'Never before has there been so many and such dreadful weapons in so many irresponsible hands.' - Karl Popper, from the Preface All Life is Problem Solving is a stimulating and provocative selection of Popper's writings on his main preoccupations during the last twenty-five years of his life. This collection illuminates Popper's process of working out key formulations in his theory of science, and indicates his view of the state of the world at the end of the Cold War (...) and after the collapse of communism. (shrink)

This seminal contribution to Kant studies, originally published in 1982, was the first to present a thorough survey and evaluation of Kant's theory of mind. Ameriks focuses on Kant's discussion of the Paralogisms in the Critique of Pure Reason, and examines how the themes raised there are treated in the rest of Kant's writings. Ameriks demonstrates that Kant developed a theory of mind that is much more rationalistic and defensible than most interpreters have allowed.

It features Easton and Guddat's own highly regarded translations (based on the best German editions as well as on the original manuscripts and first editions) ...

Japan has more robots than any other country with robots contributing to many areas of society, including manufacturing, healthcare, and entertainment. However, few studies have examined Japanese attitudes toward robots, and none has used implicit measures. This study compares attitudes among the faculty of a US and a Japanese university. Although the Japanese faculty reported many more experiences with robots, implicit measures indicated both faculties had more pleasant associations with humans. In addition, although the US faculty reported people were more (...) threatening than robots, implicit measures indicated both faculties associated weapons more strongly with robots than with humans. Despite the media’s hype about Japan’s robot ‘craze,’ response similarities suggest factors other than attitude better explain robot adoption. These include differences in history and religion, personal and human identity, economic structure, professional specialization, and government policy. Japanese robotics offers a unique reference from which other nations may learn. (shrink)

Written in political exile during the Second World War and first published in 1945, Karl Popper's _The Open Society and Its Enemies_ is one of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Hailed by Bertrand Russell as a 'vigorous and profound defence of democracy', its now legendary attack on the philosophies of Plato, Hegel and Marx exposed the dangers inherent in centrally planned political systems. Popper's highly accessible style, his erudite and lucid explanations of the thought of great (...) philosophers and the recent resurgence of totalitarian regimes around the world are just three of the reasons for the enduring popularity of_The Open Society and Its Enemies_, and for why it demands to be read both today and in years to come. This is the first of two volumes of _The Open Society and Its Enemies_. (shrink)

An autobiographic instinct may be as old as Man Writing; but only since 1800 has Western Man placed a premium on autobiography. A bibliography of all autobiographic writing prior to that time would be a small fascicule; a bibliography since 1800 a thick tome. The ground behind this simpleminded assertion of a quantitative measure cannot be explained away by easy reference to the mass literacy of the modern world or the greater ease of publishing. It is as much a fact (...) of cultural conditions as is the significant relation of rhetoric to the intense public mindedness of classical men, the relative insignificance of tragedy in a thoroughly Christianized world view, the disappearance of epic from a nonaristocratic world, or the powerful assertion of the novel in an age of burghers. The usage of the term "autobiography" itself is suggestive, although this mode of historical explanation is always defective in the sense that such older terms as "hypomnemata," "commentarii," "vita," "confessions," or "memoirs" may well have covered the functions subsequently encapsulated in a newly fashionable term. In German the term makes its appearance shortly before 1800; the Oxford English Dictionary attributes first English usage to Southey in an article on Portuguese literature from the year 1809. Karl J. Weintraub, Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of History and dean of the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago, is the author of Visions of Culture and numerous articles. His introduction to a new edition of Goethe's Autobiography will prove of special interest to our readers. (shrink)

A 2016 article in the Journal of Consumer Research argues that busyness has become a status symbol. In earlier societies, such as the 19th century Thorstein Veblen describes in his Theory of the Leisure Class, the wealthy conspicuously avoided work. They saw idleness as an ideal. By contrast, contemporary Americans praise being overworked. They see busy individuals as possessing rare and desirable characteristics, such as competence and ambition. -/- To respond philosophically to our new overworked overlords and status icons, we (...) need only return to the 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is known for his philosophical account of boredom, which is often associated with idleness. If busyness is the opposite of idleness, perhaps he can diagnose busyness also. (shrink)

Soren Kierkegaard (1813‐1855) is primarily known as a moral philosopher. This chapter looks at his contributions to ethics, and shows how Kierkegaard's writings can contribute to epistemology, metaphysics, and other areas of contemporary philosophy. In order to contextualize Kierkegaard's contributions to philosophy the chapter briefly surveys some of the ways Kierkegaard is connected to nineteenth‐century philosophers, as well as classical figures like Socrates. It considers Kierkegaard's contributions to moral philosophy in two ways. First, the chapter briefly recounts Kierkegaard's suspicion of (...) Hegelian social ethics as discussed in Fear and Trembling. While Works of Love contains much of Kierkegaard's mature ethical thought, the former text may still serve as an introduction to his approach. Second, the chapter discusses several specific ways Kierkegaard can contribute to contemporary ethics. It also considers future directions for Kierkegaard scholarship and identifies some other areas of philosophy to which Kierkegaard's writings might contribute. (shrink)

Each of us experiences two conflicting attitudes towards time. On the one hand, we all, at least to some degree, look ahead towards the future. On the other hand, we sometimes feel like we ought to live in the present, without this concern about the future. Derek Parfit claims that we would be happier if we lacked our focus on the future: we would not be sad when good things were in the past, we could take life’s pleasures as they (...) come, and we would have fewer reasons to regret aging and death. Given his emphasis on the future as a philosophical problem, Kierkegaard seems especially challenged by Parfit’s claims. I argue that a response to Parfit’s challenges can be found in Kierkegaard’s discourses on the lily of the field and the bird of the air. Though not often read philosophically, these discourses also contribute to Kierkegaard’s philosophy of time. They can provide readers of Kierkegaard with a response to Parfit’s challenges by proffering a way to care for the future while living in the present. To defend this thesis, my first chapter recounts Parfit’s challenges and extant responses by readers of Kierkegaard to them. Chapters Two and Three develop Kierkegaard’s metaphysics of time by working through The Concept of Anxiety and Philosophical Fragments. The former chapter emphasizes Kierkegaard’s focus on the eschatological future while showing how Kierkegaard can contribute to contemporary debates within the philosophy of time. The latter considers Kierkegaard’s Christology and Trinitarian theology by working through Kierkegaard’s understanding of the past event of the incarnation. The fourth and fifth chapters discuss the ethical implications of Kierkegaard’s metaphysics of time through readings of Christian Discourses and Works of Love. Chapter Four contains my account of the attitude towards time Kierkegaard exhorts us to adopt: facing away from the future and towards the work we are called to do in the present. Chapter Five concludes by discussing the implications of this account for the ways we hope for and love our neighbors. (shrink)

According to the Timing Argument, death is not bad for the individual who dies, because there is no time at which it could be bad for her. Defenders of the badness of death have objected to this influential argument, typically by arguing that there are times at which death is bad for its victim. In this paper, I argue that a number of these writers have been concerned with quite different formulations of the Timing Argument. Further, and more importantly, I (...) show that their objections to the Timing Argument fail as attempts to refute the argument in its most challenging form. (shrink)

Our engagement with social media, smart and mobile technologies is ambiguous and raises existential questions about the naturalness and desirability of hyper-connectivity. On the one hand, we benefit from using these technologies in organizing and socializing our everyday life. On the other hand, they further complicate our lives. Hence, in recent years, more and more people choose to abstain from digital media by taking on a so-called ‘digital detox,’ a period of living without these technologies. In this article, we look (...) at ‘digital detoxing’ from an existential perspective by introducing Kierkegaard’s existential categories of repetition and recollection to tackle the question whether ‘dropping out’ is a meaningful act or a temporary respite. What would it mean, so we ask, to find a proper balance in a world that demands constant connectivity? (shrink)

The explanation versus understanding debate was important to the philosophy of thesocial sciences from the time of Dilthey and Weber through the work of Popper and Hempel.

On its face, Hume's account of mental representation involves at least two elements. On the one hand, Hume often seems to write as though the representational properties of an idea are fixed solely by what it is a copy or image of. But, on the other, Hume's treatment of abstract ideas makes it clear that the representational properties of a Humean idea sometimes depend, not just on what it is copied from, but also on the manner in which the mind (...) associates it with other ideas. Past interpretations of Hume have tended to focus on one of these elements of his account to the neglect of the other. But no interpretation of this sort is likely to capture the role that both copying and association play within Hume's discussion. In what follows, I argue that the most plausible way of understanding Hume's discussion involves attributing to him a unified account of mental representation in which both of these elements play a central role. I close by discussing the manner in which reading Hume in this way would alter our understanding of the relationship between Hume's thought and contemporary philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Beginning with an examination of the relationship between Hegel and Goethe, Löwith discusses how Hegel's students, particularly Marx and Kierkegaard, interpreted--or reinterpreted--their master's thought, and proceeds with an in-depth assessment of the other important philosophers, from Feuerbach, Stirner, and Schelling to Nietzsche.

Many libertarians make a moral argument that liberty requires the freedom to exercise strong property rights. From this, they argue that no more than a minimal state with sharply limited powers of taxation can be justified. A larger state would supposedly interfere with private property rights and thereby reduce liberty. In response, this article shows how natural rights to property do not entail any particular vision of the state. It demonstrates that the principles of natural property rights support monarchy just (...) as well as they support a capitalist aristocracy. Nothing in the theory of natural property rights rules out government ownership of property or government ownership of the right to tax. Therefore, the natural rights argument does not necessarily imply libertarian limits on the state, but rather the acceptance of whatever state powers and property rights have been in place for a sufficient amount of time. For example, historical property rights in Britain do not imply that private titleholders possess rights that have been subject to interference from the state, as libertarians claim. Instead, they imply that the Queen and her ministers in parliament have a strong claim to at least partial ownership of the whole island of Britain and the property within it. If this argument holds, it poses a serious dilemma for libertarians, forcing them to choose between their account of liberty as the exercise of property rights and their belief that only a minimal state is justifiable. Key Words: libertarianism • ownership • property rights • taxation • distribution • redistribution. (shrink)

Despite his own observations that autonomy is never complete, never once-and-for-all — in short, that autonomy is always relatively more-or-less; or rather, human subjects, institutions and societies can only ever be more-or-less autonomous, and thus more-or-less heteronomous — Castoriadis nevertheless polarizes autonomy and heteronomy. From the polarized perspective, then, he maintains that religion is intrinsically heteronomous, and thus intrinsically antithetical to the project of autonomy. By exploring Taylor's more nuanced understanding of the varieties of religious experience, I argue in this (...) article that there must be room for religious belief within an autonomous society, and that religiosity per se is not incompatible with the project of creating an autonomous society. (shrink)

Occasionally, people are called upon to estimate probabilities after an event has occurred. In hindsight, was this an outcome we could have expected? Could things easily have turned out differently? One strategy for performing post hoc probability judgements would be to mentally turn the clock back and reconstruct one's expectations before the event. But if asked about the probability of an alternative, counterfactual outcome, a simpler strategy is available, based on this outcome's perceived closeness to what actually happened. The article (...) presents five studies exploring the relationship between counterfactual closeness and counterfactual probability. The first study indicates that post hoc probabilities typically refer to the counterfactual rather than the factual outcome. Studies 2-5 show that physical, temporal, or conceptual proximity play a decisive role for post hoc probability assessments of counterfactual events. When margins are narrow, the probabilities of, for instance, winning a match (when losing), and of losing (when actually winning) may even be rated higher than the corresponding probabilities of what really happened. Closeness is also more often referred to, and rated to be a better reason for believing there is a ''good chance" of the counterfactual rather than of the factual result occurring. Finally, the closeness of the alternative outcome in success and failure stories is shown to be significantly correlated to its rated probability. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell described this study, with its companion volume on Plato, as a work of first-class importance. Karl Popper writes with extreme clarity and vigour. Platonic history will never be the same again.

Much recent work in metaontology challenges the so-called ‘Quinean tradition’ in metaphysics. Especially prominently, Amie Thomasson argues for a highly permissive ontology over ontologies which eliminate many entities. I am concerned with disputing not her ontological claim, but the methodology behind her rejection of eliminativism – I focus on ordinary objects. Thomasson thinks that by endorsing the Quinean criterion of ontological commitment eliminativism goes wrong; a theory eschewing quantification over a kind may nonetheless be committed to its existence. I argue (...) that, contrary to Thomasson's claims, we should retain the Quinean criterion. Her arguments show that many eliminativist positions are flawed, but their flaws lie elsewhere: the Quinean criterion is innocent. Showing why reveals the importance of pragmatism in ontology. In §1 I compare Thomasson's account and the eliminativist views to which it stands in opposition. In §2 I re-construct Thomasson's reasons for rejecting the Quinean criterion. In §3 I defend the Quinean criterion, showing that the eliminativists’ flaws are not consequences of applying the Quinean criterion, before explaining the criterion's importance when properly understood. I conclude that Thomasson, though right to criticise the methodology of ordinary-object eliminativists, is wrong to identify the Quinean criterion as the source of their mistake. (shrink)