realism—the challenge to explain the reliability of our D-beliefs. Harman’s contrast is relevant to the first, but not, evidently, to the second. One upshot of the discussion is that genealogical debunking arguments are fallacious. Another is that indispensability considerations cannot answer the Benacerraf–Field challenge for mathematical realism. (shrink)

This book discusses the problem of mathematical knowledge, and its broader philosophical ramifications. It argues that the problem of explaining the (defeasible) justification of our mathematical beliefs (‘the justificatory challenge’), arises insofar as disagreement over axioms bottoms out in disagreement over intuitions. And it argues that the problem of explaining their reliability (‘the reliability challenge’), arises to the extent that we could have easily had different beliefs. The book shows that mathematical facts are not, in general, empirically accessible, contra Quine, (...) and that they cannot be dispensed with, contra Field. However, it argues that they might be so plentiful that our knowledge of them is intelligible. The book concludes with a complementary ‘pluralism’ about modality, logic and normative theory, highlighting its revisionary implications. Metaphysically, pluralism engenders a kind of perspectivalism and indeterminacy. Methodologically, it vindicates Carnap’s pragmatism, transposed to the key of realism. (shrink)

Samuel Clarke was by far the most gifted and influential Newtonian philosopher of his generation, and A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, which constituted the 1704 Boyle Lectures, was one of the most important works of the first half of the eighteenth century, generating a great deal of controversy about the relation between space and God, the nature of divine necessary existence, the adequacy of the Cosmological Argument, agent causation, and the immateriality of the soul. Together (...) with the other texts presented in this edition, it also provides the best introduction to Clarke's philosophical views, which, in addition to their intrinsic interest, are historically important for the light they shed both on the philosophical positions within the Newtonian circle and on the exchange between Clarke and Leibniz, the most famous philosophical controversy of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

The dismissive attitude of intellectuals toward conspiracy theorists is considered and given some justification. It is argued that intellectuals are entitled to an attitude of prima facie skepticism toward the theories propounded by conspiracy theorists, because conspiracy theorists have an irrational tendency to continue to believe in conspiracy theories, even when these take on the appearance of forming the core of degenerating research program. It is further argued that the pervasive effect of the "fundamental attribution error" can explain the behavior (...) of such conspiracy theorists. A rival approach due to Brian Keeley, which involves the criticism of a subclass of conspiracy theories on epistemic grounds, is considered and found to be inadequate. Key Words: conspiracy • conspiracy theories • conspiracy theorizing. (shrink)

Gideon Rosen, Brian Leiter, and Catarina Dutilh Novaes raise deep questions about the arguments in Morality and Mathematics (M&M). Their objections bear on practical deliberation, the formulation of mathematical pluralism, the problem of universals, the argument from moral disagreement, moral ‘perception’, the contingency of our mathematical practices, and the purpose of proof. In this response, I address their objections, and the broader issues that they raise.

This essay examines several varieties of libertarian accounts of free will. Some require free actions to be uncaused, some require agent causation, and some require non-deterministic event causation. Difficulties are raised for all of these varieties.

Biological theory demands a clear organism concept, but at present biologists cannot agree on one. They know that counting particular units, and not counting others, allows them to generate explanatory and predictive descriptions of evolutionary processes. Yet they lack a unified theory telling them which units to count. In this paper, I offer a novel account of biological individuality, which reconciles conflicting definitions of ‘organism’ by interpreting them as describing alternative realisers of a common functional role, and then defines individual (...) organisms as essentially possessing some mechanisms that play this role. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that the intelligibility of modal metaphysics has been vindicated. Quine's arguments to the contrary supposedly confused analyticity with metaphysical necessity, and rigid with non-rigid designators.2 But even if modal metaphysics is intelligible, it could be misconceived. It could be that metaphysical necessity is not absolute necessity – the strictest real notion of necessity – and that no proposition of traditional metaphysical interest is necessary in every real sense. If there were nothing otherwise “uniquely metaphysically significant” about (...) metaphysical necessity, then paradigmatic metaphysical necessities would be necessary in one sense of “necessary”, not necessary in another, and that would be it. The question of whether they were necessary simpliciter would be like the question of whether the Parallel Postulate is true simpliciter – understood as a pure mathematical conjecture, rather than as a hypothesis about physical spacetime. In a sense, the latter question has no objective answer. In this article, I argue that paradigmatic questions of modal metaphysics are like the Parallel Postulate question. I then discuss the deflationary ramifications of this argument. I conclude with an alternative conception of the space of possibility. According to this conception, there is no objective boundary between possibility and impossibility. Along the way, I sketch an analogy between modal metaphysics and set theory. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed an escalation in corporate social reporting (CSR) by UK companies (Gray, Kouhy and Lavers 1995). Whilst some elements of CSR reporting are required by law, much of it represents voluntary reporting. By investigating the non‐mandatory reporting of two aspects of social responsibility, corporate community involvement (CCI) and environmental impact, this paper seeks to explore why companies choose to make such disclosures. It specifically asks whether companies are primarily motivated by the strategic need to manage their reputation (...) and legitimacy rather than by the recognition of their ethical accountability, which is the stated purpose of reports produced by cutting edge companies (Clarke 1998). (shrink)

Sometimes someone does something morally wrong in clear-eyed awareness that what she is doing is wrong. More commonly, a wrongdoer fails to see that her conduct is wrong. Call the latter behavior unwitting wrongful conduct. It is generally agreed that an agent can be blameworthy for such conduct, but there is considerable disagreement about how one’s blameworthiness in such cases is to be explained, or what conditions must be satisfied for the agent to be blameworthy for her conduct. Many theorists (...) hold that an agent’s blameworthiness for unwitting wrongful conduct must stem from—or trace back to—her blameworthiness for something else. And appeals to tracing in these cases lead some writers to a highly revisionist view, on which people are blameworthy for wrongdoing much less often than we ordinarily think (and our mistake, unfortunately, isn’t about how much wrongdoing there is). In this chapter, I set out the main claims of an argument for such a view and respond to it. I offer grounds for retaining a good many of the judgments that the revisionist would have us reject. The defense rests to a significant extent on commonsense views about the psychological capacities and abilities to act that people ordinarily possess, views that, as far as I can tell, revisionists have not shown to be mistaken. (shrink)

Should economics study the psychological basis of agents' choice behaviour? I show how this question is multifaceted and profoundly ambiguous. There is no sharp distinction between "mentalist'' answers to this question and rival "behavioural'' answers. What's more, clarifying this point raises problems for mentalists of the "functionalist'' variety (Dietrich and List, 2016). Firstly, functionalist hypotheses collapse into hypotheses about input--output dispositions, I show, unless one places some unwelcome restrictions on what counts as a cognitive variable. Secondly, functionalist hypotheses make some (...) risky commitments about the plasticity of agents' choice dispositions. (shrink)

In the first English translation of his work, Laruelle explores the major European thinkers from Nietzsche to Derrida to define his own 'non-philosophical' ...