Ellis argues that certain essential properties of objects in the world not only determine the nature of these objects but also how they will behave in any situation. In this paper I will critique Ellis's essentialism from the perspective of the philosophy of chemistry, arguing that our current knowledge of chemistry in fact does not lend itself to essentialist interpretations and that this seriously undercuts Ellis's project. In particular I will criticize two key distinctions Ellis draws between internal vs. external (...) properties and essential vs. accidental properties, showing that at the chemical level such distinctions are insupportable. If essential properties only exist at the level of sub-atomic physics, then Ellis's hopes that essentialism will provide a theoretical basis for a philosophy of chemistry are at best hopes for a very distant future, since the argument that chemical structure and dynamics can be explained at the quantum level derived is purely from analogy to much simpler systems than those chemists actually study. This suggests that we have very little scientific evidence that scientific essentialism is a viable ontology. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

On Gandhian philosophy, socialism, and communism.

The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader brings together seminal texts from antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century and makes them accessible in one volume for the first time. With readings from Aristotle, Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Lavoisier, Linnaeus, Darwin, Faraday, and Maxwell, it analyses and discusses major classical, medieval and modern texts and figures from the natural sciences. Grouped by topic to clarify the development of methods and disciplines and the unification of theories, each section (...) includes an introduction, suggestions for further reading and end-of-section discussion questions, allowing students to develop the skills needed to: § read, interpret, and critically engage with central problems and ideas from the history and philosophy of science § understand and evaluate scientific material found in a wide variety of professional and popular settings § appreciate the social and cultural context in which scientific ideas emerge § identify the roles that mathematics plays in scientific inquiry Featuring primary sources in all the core scientific fields - astronomy, physics, chemistry, and the life sciences - The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader is ideal for students looking to better understand the origins of natural science and the questions asked throughout its history. By taking a thematic approach to introduce influential assumptions, methods and answers, this reader illustrates the implications of an impressive range of values and ideas across the history and philosophy of Western science. (shrink)

Why is a red face not really red? How do we decide that this book is a textbook or not? Conceptual spaces provide the medium on which these computations are performed, but an additional operation is needed: Contrast. By contrasting a reddish face with a prototypical face, one gets a prototypical ‘red’. By contrasting this book with a prototypical textbook, the lack of exercises may pop out. Dynamic contrasting is an essential operation for converting perceptions into predicates. The existence of (...) dynamic contrasting may contribute to explaining why lexical meanings correspond to convex regions of conceptual spaces. But it also explains why predication is most of the time opportunistic, depending on context. While off-line conceptual similarity is a holistic operation, the contrast operation provides a context-dependent distance that creates ephemeral predicative judgments that are essential for interfacing conceptual spaces with natural language and with reasoning. (shrink)

A new English translation of the founding text of the Madhyamaka (Middle Way) school of Buddhism, with the Tibetan version of the text included. The Root Stanzas holds an honored place in all branches of Tibetan Buddhism, as well as in the Buddhist traditions found in China, Japan, and Korea, because of the way it develops the seminal view of emptiness (shunyata), which is crucial to understanding Mahayana Buddhism and central to its practice. It is prized for its pithy and (...) pointed arguments that show that things lack intrinsic being and thus are “empty” (shunya). They abide in the Middle Way, free from the extremes of permanence and annihilation. (shrink)

Study of Parāśaragītā, portion of Śāntiparva of Mahābhārata; includes Sanskrit text with Hindi translation.

This volume gathers papers, which were read at the congress held at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Toledo (Spain), in September 2007, under the general subject of phenomenology. The book is devoted to Wittgenstein’s thoughts on phenomenology. One of its aims is to consider and examine the lasting importance of phenomenology for philosophic discussion. For E. Husserl phenomenology was a discipline that endeavoured to describe how the world is constituted and experienced through a series of conscious acts. His fundamental (...) concept was that of intentional consciousness. What did drag Wittgenstein into working on phenomenology? In his 'middle period' work, Wittgenstein used the headline 'Phenomenology is Grammar'. These cornerstones can be signalled by notions like language, grammar, rule, visual space versus Euclidean space, minima visibilia and colours. L. Wittgenstein’s main interest takes the form of a research on language. (shrink)

This paper discusses literacy as a socio-political phenomenon from the perspective of several relatively independent educational discourses. The first is critical education theory and research revealing the hidden mechanisms by which education policies act in the interests of a global market economy. The second is the perspective of critical pedagogy scholars on contemporary educational challenges, who offer responses similar to those discussed in current discourse on informal civic education. The third is the heated discussion of high-stakes literacy testing (related to (...) OECD literacy studies such as PISA, IALS, etc.) the results of which are used as a source of argumentation for diverse attitudes and educational consequences. Based on an analysis of literacy theory, research on active citizenship and civic education, the term “civic literacy” is proposed and argued as a relevant conceptual frame for conceptualizing school as an institution which can be involved in resistance to all forms of power politics or ideological indoctrination and manipulation, while at the same time, respecting the traditional values and aims of general education. (shrink)