Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to assume that the world of nature can be reduced to basic physics. Yet there are features of the mind consciousness, intentionality, normativity that do not seem to be reducible to physics or neuroscience. This explanatory gap between mind and brain has thus been a major cause of concern in recent philosophy of mind. Reductionists hold that, despite all appearances, the mind can be reduced to the brain. Eliminativists hold that it cannot, and that this (...) implies that there is something illegitimate about the mentalistic vocabulary. Dualists hold that the mental is irreducible, and that this implies either a substance or a property dualism. Mysterian non-reductive physicalists hold that the mind is uniquely irreducible, perhaps due to some limitation of our self-understanding. In this book, Steven Horst argues that this whole conversation is based on assumptions left over from an outdated philosophy of science. While reductionism was part of the philosophical orthodoxy fifty years ago, it has been decisively rejected by philosophers of science over the past thirty years, and for good reason. True reductions are in fact exceedingly rare in the sciences, and the conviction that they were there to be found was an artifact of armchair assumptions of 17th century Rationalists and 20th century Logical Empiricists. The explanatory gaps between mind and brain are far from unique. In fact, in the sciences it is gaps all the way down.And if reductions are rare in even the physical sciences, there is little reason to expect them in the case of psychology. Horst argues that this calls for a complete re-thinking of the contemporary problematic in philosophy of mind. Reductionism, dualism, eliminativism and non-reductive materialism are each severely compromised by post-reductionist philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind is in need of a new paradigm. Horst suggests that such a paradigm might be found in Cognitive Pluralism: the view that human cognitive architecture constrains us to understand the world through a plurality of partial, idealized, and pragmatically-constrained models, each employing a particular representational system optimized for its own problem domain. Such an architecture can explain the disunities of knowledge, and is plausible on evolutionary grounds. (shrink)

Many virtue epistemologists conceive of epistemic competence on the model of skill —such as archery, playing baseball, or chess. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake: epistemic competences and skills are crucially and relevantly different kinds of capacities. This, I suggest, undermines the popular attempt to understand epistemic normativity as a mere special case of the sort of normativity familiar from skilful action. In fact, as I argue further, epistemic competences resemble virtues rather than skills—a claim that (...) is based on an important, but often overlooked, difference between virtue and skill. The upshot is that virtue epistemology should indeed be based on virtue, not on skill. (shrink)

Epistemic constitutivism (EC) holds that the nature of believing is such that it gives rise to a standard of correctness and that other epistemic normative notions (e.g., reasons for belief) can be explained in terms of this standard. If defensible, this view promises an attractive and unifying account of epistemic normativity. However, EC faces a forceful objection: that constitutive standards of correctness are never enough for generating normative reasons. This paper aims to defend EC in the face of this objection. (...) I do so in two steps. First, I dispute a crucial assumption underlying the case against EC: that constitutive standards of correctness in general are ‘reason-giving’ only if and because there is also a prior reason to comply with them. Second, I outline a strategy of how EC can meet the challenge of explaining what’s special about the activity of believing such that, unlike other standard-governed activities, it is capable of generating normative reasons. (shrink)

Many hold that theoretical reasoning aims at truth. In this paper, I ask what it is for reasoning to be thus aim-directed. Standard answers to this question explain reasoning’s aim-directedness in terms of intentions, dispositions, or rule-following. I argue that, while these views contain important insights, they are not satisfactory. As an alternative, I introduce and defend a novel account: reasoning aims at truth in virtue of being the exercise of a distinctive kind of cognitive power, one that, unlike ordinary (...) dispositions, is capable of fully explaining its own exercises. I argue that this account is able to avoid the difficulties plaguing standard accounts of the relevant sort of mental teleology. (shrink)

This book introduces an account of cognitive architecture, Cognitive Pluralism, on which the basic units of understanding are models of particular content domains. Having many mental models is a good adaptive strategy for cognition, but models can be incompatible with one another, leading to paradoxes and inconsistencies of belief, and it may not be possible to integrate the understanding supplied by multiple models into a comprehensive and self-consistent "super model". The book applies the theory to explaining intuitive reasoning and cognitive (...) illusions and explores implications for epistemology, semantics, and disunity of science. (shrink)

This paper provides an analysis of U.S. farmland owners, operators, and workers by race, ethnicity, and gender. We first review the intersection between racialized and gendered capitalism and farmland ownership and farming in the United States. Then we analyze data from the 2014 Tenure and Ownership Agricultural Land survey, the 2012 Census of Agriculture, and the 2013–2014 National Agricultural Worker Survey to demonstrate that significant nation-wide disparities in farming by race, ethnicity and gender persist in the U.S. In 2012–2014, White (...) people owned 98% and operated 94% of all farmland. They generated 98% of all farm-related income from land ownership and 97% of income from farm owner-operatorship. Meanwhile, People of Color farmers were more likely to be tenants rather than owners, owned less land, and generated less farm-related wealth per person than their White counterparts. Hispanic farmers were also disproportionately farm laborers. In addition to racial and ethnic disparities, there were disparities by gender. About 63% of non-operating landowners, 86% of farm operators, and 87% of tenant farmers were male, and female farmers tended to generate less income per farmer than men. This data provides evidence of ongoing racial, ethnic and gender disparities in agriculture in the United States. We conclude with a call to address the structural drivers of the disparities and with recommendations for better data collection. (shrink)

Since the seventeenth century, our understanding of the natural world has been one of phenomena that behave in accordance with natural laws. While other elements of the early modern scientific worldview may be rejected or at least held in question—the metaphor of the world as a great machine, the narrowly mechanist assumption that all physical interactions must be contact interactions, the idea that matter might actually be obeying rules laid down by its Divine Author – the notion of natural law (...) has continued to play a pivotal role in actual scientific practice, in our philosophical interpretations of science, and in their its metaphysical implications. (shrink)

Die erste Rezeption Kants unmittelbar nach Erscheinen der Kritik der reinen Vernunft zahlt zu den folgenreichsten und spannendsten Etappen der neueren Philosophiegeschichte. Erstaunlicherweise ist sie noch immer weithin unerforscht. Dieser Band geht auf eine Fruhkantianismus-Ausstellung der Universitat Jena (1993) zuruck. Er hilft, das Quellenmaterial leichter zu erschliessen. Kapitel uber Ch. G. Schutz, C. Ch. E. Schmid, die Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Reinhold, Schiller, Hufeland u.a. geben neue Einblicke in diese fruhe Etappe der Kantrezeption. An die hundert Abbildungen prasentieren teilweise vollig unbekanntes Quellenmaterial (...) von hohem Wert. The first reception of Kant directly after publication of the Critique of Pure Reason is one of the most momentous and fascinating stages in the recent history of philosophy. Surprisingly not much research has been done on this. This volume is the result of an exhibition of early Kantianism at the University of Jena in 1993. It helps to make the source material more easily accessible. Chapters on Ch. G. Schutz, C. Ch. E. Schmid, the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Reinhold, Schiller, Hufeland among others provide new insight into this early stage of Kant's reception. There are approximately 100 illustrations which present very valuable source material, some of which was previously completely unknown. (shrink)

Over the past thirty years, it is been common to hear the mind likened to a digital computer. This essay is concerned with a particular philosophical view that holds that the mind literally is a digital computer (in a specific sense of “computer” to be developed), and that thought literally is a kind of computation. This view—which will be called the “Computational Theory of Mind” (CTM)—is thus to be distinguished from other and broader attempts to connect the mind with computation, (...) including (a) various enterprises at modeling features of the mind using computational modeling techniques, and (b) employing some feature or features of production-model computers (such as the stored program concept, or the distinction between hardware and software) merely as a guiding metaphor for understanding some feature of the mind. This entry is therefore concerned solely with the Computational Theory of Mind (CTM) proposed by Hilary Putnam [1961] and developed most notably for philosophers by Jerry Fodor [1975, 1980, 1987, 1993]. The senses of ‘computer’ and ‘computation’ employed here are technical; the main tasks of this entry will therefore be to elucidate: (a) the technical sense of ‘computation’ that is at issue, (b) the ways in which it is claimed to be applicable to the mind, (c) the philosophical problems this understanding of the mind is claimed to solve, and (d) the major criticisms that have accrued to this view. (shrink)

In this carefully argued critique, Steven Horst pronounces the theory deficient.

Someone acts in a morally worthy way when they deserve credit for doing the morally right thing. But when and why do agents deserve credit for the success involved in doing the right thing? It is tempting to seek an answer to that question by drawing an analogy with creditworthy success in other domains of human agency, especially in sports, arts, and crafts. Accordingly, some authors have recently argued that, just like creditworthy success in, say, chess, playing the piano, or (...) archery, creditworthy moral success is a matter of getting things right by way of manifesting a relevant skill. My main aim in this paper is to bring out an important structural difference between moral creditworthiness and creditworthiness in sports, arts, and craft, undermining attempts to use examples of the latter as a model for understanding the former. As an alternative, I propose an account of morally creditworthy action, according to which such action is a matter of manifesting virtue, not skill—a claim that's based on an important, but underappreciated, difference between the sorts of excellences constituting virtues and skills. The paper thus contributes to a more nuanced picture of normative achievements across different domains of human agency, highlighting largely overlooked structural dissimilarities among them. (shrink)

Horst Ruthrof revisits Husserl's phenomenology of language and highlights his late writings as essential to understanding the full range of his ideas. Focusing on the idea of language as imaginable as well as the role of a speech community in constituting it, Ruthrof provides a powerful re-assessment of his methodological phenomenology. From the Logical Investigations to untranslated portions of his Nachlass, Ruthrof charts all the developments and amendments in his theorizations. Instead of emphasising the definition and meaning of words, (...) Husserl's later writings point to the variation produced by a community of speakers in the act of communicating. Essential to this linguistic meaning is the intersubjective character that Ruthrof argues is so emblematic of Husserl's position. Using his concepts of intimation, introjection, reciprocity, and voice further outlines a theory that is intersubjective and communal. Bringing his study up to the present day, Ruthrof discusses metal time travel, the evolution of language, and protosyntax in the context of Husserl's late writings, progressing a comprehensive new phenomenological ontology of language with wide-ranging implications for philosophy, linguistics, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Most contemporary philosophers of mind claim to be in search of a 'naturalistic' theory. However, when we look more closely, we find that there are a number of different and even conflicting ideas of what would count as a 'naturalization' of the mind. This article attempts to show what various naturalistic philosophies of mind have in common, and also how they differ from one another. Additionally, it explores the differences between naturalistic philosophies of mind and naturalisms found in ethics, epistemology, (...) and philosophy of science. Section 1 introduces a distinction between two types of project that have been styled 'naturalistic', which I call philosophical naturalism and empirical naturalism . Sections 2 to 6 canvass different strands of philosophical naturalism concerning the mind, followed by a much briefer discussion of attempts to provide empirical naturalizations of the mind in Section 7 . Section 8 concludes the essay with a consideration of the relations between philosophical and empirical naturalism in philosophy of mind, arguing that at least some types of philosophical naturalism are incompatible with empirical naturalism. (shrink)

Chalmers and others have argued that physicalist microexplanation is incapable of solving the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness. This article examines whether evolutionary accounts of the mind, such as those developed by Millikan, Dretske and Flanagan, can add anything to make up for the possible short falls of more reductionist accounts. I argue that they cannot, because evolutionary accounts explain by appeal to a selectional history that only comes into the picture if consciousness can first arise due to spontaneous mutation in (...) some individual organism, and explaining this emergence of consciousness from DNA and embryology calls for precisely the kind of structurally-based supervenience account that Chalmers et al. have objected to. Not only does an evolutionary account not succeed where a reductionist account fails; the evolutionary account presupposes the possibility of a reductionist account. (shrink)

Shaping the Future maps out the ascetic practices of a Neitzschean way of life. Hutter argues that Nietzsche's doctrines are attempts and "temptations" that aim to provoke his free-spirited readers into changing themselves by putting philosophy into practice in their lives.

An enkratic agent is someone who intends to do A because she believes she should do A. Being enkratic is usually understood as something rationality requires of you. However, we must distinguish between different conceptions of enkratic rationality. According to a fairly common view, enkratic rationality is solely a normative requirement on agency: it tells us how agents should think and act. However, I shall argue that this normativist conception of enkratic rationality faces serious difficulties: it makes it a mystery (...) how an agent's thinking and acting can be guided by the enkratic requirement, which, as I shall further argue, is something that an adequate conception of enkratic rationality must be able to explain. This, I suggest, motivates exploring a different account of enkratic rationality. On this view, enkratic rationality is primarily a constitutive requirement on agency: it is a standard internal to agency, i.e., a standard that partly spells out what it is to exercise one's agential powers well. (shrink)

Seit dem byzantinischen Bilderstreit und dem Bildersturm der Reformation ist nicht mehr in solcher Intensität über Bilder nachgedacht worden wie in den letzten Jahrzehnten. Neben der Archäologie und der Kunstgeschichte haben sich zahlreiche weitere Fächer an Fragestellungen rund um das Bild geradezu festgebissen. Angesichts dessen geht einer der bedeutendsten Kunsthistoriker der Gegenwart der Frage nach, warum Begriff und Geltung sowie Macht und Ohnmacht von Bildern so hartnäckig verfolgte Themen unserer Tage geworden sind.

Das Buch steht im Zusammenhang des Versuches, die zentrale Rolle der Bilder für die Ausbildung der modernen Philosophie am Beispiel bedeutender Gestalten des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts zu rekonstruieren. Das Projekt begann mit der Erschließung der Staatstheorie aus der Bildpolitik des "Leviathan" von Thomas Hobbes. Mit Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz' Ideen, ein Theater der Natur und Kunst sowie einen Atlas der Einbildungskraft zu errichten, folgt nun die Rekonstruktion eines Projektes, das für das Verständnis seiner Philosophie von tiefgreifender Bedeutung sein könnte. Obwohl Leibniz diese (...) Idee so hartnäckig und ausdauernd wie kaum ein anderes Unternehmen betrieben hat, ist sie in der Forschung bislang so gut wie unbekannt geblieben. Für diesen Umstand war die zersplitterte und unvollständige Überlieferung von Leibniz' Schriften ebenso verantwortlich wie ein mächtiger Strang der Philosophiegeschichte, der die Welt des Haptischen und Visuellen immer dann favorisiert, wenn sie transzendiert wird. Die jüngsten Bände der Akademie-Ausgabe bieten jedoch erstmals die Möglichkeit, Leibniz' Wertschätzung der tastenden und zeichnenden Hand und des neugierigen und geschulten Auges im Zusammenhang zu verfolgen. Seine schier unbegreiflich vielfältigen Denkbewegungen und Aktivitäten erhalten mit dem Projekt des Theaters der Natur und Kunst daher nicht nur eine Ergänzung, sondern einen neuen Rahmen. Leibniz' Faible für das Theatrum Naturae et Artis könnte das Gesamtbild seiner Philosophie verwandeln, weil es die Kluft zwischen Kalkül und Anschauung wie auch zwischen der "Fensterlosigkeit" der Monade und der körperlichen Form ihrer Perzeptionsweisen zugleich vertieft und überbrückt. (shrink)

Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915) war Ordinarius der Philosophie im Deutschen Kaiserreich, Haupt der südwestdeutschen Schule des Neukantianismus und einflussreicher Kathederfürst. Dem Neukantianismus wird Gegnerschaft zur Psychologie nachgesagt, und Windelband gilt in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte als jemand, der eine ausgeprägte Abneigung gegen die Psychologie hegte und diese polemisch von sich gab. Die hier erstmalig untersuchte Wirklichkeit sah anders aus. Er setzte sich frühzeitig für die Selbständigkeit der Psychologie ein, arbeitete an einem Buch zur Psychologie und hielt mehr als zwanzig Hauptvorlesungen zur Psychologie. Institutionelle (...) Hintergründe des problematischen Verhältnisses zwischen Philosophie und Psychologie werden untersucht und gezeigt, weshalb Windelband kein Einzelfall in der Geschichte des Faches Philosophie war. (shrink)

Fifty years ago Hartman studied the barrier transmission time of wave packets (J Appl Phys 33:3427–3433, 1962). He was inspired by the tunneling experiments across thin insulating layers at that time. For opaque barriers he calculated faster than light propagation and a transmission time independent of barrier length, which is called the Hartman effect. A faster than light (FTL or superluminal) wave packet velocity was deduced in analog tunneling experiments with microwaves and with infrared light thirty years later. Recently, the (...) conjectured zero time of electron tunneling was claimed to have been observed in ionizing helium inside the barrier. The calculated and measured short tunneling time arises at the barrier front. This tunneling time was found to be universal for elastic fields as well as for electromagnetic fields. Remarkable is that the delay time is the same for the reflected and the transmitted waves in the case of symmetric barriers. Several theoretical physicists predicted this strange nature of the tunneling process. However, even with this background many members of the physics community do not accept a FTL signal velocity interpretation of the experimental tunneling results. Instead a luminal front velocity was calculated to explain the FTL experimental results frequently. However, Brillouin stated in his book on wave propagation and group velocity that the front velocity is given by the group velocity of wave packets in the case of physical signals, which have only finite frequency bandwidths. Some studies assumed barriers to be cavities and the observed tunneling time does represent the cavity lifetime. We are going to discus these continuing misleading interpretations, which are found in journals and in textbooks till today. (shrink)

This study argues that in Romans 5–8, the present plight of “death” refers to a state of moral bondage in which a person’s will is dominated by passions. It is death of this sort, rather than human mortality or a “cosmic power,” that entered the world through Adam.

The article combines a criticism of public understanding of science with the sociology of expectations to examine how particular expectations toward scientific progress have performative effects for the construction of publics as citizens of science. By analyzing a particular controversy about gene therapy in Denmark, the article demonstrates how different sets of expectations can be used to discriminate among three different assemblages: the assemblage of consumption, the assemblage of comportment, and the assemblage of heroic action. Each of these assemblages makes (...) medical science, scientific citizenship, politics, patients, doctors, and expectations toward the future emerge in particular ways. By their radically different expectations toward science and their different constructions of what it means to be a scientific citizen, the assemblages construct the objectives of the governance of science in three very different ways. (shrink)

Digital data is an increasing and continual presence across the sites, activities and relationships of everyday life. In this article we explore what data presence means for the ways that the everyday is organised, sensed, and anticipated. While digital data studies have demonstrated how data is deeply entangled with the way in which everyday life is lived out and valued, at the same time our relationships with data are riddled with anxieties or small niggles or tricky trade-offs and their use (...) is often chaotic and muddled, part of the inevitable uncertainty about what will happen next. If the presence of data is part of the environments we inhabit, this raises the question of how and why data is valuable to us and what forms of hope and trust enable this value to further develop. (shrink)

Die philosophische Promotion Horst-Eberhard Richters stellt eine wichtige Auseinandersetzung mit der Phänomenologie des Schmerzes dar. Geprägt von seinem subjektiven Schmerzerleben und seinen Leiderfahrungen als Soldat im Zweiten Weltkrieg in Russland formuliert Richter bereits 1948 – im Alter von 25 Jahren – die Grundgedanken seines wirkmächtigen philosophischen Hauptwerks Der Gotteskomplex (1979). In seinem »Antrag auf Zulassung zur Promotion« im Fach Philosophie schrieb Richter, die »philosophische Arbeit« stelle für ihn »eine zentrale Lebensfrage« dar. Obwohl er seine »Zukunft als Mediziner« sehe, betrachte (...) er die Philosophie »als Basis für die weitere Entfaltung meiner philosophischen Tätigkeit«. Ihm schwebte eine Verbindung von Medizin und Philosophie vor, die er in der Psychosomatischen Medizin, der Psychoanalyse und auch in seinen sozialphilosophischen Schriften verwirklichte. (shrink)