This essay consists of an examination of the work of three thinkers who conceive of liberal education primarily in teleological terms, and, implicitly if not explicitly, attempt to offer some answer to the question: what does it mean to be fully human? John Henry Newman, T. S. Eliot, and Josef Pieper developed their understanding of liberal education from their own intellectual and religious experience, which was informed by a specifically Christian conception of the place of education in a fully developed (...) human life. I suggest that the strength of their understanding of liberal education derives from its connection to the various small cohesive religious communities to which they were connected. Nonetheless, this insularity was also the primary weakness because each writer ended universalising what was in fact a particular and unique cultural and religious experience instead of providing convincing proof of a single human nature with a single telos. I will contrast this teleological conception of liberal education with that of Michael Oakeshott and his student Kenneth Minogue, both of whom wrote about education in a post-religious era in which the earlier consensus had completely broken down. They both celebrated the variety of practices which human beings have invented for themselves over the past several centuries (and past several millennia), and did not appear to suffer from the lack of any unifying single human telos. I will suggest that their understanding of practice insulated them from the need for a single unifying telos. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer both a brief study of Collingwood's conception of historical explanation and epistemological historicity, and an examination of the influence of Collingwood's work on the historical methodology of Quentin Skinner and on Gadamer's hermeneutic philosophy. Collingwood's work on the philosophy of history manifests a tension between the realist implications of the doctrine of reenactment and the logic of question and answer on the one hand, and, on the other, the constructionist tendency of the rest of his (...) work on the logic of historical inquiry and on the hermeneutic character of his more general conception of human historicity. This tension is displayed in the divergent interpretations of Collingwood by Quentin Skinner and Hans-Georg Gadamer, and in the inherent difficulties of each man's philosophy of history. I argue that the weaknesses of Skinner's methodological historicism are present already in his reading of Collingwood and reflect the difficulties inherent in understanding Collingwood as offering primarily a methodology of history. I also claim that Gadamer's hermeneutic philosophy, while presenting a more plausible reading of Collingwood, suffers from tensions similar to those within Collingwood's work between the logic of explanation and the logic of practical recommendation, and between the character of historical explanation and the character of philosophical understanding. (shrink)

As reports of genocide, terrorism, and political violence fill today’s newscasts, more attention has been given to issues of human rights—but all too often the sound bites seem overly simplistic. Many Westerners presume that non-Western peoples yearn for democratic rights, while liberal values of toleration give way to xenophobia. This book shows that the identification of rights with contemporary liberal democracy is inaccurate and questions the assumptions of many politicians and scholars that rights are self-evident in all circumstances and will (...) overcome any conflicts of thought or interest. _Rethinking Rights_ offers a radical reconsideration of the origins, nature, and role of rights in public life, interweaving perspectives of leading scholars in history, political science, philosophy, and law to emphasize rights as a natural outgrowth of a social understanding of human nature and dignity. The authors argue that every person comes to consciousness in a historical and cultural milieu that must be taken into account in understanding human rights, and they describe the omnipresence of concrete, practical rights in their historical, political, and philosophical contexts. By rooting our understanding of rights in both history and the order of existence, they show that it is possible to understand rights as essential to our lives as social beings but also open to refinement within communities. An initial group of essays retraces the origins and historical development of rights in the West, assessing the influence of such thinkers as Locke, Burke, and the authors of the Declaration of Independence to clarify the experience of rights within the Western tradition. A second group addresses the need to rethink our understanding of the nature of existence if we are to understand rights and their place in any decent life, examining the ontological basis of rights, the influence of custom on rights, the social nature of the human person, and the importance of institutional rights. Steering a middle course between radical individualist and extreme egalitarian views, _Rethinking Rights_ proposes a new philosophy of rights appropriate to today’s world, showing that rights need to be rethought in a manner that brings them back into accord with human nature and experience so that they may again truly serve the human good. By engaging both the history of rights in the West and the multicultural challenge of rights in an international context, _Rethinking Rights_ offers a provocative and coherent new argument to advance the field of rights studies. (shrink)

Because of the public identification of both Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss as conservative political philosophers, there have been numerous comparisons of their political thought. Whatever similarities or differences that do exist between them, it is certainly true that they shared a keen interest in the history of political thought. However, they understood the character of history in widely divergent ways. In the following paper, I examine the way in which each writer understood the logic of historical explanation, and there (...) are two primary reasons for wanting to do so. First, there have been few examinations of either writer’s arguments concerning historical understanding, despite the stature of both as historians of political theory. Second, the differences between Oakeshott and Strauss on history are central to two fundamentally opposed ways of understanding the past, each of which has manifested itself in the contemporary practice of the history of political thought. I will argue that Strauss’s approach to the past is primarily a practical one and yields a concern with a legendary or mythical past constructed primarily to address contemporary political problems, and that his specific methodological propositions are either irrelevant to a specifically historical understanding of the past or inadequately argued and unconvincing. Conversely, I will suggest that Oakeshott offers a coherent and compelling account of the logic of historical understanding, which involves both a defense of the autonomy of historical explanation and an elaboration of the character of historical contextualism. (shrink)

This essay consists of an examination of the work of three thinkers who conceive of liberal education primarily in teleological terms, and, implicitly if not explicitly, attempt to offer some answer to the question: what does it mean to be fully human? John Henry Newman, T. S. Eliot, and Josef Pieper developed their understanding of liberal education from their own intellectual and religious experience, which was informed by a specifically Christian conception of the place of education in a fully developed (...) human life. I suggest that the strength of their understanding of liberal education derives from its connection to the various small cohesive religious communities to which they were connected. Nonetheless, this insularity was also the primary weakness because each writer ended universalising what was in fact a particular and unique cultural and religious experience instead of providing convincing proof of a single human nature with a single telos. I will contrast this teleological conception of liberal education with that of Michael Oakeshott and his student Kenneth Minogue, both of whom wrote about education in a post-religious era in which the earlier consensus had completely broken down. They both celebrated the variety of practices which human beings have invented for themselves over the past several centuries (and past several millennia), and did not appear to suffer from the lack of any unifying single human telos. I will suggest that their understanding of practice insulated them from the need for a single unifying telos. (shrink)

Analysis of the mechanisms underlying sex determination and sex differentiation in Drosophila has provided evidence for a complex but comprehensible regulatory hierarchy governing these developmental decisions. It is suggested here that the pattern of sexual differentiation and dosage compensation characteristic of the male is a default regulatory state. Recent results have provided, in addition, some surprising and intriguing conclusions: (1) that several of the critical controlling genes produce more transcripts than was predicted from the genetic analyses; (2) that setting of (...) the alternative sex‐specific states of the doublesex (dsx) locus involves differential transcript processing; and (3) that some aspects of sexual differentation require the prolonged action of certain elements of the regulatory hierarchy. These findings are discussed in connection with the current model of sex determination in Drosophila. (shrink)

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

R. G. Collingwood's philosophical work is marked both by its compelling critique of scientific experience and by an unresolved tension between the claims of philosophy and the claims of history. The three works under consideration here, Speculum Mentis, Essay on Philosophical Method, and Essay on Metaphysics, comprise a systematic expression of the character of human understanding in terms of its open-ended, dialectical character, and a sustained critique of the scientific conception of human knowledge as a denial of that character.

Most interpretations of Orwell's political thought have concentrated on his critique of the ideology of totalitari-anism, especially as this ideology manifested itself in the 1930's in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in Nazi Germany under Hitler.2 These interpretations have provided valuable insights into Orwell's own perceptions of the dangers of cen-tralized state tyranny. However, they suffer from two weak-nesses connected with the concept of totalitarianism. First, the concept of totalitarianism as it has been developed in aca-demic political science has (...) been related specifically to the Soviet and Nazi experiences, and, thus, does not adequately account for other types of tyrannical regimes.3 Second, the application of the totalitarian model to the examination of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four tends to emphasize the pro-phetic aspects of the novel and to diminish its character as an investigation of contemporary political life.4 Instead of using the normal rubric of totalitarianism, I shall examine Orwell's political thought as expressed in Nineteen Eighty-four in terms of the conception of the modern state as a teleocracy, a con-cept which was elaborated by the political philosopher Michael Oakeshott. (shrink)

This book provides an overview of some of the most important critics of “Enlightenment rationalism.” The subjects of the volume—including, among others, Burke, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, C.S. Lewis, Gabriel Marcel, Russell Kirk, and Jane Jacobs—do not share a philosophical tradition as much as a skeptical disposition toward the notion, common among modern thinkers, that there is only one standard of rationality or reasonableness, and that that one standard is or ought to be taken from the presuppositions, methods, (...) and logic of the natural sciences. The essays on each thinker are intended not merely to offer a commentary on that thinker, but also to place that thinker in the context of this larger stream of anti-rationalist thought. Thus, while this volume is not a history of anti-rationalist thought, it may contain the intimations of such a history. (shrink)

People use commonsense science knowledge to flexibly explain, predict, and manipulate the world around them, yet we lack computational models of how this commonsense science knowledge is represented, acquired, utilized, and revised. This is an important challenge for cognitive science: Building higher order computational models in this area will help characterize one of the hallmarks of human reasoning, and it will allow us to build more robust reasoning systems. This paper presents a novel assembled coherence theory of human conceptual change, (...) whereby people revise beliefs and mental models by constructing and evaluating explanations using fragmentary, globally inconsistent knowledge. We implement AC theory with Timber, a computational model of conceptual change that revises its beliefs and generates human-like explanations in commonsense science. Timber represents domain knowledge using predicate calculus and qualitative model fragments, and uses an abductive model formulation algorithm to construct competing explanations for phenomena. Timber then scores competing explanations with respect to previously accepted beliefs, using a cost function based on simplicity and credibility, identifies a low-cost, preferred explanation and accepts its constituent beliefs, and then greedily alters previous explanation preferences to reduce global cost and thereby revise beliefs. Consistency is a soft constraint in Timber; it is biased to select explanations that share consistent beliefs, assumptions, and causal structure with its other, preferred explanations. In this paper, we use Timber to simulate the belief changes of students during clinical interviews about how the seasons change. We show that Timber produces and revises a sequence of explanations similar to those of the students, which supports the psychological plausibility of AC theory. (shrink)

This collection, the first of its kind, brings together specially commissioned academic essays to mark fifty years since the death of John Kennedy Toole.

Legal decision-making emphasizes, in a very self-conscious way, the justificatory significance of reasons. This paper argues that the obligation to provide reasons for choices, which must be articulated and structured around a set of generally shared and publicly comprehensible categories of thought, can serve to make the space of possible choices ‘concept sensitive’ in a very useful way. In particular, concept sensitivity has the effect of restricting certain movements within the choice space so that some of the systematic difficulties in (...) achieving an equilibrium in social choice which arise out of an excess of rational doing are avoided. The resulting equilibrium is path dependent. But because it is dependent on a choice path which ‘makes sense’ (or is ordered by thought precisely because it is concept sensitive), it is not the sort of arbitary path-dependent social choice which originally concerned Kenneth Arrow. This paper illustrates these points with examples from criminal law procedure, contract law and constitutional law. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of the important role which an obligation to provide reasons can play in avoiding some of the systematic difficulties encountered in the theory of rational social choice. The paper builds on some of the insights offered by theories of structure-induced equilibrium. It argues that the obligation to provide reasons for certain choices, reasons which must be articulated and structured around a set of generally shared and publicly comprehensible categories of thought, can serve to make the (...) space of possible choices "concept-sensitive" in a very useful way. Concept-sensitivity has the effect of restricting certain movements within the choice space so that some of the difficulties for achieving an equilibrium in social choice, difficulties which arise out of an excess of rational doing, are avoided. The resulting equilibrium is path dependent, of course, but because it is dependent on a choice path which "makes sense" (or is ordered by thought precisely because it is concept-sensitive), it is not the sort of arbitrary path dependent social choice which was of such concern to Kenneth Arrow in his original Nobel prize winning work. The paper illustrates its points with examples taken from the law. The law is a method of making social choices which emphasizes (in a very self-conscious way, and one which has no parallel either in politics or the market) the justificatory significance of the obligation to give publicly accountable reasons which attend to those issues arising in an ordered way out of a highly structured adjudicative process. Thus, the paper has as one of its ambitions the bringing together of two accounts of rational decision-making which, to this point at least, have not had much contact, namely, the theory of rational social choice and the theory of legal reasoning. (shrink)

As readers of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics undoubtedly know, edited books can be highly uneven in their quality, with some chapters excelling in content, depth, and readability while others languish in mediocrity. Volumes in an annually issued series run an even greater risk of suffering the plague of inferiority, especially after many years of fame and success. End-of-Life Ethics: A Case Study Approach clearly overcomes these maladies and provides readers with an excellent collection of well-written, thought-provoking essays.The Hospice Foundation of (...) America launched its annual bereavement teleconference two decades ago, publishing a book each year to accompany that educational event. Dubbed the “Living with Grief” series, every volume includes chapters written by a diversity of clinicians and scholars in the care of the dying and bereaved. The series has been unique in its approach to bridge scholarly understandings with practical clinical application.This volume takes a unique .. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kenneth Burke, John Dewey, and the Pursuit of the PublicPaul StobIn Deliberation Day, Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin argue for the creation of a national holiday, "Deliberation Day," in which citizens come together over a two-day period in their local schools and community centers to deliberate over the merits of presidential candidates and their platforms (Ackerman and Fishkin 2004). While Ackerman and Fishkin propose that the government (...) pay each citizen a $150 stipend for voluntary participation, the purpose is not so much to monetarily to reward citizens for "showing up" as it is to foster an enriched civic culture that would send shockwaves through America's political infrastructure: "If Deliberation Day succeeded, everything else would change: the candidates, the media, the activists, the interest groups, the spin doctors, the advertisers, the pollsters, the fund raisers, the lobbyists, the political parties. All would have no choice but to adapt to a more attentive and informed public" (3). The task of Deliberation Day would be to create a new social context in which citizens could become enlightened through public participation. As the authors conclude the book, "We can, through an act of political imagination, create new institutions for redeeming the ancient promise of democratic citizenship. Ordinary men and women need not be the hapless playthings of the powerful. They can and must find new ways to hold their leaders to account, and redeem their dignity as human beings by responsibly shaping their collective destiny" (219).Ackerman and Fishkin's proposal is indeed filled with political imagination. I bring their proposal to light not to critique the possibilities and limitations of Deliberation Day, but to understand the way in which the authors understand "the public." At the bottom, what the polity needs, Ackerman and Fishkin believe, is a public space dedicated to the reinvigoration [End Page 226] of political culture. It is not that the citizenry is incapable of hammering out intelligent political solutions, but that it needs access to social contexts that facilitate deliberation and the emergence of a common good. To foster a culture of political intelligence, the public needs only the chance to enter the forums that will facilitate thorough, cooperative political decision-making.Ackerman and Fishkin are not alone in calling for access to or creation of these types of forums. Habermas's bourgeois public sphere—a public space in which citizens could come together and rationally debate the activities of the state—essentially represents the evolution of a context, a social space, a public arena (Habermas 1989). The bourgeois public sphere is meant to be egalitarian, providing citizens a forum in which to debate openly and foster a common political consciousness.1 But this sphere has proved problematic for a number of scholars. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1993), for example, propose a proletarian public sphere to counter capitalism's socioeconomic domination over public resources. Joan Landes (1988) argues that the bourgeois public sphere entails male domination in public life, to the exclusion of women. Nancy Fraser (1992) builds on the feminist critique by adopting the term "counterpublics," collectives of citizens—women, peasants, the working class, and other groups demarcated by issues of race, gender, and ethnicity—that arise in reaction to the dominant public sphere.2In the introduction to Counterpublics and the State (2001), Robert Asen and Daniel Brouwer argue that critiques of the bourgeois public sphere specifically and public sphere theory generally amount to three "reconfigurations" in the way in which scholars think of the public. First, scholars have come to recognize the existence and interaction of multiple public spheres. Second, they have come to acknowledge permeable boundaries of access to the multiple public spheres. Third, scholars have come to recognize the dynamic role of the state in shaping public discourse. One considerable result of these three reconfigurations is an increasing recognition of the political divisions that permeate society (Asen and Brouwer 2001, 17-25).If Asen and Brouwer are right, and I think they are, these three reconfigurations represent the general thrust of contemporary public sphere scholarship, including as it is understood among communication scholars.3 And however diverse such scholarship may be, a few common themes seem to recur across... (shrink)

Im Zentrum des Werkes von Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) steht die Frage nach der Vernunft der Praxis und der Praxis der Vernunft. Dieses klassische Thema der praktischen Philosophie, das heute im Hintergrund verschiedener Debatten in Philosophie und Politikwissenschaft steht, leitete Oakeshott in seiner Auseinandersetzung mit der modernen Politik. Die in dem Sammelband vereinigten Beitrage bieten einen Uberblick uber die internationale Forschungslage; ihr gemeinsamer Angelpunkt ist Oakeshotts Praxisbegriff: Diskutiert wird seine praktische Bedeutung im Durchgang durch die grundlegenden politischen und gesellschaftlichen Problemfragen der (...) Gegenwart, seine theoretische Leistungsfahigkeit ist Gegenstand vergleichender Perspektiven, die vor allem die deutschen Zeitgenossen wie H. Arendt, H.-G. Gadamer, G. Simmel oder L. Strauss einbeziehen. Der vorliegende Band unternimmt es, die seit mehr als zwei Jahrzehnten intensiv gefuhrte, vor allem angelsachsische Debatte um Oakeshotts Denken in die einschlagigen deutschen Diskussionen zu tragen und die Anknupfungspunkte sichtbar zu machen, die sein facettenreiches Werk fur die Verstandigung uber eine humane Praxis in den Konflikten des 21. Jahrhunderts bietet. Mit Beitragen von: Josiah Lee Auspitz, Michael Becker, Wendell John Coats Jr., Peter Finn, Jurgen Gebhardt, Steven A. Gerencser, Michael Grossheim, Michael Henkel, Hans Jorg Hennecke, Bart van Klink, Silviya Lechner, Oliver W. Lembcke, Kenneth B. McIntyre, Efraim Podoksik, Rainer Schmidt, Suvi Soininen, Judith A. Swanson, Martyn P. Thompson. (shrink)

This article proposes a role for aesthetic judgment in our practical thought. The role is related to those moments when practical reason seems to give out, when it fails to yield a judgment about what to do in the face of a choice we cannot avoid. I argue that these impasses require agents to create, but that not any creativity will do. For we cannot regard a response to one of these problems as arbitrary or capricious if we want to (...) act on it. We must instead regard that response as justified by the problem itself. I suggest that this combination of creativity and normativity is characteristic of aesthetic judgment and this makes it a promising candidate for making these very difficult choices. (shrink)

A bridge between semipopular works for the general reader and technical treatises written for specialists, this excellent work discusses the foundational ideas and background of modern physics. It is not a text on theoretical physics, but a discussion of the methods of physic description and construction of theory. As such, it is especially valuable for the physicist with a background in elementary calculus who is interested in the ideas which give meaning to the data and tools of modern physics.

In this book, Bruce Waller attacks two prevalent philosophical beliefs. First, he argues that moral responsibility must be rejected; there is no room for such a notion within our naturalist framework. Second, he denies the common assumption that moral responsibility is inseparably linked with individual freedom. Rejection of moral responsibility does not entail the demise of individual freedom; instead, individual freedom is enhanced by the rejection of moral responsibility. According to this theory of "no-fault naturalism," no one deserves either (...) blame or reward.In the course of arguing against moral responsibility, Waller critiques major compatibilist arguments-by Dennett, Frankfurt, Strawson, Bennett, Wolf, Hampshire, Glover, Rachels, Sher, and others. In addition, the implications of denying moral responsibility-for individual freedom, for moral judgments and moral behavior, and for social justice-are examined; the supposed dire consequences of the denial of moral responsibility are challenged; and the benefits of denying moral responsibility are described. Author note: Bruce N. Waller, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Youngstown State University, Youngstown, Ohio, is the author of Critical Thinking: Consider the Verdict. (shrink)

In this book the author examines the stubborn philosophical belief in moral responsibility, surveying the philosophical arguments for it, but focusing on the system that supports these arguments: powerful social and psychological factors that hold the belief in moral responsibility firmly in place.--Publisher's description.

Perry Hendricks’ original impairment argument for the immorality of abortion is based on the impairment principle (TIP): if impairing an organism to some degree is immoral, then ceteris paribus, impairing it to a higher degree is also immoral. Since abortion impairs a fetus to a higher degree than fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) and giving a fetus FAS is immoral, it follows that abortion is immoral. Critics have argued that the ceteris paribus is not met for FAS and abortion, and so (...) we proposed the Modified Impairment Principle (MIP) to avoid these difficulties. Dustin Crummett has responded, arguing that MIP is open to various counterexamples which show it to be false. He also shows that MIP can generate moral dilemmas. Here, we propose a modification to MIP that resolves the issues Crummett raises. Additionally, Alex Gillham has criticized our appropriation of Don Marquis’ ‘future like ours’ reasoning about the wrongness of impairment. We show that his objections have minimal implications for our argument. (shrink)

“Clinical ethics consultants” have been practicing in the United States for about 50 years. Most of the earliest consultants—the “pioneers”—were “outsiders” when they first appeared at patients' bedsides and in the clinic. However, if they were outsiders initially, they acclimated to the clinical setting and became “insiders” very quickly. Moreover, there was some tension between traditional academics and those doing applied ethics about whether there was sufficient “critical distance” for appropriate reflection about the complex medical ethics dilemmas of the day (...) if one were involved in the decision making. Again, the pioneers deflected concerns by identifying and instituting safeguards to assure professional objectivity in clinical ethics consultation services. One might suggest that in moving inside and establishing normative practices, the pioneer clinical ethics consultants anticipated adoption of their routines and professionalization of the field. (shrink)

William Simkulet has recently criticised Colgrove et al ’s defence against what they have called inconsistency arguments—arguments that claim opponents of abortion act in ways inconsistent with their underlying beliefs about human fetuses. Colgrove et al presented three objections to inconsistency arguments, which Simkulet argues are unconvincing. Further, he maintains that OAs who hold that the fetus is a person at conception fail to act on important issues such as the plight of frozen embryos, poverty and spontaneous abortion. Thus, they (...) are morally negligent. In response, we argue that Simkulet has targeted a very narrow group of OAs, and so his criticisms are inapplicable to most OAs. We then explain why his responses to each of Colgrove et al’s objections do not succeed, even for this restricted group. Finally, we note that Simkulet fails to provide evidence for his claims regarding OAs’ supposed failures to act, and we show that OAs veritably do invest resources into these important issues. We conclude that Colgrove et al ’s reasons for rejecting inconsistency arguments remain intact. (shrink)

A perennial problem in social epistemology is the problem of expert testimony, specifically expert testimony regarding scientific issues: for example, while it is important for me to know information pertaining to anthropogenic climate change, vaccine safety, Covid-19, etc., I may lack the scientific background required to determine whether the information I come across is, in fact, true. Without being able to evaluate the science itself, then, I need to find trustworthy expert testifiers to listen to. A major project in social (...) epistemology has thus become determining what the markers of trustworthiness are that laypersons can appeal to in order to identify and acquire information from expert testifiers. At the same time, the ways in which we acquire scientific information has changed significantly, with much of it nowadays being acquired in online environments. While much has been said about the potential pitfalls of seeking information online, little has been said about how the nature of seeking information online should make us think about the problem of expert testimony. Indeed, it seems to be an underlying assumption that good markers of trustworthiness apply equally well when seeking information from expert testifiers in online and offline environments alike, and that the new challenges and opportunities presented by online environments merely affects the methods by which we can acquire evidence of said trustworthiness. Here I argue that in making this assumption one risks failing to account for how unique features of the ways in which we acquire information online affect how we evaluate the trustworthiness of experts. Specifically, I argue for two main claims: first, that the nature of information-seeking online is such that the extent to which information is susceptible to manipulation is a dominant marker of trustworthiness; second, as a result, one will be more likely to seek out a particular kind of expert testifier in online environments, what I call a cooperative as opposed to preemptive expert. The result is that criteria for expert trustworthiness may look significantly different when acquiring information online as opposed to offline. (shrink)

In this chapter, we defend an explanationist version of proper functionalism. After explaining proper functionalism’s initial appeal, we note two major objections to proper functionalism: creatures with no design plan who appear to have knowledge (Swampman) and creatures with malfunctions that increase reliability. We then note how proper functionalism needs to be clarified because there are cases of what we call warrant-compatible malfunction. We then formulate our own view: explanationist proper functionalism, which explains the warrant-compatible malfunction cases and helps to (...) block the above objections. We also advance a positive argument for explanationist proper functionalism. (shrink)

If representation is resemblance, how we do we think of groups or classes of things? According to a tradition Berkeley opposed—a tradition represented by Locke—we do so by forming abstract or incomplete ideas. I show that Berkeley's opposition does not depend on his own personal failure to form abstract images, but on what he took to be the impersonal or objective impossibility of abstract objects. Berkeley himself accounts for general thinking not in terms of abstract or incomplete ideas, but in (...) terms of our selective attention to ideas both concrete and determinate. Contentful thought about the natural world is impossible without ideas as objects, Berkeley believes, but ideas do not, in his view, completely fix the content of our thought. (shrink)

After describing the corpuscularian background of Berkeley's work, I consider whether Berkeley can endorse the existence of immaterial atoms or corpuscles. I suggest that he hopes to avoid a definite commitment. He wants his position to ‘float’, its level to be determined by the kind of empirical evidence that would strike materialists and immaterialists with equal force. This chapter foregrounds the role played by the notion of intelligibility, both in the defence of modern corpuscularian science and in Berkeley's critical response (...) to it. (shrink)