Despite the belief that metaphors are thought to be powerful persuasive devices, little empirical evidence exists to support this claim. A first step in examining the persuasive impact of metaphors is to measure recall and production variables concerning the persuasive message. This study examined recollections regarding the Iran-Contra hearings among honors introductory psychology students. Recall of the hearings appeared heavily influenced by externally imposed (i.e., media, politicians) metaphors. Moreover, metaphors used typically expressed an attitude about the Iran-Contra affair, particularly about (...) Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North's involvement. (shrink)

There is a revival of notions of leader democracy and plebiscitary leader democracy both at the level of politics and in academic debate. This paper focuses largely on the latter, with occasional reference to real-world political developments. The paper sketches changes in the nature of contemporary governance; argues that Weber’s and Schumpeter’s account of leader democracy LD) as a means of addressing the crisis of representation has marked affinities with current debates; discusses the possible implications of the re-emergence of a (...) political language of LD. The paper takes a sceptical view, arguing that an appeal to leadership is a symptom of, and contributor towards, the problems it purports to address. Two contemporary defences of LD are discussed: that of the political scientist András Körösényi and that of the political theorist Jeffery Green. (shrink)

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

This paper presents an account of the manner in which a proposition’s immediate structural features are related to its core truth-conditional features. The leading idea is that for a proposition to have a certain immediate structure is just for certain entities to play certain roles in the correct theory of the brute facts regarding that proposition’s truth conditions. The paper explains how this account addresses certain worries and questions recently raised by Jeffery King and Scott Soames.

An original interpretation of Merleau-Ponty on subjectivity, drawing from and challenging both the continental and analytic traditions.

Consider the claims that representations of physical laws are intersubjective, and that they ultimately provide the foundation for all other intersubjective knowledge. Those claims, as well as the deeper philosophical commitments that justify them, constitute rare points of agreement between the Marburg School neo-Kantians Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer and their positivist rival, Ernst Mach. This is surprising, since Natorp and Cassirer are both often at pains to distinguish their theories of natural scientific knowledge from positivist views like Mach’s, and (...) often from Mach’s views in particular. Thus the very fact of this agreement between the Marburg School neo-Kantians and their positivist stalking horse points to a deep current of ideas that runs beneath the whole of the post-Kantian intellectual context they shared. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 1, Page 148-168, March 2022.

_An original interpretation of Merleau-Ponty on subjectivity, drawing from and challenging both the continental and analytic traditions._.

In Bertrand Russell's 1903 Principles of Mathematics, he offers an apparently devastating criticism of the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen's Principle of the Infinitesimal Method and its History (PIM). Russell's criticism is motivated by his concern that Cohen's account of the foundations of calculus saddles mathematics with the paradoxes of the infinitesimal and continuum, and thus threatens the very idea of mathematical truth. This paper defends Cohen against that objection of Russell's, and argues that properly understood, Cohen's views of limits and infinitesimals (...) do not entail the paradoxes of the infinitesimal and continuum. Essential to that defense is an interpretation, developed in the paper, of Cohen's positions in the PIM as deeply rationalist. The interest in developing this interpretation is not just that it reveals how Cohen's views in the PIM avoid the paradoxes of the infinitesimal and continuum. It also reveals some of what is at stake, both historically and philosophically, in Russell's criticism of Cohen. (shrink)

Bhimrao Ambedkar is well-known as the architect of the Indian constitution, the document that created the world's largest democracy when it came into effect in 1950. Ambedkar is also famous, or infamous according to some religious partisans, in the Indian political context for his unflagging and often bombastic advocacy on behalf of India's so-called "untouchables." Being a Mahar, an untouchable caste in the Indian state of Maharashtra, Ambedkar knew of the struggles and the religiously underwritten violence that was foisted upon (...) these swaths of Indian society. His struggles in and against the caste system, and the Hindu religious-philosophical system that frequently enabled it, are well documented by... (shrink)

The two volumes of Philosophical Essays bring together the most important essays written by one of the world's foremost philosophers of language. Scott Soames has selected thirty-one essays spanning nearly three decades of thinking about linguistic meaning and the philosophical significance of language. A judicious collection of old and new, these volumes include sixteen essays published in the 1980s and 1990s, nine published since 2000, and six new essays. The essays in Volume 1 investigate what linguistic meaning is; how (...) the meaning of a sentence is related to the use we make of it; what we should expect from empirical theories of the meaning of the languages we speak; and how a sound theoretical grasp of the intricate relationship between meaning and use can improve the interpretation of legal texts. The essays in Volume 2 illustrate the significance of linguistic concerns for a broad range of philosophical topics--including the relationship between language and thought; the objects of belief, assertion, and other propositional attitudes; the distinction between metaphysical and epistemic possibility; the nature of necessity, actuality, and possible worlds; the necessary a posteriori and the contingent a priori; truth, vagueness, and partial definition; and skepticism about meaning and mind. The two volumes of Philosophical Essays are essential for anyone working on the philosophy of language. (shrink)

I talked to my chair for hours, without it responding—and then I heard its voice, its desire, its rhetoric: sit in me.A new specter of materialist thought, conveniently cloaked in "realism," now haunts philosophy and rhetoric—object-oriented ontology and object-oriented rhetoric.1 Ostensibly, OOO arrives as the logical next step for theories of anti-, extra-, and post-humanism that have, over the past several decades, sought to destabilize the privileged position of human exceptionalism....

The physiologist Johannes Müller’s doctrine of specific nerve energies had a decisive influence on neo-Kantian conceptions of the objectivity of knowledge in the 1850s - 1870s. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Müller amassed a body of experimental evidence to support his doctrine, according to which the character of our sensations is determined by the structures of our own sensory nerves, and not by the external objects that cause the sensations. Neo-Kantians such as Hermann von Helmholtz, F.A. Lange, (...) and Otto Liebmann took Müller’s doctrine to have far-reaching consequences for their epistemologies. Over the course of the 1850s - 1870s, these three neo-Kantians, each in his own way, argued that reflection on Müller’s doctrine ruled out a certain conception of the objectivity of knowledge. It ruled out the view that knowledge is objective in virtue of affording us information about objects in a mind-independent external world. -/- This paper traces how Helmholtz, Lange, and Liebmann developed their arguments for this view, and how each developed his own alternative conception of objectivity, according to which objectivity has nothing to do with a mind-independent world. Finally, the paper concludes by considering why these arguments modelled on Müller’s doctrine would have been so powerful against rival post-Hegelian conceptions of objectivity, especially those of scientific materialists like Ludwig Büchner. (shrink)

Aristotle's treatment of trade in the Politics book one is usually regarded as especially hostile, and this is put down to snobbery and political prejudice on his part. The Greeks often regarded trade as a degrading thing for a free man to engage in, and it would be surprising if Aristotle's view of trade were entirely unconnected with this Greek sensibility. But there should be something more definite than a loose general affinity if a charge of prejudice is to be (...) taken seriously. A balance of hostile judgements over argued cases to back them up would be some sort of evidence for prejudice, and prima facie evidence against would be anything like a theory from which the hostile judgements followed as conclusions. Theories can be concocted to give the required conclusions, of course, and then we must try to decide how serious the theory is. It comes to this: is there so little in the reasons Aristotle gives for his condemnation of trade that they may be convincingly explained away and belittled as no more than expressions of attitudes? (shrink)

This paper situates the moral domain of practice within the context of a particular description of nursing practice – one that sees human interaction at the heart of that practice. Such a description fits not only with professional rhetoric but also with literature from patients and recent empirical work exploring the nature of nursing practice.Martha Levine in her 1977 description of ethics, within the context of nursing practice, indicated that what was important from an ethical perspective was how we interact (...) with each other, with patients and colleagues, on a daily basis. What enables such interaction to display moral sensitivity, insight into patient need, and a focus on the good for the patient? Of relevance when answering this question is the empirical evidence indicating that professional socialization, as a nurse or a doctor, may dull the individual’s moral sense. If this is the case, cognizance needs to be taken of such evidence when identifying theoretical approaches from mainstream ethics that may provide insight and value for nurse education. It is suggested that such insight and value can be gained from a consideration of the work of Aristotle, Murdoch, and Vetlesen. (shrink)

In the middle of the nineteenth century, advances in experimental psychology and the physiology of the sense organs inspired so-called "Back to Kant" Neo-Kantians to articulate robustly psychologistic visions of Kantian epistemology. But their accounts of the thing in itself were fraught with deep tension: they wanted to conceive of things in themselves as the causes of our sensations, while their own accounts of causal inference ruled that claim out. This paper diagnoses the source of that problem in views of (...) one Neo-Kantian, F. A. Lange, and argues that it is solved only by Ernst Mach. No less than Lange and other Neo-Kantians, Mach was inspired to develop a psychologistic account of the foundations of knowledge, but his account also includes a coherent denial of things in themselves' existence. Finally, this paper uses this account of Lange and Mach on things in themselves to illuminate Mach's relation to a certain strain of the Neo-Kantian philosophy of his own time: his views constitute a more fully coherent version of the psychologistic theory of knowledge Back to Kant figures tried to articulate. (shrink)

This study seeks to understand and critique the growing online trend of “revenge porn,” or the intentional embarrassment of identifiable individuals through the posting of nude images online. This posting of intimate pictures, often done out of motives of revenge for perceived relational scorn, is enhanced by the varying levels of online anonymity. Using the theoretical framework of John Dewey's pragmatism, this study both analyzes this understudied but complex new problem precipitated by the conditions of the online self and establishes (...) the groundwork for the use of pragmatist ethics in other areas of communication ethics. (shrink)

Consider two competing interpretations of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: the epistemic and cognitive interpretations. The epistemic interpretation presents the first Critique as a work of epistemology, but what is more, it sees Kant as an early proponent of anti-psychologism—the view that descriptions of how the mind works are irrelevant for epistemology.2 Even if Kant does not always manage to purge certain psychological-sounding idioms from his writing, the epistemic interpretation has it, he is perfectly clear that he means his evaluation (...) of knowledge to be carried out independently of psychology.3 In contrast, the cognitive interpretation presents the first Critique as a description of the operation of human .. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIncreasing attention is being directed at the impact of fake news on democratic societies across the globe. Scholars in a range of fields are attempting to determine who is behind fake news...

ABSTRACT This article explores what the contours of a pragmatist theory of rhetoric would be like in its democratic instantiation. The threat of partisan thought and dogmatism in argument is examined as a threat to the sort of democratic community pragmatists such as John Dewey desired to create. Partisans fail to realize not only their own limitations in pursuing the true and the good but also the fact that solving problems through overly partisan forms of reasoning or argument only creates (...) future obstacles to community life. This provides an extended reading of what Dewey meant by free communication: communication not only free from legal constraints and censorship but also free from the binding habits of thought and interaction that can be identified as “partisan perfect reasoning.”. (shrink)

This paper considers George A. Reisch’s account of the role of Cold War political forces in shaping the apolitical stance that came to dominate philosophy of science in the late 1940s and 1950s. It argues that at least as early as the 1930s, Logical Empiricists such as Rudolf Carnap already held that philosophy of science could not properly have political aims, and further suggests that political forces alone cannot explain this view’s rise to dominance during the Cold War, since political (...) forces cannot explain why a philosophy of science with liberal democratic, anti-communist aims did not flourish. The paper then argues that if professionalization is understood in the right way, it might point toward an explanation of the apolitical stance of Cold War philosophy of science. (shrink)

The thought of William James, due to its pragmatically-inclined and contextually-engaged character, would seem to hold great resources for normative subfields of philosophy such as business ethics. Yet not much research has been done on what James could tell us about substantive topics in business ethics, or in terms of the methodology of ethics research. I start such an exploration by examining the concept of the ideal in James's work and how it can be a conscious and vivid way of (...) infusing activity with a larger significance, solving the problems James notes about current orientations toward activity that are driven by mere habit. I tie this analysis into two important issues in business ethics: the debate over what "integrity" is and the concern over the differing methods used in business ethics research. (shrink)

A Platonic explanation of non-modal and modal truths is explained and defended using non-spatiotemporal entities as their truthmakers. It is argued, further, that this theory is parsimonious, naturalistic, and ontologically serious. These features should commend the view to a wide swath of philosophers.

This paper examines the anti-psychologism of Paul Natorp, a Marburg School Neo-Kantian. It identifies both Natorp’s principle argument against psychologism and the views underlying the argument that give it its force. Natorp’s argument depends for its success on his view that certain scientific laws constitute the intersubjective content of knowledge. That view in turn depends on Natorp’s conception of subjectivity, so it is only against the background of his conception of subjectivity that his reasons for rejecting psychologism make sense. This (...) interpretation of Natorp suggests that attention paid to late nineteenth century theories of subjectivity and philosophy of psychology could improve our understanding of the emergence of anti-psychologism in that period.Keywords: Paul Natorp; Marburg School; Neo-Kantianism; Psychologism; Subjectivity. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to argue for psychological egoism, i.e., the view that the ultimate motivation for all human action is the agent’s self-interest. Two principal opponents to psychological egoism are considered. These two views are shown to make human action inexplicable. Since the reason for putting forward these views is to explain human action, these views fail. If psychological egoism is the best explanation of human action, then humans will not differ as regards their motivations for their (...) actions. However, humans will differ as regards their knowledge of what is in fact in their self-interest. (shrink)

Hermann Cohen (b. 1842, d. 1919), more than any other single figure, is responsible for founding the orthodox neo-Kantianism that dominated academic philosophy in Germany from the 1870s until the end of the First World War. Earlier German philosophers finding inspiration in Kant tended either towards speculative, metaphysical idealism, or sought to address philosophical questions with the resources of the empirical sciences, especially psychology. In contrast, Cohen’s seminal interpretation of Kant offered a vision of philosophy that decisively maintained its independence (...) from empirical psychology, without at the same time simply lapsing back into uncritical metaphysics. Cohen brought these attitudes to bear on a wide range of topics, writing systematically about epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, law, political theory, and aesthetics. His anti-psychologism became a defining commitment not only of the Marburg School of neo-Kantianism, founded by Cohen himself, but of orthodox neo-Kantianism more generally. Indeed, that commitment ultimately defined the philosophical context from which, in the early twentieth century, both phenomenology and logical positivism emerged. No less significant than his influence on academic philosophy, Cohen was his generation’s preeminent German-Jewish public intellectual and religious philosopher. His philosophical ethics and political theory provided the foundation for a non-Marxist, Kantian democratic socialism that informed his more popular and topical writings. He argued publicly for universal suffrage and for the rights of workers to organize democratically-constituted collectives. He also saw deep points of connection between ethics and religion, and developed a view of Judaism as a fundamentally ethical system of belief and practice. He argued that monotheism was the historical source of the idea of universal ethical laws, and thus that Judaism offered the world its first model of a universalist morality. This view of Judaism’s ethical significance ultimately informed Cohen’s public defense of the Jews’ place in Germany not only against anti-Semitic attacks, but also against the arguments of early twentieth-century Zionists. However, Cohen’s influence on Jewish thought extends far beyond debates within Imperial Germany: his late religious writings inspired a broad renewal in twentieth-century Jewish ethics and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

In the second edition of Hermann Cohen’s Kant’s Theory of Experience, he abandons the interpretation of Kant’s Anticipations of Perception that he gave in the first edition, in favourof a radically different one. On his early interpretation, the Anticipations is largely of psychological interest for its influence on, and continuing significance for, physiological psychology and psychophysics. But on his mature interpretation, it defends the superiority of a dynamic conception of nature over a mechanical conception. Further, on his early interpretation, Cohen (...) thought the Anticipations was not a central part of Kant’s critical theory of knowledge. But on his mature interpretation, he thinks it is absolutely central to that project. What is more, Cohen seems to have revised his interpretation in a relatively short period of time, in 1880-1. This paper argues that Cohen’s change in views about Kant’s Anticipations is explained by his reception of Leibniz in the very early 1880s, and specifically Cohen’s reception of Leibniz’s arguments against Descartes’ view that extension is the essence of matter. (shrink)

In Technology and the Lifeworld, Don Ihde advances what he calls “formalisms” for the ways in which we experience or relate to technology. In this article, I seek to clarify the grammar of Ihde’s formalisms. Ihde’s formalisms have not been the focus of scrutiny. Rather, they have largely been received in the literature as merely aphoristic or epigrammatical devices serving to clarify what can be explained in prose. My hypothesis is that Ihde’s formalisms do not merely serve an epigrammatical function (...) but rather admit of a generative grammar that extends his postphenomenological framework. I propose a notation that adheres to six rules of syntax that can be derived from Ihde’s framework. I show that the proposed notation makes explicit the inter-relations among hidden dimensions of human–technology relations. Relying on my notation, I also suggest that the so-called cyborg turn is actually a turn away from the unharnessed syntax of Ihde’s formalisms. (shrink)

In the present work, I constructively engage the thought of the American pragmatist John Dewey and the Zen Buddhist Dōmgen on moral cultivation. I argue that Dewey presents a useful notion of moral development and growth with a focus on attentiveness to one's situation, but I also note that he leaves out extended analysis of how one is to foster such an orientation. Turning to the writings of Dōmgen, I argue that Deweyan moral theory can be supplemented by the methods (...) that Zen Buddhism prescribes to bring attentiveness back to one's experience of activity. This analysis is placed in the context of my overall project of orientational meliorism, or the alteration of one's orientation toward self, world, and activity with the goal of improving the quality of one's future experience. (shrink)

Abstract:This article builds on Bellucci’s and Murphey’s accounts of Peirce’s early logic of signs by making a pair of contributions to the literature on Peirce’s reduction of illation to the sign relation. First, I reinvesti-gate the connection between the structure of inference and the representative relation, relying here on Peirce’s early accounts of sign inference from 1865 and 1866. Second, with the development of Peirce’s theory of inquiry in mind, I elucidate the implications of Peirce’s early view of sign inference. (...) These contributions deepen our understanding of Fisch’s claim that the Illustrations series “is thought out within the framework of the doctrine of signs.”. (shrink)

There are few contemporary thinkers in the tradition of American pragmatism as prolific or as creative as Richard Shusterman. His thought and work range from analytic aesthetics to political philosophy, from ethics to the importance of bodily habits in modern society. The volume edited by Dorota Koczanowicz and Wojciech Malecki highlights the remarkable international reception of Shusterman’s ideas. The majority of the contributors to this volume are Polish academics, a fact that stems from its origin in a 2008 conference in (...) Poland on Shusterman’s work. A few additional essays were solicited from scholars in the United States and other parts of Europe to round out the diversity of this collection’s offerings. .. (shrink)

Scott Aikin, Tempest Henning Download PDF.

The sharpest corner of the cutting edge of recent epistemology is to be found in Richard Pettigrew’s Accuracy and the Laws of Credence. In this fine book Pettigrew argues that a certain kind of accuracy-based value monism entails that rational credence manifests a host of features emphasized by anti-externalists in epistemology. Specifically, he demonstrates how a particular version of accuracy-based value monism—to be discussed at length below—when placed with some not implausible views about how epistemic value and rationality relate to (...) one another, ensures that rational credence manifests many of the structural properties emphasized by those who give evidence pride of place in the theory of rationality. A major goal of Pettigrew’s book, then, is to make clear how accuracy-based value monism fits together with the phenomena used by those who argue against accuracy-based externalism.2 2. (shrink)

Do contemporary big-budget blockbuster films like Gravity move something in us that is fundamentally the same as what avant-garde and experimental films have done for more than a century? In a powerful challenge to mainstream film theory, Cinema's Bodily Illusions demonstrates that this is the case. Scott C. Richmond bridges genres and periods by focusing, most palpably, on cinema's power to evoke illusions: feeling like you're flying through space, experiencing 3D without glasses, or even hallucinating. He argues that cinema (...) is, first and foremost, a technology to modulate perception. He presents a theory of cinema as a proprioceptive technology: cinema becomes art by modulating viewers' embodied sense of space. It works primarily not at the level of the intellect but at the level of the body. Richmond develops his theory through examples of direct perceptual illusion in cinema: hallucinatory flicker phenomena in Tony Conrad's The Flicker, eerie depth effects in Marcel Duchamp's Anémic Cinéma, the illusion of bodily movement through onscreen space in Stanley Kubrick's 2001, Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, and Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity. In doing so he combines insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and James J. Gibson's ecological approach to perception. The result is his distinctive ecological phenomenology, which allows us to refocus on the cinema's perceptual, rather than representational, power. Arguing against modernist habits of mind in film theory and aesthetics, and the attendant proclamations of cinema's death or irrelevance, Richmond demonstrates that cinema's proprioceptive aesthetics make it an urgent site of contemporary inquiry. (shrink)

Justice will once take the place which the Magians are keeping now, for it is they who lord it over the world.