I argue that the most promising approach to understanding J.J. Gibson's "affordances" takes affordances themselves as ontological primitives, instead of treating them as dispositional properties of more primitive things, events, surfaces, or substances. These latter are best treated as coalescences of affordances present in the environment (or "coalescences of use-potential," as in Sanders (1994) and Hilditch (1995)). On this view, even the ecological approach's stress on the complementary organism/environment pair is seen as expressing a particular affordance relation between the world (...) and the analyst. That the world is parsed in any way among events and objects, perceivers and worlds, etc., reflects equally features of certain real or possible perspectives on the world and features of the world itself. In section 1, I begin by contending that, contrary to the apparent expectations of some in the field, the bare existence of affordances is surely quite uncontroversial. In section 2, I argue that the most reasonable approach to foundational ontology is a relativistic one. In section 3, I address the claim that affordances must be ontologically complemented by effectivities for the sake of completeness, and I shall argue against that claim on grounds that I take to reflect some of Gibson's most important insights. This work will help to clarify the way affordances are to be used in the fourth and final section, where I argue that ontological work, even within special sciences, should not be merely "regional," and that the most attractive general approach to ontological questions is one that is based on affordances, rather than upon things, events, surfaces, and the like. (shrink)

There is a great deal that might be said about justice in property claims. The strategy that I shall employ focuses attention upon the initial acquisition of property -- the most sensitive and most interesting area of property theory. Every theory that discusses property claims favorably assumes that there is some justification for transforming previously unowned resources into property. It is often this assumption which has seemed, to one extent or another, to be vulnerable to attack by critics of particular (...) justifications of property. Nevertheless, this assumption is frequently left undefended by property theorists, and where it is defended, the defense is often remarkably weak. That some initial claim to property be defensible is required by any theory which holds that certain present distributions may be justified, that certain transfers of property are justified, or that restitution ought to be made for previous injustice in transfer or acquisition. The initial acquisition of property, and its justification, is crucial to the remainder of property theory. (shrink)

I try in this essay to accomplish two things. First I offer some first thoughts toward a clarification of the ethical foundations of private property rights that avoids pitfalls common to more strictly Lockean theories, and is thus better prepared to address arguments posed by critics of standard private property arrangements. Second, I'll address one critical argument that has become pretty common over the years. While versions of the argument can be traced back at least to Pierre Joseph Proudhon, I'll (...) focus on a formulation given it by Jeremy Waldron. The basic idea is that the only sound arguments for private property rights lead to the conclusion that society has an obligation to insure that every citizen possess private property. In Waldron's formulation, what is justifiable is a general, rather than a special, right to private property. I shall try to suggest that this conclusion is unwarranted. (shrink)

This volume explores the theological thought of John Mair, a significant 16th-century Parisian scholar. It includes articles exploring his positions on humanism and scholasticism, faith and theology, the Trinity and Incarnation, ethics and casuistry, and justification and sacraments.

This collection addresses the central issue of political philosophy or, in a couple of cases, issues very close to the heart of that question: Is government justified? This ancient question has never been more alive than at the present time, in the midst of continuing political and social upheaval in virtually every part of the world. Only two of the pieces collected here have been published previously. All the other contributions were, at the time of the inception of the volume, (...) fresh from the pens, or still to emerge from the pens, of their authors. (shrink)

The article covers electronic informed consent from different dimensions so that practitioners might understand the history, regulation, and current status of eIC. It covers the transition of informed consent to electronic screens and the implications of that transition in terms of design, costs, and data analysis. The article explores the limits of regulation mandating eIC for mobile application research, and addresses some of the broader social context around eIC.

Against David Schenck's interpretation, I argue that it is not absolutely clear that Merleau-Ponty ever meant to replace what Schenck refers to as the "unity of meanings" interpretation of "structure" with a "material meanings" interpretation. A particular problem-setting -- for example, an attempt to understand the "truth in naturalism" or the "truth in dualism" -- may very well require a particular mode of expression. I argue that the mode of expression chosen by Merleau-Ponty for these purposes, while unfortunate in some (...) of its apparent implications, need not be interpreted as recommitting him to the doctrine he spent his life working to renounce. I have argued that this would have been clearer had he been able to avail himself of James J. Gibson's notion of affordances, which capture perfectly what he was reaching for. (shrink)

Hrushovski originated the study of “flat” stable structures in constructing a new strongly minimal set and a stable 0-categorical pseudoplane. We exhibit a set of axioms which for collections of finite structure with dimension function δ give rise to stable generic models. In addition to the Hrushovski examples, this formalization includes Baldwin's almost strongly minimal non-Desarguesian projective plane and several others. We develop the new case where finite sets may have infinite closures with respect to the dimension function δ. In (...) particular, the generic structure need not be ω-saturated and so the argument for stability is significantly more complicated. We further show that these structures are “flat” and do not interpret a group. (shrink)

This is a more detailed version of my "On 'Cuteness'", which appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics in April 1992. For John Morreall, cuteness is an abstract general attribute of infants that causes adults to want to care for them (or which is the reason, or at least important reason, for such solicitousness). I shall try to show, in what follows, that this is, if not an altogether fallacious way of explaining the matter, at least an extremely misleading (...) one. As it stands, in particular, it is too easy to infer from Morreall's line of reasoning 1) that infants in general might conceivably never have developed cuteness, and 2) that infants, because of this deficiency, would then not be cared for as adequately by their parents. An equally wrong further implication, which further helps to express my difficulty with Morreall's formulation of the matter, would be that if baby spiders (for example) had happened to have the abstract general characteristic called 'cuteness', while human children did not have it, then human adults would have been more inclined to care for baby spiders than for baby humans. It is to avoid such oddities as these that, it seems to me, a further consideration of the problem is warranted. (shrink)

Interest in "embodiment", and over how one may best express the implications of embodiment, is no parochial question, of interest only to a small number of effete philosophers. It confronts perceptual psychologists, developmental psychologists, and psychotherapists, of course. It may not be surprising, either, that it has become an important issue to some students of history and sociology, and to linguists, literary theorists and aestheticians. But that's not all. As physicists -- working within the very bastion of "objective" analysis -- (...) have tried to find expression for what seems to be going on in the domain of sub-atomic nature, they have begun to suggest that physical description itself is inevitably situated. And within the study of artificial intelligence, support is growing for the contention that intelligence cannot be understood entirely formalistically. Intelligence must at least be embodied -- it must somehow display "engaged agency" -- if it is to be recognizable as intelligence. It is within this context that the contribution offered by this essay must be understood. I shall contend that a particular conception -- that of "affordances" -- can, when suitably qualified, offer a conceptual tool of quite exceptional value in the construction of a positive theory of embodied agency, and of its philosophical consequences. (shrink)

CHAPTER 1 Combinatorial Geometries and Infinitary Logics In this chapter we introduce two of the key concepts that are used throughout the text. ...

How do I live a good life, one that is deeply personal and sensitive to others? John T. Lysaker suggests that those who take this question seriously need to reexamine the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In philosophical reflections on topics such as genius, divinity, friendship, and reform, Lysaker explores "self-culture" or the attempt to remain true to one's deepest commitments. He argues that being true to ourselves requires recognition of our thoroughly dependent and relational nature. Lysaker guides readers (...) from simple self-absorption toward a more fulfilling and responsive engagement with the world. (shrink)

In The Libertarian Idea, Jan Narveson explains his interpretation of social contract theory this way: "The general idea of this theory is that the principles of morality are (or should be) those principles for directing everyone's conduct which it is reasonable for everyone to accept. They are the rules that everyone has good reason for wanting everyone to act on, and thus to internalize in himself or herself, and thus to reinforce in the case of everyone." It is plain, here, (...) that Narveson believes that social contract is to provide justification -- a foundation, in fact -- for 'the principles of morality'. The burden assumed in this essay is to examine how far Narveson has succeeded in making this foundational claim plausible. (shrink)

Benjamin Franklin's social and political thought was shaped by contacts with and knowledge of ancient aboriginal traditions. Indeed, a strong case can be made that key features of the social structure eventually outlined in the United States Constitution arose not from European sources, and not full-grown from the foreheads of European-American "founding fathers", but from aboriginal sources, communicated to the authors of the Constitution to a significant extent through Franklin. A brief sketch of the main argument to this effect is (...) offered in this essay. (shrink)

I examine the claim that the underlying importance given to freedom within a society's scheme of values varies with historical circumstance and social context (I shall sometimes call this the "relativist claim"). The point of the examination will be to attempt to determine the manner in which, and the extent to which, this claim really endangers the liberal argument, which seems to suggest that freedom is valuable everywhere and always. It will be seen that several apparent challenges may be dismissed, (...) since for one reason or another they do not really threaten traditional liberalism. When these apparent (but non-threatening) challenges are pared away from the relativist claim, it will be seen that the remaining threat is on the one hand weaker, and on the other hand more dubious, than might have been supposed at first. This rather formal work will then set the stage for a proffered definition of the sort of "freedom" that is at stake in this discussion, and for my own attempt to offer answers to the questions about the value of freedom that I raise. (shrink)

Major shifts in the field of model theory in the twentieth century have seen the development of new tools, methods, and motivations for mathematicians and philosophers. In this book, John T. Baldwin places the revolution in its historical context from the ancient Greeks to the last century, argues for local rather than global foundations for mathematics, and provides philosophical viewpoints on the importance of modern model theory for both understanding and undertaking mathematical practice. The volume also addresses the impact (...) of model theory on contemporary algebraic geometry, number theory, combinatorics, and differential equations. This comprehensive and detailed book will interest logicians and mathematicians as well as those working on the history and philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

We introduce the notion T does not omit obstructions. If a stable theory does not admit obstructions then it does not have the finite cover property (nfcp). For any theory T, form a new theory by adding a new unary function symbol and axioms asserting it is an automorphism. The main result of the paper asserts the following: If T is a stable theory, T does not admit obstructions if and only if has a model companion. The proof involves some (...) interesting new consequences of the nfcp. (shrink)

We provide a general framework for studying the expansion of strongly minimal sets by adding additional relations in the style of Hrushovski. We introduce a notion of separation of quantifiers which is a condition on the class of expansions of finitely generated models for the expanded theory to have a countable ω-saturated model. We apply these results to construct for each sufficiently fast growing finite-to-one function μ from 'primitive extensions' to the natural numbers a theory T μ of an expansion (...) of an algebraically closed field which has Morley rank 2. Finally, we show that if μ is not finite-to-one the theory may not be ω-stable. (shrink)

I begin this essay with a notion of "authority" that makes a sharp distinction between authority and power, and grant that such authority is not only legitimate, but perhaps even necessary in human affairs. I then trace the devaluation of this idea through varying degrees of institutionalization, culminating in its political cooptation. I argue, finally, that what goes by the name of political authority is the very antithesis of the legitimate and necessary element that we began with.

In response to Professor Rorty’s reaction to Professor Habermas’s paper in this symposium, I confess that I am still not sure I understand Rorty’s hostility to ideals such as the ideal of truth. Such ideals as the ideal of truth -- and ideals like those of reason and morality surely stand and fall with the ideal of truth -- seem plainly to have an enormous pragmatic value. They lure us out of our too-constrained, too-limited ethnocentric or idiosyncratic frames of reference. (...) It is always possible, of course, that such ideals may be abused; they have frequently been deployed, in particular, as clubs used to beat down views and modes of behavior that are threatening or otherwise disliked. But they need not be abused. Their proven and potential value is quite extraordinary. They offer us standards which pay explicit respect to the principle that the criteria we use for evaluating ideas and modes of behavior should be nonethnocentric and nonidiosyncratic. They offer us standards that we can appeal to in luring ourselves or others to step outside of our relatively narrow present points of view here and now and toward a broader perspective that can serve us better tomorrow and elsewhere. (shrink)

The law-governed world-picture -- A remarkable idea about the way the universe is cosmos and compulsion -- The laws as the cosmic order : the best-system approach -- The three ways : no-laws, non-governing-laws, governing-laws -- Work that laws do in science -- An important difference between the laws of nature and the cosmic order -- The picture in four theses -- The strategy of this book -- The meta-theoretic conception of laws -- The measurability approach to laws -- What (...) comes where -- In defense of some received views -- Some assumptions that will be in play -- The laws are propositions -- The laws are true -- The logically contingent consequences of the laws are laws themselves -- At least some laws are metaphysically contingent -- The meta-theoretic conception of laws -- Laws of nature, laws of science, laws of theories -- The first-order conception versus the meta-theoretic conception -- What is a law of nature? -- Some examples of meta-theoretic accounts -- The virtues of the meta-theoretic conception -- Weighing the virtues and shortcomings of the meta-theoretic conception -- An epistemological argument for the meta-theoretic conception of laws -- The discoverability thesis, the governing thesis, and the first-order conception -- The main argument -- The objection from bad company -- The objection from inference to the best explanation -- The objection from bayesianism -- The objection from contextualist epistemology -- The objection from the threat of inductive skepticism -- Laws, governing, and counterfactuals -- Where we are now -- What would things have to be like in order for the laws of nature to govern the universe? -- Lawhood, inevitability, counterfactuals -- What is it for a proposition to be inevitably true? -- What is it for a whole class of propositions to be inevitably true? -- What is it for lawhood to confer inevitability? -- NP and supporting counterfactuals -- The worry about context-variability -- A solution and a look ahead -- When would the laws have been different? -- Where we are now -- The God cases -- Other counterexamples to NP -- A moral-theoretic counterexample to NP -- Scientific contexts and non-scientific contexts -- Scientific God cases? -- Lewisian non-backtracking counterexamples -- Where things stand now -- How could science show that the laws govern? -- Why the law-governed world-picture must include the science-says-so thesis -- What is extra-scientific? -- How can the science-says-so thesis be true? -- NP as a consequence of the presuppositions in any scientific context -- Np as true in all possible scientific contexts -- But how could it be so? -- Attack of the actual-factualists -- Measurement and counterfactuals -- Where we are now -- Measurements, reliability, counterfactuals -- A general principle that captures the relation between measurement and counterfactuals -- What we can learn about lawhood from what we have learned about the counterfactual commitments of science -- A first-order account of laws or a meta-theoretic account of laws? -- What methods are presupposed to be legitimate measurement procedures? -- Why we must adopt a meta-theoretic account of laws -- What lawhood is -- Where we are now -- The measurability account of laws -- Brief review of the case for the mal -- A note about hedged laws -- How plausible is the mal? -- What if we don't care about the law-governed world-picture? -- Newton's God and Laplace's demon -- Beyond humean and non-humean -- Two views of laws -- Humean supervenience and the meta-theoretic conception -- Alleged counterexamples to humean supervenience -- Governing and non-trivial necessity -- How the mal lets us have it all -- Humeanism? non-humeanism? -- What is the significance of the idea of the law-governed universe? -- Where in the world are the laws of nature? -- Appendix: The mal in action : a few examples -- Of scientific theories and their laws -- Newton's theory as a paradigm example -- Classical special-force laws -- Geometrical optics and one of its laws -- Local deterministic field theories. (shrink)

Risk is not always nasty. Risk can be the cost of opportunity, of course; but sometimes risk is regarded not as a cost at all, but as a close attendant of pleasure. Many things that people invest considerable time and resources in would not be pursued at all if not for the attendant risk. Attempting to offer clarification of the role that risk plays in human affairs is thus itself a risky business. People largely want to avoid unnecessary risk except (...) when they deliberately seek it out. One might be tempted to say that people are funny that way. In what follows, I shall attempt to undermine the temptation to say this. I shall argue that there is nothing at all odd or funny about the fact that people are sometimes drawn to and sometimes repelled by risk. I would contend, further, that a clear understanding of the way value enters human affairs not only allows but requires this. (shrink)

It is commonly assumed that there is some sort of tacit ’inference’ involved when we form the belief that intentional activity on the part of some (perhaps unidentified) person is causally relevant to the occurrence of some event. Against this "inferential model" of design belief formation I argue that in many ordinary cases we do not ’infer’ design beliefs at all, but that they form spontaneously and ’properly’ whenever certain conditions are met. This alternative model has a respectable historical precedent, (...) better matches our introspective judgments about design beliefs, and helps resolve a puzzling objection to the standard "fine-tuning" argument. (shrink)

We introduce the notion T does not omit obstructions. If a stable theory does not admit obstructions then it does not have the finite cover property . For any theory T, form a new theory $T_{\rm Aut}$ by adding a new unary function symbol and axioms asserting it is an automorphism. The main result of the paper asserts the following: If T is a stable theory, T does not admit obstructions if and only if $T_{\rm Aut}$ has a model companion. (...) The proof involves some interesting new consequences of the nfcp. (shrink)

Previous discussions of addiction have often focused on the question of whether addiction is a disease. This discussion distinguishes that question – the disease question – from the question of whether addiction is a disability. I argue that, however one answers the disease question, and indeed on almost any credible account of addiction, addiction is a disability. I then consider the implications of this view, or why it matters that addiction is a disability. The disease model of addiction has led (...) many to see addiction as primarily a medical problem, and to make medical treatment of the addicted person the first priority in addressing addiction. Once addiction is viewed as a disability, different concerns are foregrounded. The problem of addiction resides not only in the addicted person, but also in the social environment in which the addicted person finds herself. The fundamental ethical question about addiction is not how addicted persons can be treated or otherwise changed, but how a just society can make reasonable accommodations for addicted persons. (shrink)

The growing power of communication and information technologies and their reliance on systems, poses great challenges to cultural and religious diversity, and even education. Will these technological systems continue to homogenize cultures and religions? Will this process lead to increasing strife? Or is there a possibility of maintaining both identity and diversity in a peaceful manner? This paper explores an early attempt to consider this problem. It will focus on the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā and their attempt to construct an encyclopedic system (...) to coordinate knowledge during the flowering of Islamic Civilization in the tenth century. It will primarily deal with Epistle or Rasā'il twenty-two – a fable concerning a debate between the humans, the animals and the Jinn. It will discuss their debate and show how the major concern for the Ikhwān al-Ṣafā was not only to embrace the diversity of knowledge but also the need to navigate through this diversity. I would like to suggest through this analysis that a culture gains its richness and identity by recognizing perfections outside of their own identity. This is analogous to the way that the individual human being gains meaning and dignity by reaching beyond its individuality. It also shows the importance of cultural and religious diversity and how the world cannot be unified by a single all-encompassing system. This approach is important because it shows the possibility of maintaining cultural and religious identity while participating in a technological world involving the flow of information on one hand, and global cultural diversities on the other. (shrink)

New readings of Anselm’s speculative and spiritual writings brought in light of questions and thinkers from Augustine to today.

New Blackfriars, Volume 102, Issue 1101, Page 637-657, September 2021.

What is the reason for the continued interest in Newman’s theology? This article’s reply that Newman was a contextual theologian is based on a consideration of three questions:Was Newman a theologian? What was the context of his theology? What are the reasons for Newman’s theological longevity?

The momentum of globalization and universalism, operating through the media, information technology and politics, has steadily diminished the importance of cultural diversity. It has even threatened to erase many of our cultural traditions, or extinguish our diverse experiences of the sacred. Yet the sacred which seems to be lost is often still encased in our cultural objects, stories and religious rituals. This paper will discuss how the memories of the sacred can be both preserved and reawakened. This paper will focus (...) on three scholars who develop alternative approaches to the universal. Franz Rosenzweig saw universal historical progress as oppressive. He believed that the practice of his Jewish religion offered a resistance and a possible correction to the general movement of history. Walter Benjamin saw the forgotten 'ruins' of history encase memories of the sacred and the silenced voices within history. For Benjamin, the role of interpretation is to awaken these hidden memories and voices which are encoded within our objects, images and commodities. This led him to a particular idea of a momentary messianic redemption in relation to greater flow of time. And finally, Jacob Taubes read St. Paul as offering a revolutionary model on how to live one's particular faith within a wider political order. In general, each writer developed an idea of redemption which involves a kind of remembrance of what has been obscured by the more general universal movement of history itself. This is especially relevant for the various religious and cultural communities within Cambodia. The paper will begin and end by discussing the origin story of Cambodia – the marriage between Preah Thong, the Indian prince, and Neag Neak, the Naga princess. I will additionally try to demonstrate that the story and its various reenactments is important because it represents a regenerative process rooted in the eclectic character of South East Asian culture in general. Various forms of memory within the syncretic or eclectic context of Southeast Asia can operate to preserve the sacred in an age of universalization and globalization. It also illustrates how the performance of memory can also offer an antidote to the "trauma" of Cambodia's past. (shrink)

We study when classes can have the disjoint amalgamation property for a proper initial segment of cardinals. Theorem A For every natural number k, there is a class $K_k $ defined by a sentence in $L_{\omega 1.\omega } $ that has no models of cardinality greater than $ \supset _{k - 1} $ , but $K_k $ has the disjoint amalgamation property on models of cardinality less than or equal to $\mathfrak{N}_{k - 3} $ and has models of cardinality $\mathfrak{N}_{k (...) - 1} $ . More strongly, we can have disjoint amalgamation up to $\mathfrak{N}_\alpha $ for α > ω, but have a bound on size of models. Theorem B For every countable ordinal a, there is a class $K_\alpha $ defined by a sentence in $L_{\omega 1.\omega } $ that has no models of cardinality greater than $ \supset _{\omega 1} $ , but K does have the disjoint amalgamation property on models of cardinality less than or equal to $\mathfrak{N}_\alpha $ . Finally we show that we can extend the $\mathfrak{N}_\alpha $ to $ \supset _\alpha $ in the second theorem consistently with ZFC and while having $\mathfrak{N}_i \ll \supset _i $ for 0 > i < α. Similar results hold for arbitrary ordinals α with |α|= K and $L_{k + ,\omega } $. (shrink)

The projective plane of Baldwin 695) is model complete in a language with additional constant symbols. The infinite rank bicolored field of Poizat 1339) is not model complete. The finite rank bicolored fields of Baldwin and Holland 371; Notre Dame J. Formal Logic , to appear) are model complete. More generally, the finite rank expansions of a strongly minimal set obtained by adding a ‘random’ unary predicate are almost strongly minimal and model complete provided the strongly minimal set is ‘well-behaved’ (...) and admits ‘exactly rank k formulas’. The last notion is a geometric condition on strongly minimal sets formalized in this paper. (shrink)

I propose understanding CP-law statements as statements that assert the existence of vague statistical laws, not by fully specifying the contents of those laws, but by picking them out via a description that is both self-referential and self-locating. I argue that this proposal validates many common assumptions about CP-laws and correctly classifies many examples of putative CP-laws. It does this while avoiding the most serious worries that motivate some philosophers to be skeptical of CP-laws, namely the worry that they lack (...) non-trivial truth conditions and that it is impossible for empirical evidence to disconfirm them. (shrink)