Causation is at once familiar and mysterious. Neither common sense nor extensive philosophical debate has led us to anything like agreement on the correct analysis of the concept of causation, or an account of the metaphysical nature of the causal relation. Causation: A User's Guide cuts a clear path through this confusing but vital landscape. L. A. Paul and Ned Hall guide the reader through the most important philosophical treatments of causation, negotiating the terrain by taking a set of (...) examples as landmarks. They clarify the central themes of the debate about causation, and cover questions about causation involving omissions or absences, preemption and other species of redundant causation, and the possibility that causation is not transitive. Along the way, Paul and Hall examine several contemporary proposals for analyzing the nature of causation and assess their merits and overall methodological cogency.The book is designed to be of value both to trained specialists and those coming to the problem of causation for the first time. It provides the reader with a broad and sophisticated view of the metaphysics of the causal relation. (shrink)

The interventionist account of causal explanation, in the version presented by Jim Woodward, has been recently claimed capable of buttressing the widely felt—though poorly understood—hunch that high-level, relatively abstract explanations, of the sort provided by sciences like biology, psychology and economics, are in some cases explanatorily optimal. It is the aim of this paper to show that this is mistaken. Due to a lack of effective constraints on the causal variables at the heart of the interventionist causal-explanatory scheme, as presently (...) formulated it is either unable to prefer high-level explanations to low, or systematically overshoots, recommending explanations at so high of a level as to be virtually vacuous. (shrink)

This paper critiques the new mechanistic explanatory program on grounds that, even when applied to the kinds of examples that it was originally designed to treat, it does not distinguish correct explanations from those that blunder. First, I offer a systematization of the explanatory account, one according to which explanations are mechanistic models that satisfy three desiderata: they must 1) represent causal relations, 2) describe the proper parts, and 3) depict the system at the right ‘level.’ Second, I argue that (...) even the most developed attempts to fulfill these desiderata fall short by failing to appropriately constrain explanatorily apt mechanistic models. -/- *This paper used to be called "The Emperor's New Mechanisms". (shrink)

Among the factors necessary for the occurrence of some event, which of these are selectively highlighted in its explanation and labeled as causes — and which are explanatorily omitted, or relegated to the status of background conditions? Following J. S. Mill, most have thought that only a pragmatic answer to this question was possible. In this paper I suggest we understand this ‘causal selection problem’ in causal-explanatory terms, and propose that explanatory trade-offs between abstraction and stability can provide a principled (...) solution to it. After sketching that solution, it is applied to a few biological examples, including to a debate concerning the ‘causal democracy’ of organismal development, with an anti-democratic (though not a gene-centric) moral. (shrink)

The Tree of Life has traditionally been understood to represent the history of species lineages. However, recently researchers have suggested that it might be better interpreted as representing the history of cellular lineages, sometimes called the Tree of Cells. This paper examines and evaluates reasons offered against this cellular interpretation of the Tree of Life. It argues that some such reasons are bad reasons, based either on a false attribution of essentialism, on a misunderstanding of the problem of lineage identity, (...) or on a limited view of scientific representation. I suggest that debate about the Tree of Cells and other successors to the traditional Tree of Life should be formulated in terms of the purposes these representations may serve. In pursuing this strategy, we see that the Tree of Cells cannot serve one purpose suggested for it: as an explanation for the hierarchical nature of taxonomy. We then explore whether, instead, the tree may play an important role in the dynamic modeling of evolution. As highly-integrated complex systems, cells may influence which lineage components can successfully transfer into them and how they change once integrated. Only if they do in fact have a substantial role to play in this process might the Tree of Cells have some claim to be the Tree of Life. (shrink)

Philosophical theories of explanation characterize the difference between correct and incorrect explanations. While remaining neutral as to which of these ‘first-order’ theories is right, this paper asks the ‘meta-explanatory’ question: is the difference between correct and incorrect explanation real, i.e., objective or mind-independent? After offering a framework for distinguishing realist from anti-realist views, I sketch three distinct paths to explanatory anti-realism.

The Danish scholar Jan Pinborg made outstanding contributions to our understanding of medieval language study. The papers in this volume clearly demonstrate the wealth of Pinborg's scholarly interests and the extent of his influence.Though centered on medieval theories of grammar and language, the collection ranges in time from the fourth century B.C. to the seventeenth century A.D.; theories of the pronoun, of mental language, of supposition, of figurative expressions and of mereology are among the topics discussed; and the papers deal (...) with both humble anonymous teachers of grammar and with such well-known men as Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Peter of Spain, Roger Bacon, Robert Kilwardby, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, William of Ockham, Domingo de Soto, and Suárez. The papers are in English, German, or French. (shrink)

The companion volume to Arnold Come's Kierkegaard as Humanist, Kierkegaard as Theologian is an exploration of Søren Kierkegaard's deliberately Christian writings, from Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (1846) to For Self-Examination (1851). In his later writings Kierkegaard sought to "get further forward in the direction of discovering the Christianity of the New Testament" to resolve his own spiritual crisis. His struggle to understand how authentic theologizing relates to the spiritual struggles of personal faith led him to a discussion of the (...) three basic foci of his theologizing: the self as gift, that is, a creation "out of nothing" from God; the self as failure, which brings on a state of despair; and the self redeemed by God's love and healing compassion. Come probes some of the problematic aspects of Kierkegaard's theology. He addresses the question of whether God's high intentions and demands for human achievement of selfhood and spirituality justify the unspeakable sufferings entailed in human failures to fulfil those demands. He also explores the puzzling relation between Kierkegaard's seeming assignment of exclusivity to the Christian understanding and experiences of both sin and salvation as well as his assumption of the capacity of humans to recognize the need to turn to the eternal that is immanent in every human consciousness - so-called Religiousness A. (shrink)

Examines the issues of self (including gender), truth, and transcendence in classical Chinese and Western philosophy.

This book explores aspects of William H. Poteat's philosophical anthropology, which proposes a post-critical alternative to the prevailing dualistic conception of the person and opens a path to recovery of the pre-reflective ontological ground of the person where our personhood can be recovered and re-appropriated.

Among the many philosophers who hold that causal facts1 are to be explained in terms of—or more ambitiously, shown to reduce to—facts about what happens, together with facts about the fundamental laws that govern what happens, the clear favorite is an approach that sees counterfactual dependence as the key to such explanation or reduction. The paradigm examples of causation, so advocates of this approach tell us, are examples in which events c and e— the cause and its effect— both occur, (...) but: had c not occurred, e would not have occurred either. From this starting point ideas proliferate in a vast profusion. But the remarkable disparity among these ideas should not obscure their common foundation. Neither should the diversity of opinion about the prospects for a philosophical analysis of causation obscure their importance. For even those philosophers who see these prospects as dim—perhaps because they suffer post-Quinean queasiness at the thought of any analysis of any concept of interest—can often be heard to say such things as that causal relations among events are somehow “a matter of” the patterns of counterfactual dependence to be found in them. (shrink)

Composed more than 2,000 years ago during a turbulent period of Chinese history, the Dao de jing set forth an alternative vision of reality in a world torn apart by violence and betrayal. Daoism, as this subtle but enduring philosophy came to be known, offers a comprehensive view of experience grounded in a full understanding of the wonders hidden in the ordinary. Now in this luminous new translation, based on the recently discovered ancient bamboo scrolls, China scholars Roger T. Ames (...) and David L. Hall bring the timeless wisdom of the Dao de jing into our contemporary world. Though attributed to Laozi, “the Old Master,” the Dao de jing is, in fact, of unknown authorship and may well have originated in an oral tradition four hundred years before the time of Christ. Eschewing philosophical dogma, the Dao de jing set forth a series of maxims that outlined a new perspective on reality and invited readers to embark on a regimen of self-cultivation. In the Daoist world view, each particular element in our experience sends out an endless series of ripples throughout the cosmos. The unstated goal of the Dao de jing is self-transformation–the attainment of personal excellence that flows from the world and back into it. Responding to the teachings of Confucius, the Dao de jing revitalizes moral behavior by recommending a spontaneity made possible by the cultivated “habits” of the individual. In this elegant volume, Ames and Hall feature the original Chinese texts of the Dao de jing and translate them into crisp, chiseled English that reads like poetry. Each of the eighty-one brief chapters is followed by clear, thought-provoking commentary exploring the layers of meaning in the text. The book’s extensive introduction is a model of accessible scholarship in which Ames and Hall consider the origin of the text, place the emergence of Daoist philosophy in its historical and political context, and outline its central tenets. The Dao de jing is a work of timeless wisdom and beauty, as vital today as it was in ancient China. This new version will stand as both a compelling introduction to the complexities of Daoist thought and as the classic modern English translation. (shrink)

Will democracy figure prominently in China's future? If so, what kind of democracy? In this insightful and thought-provoking book, David Hall and Roger Ames explore such questions and, in the course of answering them, look to the ideas of John Dewey and Confucius.

One of the most basic functions of human language is to convey who did what to whom. In the world's languages, the order of these three constituents (subject [S], verb [V], and object [O]) is uneven, with SOV and SVO being most common. Recent experiments using experimentally elicited pantomime provide a possible explanation of the prevalence of SOV, but extant explanations for the prevalence of SVO could benefit from further empirical support. Here, we test whether SVO might emerge because (a) (...) SOV is not well suited for describing reversible events (a woman pushing a boy) and (b) pressures to be efficient and mention subjects before objects conspire to rule out many other alternatives. We tested this by asking participants to describe reversible and non‐reversible events in pantomime, and we instructed some participants to be consistent in the form of their gestures and to teach them to the experimenter. These manipulations led to the emergence of SVO in speakers of both English (SVO) and Turkish (SOV). (shrink)

Causation is a deeply intuitive and familiar relation, gripped powerfully by common sense. Or so it seems. As is typical in philosophy, however, that deep intuitive familiarity has not led to any philosophical account of causation that is at once clean, precise, and widely agreed upon. Not for lack of trying: the last thirty years or so have seen dozens of attempts to provide such an account, and the pace of development is, if anything, accelerating. (See Collins et al. [2003a] (...) for a comprehensive sampling of the latest work.). (shrink)

This book is a discussion of the nature and import of Richard Rorty's philosophy, particularly as it relates to his reevaluation of American pragmatism.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:On Dialogue: An Essay in Free ThoughtMichael L. HallOn Dialogue: An Essay in Free Thought, by Robert Grudin; ix & 228 pp. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1996, $23.95.In the fifth chapter of his recent book Robert Grudin touched on a question that had been vexing me since I began reading On Dialogue: An Essay in Free Thought. There, amongst his ruminations on the “Social Channels of Free (...) Thought,” Grudin recalls a luncheon celebration for his first trade book during [End Page 181] which one of the executives asked him: “Where in the bookstore would you display this book for sale?” In the four years it had taken him to write the book, Grudin had not given that question a moment’s thought. But it startled him into the realization that books are commodities that must be marketed; as a result he found himself confronting a powerful truth, “that money, like water, flows in channels, and that projects that ignore these channels are likely to come up dry.” More to the point: “These market channels give the American book industry, and hence current American literature, their overall shape. They largely dictate what will be written and read and what will not” (pp. 82–83).Grudin had not only anticipated my question, his response was a practical demonstration of the need for dialogic thinking, for a greater array of choices, questions and answers. I had been looking at On Dialogue from a kind of market perspective, or worse, an academic market perspective. Was it philosophy? Was it literature? Was it both, or neither? I was following the same familiar channels, but Grudin was telling me, quite explicitly, that my approach was unnecessarily limiting. Were I to employ, instead, the method of Renaissance copia that Grudin recommends as a propaedeutic to dialogic thinking, I would quickly discover that On Dialogue is certainly philosophy, and literary criticism, and that it partakes of the history of ideas, dabbles in personal memoir, and takes up theories of interpretation, and education, and creative writing, as well as various forms of psychotherapy, journalism, political theory, and economics.Grudin is obviously at home in the realm of literary criticism. His deft uses of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and of Henry James’s Daisy Miller advance his discussion of dialogic thinking, while at the same time offering focused interpretations of these works. And his examination of the Renaissance rhetorical practice of copia provides a stunning example of the way Grudin grounds his presentations in history and makes connections to other disciplines, thus extending the reach of his arguments. For instance, his reading of Plato’s Parmenides as a “Dialogue of the One and the Many” transforms Plato from an advocate of dialectic to a practitioner of dialogue: “The deep message of Plato’s Parmenides is that wholeness and fragmentation—the One and the Many—are valuable only as joint parameters. They cannot be objects of choice, because they are the nature of choice: they establish the playing field on which choices can be made” (p. 191).If all this makes On Dialogue sound like a congeries, in some respects it is, except that the force of Grudin’s discussion of “dialogic thinking” carries through the entire book and makes the whole cohere in a way that satisfies even when some of the parts occasionally begin to bewilder. His title may call to mind the 1980s literary critical trend spun off by the English translation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (1981), but Grudin’s notions about dialogue are grounded more in Plato, Martin Buber and Hans-Georg Gadamer than in Bakhtin. His sense of dialogue is personal and transformative as much [End Page 182] as it is critical and interpretive. In fact, Grudin’s subtitle is no throwaway. His dialogic demonstrations, as they find their literary form, are the offspring of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, as well as being firmly grounded in the writing of other Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus and Rabelais. In a book as multifarious as this, there will be many interesting (and a few not so interesting) loose ends. Grudin acknowledges this in chapters that sometimes end with a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Virgil and the ModernsMichael L. HallVirgil and the Moderns, by Theodore Ziolkowski; xv & 274 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, $35.00.Theodore Ziolkowski’s Virgil and the Moderns is a wonderful book. Everyone interested in modern literature and the western cultural heritage should read it. Ziolkowski does much more than tell us about Virgil and his influence on modern authors and readers; he traces the Latin poet’s appeal from (...) the nineteenth century forward, focusing on different national trends and responses to the Roman past. His book is a veritable education in modern literature and cultural history.In the introductory chapter Ziolkowski situates Virgil in the twentieth century, with references to the Virgilian epigraph on the title page of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the Virgilian motto to the first volume of Toynbee’s A Study of History (1934). Ziolkowski concentrates attention, in fact, on the appeal to Roman history in many early twentieth-century historians, and he explores the various European and American reactions to the bimillennial celebrations in 1930 of Virgil’s birth. Like the Bible, the Roman past seems to speak directly to a great variety of points of view: “Roman history, properly comprehended in its broad outlines, is and remains the best teacher not only for today, but indeed for all times”; thus opined the author of Mein Kampf.Ziolkowski’s second chapter, “The Ideological Lives,” begins by observing that “every biography is ideological” and quoting Duane Reed Stuart’s comment that “Every age has tended to fashion a Virgil after its own image.” Ziolkowski tests this proposition against the many “modern” biographies of Virgil that appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially during the bimillennial celebrations. In Italy he finds Virgil described as “a Latin nationalist with conservative messages for the present on government and agriculture”; in France he discovers “a protofascist emerging from the bohemian life of the rive gauche of ancient Rome”; in Germany he encounters “an agrarian anima naturaliter christiana destined to become Father of the West in opposition to the rise of Nazism”; and in Latin America he sees that Virgil has become “an apostle of peace among the pagans with the providential mission to serve the generations as a pedagogue for Christ.”In the five chapters that follow, Ziolkowski shows that these various versions of Virgil’s life and influence resulted in a similar diversity of literary manifestations. In Europe, each country found a Virgil suited to its own preoccupations and prejudices. A rich and indeed overwhelming curriculum in modern literature could be constructed from the authors and texts Ziolkowski discusses in these brief surveys of works influenced by Virgil’s poetry. But although he is a deft literary critic, Ziolkowski goes further, to trace biographical and cultural influences. We discover, for example, that Gide was obsessed with the Eclogues, that it was the Georgics that Mr. Carmichael “liked to lie awake a little reading” in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and that Joe Paterno’s first and most enduring hero [End Page 175] was Virgil’s Aeneas, “to whom he was introduced by his high school Latin teacher at Brooklyn Prep.”I confess that my favorite parts of the book were the chapters on Virgil in Britain and the “New World.” I thought I was a pretty good student of the classics and of British and American literature, but I am ashamed to admit how much I learned from Ziolkowski’s discussions of Virgil’s influence on Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Cyril Connolly, on Willa Cather and Robert Frost, on Archibald MacLeish, Allen Tate, and Robert Lowell. Ziolkowski is a treasure, and he has given us a rare treat in this very thoughtful study of the way our cultural inheritance is passed on and reaffirmed. As he himself remarks in the book’s final sentences on the ties that bind us to Virgil and our common past: “This reaffirmation, attained at the cost of great spiritual engagement by our intellectual predecessors, we neglect today at our peril.”Michael L. HallAlexandria, VirginiaCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The interactivist approach to development generates a framework of types of constraints on what can be constructed. The four constraint types are based on: (1) what the constructed systems are about; (2) the representational relationship itself; (3) the nature of the systems being constructed; and (4) the process of construction itself. We give illustrations of each constraint type. Any developmental theory needs to acknowledge all four types of constraint; however, some current theories conflate different types of constraint, or rely on (...) a single constraint type to explicate development. Such theories will be inherently unable to explain important aspects of development. (shrink)

“The conception of culture and philosophy’s role within it developed in this work permits interesting formulations of a number of important issues and concepts: the relations between the utopian and utilitarian functions of philosophic theory; the character of the aesthetic and mystical sensibilities; the meaning and function of metaphor and of irony; the value of theoretical consensus; the nature of philosophic communication; and the distinctive relation of Plato and Socrates as a model for philosophic activity.” — David L. Hall (...) With Eros and Irony, David Hall re-evaluates the cultural role of philosophy, probing to the very heart of questions in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of culture. Two central arguments structure the book: the first is that in modern culture the autonomy of the aesthetic and religious sensibilities has been seriously qualified by an overemphasis on narrowly rational moral interests. The second is that philosophic activity must be construed in terms of two conflicting elements: the desire for completeness of understanding, and the failure to achieve such understanding. Hall provides a historical survey of philosophic thought, encompassing Plato, Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Whitehead. He also avails himself of sources outside of philosophy, in such diverse fields as poetry, psychology, physics, and Eastern religion, to create a work that not only addresses key issues in philosophy, but also has deep implications for science, art, religion, morality, and cultural self-understanding. (shrink)

This review provides a current perspective on the insertion of genes into plants. Some of the knowledge on the structure and control of plant genes gained recently from genetic engineering approaches is described, together with developments that can be expected to emerge from further exploitation of gene transfer techniques.