While we agree in broad strokes with the characterisation of rationalization as a “useful fiction,” we think that Fiery Cushman's claim remains ambiguous in two crucial respects: the reality of beliefs and desires, that is, the fictional status of folk-psychological entities and the degree to which they should be understood as useful. Our aim is to clarify both points and explicate the rationale of rationalization.

Keith Reader's brief, unfinished article ‘Freeze Peach’ situates contemporary controversies surrounding free speech in relation to material and economic concerns. Ian James's response draws attention to the way Keith does this by bringing together four key figures of late twentieth-century philosophy and theory: Louis Althusser, Jean-François Lyotard, Terry Eagleton and Stanley Fish. Ian argues that the conjugation of Marx-inspired theory with thinkers associated with the postmodern would have allowed Keith to develop a uniquely perceptive and productive (...) insight into the present moment of political disorientation, one which demands a renegotiation of the legacies of both modernity and postmodernity. (shrink)

This paper has two aims. The first is to use contemporary discussions of naïve realist theories of perception to offer an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception. The second is to use consideration of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception to outline a distinctive version of a naïve realist theory of perception. In a Merleau-Pontian spirit, these two aims are inter-dependent.

This chapter seeks to make a contribution to the growing interest in Nietzsche's relation to traditions of therapy in philosophy that has emerged in recent years. It is in the texts of his middle period that Nietzsche's writing comes closest to being an exercise in philosophical therapeutics, and in this chapter I focus on Dawn from 1881 as a way of exploring this. Dawn is a text that has been admired in recent years for its ethical naturalism and for its (...) anticipation of phenomenology. My interest in the text in this chapter is in the way it revitalises for a modern age ancient philosophical concerns, notably a teaching for mortal souls who wish to be liberated from the fear and anguish of existence, as well as from God, the ‘metaphysical need’, and romantic music, and are able to affirm their mortal conditions of existence. As a general point of inspiration I have adopted Pierre Hadot's insight into the therapeutic ambitions of ancient philosophy which was, he claims, ‘intended to cure mankind's anguish’. This is evident in the teaching of Epicurus which sought to demonstrate the mortality of the soul and whose aim was, ‘to free humans from “the fears of the mind”.’ Similarly, Nietzsche's teaching in Dawn is for mortal souls. In the face of the loss of the dream of the soul's immortality, philosophy for Nietzsche, I shall show, has new consolations to offer in the form of new sublimities. Indeed, for Nietzsche it is by reflecting, with the aid of psychological observation, on what is ‘human, all too human’, that ‘we can lighten the burden of life’. Nietzsche's thinking in Dawn contains a number of proposals and recommendations of tremendous value to philosophical therapeia, including a call for a new honesty about the human ego and human relations, including relations of self and other and love, so as to free us from certain delusions; the search for an authentic mode of existence which appreciates the value of solitude and independence; the importance of having a rich and mature taste in order to eschew the fanatical. After an introduction to Nietzsche's text the chapter is divided into two main parts. In the first main part I explore various aspects of his conception of philosophical therapy, including purification of the higher feelings and liberation from the destructive effects of ‘morality’ and Christianity. In the second main part I explore his conception of ‘the passion of knowledge’, which is the passion that guides modern free spirits as they seek to overcome the need of religion and constraints of ‘morality’, and to access the new sublimities of philosophy. (shrink)

Margaret Cavendish was a contemporary critic of the mechanistic theories of matter that came to dominate seventeenth-century thought and the proponent of a distinctive form of non-mechanistic materialism. Colour was a central issue both to the mechanistic theories of matter that Cavendish opposed and to the non-mechanistic alternative that she defended. This chapter considers the form of colour realism that Cavendish developed to complement her non-mechanistic materialism, and uses her criticisms of contemporary views of colour to try to better understand (...) the experimental approach to natural philosophy associated with writers like Hooke and Boyle. Allen argues that Cavendish’s discussion of colour in Observations upon Experimental Philosophy helps to show that there was a close connection between experimental philosophy and mechanistic theories of matter, and that, at least in the middle of the seventeenth century, experimental and speculative forms of mechanism were not mutually exclusive. (shrink)

Consider the following argument written on the board in room 227: 1 = 1. So, the argument on the board in room 227 is not valid. This argument generates a paradox. The aim of this paper is to present a resolution of this paradox and related paradoxes of validity, including a version of the Curry paradox. The proposal stresses the close connections between these validity paradoxes and paradoxes of truth and paradoxes of denotation. So a more general aim is to (...) provide a unified response to semantic paradox. The positive proposal is in part inspired by a brief, tantalizing suggestion of Gödel’s, that the paradoxes might appear “as something analogous to dividing by zero”—so that the concept of validity, for example, is everywhere applicable except for certain singular points or singularities. A second central claim is that ‘valid’ is a context-sensitive predicate. The key notions of this contextual-singularity theory are presented and applied to a variety of cases. Any purported solution to paradox must deal with the phenomenon of revenge, and a response to revenge is outlined. The paper closes with remarks about the accommodation of Tarski’s claim that natural languages are universal. (shrink)

A Curry paradox about truth is generated by the following sentence, written on the board in room 101:If the sentence on the board in room 101 is true then 1 ≠ 1.A Curry paradox about validity is generated by the following argument, written on the board in room 102:The argument on the board in room 102 is valid. Therefore, 1 ≠ 1.Though the sentence and the argument generate Curry paradoxes, they also generate more basic paradoxes, in a sense to be (...) made clear. I argue that if we solve these more basic paradoxes, we have solutions to both kinds of Curry paradox. The positive proposal is in part inspired by a brief remark of Gödel’s, that the paradoxes might appear “as something analogous to dividing by zero”—so that the concepts of truth and validity, for example, are everywhere applicable except for certain singular points or singularities. A second central claim is that 'true' and 'valid' are context-sensitive predicates. This contextual-singularity approach to the Curry paradoxes applies also to other paradoxes of truth, validity, denotation, and predicate-extension. So a more general aim of the paper is to provide a unified response to semantic paradox. (shrink)

In this bracing book, Fish argues that there is no realm of higher order impartiality--no neutral or fair territory on which to stake a claim--and that those ...

This volume offers a general introduction to the field of semantics and provides coverage of the main perspectives.

2nd edition of this well respected and popular introduction to the philosophy of mind fully updated and expanded throughout includes a new chapter which explores Aristotles philosophy of psychology and mind designed to help students think for themselves and contains exercises throughout the text to stimulate and challenge the reader an excellent introduction to this subject for A-Level and first year undergraduates.

Natural myside bias is the tendency to evaluate propositions from within one's own perspective when given no instructions or cues (such as within-participants conditions) to avoid doing so. We defined the participant's perspective as their previously existing status on four variables: their sex, whether they smoked, their alcohol consumption, and the strength of their religious beliefs. Participants then evaluated a contentious but ultimately factual proposition relevant to each of these demographic factors. Myside bias is defined between-participants as the mean difference (...) in the evaluation of the proposition between groups with differing prior status on the variable. Whether an individual difference variable (such as cognitive ability) is related to the magnitude of the myside bias is indicated by whether the individual difference variable interacts with the between-participants status variable. In two experiments involving a total of over 1400 university students ( n = 1484) and eight different comparisons, we found very little evidence that participants of higher cognitive ability displayed less natural myside bias. The degree of myside bias was also relatively independent of individual differences in thinking dispositions. We speculate that ideas from memetic theory and dual-process theory might help to explain why natural myside bias is quite dissociated from individual difference variables. (shrink)

Contemporary virtue ethics was revolutionized by Alasdair MacIntyre’s reconfiguration using practices as the starting point for understanding virtues. However, MacIntyre has very pointedly excluded the professions of the financial world from the reformulation. He does not count these professions as practices, and further charges that virtue would actually hinder or even rule out one’s pursuit of these professions. This paper addresses three tasks, in regard to the financial profession of investment advising. First, the paper lays out MacIntyre’s soon-to-be-published charges against (...) the investment world, as specified to this profession. Second, it sets forth the role function of investment advising and shows that it does possess internal goods—the crucial aspect of practices disputed by MacIntyre in this case—including goods of production and goods of performance. Third, it demonstrates that this function, and the goods tied to it, cannot be achieved apart from the virtuous pursuit of the profession, thereby showing that MacIntyre’s charges are mistaken. Investment advising is shown to be a virtue-based practice, and the groundwork is laid for showing that other financial professions are so, as well. (shrink)

This paper offers a brief comment on Jennings’ preceding paper, focusing on the capacity of a republican approach to public health ethics to facilitate reconceptualization of the right to health in situations of limited resources through a relational reading.

In this paper we address the question of when a researcher is justified in describing his or her artificial agent as demonstrating ethical decision-making. The paper is motivated by the amount of research being done that attempts to imbue artificial agents with expertise in ethical decision-making. It seems clear that computing systems make decisions, in that they make choices between different options; and there is scholarship in philosophy that addresses the distinction between ethical decision-making and general decision-making. Essentially, the qualitative (...) difference between ethical decisions and general decisions is that ethical decisions must be part of the process of developing ethical expertise within an agent. We use this distinction in examining publicity surrounding a particular experiment in which a simulated robot attempted to safeguard simulated humans from falling into a hole. We conclude that any suggestions that this simulated robot was making ethical decisions were misleading. (shrink)

Stem-cell nomenclature is in a muddle! So-called stem cells may be self-renewing or emergent, oligopotent (uni- and multipotent) or pluri- and totipotent, cells with perpetual embryonic features or cells that have changed irreversibly. Ambiguity probably seeped into stem cells from common usage, flukes in biology's history beginning with Weismann's divide between germ and soma and Haeckel's biogenic law and ending with contemporary issues over the therapeutic efficacy of adult versus embryonic cells. Confusion centers on tissue dynamics, whether stem cells are (...) properly members of emerging or steady-state populations. Clarity might yet be achieved by codifying differences between cells in emergent populations, including embryonic stem and embryonic germ (ES and EG) cells in tissue culture as opposed to self-renewing (SR) cells in steady-state populations. BioEssays 28: 301–308, 2006. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This paper considers whether we should believe philosophical claims on the basis of testimony in light of related debates about aesthetic and moral testimony. It is argued that we should not believe philosophical claims on testimony, and different explanations of why we should not are considered. It is suggested that the reason why we should not believe philosophical claims on testimony might be that philosophy is not truth-directed.

Many critics of dual-process models have mistaken long lists of descriptive terms in the literature for a full-blown theory of necessarily co-occurring properties. These critiques have distracted attention from the cumulative progress being made in identifying the much smaller set of properties that truly do define Type 1 and Type 2 processing. Our view of the literature is that autonomous processing is the defining feature of Type 1 processing. Even more convincing is the converging evidence that the key feature of (...) Type 2 processing is the ability to sustain the decoupling of secondary representations. The latter is a foundational cognitive requirement for hypothetical thinking. (shrink)

This volume brings together experts from a wide range of disciplines to define and describe taboo words and language and to investigate the reasons and beliefs behind them. It examines topics such as impoliteness, swearing, censorship, taboo in deaf communities, translation of tabooed words, and the use of taboo in banter and comedy.

Complexity theory challenges educational philosophy to reconsider accepted paradigms of teaching, learning and educational research. However, though attractive, not least because of its critique of positivism, its affinity to Dewey and Habermas, and its arguments for openness, diversity, relationships, agency and creativity, the theory is not without its difficulties. These are seen to lie in terms of complexity theory's nature, status, methodology, utility and contribution to the philosophy of education, being a descriptive theory that is easily misunderstood as a prescriptive (...) theory, silent on key issues of values and ethics that educational philosophy should embrace, of questionable internal consistency, and of limited ‘added value’ in educational philosophy. The paper sets out key tenets of complexity theory and argues that, though it is useful for educational philosophy, it requires new conceptual tools and mind‐sets to comprehend fully its significance. (shrink)

The contributors to this book draw upon their unique insights and research experience to address fundamental questions, including: What forms does the will take ...

Based on the original handwritten manuscript, this book provides a new, accurate edition of Hume’s important work, faithful to his original text, marginal notes, and changes. Stanley Tweyman’s comprehensive introduction gives an interpretation of the _Dialogues_ as a whole, as well as close analysis of each of the work’s twelve parts. Hume’s views on evil are discussed in four previously published articles, and the volume concludes with an extensive bibliography. Originally published in 1991.

In this book a distinguished philosopher offers a comprehensive interpretation of Plato’s most controversial dialogue. Treating the _Republic _as a unity and focusing on the dramatic form as the presentation of the argument, Stanley Rosen challenges earlier analyses of the _Republic _ and argues that the key to understanding the dialogue is to grasp the author’s intention in composing it, in particular whether Plato believed that the city constructed in the _Republic _is possible and desirable. Rosen demonstrates that the (...) fundamental principles underlying the just city are theoretically attractive but that the attempt to enact them in practice leads to conceptual incoherence and political disaster. The _Republic, _says Rosen, is a vivid illustration of the irreconcilability of philosophy and political practice. (shrink)

This commentary does three things. First, it offers further support for the view that explicit reasoning evolved for public argumentation. Second, it suggests that promoting effective communication may not be the only, or even the main, function of public argumentation. Third, it argues that the data Mercier and Sperber (M&S) cite are compatible with the view that reasoning has subsequently been co-opted to play a role in individual cognition.

This article engages with the arguments forwarded by Perez Zagorin against the possible consequences of postmodernism for history as it is currently conceived of particularly in its "proper" professional/academic form . In an overtly positioned response which issues from a close reading of Zagorin's text, I argue that his all-too-typical misunderstandings of postmodernism need to be "corrected"-not, however, to make postmodernism less of a threat to "history as we have known it," or to facilitate the assimilation of its useful elements (...) while exorcising its "extremes." My "corrections" instead forward the claim that, understood positively and integrated into those conditions of postmodernity which postmodernism variously articulates at the level of theory, such theory signals the possible "end of history," not only in its metanarrative styles but also in that particular and peculiar professional genre Zagorin takes as equivalent to history per se. And I want to argue that if this theory is understood in ways which choose not to give up the "discourse of emancipation" after the failure of its first attempt in the "experiment of modernity," then this ending can be considered "a good thing.". (shrink)