In his recent paper ‘Knowing What Things Look Like’, Matthew McGrath offers a challenge to the idea that knowing an object by seeing it, ‘visual objectual knowledge’ is an instance of immediate knowledge. I offer supporters of the notion of immediate visual objectual knowledge two potential strategies for blocking McGrath’s argument: either by questioning McGrath’s claim about the role that knowing what an object looks like plays in visual objectual knowledge or by denying that any explanation of how knowing what (...) an object looks like plays that role must proceed through an appeal to factual knowledge involving that object’s looks. (shrink)

The debate concerning the role of intuitions in philosophy has been characterized by a fundamental disagreement between two main camps. The first, the autonomists, hold that, due to the use in philosophical investigation of appeals to intuition, most of the central questions of philosophy can in principle be answered by philosophical investigation and argument without relying on the sciences. The second, the naturalists, deny the possibility of a priori knowledge and are skeptical of the role of intuition in providing evidence (...) in philosophical inquiry. In spite of the seemingly stark and deep disagreement between the autonomist and the naturalist, in this paper I will attempt to suggest that there is a way to mount a partial defense of intuition-based philosophical practice on naturalist grounds. As will be seen, doing so will require a number of concessions that will satisfy few autonomists while simultaneously disappointing those naturalists who might have thought that all notions of the a priori had been successfully laid to rest. However, I will argue that the account proposed here will preserve those features of traditional philosophical practice that matter most and better explain the history of successes and failures of that practice, thus answering the worries of the autonomist, and that the rejection of the No A Priori Thesis attendant with the account presented here is indeed demanded by the current theories of our best scientific understanding of the mind, thus pacifying the rabid naturalistic critic of any version of apriorism. (shrink)

The idea of God: absolute intellectuality.-- The creation: absolute emanation.-- Matter and force: the universe in its potentiality and actuality.-- The universal mechanism: motion and its transformations.

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)

An Indexed Synopsis of the Grammar of Assent by John J. Toohey. This book is a reproduction of the original book published in 1906 and may have some imperfections such as marks or hand-written notes.

In a number of recent articles, Hartry Field has attempted to reclaim the a priori for his own brand of non‐factualist epistemology by introducing a non‐epistemic notion of the a priori based purely upon the position of individual beliefs within belief systems. In this article we examine (i) whether a robust enough notion of aprioricity is available to Field, and, by extension, to the radical empiricist and (ii) whether it is possible to connect up the non‐epistemic notion of aprioricity with (...) questions about the epistemic status of those beliefs that happen to be a priori in the non‐epistemic sense. (shrink)

Joseph Houston’s book is a fine contribution to the philosophical investigation of the value of miracle reports for religious apologetics. It covers a wide range of arguments of interest to philosophers about the concept of miracles and the justifiability of belief in their occurrence, but it is also rich in theological and biblical sources. Houston’s reasoning throughout is careful and subtle, but neither technical nor excessively pedantic. So while the book is primarily intended for scholars, students should find it (...) within their reach. (shrink)

Recent debates over climate change policy have made it clear that the choice of a social discount rate has enormous consequences for the amount of mitigation that will be recommended. The social discount rate determines how future costs are to be compared to present costs. Philosophers, however, have been almost unanimous in endorsing the view that the only acceptable social rate of time preference is zero, a view that, taken literally, has either absurd or extremely radical implications. The first goal (...) of this paper is to show that the standard arguments against temporal preference are much less persuasive than they are usually taken to be. The second goal is to explore two different avenues of argument that could be adopted, in order to show that temporal discounting of welfare may be permissible. The first involves simply an application of the method of reflective equilibrium, while the second involves consideration of the way that our abstract moral commitments are institutionalized. (shrink)

A defining characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease is difficulty in retrieving semantic memories, or memories encoding facts and knowledge. While it has been suggested that this impairment is caused by a degradation of the semantic store, the precise ways in which the semantic store is degraded are not well understood. Using a longitudinal corpus of semantic fluency data, we derive semantic network representations of patients with Alzheimer’s disease and of healthy controls. We contrast our network-based approach with analyzing fluency data with (...) the standard method of counting the total number of items and perseverations in fluency data. We find that the networks of Alzheimer’s patients are more connected and that those connections are more randomly distributed than the connections in networks of healthy individuals. These results suggest that the semantic memory impairment of Alzheimer’s patients can be modeled through the inclusion of spurious associations between unrelated concepts in the semantic store. We also find that information from our network analysis of fluency data improves prediction of patient diagnosis compared to traditional measures of the semantic fluency task. (shrink)

No recent natural disaster since perhaps the great Mississippi floods of 1927 and 1993 has had such an immense impact on our national pride and confidence, as did Katrina. The reason was evident from the time the storm began to form in the Gulf of Mexico to once it hit land, our government at all levels was dazed and confused. The billions spent on infrastructure and the organizational structures operating for decades were overwhelmed. This was a disaster of great proportions (...) taking place in one of the poorest communities in our country with some of the most important economic structures in the land. Our largest port, a huge network of oil and gas pipeline and production facilities, offshore drilling, ship building and some of our largest fisheries to just cite a few examples. Much has been written and debated about this event and its impacts on the local area and the nation and this paper does not intend to replicate that work. The focus here is on the process used to support and invest in the nations water resources infrastructure. It will describe changes that have come about in recent years and why this process may do more to put people and communities at risk. (shrink)

Reducing health disparities and improving health outcomes are fundamental principles in global health. Environmental justice remains underrecognized and undervalued as a key driver of health dispar...

Joseph Margolis, known for his considerable contributions to the philosophy of art and aesthetics, pragmatism, and American philosophy, has focused primarily on the troublesome concepts of culture, history, language, agency, art, interpretation, and the human person or self. For Margolis, the signal problem has always been the same: how can we distinguish between physical nature and human culture? How do these realms relate? _The Cultural Space of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism_ identifies a conceptual tendency that can (...) be drawn from the work of the twentieth century's best-known analytic philosophers of art: Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, Kendall Walton, Nelson Goodman, Monroe Beardsley, Noël Carroll, and Jerrold Levinson, among others. This trend threatens to impoverish our grasp and appreciation of the arts by failing to do justice to the culturally informed nature of the arts themselves. Through his analysis, Margolis sets out to retrieve an adequate picture of the essential differences between physical nature and human culture—particularly through language, history, meaning, significance, the emergence of the human self or person, and the essential features of human life—all to explain how such difference bears on our perception of paintings and literature. Clearly argued and provocatively engaging, Margolis's work reestablishes what is essential to a productive encounter with art. (shrink)

Joseph Levine draws together a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive approach to philosophy of mind. He defends a materialist view of the mind against various challenges, and offers illuminating studies of consciousness, phenomenal concepts, mental representation, demonstrative thought, and cognitive phenomenology.

Critique of the writings of Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950.

What did the twentieth century threaten in the deepest way? What were those who were eventually defeated at such staggering cost fighting from the start? The individual, the sacredness and value of the individual, and spirit itself, seen in us in being seen as an individual, and seen beyond us. The home in the secular world for both these, the individual and spirit, is the legal mind and the legal form of thought. The individual in modern law is a mystery (...) because its presence runs counter to the thrust of what are called modern efforts to understand the world. But it will be the legal mind - rooted in and the possession of people in circles out and out from those professionally involved with it - that can protect humanity and the rest of the sentient world from reliving the twentieth century in the twenty-first. (shrink)

American historians have generally accepted Richard Hofstadter's thesis that the scientism of Social Darwinism, or more appropriately, Spencerianism, dominated American thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and nowhere more enthusiastically or more purposively than within the conservative business community, which used Herbert Spencer's scientism to justify corporate business practices and to rewrite American Constitutional law to protect property interests against governmental regulations. Following Sharlin's general exposition of Herbert Spencer's scientism, this paper examines in detail the validity of (...) the Hofstadter thesis as applied to the notorious Lochner v. New York Supreme Court opinion of 1905. The conclusions drawn from this analysis are offered as a repudiation of the generally accepted belief that it was the conservative activists on the Court who were guilty of Spencerian scientism. On the contrary, the argument is presented that it was Justice Holmes and the liberal reformers who found the evolutionary doctrines of Spencer congenial to their efforts of identifying needed reinterpretations of the American Constitution with biological evolution. (shrink)