The purpose of this research is to empirically test the salmon bias hypothesis, which states that the “healthy migrant” effect—referring to a situation in which migrants enjoy lower mortality risks than natives—is caused by selective return-migration of the weak, sick, and elderly. Using a unique longitudinal micro-level database—the Historical Sample of the Netherlands—we tracked the life courses of internal migrants after they had left the city of Rotterdam, which allowed us to compare mortality risks of stayers, returnees, and movers using (...) survival analysis for the study group as a whole, and also for men and women separately. Although migrants who stayed in the receiving society had significantly higher mortality risks than natives, no significant difference was found for migrants who returned to their municipality of birth. By contrast, migrants who left for another destination had much lower mortality risks than natives. Natives who left Rotterdam also had significantly lower mortality risks than natives who stayed in Rotterdam. Female migrants, in particular, who stayed in the receiving urban society paid a long-term health price. In the case of Rotterdam, the salmon bias hypothesis can be rejected because the lower mortality effect among migrants was not caused by selective return-migration. The healthy migrant effect is real and due to a positive selection effect: Healthier people are more likely to migrate. (shrink)

Life history theory predicts that exposure to high mortality in early childhood leads to faster and riskier reproductive strategies. Individuals who grew up in a high mortality regime will not overly wait until they find a suitable partner and form a stable union because premature death would prevent them from reproducing. Cox proportional hazard models were used to determine whether women who experienced sibling death during early childhood (0–5 years) reproduced earlier and were at an increased risk of giving birth (...) to an illegitimate child, with illegitimacy serving as a proxy for risky sexual behavior. Furthermore, we investigate whether giving birth out of wedlock is influenced by individual mortality experience or by more promiscuous sexual behavior that is clustered in certain families. Models are fitted on pedigree data from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Krummhörn population in Germany. The results show a relationship between sibling death in early childhood and the risk of reproducing out of wedlock, and reproductive timing. The risk of giving birth out of wedlock is linked to individual mortality experience rather than to family-level effects. In contrast, adjustments in connubial reproductive timing are influenced more by family-level effects than by individual mortality experience. (shrink)

JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY PRIZE for the best published book in the history of philosophy [Awarded in 2010] _______________ -/- Although it is widely recognized that David Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) belongs among the greatest works of philosophy, there is little agreement about the correct way to interpret his fundamental intentions. It is an established orthodoxy among almost all commentators that skepticism and naturalism are the two dominant themes in this work. The difficulty has been, (...) however, that Hume's skeptical arguments and commitments appear to undermine and discredit his naturalistic ambition to contribute to "the science of man". This schism appears to leave his entire project broken-backed. The solution to this riddle depends on challenging another, closely related, point of orthodoxy: namely, that before Hume published the Treatise he removed almost all material concerned with problems of religion. Russell argues, contrary to this view, that irreligious aims and objectives are fundamental to the Treatise and account for its underlying unity and coherence. It is Hume's basic anti-Christian aims and objectives that serve to shape and direct both his skeptical and naturalistic commitments. When Hume's arguments are viewed from this perspective we can solve, not only puzzles arising from his discussion of various specific issues, we can also explain the intimate and intricate connections that hold his entire project together. This "irreligious" interpretation provides a comprehensive fresh account of the nature of Hume's fundamental aims and ambitions in the Treatise. It also presents a radically different picture of the way in which Hume's project was rooted in the debates and controversies of his own time, placing the Treatise in an irreligious or anti-Chrisitan philosophical tradition that includes Hobbes, Spinoza and freethinking followers. Considered in these terms, Hume's Treatise constitutes the crowning achievement of the Radical Enlightenment. (shrink)

Many of our most important goals require months or even years of effort to achieve, and some never get achieved at all. As social psychologists have lately emphasized, success in pursuing such goals requires the capacity for perseverance, or "grit." Philosophers have had little to say about grit, however, insofar as it differs from more familiar notions of willpower or continence. This leaves us ill-equipped to assess the social and moral implications of promoting grit. We propose that grit has an (...) important epistemic component, in that failures of perseverance are often caused by a significant loss of confidence that one will succeed if one continues to try. Correspondingly, successful exercises of grit often involve a kind of epistemic resilience in the face of failure, injury, rejection, and other setbacks that constitute genuine evidence that success is not forthcoming. Given this, we discuss whether and to what extent displays of grit can be epistemically as well as practically rational. We conclude that they can be (although many are not), and that the rationality of grit will depend partly on features of the context the agent normally finds herself in. In particular, grit-friendly norms of deliberation might be irrational to use in contexts of severe material scarcity or oppression. (shrink)

"First published in this translation 1955; second edition (revised) 1974; reprinted with additional revisions 1987; reissued with new Further Reading 2003; reissued with new introduction 2007"--T.p. verso.

A study of how syntax relates to meaning by a leader of the new generation of philosopher-linguists.

For over twenty years, Paul Weithman has explored the thought of John Rawls to ask how liberalism can secure the principled allegiance of those people whom Rawls called 'citizens of faith'. This volume brings together ten of his major essays, which reflect on the task and political character of political philosophy, the ways in which liberalism does and does not privatize religion, the role of liberal legitimacy in Rawls's theory, and the requirements of public reason. The essays reveal Rawls (...) as a thinker deeply engaged with political and existential questions that trouble citizens of faith, and explore how - in firm opposition to political realism - he tries to show that the possibility of liberal democracy and the natural goodness of humanity are objects of reasonable faith. The volume will be of interest to political philosophers, political theorists, moral theologians, and religious ethicists. (shrink)

Although thinkers of the past might have started from presumptions of fundamental difference and inequality between (say) the genders, or people of different races, this is no longer the case. At least in mainstream political philosophy, we are all now presumed to be, in some fundamental sense, basic equals. Of course, what follows from this putative fact of basic equality remains enormously controversial: liberals, libertarians, conservatives, Marxists, republicans, and so on, continue to disagree vigorously with each other, despite all presupposing (...) some kind of basic equality. They may argue about who gets what, how much, and why, but the starting point - that all people are in some sense deserving of prima facie equal consideration - has become an axiom of our moral and political thinking. But why? Why are we basic equals? The trouble is that as soon as one asks for an explanation of this foundational premise, it begins to look shaky. After all, on any conceivable metric human beings are notably unequal, and often to striking degrees. Philosophers in this area tend to talk of equal worth, but often without trying to specify what exactly that means. Philosophically, basic equality is neither acceptable nor rejectable. It is not rejectable because we appear to be, as a matter of fact, profoundly committed to the truth of the claim that we are all one another's basic equals. But to the extent that there appear to be no philosophical arguments for believing in the truth of basic equality, it is not acceptable either. The aim of this book is to try and show why basic equality is acceptable. To do so, however, it will also contend that we need to approach the question rather differently to how it has mostly been handled so far. What's required is an exercise in what Bernard Williams called 'impure philosophy': it must include insights from other areas of human intellectual endeavour, whether psychology and history or even what we learn from how we go about practicing basic equality in our collective lives. (shrink)

David Hume (1711-1776) is widely recognized as one of the most influential and significant critics of religion in the history of philosophy. There remains, nevertheless, considerable disagreement about the exact nature of his views. According to some, he was a skeptic who regarded all conjectures relating to religious hypotheses to be beyond the scope of human understanding – he neither affirmed nor denied these conjectures. Others read him as embracing a highly refined form of “true religion” of some kind. On (...) the other side of this spectrum, it is claimed that Hume was committed to atheism, although due to social conditions at the time, this had to be (thinly) concealed or masked. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of Hume’s core concerns and arguments on this subject and to provide the reader with a framework for interpreting and assessing his various contributions. (shrink)

In this chapter, we analyze the relationships between the Internet and its users in terms of situated cognition theory. We first argue that the Internet is a new kind of cognitive ecology, providing almost constant access to a vast amount of digital information that is increasingly more integrated into our cognitive routines. We then briefly introduce situated cognition theory and its species of embedded, embodied, extended, distributed and collective cognition. Having thus set the stage, we begin by taking an embedded (...) cognition view and analyze how the Internet aids certain cognitive tasks. After that, we conceptualize how the Internet enables new kinds of embodied interaction, extends certain aspects of our embodiment, and examine how wearable technologies that monitor physiological, behavioral and contextual states transform the embodied self. On the basis of the degree of cognitive integration between a user and Internet resource, we then look at how and when the Internet extends our cognitive processes. We end this chapter with a discussion of distributed and collective cognition as facilitated by the Internet. (shrink)

Free Will & The Tragic Predicament : Making Sense of Williams -/- The discussion in this paper aims to make better sense of free will and moral responsibility by way of making sense of Bernard Williams’ significant and substantial contribution to this subject. Williams’ fundamental objective is to vindicate moral responsibility by way of freeing it from the distortions and misrepresentations imposed on it by “the morality system”. What Williams rejects, in particular, are the efforts of “morality” to further “deepen” (...) or “refine” the notion of the voluntary, with a view to securing “ultimate justice”. It is these aims and aspirations, he argues, that take us to the precipice of scepticism. In Shame and Necessity (1993) Williams advances a vindicatory genealogy that unmasks the “illusions” and “fantasies” of our current ethical ideas as they relate to agency and responsibility. What we are then left with is the task of “recasting our ethical conceptions” . It is here that Williams is especially insistent on the importance and value of historical consciousness and reflection. The role of our reflections about the Greeks and tragedy is precisely to show that in order to move forward, into the future, we need to first look back at where we have come from. The value of these “untimely” observations is that they provide us with alternatives and options that we might otherwise lack. What we discover, when we consider the Greeks, is their commitment to a “pessimism of strength” that rests on rejecting scepticism. It is this two-sided perspective on our ethical predicament that delivers a more truthful account of our human situation, one that will help us discard those illusions and fantasies of "morality" that we are “better off” without. An account of this kind refuses to accept an optimism that insists that any form of responsible ethical life must be one that is immune to the influence of luck and fate. This is the fundamental lesson that we can learn from the ancient Greeks and that Williams seeks to “recover” for us. (shrink)

The argument and discussion in this paper begins from the premise that Hume was an atheist who denied the religious or theist hypothesis. However, even if it is agreed that that Hume was an atheist this does not tell us where he stood on the question concerning the value of religion. Some atheists, such as Spinoza, have argued that society needs to maintain and preserve a form of “true religion”, which is required for the support of our ethical life. Others, (...) such as D’Holbach have argued that religion is not only false it is pernicious and it should be eradicated. This paper argues that Hume rejected both these proposals, on the ground that they rest, in different ways, on excessively optimistic assumptions. The sensible, practical form of atheism that Hume defends has a more modest and realistic aim, which is simply to restrict and limit the most pernicious forms of religion. Understood this way, Hume’s practical atheism is very different from the forms of “old” atheism associated with Spinoza and D’Holbach, as well as from the “new atheism” of thinkers such as Dawkins and Dennett. -/- Reprinted in Paul Russell, "Recasting Hume and Early Modern Philosophy: Selected Essays" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021): 340-383. (shrink)

Educational research is widely believed to be essentially empirical, consisting mainly of collecting and analysing data, with randomised control trials as the 'gold standard'. This book argues that good educational research is often philosophical in nature. Offering a critical overview of the current state of educational research, the authors argue that there are two factors in particular that distort it. One is that throughout the world it is expected to serve the interests of the state in securing educational improvements, as (...) measured by standardised examination results, and to demonstrate 'scientific' credentials sufficient to guarantee absence of ideological bias and carry conviction. The other is that learning to do educational research is generally seen as a matter of being trained in empirical 'research methods'. The authors demonstrate, by contrast, that good educational research needs the rigorous thinking characteristic of philosophy, and that philosophical treatments themselves sometimes constitute such research. (shrink)

A commitment to truth requires that you are open to receiving new evidence, even if that evidence contradicts your current beliefs. You should be open to changing your mind. However, this truism gives rise to the paradox of empathy. The paradox arises with the possibility of mental corruption through transformative change, and has consequences for how we should understand tolerance, disagreement, and the ability to have an open mind. I close with a discussion of how understanding this paradox provides a (...) new explanation for a certain kind of standoff between the believer and the skeptic with regard to religious belief. (shrink)

Focusing on the logistics of perception, this title introduces the author's understanding of 'picnolepsy' - the epileptic state of consciousness produced by speed, or rather, the consciousness invented by the subject through its very absence: the gaps, glitches, and speed bumps lacing through and defining it.

Three kinds of things may be creative: persons, processes, and products. The standard definition of creativity, used nearly by consensus in psychological research, focuses specifically on products and says that a product is creative if and only if it is new and valuable. We argue that at least one further condition is necessary for a product to be creative: it must have been produced by the right kind of process. We argue furthermore that this point has an interesting epistemological implication: (...) when you judge a product to be creative--attributing creativity--you are not just judging it to be new and valuable. Even if you did not witness how it was produced, you are also making a judgement about how it was produced. (shrink)

Ricoeur’s theory of productive imagination in previously unpublished lectures. The eminent philosopher Paul Ricoeur was devoted to the imagination. These previously unpublished lectures offer Ricoeur’s most significant and sustained reflections on creativity as he builds a new theory of imagination through close examination, moving from Aristotle, Pascal, Spinoza, Hume, and Kant to Ryle, Price, Wittgenstein, Husserl, and Sartre. These thinkers, he contends, underestimate humanity’s creative capacity. While the Western tradition generally views imagination as derived from the reproductive example of (...) the image, Ricoeur develops a theory about the mind’s power to produce new realities. Modeled most clearly in fiction, this productive imagination, Ricoeur argues, is available across conceptual domains. His theory provocatively suggests that we are not constrained by existing political, social, and scientific structures. Rather, our imaginations have the power to break through our conceptual horizons and remake the world. (shrink)

This chapter explores how to understand the contributions of experience, especially with respect to the role of cognitive science, in developing and assessing metaphysical theories of reality. Further, it develops a methodological basis for the idea that, independently of work in experimental philosophy focused on explications of concepts, contemporary metaphysical theories with a role for experiential evidence can be fruitfully connected to empirical work in psychology, especially cognitive science. While there are different ways to flesh out the connection between cognitive (...) science and metaphysics, one way to understand the methodological issue concerns the evaluation of Moorean facts about the manifest. The chapter deals with Moorean facts about experience, in particular, with features of the manifest image that are drawn from ordinary experience. It also explores how temporal experience relates to the nature of time. (shrink)

The discussion of the recently derived quantum Hamilton equations for a spinning particle is extended to spin measurement in a Stern–Gerlach experiment. We show that this theory predicts a continuously changing orientation of the particles magnetic moment over the course of its motion across the Stern–Gerlach apparatus. The final measurement results agree with experiment and with predictions of the Pauli equation. Furthermore, the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen–Bohm thought experiment is investigated, and the violation of Bells’s inequalities is reproduced within this stochastic mechanics approach. (...) The origin of the violation of Bell’s inequalities is traced to the the non-local nature of the velocity fields for an entangled state in the stochastic formalism, which is a result of a non-separable probability distribution of the considered particles. (shrink)

Le philosophe, collègue et ami de Michel Foucault, fait le portrait de ce dernier et présente les grands thèmes de sa pensée philosophique et politique.

We can be aware of particulars, properties, events, propositions, facts, skills, and qualia. We can also have knowledge of and be conscious of a similar range of objects. We can, furthermore, be ignorant of such objects. Awareness is quite clearly related to knowledge, consciousness, and ignorance. But how? This entry explores some of the ways that awareness is (not) related to knowledge, consciousness, and ignorance. It also explores some of the ways that awareness might be required by, and thus fundamental (...) to, these other relations. The emerging insight is that additional clarity on the nature of awareness stands poised to add clarity to a wide range of philosophical issues in both epistemology and the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This volume brings together for the first time a significant number of Reid's manuscript papers on natural history, physiology and materialist metaphysics. An important contribution not only to Reid studies but also to our understanding of eighteenth-century science and its context.

Meta-induction, in its various forms, is an imitative prediction method, where the prediction methods and the predictions of other agents are imitated to the extent that those methods or agents have proven successful in the past. In past work, Schurz demonstrated the optimality of meta-induction as a method for predicting unknown events and quantities. However, much recent discussion, along with formal and empirical work, on the Wisdom of Crowds has extolled the virtue of diverse and independent judgment as essential to (...) maintenance of 'wise crowds'. This suggests that meta-inductive prediction methods could undermine the wisdom of the crowd inasmuch these methods recommend that agents imitate the predictions of other agents. In this article, we evaluate meta-inductive methods with a focus on the impact on a group's performance that may result from including meta-inductivists among its members. In addition to considering cases of global accessibility (i.e., cases where the judgments of all members of the group are available to all of the group's members), we consider cases where agents only have access to the judgments of other agents within their own local neighborhoods. (shrink)

In "Freedom and Resentment" P.F. Strawson, famously, advances a strong form of naturalism that aims to discredit kcepticism about moral responsibility by way of approaching these issues through an account of our reactive attitudes. However, even those who follow Strawson's general strategy on this subject accept that his strong naturalist program needs to be substantially modified, if not rejected. One of the most influential and important efforts to revise and reconstruct the Strawsonian program along these lines has been provided by (...) R. Jay Wallace, who presents a "narrower" construal of our reactive attitudes in his own account of what is involved in holding an agent responsible. In this paper I argue that Wallace's narrow construal of responsibility comes at too high a cost and that naturalists of a broadly Strawsonian cast should reject it. Related to this point, I argue that Wallace's narrow conception of responsibility is a product of his effort to construct his account within the confines of "the morality system" (i.e. as described by Bernard Williams) and that this way of construing responsibility leads into series of unnecessary and misleading oppositions. A more plausible middle path, I maintain, can be found between Strawson's excessively strong naturalist program and Wallace's narrow and restrictive view of responsibility. (shrink)

Husserls Theorie der Intersubjektivitat ist alles andere als ein abgeschlossenes, endgultiges System. Sie ist vielmehr eine riesige begriffliche Baustelle, bei der die Baugeruste verschiedenartiger phanomenologischer Versuche und Ansatze uberall zu sehen sind. Die Grundabsicht der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es daher, die Perspektive auf die Problemkonstellation der Intersubjektivitat so weit wie moglich zu erweitern, um sowohl Husserls erste Versuche, dieses Problemfeld zu umgrenzen, als auch seinen spaten Entwurf einer transzendentalen Intersubjektivitatstheorie ins Auge zu fassen und als Etappen eines einheitlichen Bemuhens zu (...) sehen. Dabei wird auch der Schlusselcharakter des Intersubjektivitatsthemas deutlich, das eine Transformation der Husserlschen Transzendentalphilosophie veranlasst und vorangetrieben hat. (shrink)

This book moves away from the frameworks that have traditionally guided ethical decision-making in the Western clinical setting, towards an inclusive, non-coercive and, reflective dialogic approach to moral decision-making. Inspired in part by Jürgen Habermas's discourse theory of morality and principles of communicative action, the book offers a proportionist approach as a way of balancing out the wisdom in traditional frameworks, set in the actual reality of the clinical situation at hand. Putting this approach into practice requires having a conversation, (...) a dialogue or a discourse, with collaboration amongst all the stakeholders. The aim of the dialogue is to reach consensus in the decision, via mutual understanding of the values held by the patient and others whom they see as significant. This book aims to underscore the moral philosophical foundations for having a meaningful conversation. Life and Death Decision in the Clinical Setting is especially relevant in our contemporary era, characterised medically by an ever-increasing armamentarium of life-sustaining technology, but also by increasing multiculturalism, a multiplicity of faiths, and increasing value pluralism. (shrink)

Throughout much of the first half of the twentieth century, the free-will debate was largely concerned with the question of what kind of freedom was required for moral responsibility and whether the kind of freedom required was compatible with the thesis of determinism. This issue was itself addressed primarily with reference to the question of how freedom is related to alternative possibilities and what the relevant analysis of “could have done otherwise” comes to. The discussion of these topics made little (...) advance on the basic strategies and positions already developed and defended on either side of the compatibilist/incompatibilist divide in the preceding two centuries. When P. F. Strawson’s published his seminal article “Freedom and Resentment” in 1962 the dynamics of this debate were fundamentally altered. This is true both in respect of Strawson’s general methodology, which demands a more empirically informed approach, and in terms of his core conceptual framework, which identifies a different set of considerations and issues at the heart of this debate. In particular, whereas the traditional or classical debate focused on the problem of (moral) freedom, Strawson directed his attention to the role of moral sentiments or “reactive attitudes” as the key to understanding and resolving the core problems lying at the heart of this debate. This essay is devoted to a critical assessment of Strawson’s project and an analysis of the current debate concerning its prospects. (shrink)

Creativity pervades human life. It is the mark of individuality, the vehicle of self-expression, and the engine of progress in every human endeavor. It also raises a wealth of neglected and yet evocative philosophical questions: What is the role of consciousness in the creative process? How does the audience for a work for art influence its creation? How can creativity emerge through childhood pretending? Do great works of literature give us insight into human nature? Can a computer program really be (...) creative? How do we define creativity in the first place? Is it a virtue? What is the difference between creativity in science and art? Can creativity be taught? The new essays that comprise The Philosophy of Creativity take up these and other key questions and, in doing so, illustrate the value of interdisciplinary exchange. Written by leading philosophers and psychologists involved in studying creativity, the essays integrate philosophical insights with empirical research. CONTENTS I. Introduction Introducing The Philosophy of Creativity Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman II. The Concept of Creativity 1. An Experiential Account of Creativity Bence Nanay III. Aesthetics & Philosophy of Art 2. Creativity and Insight Gregory Currie 3. The Creative Audience: Some Ways in which Readers, Viewers and/or Listeners Use their Imaginations to Engage Fictional Artworks Noël Carroll 4. The Products of Musical Creativity Christopher Peacocke IV. Ethics & Value Theory 5. Performing Oneself Owen Flanagan 6. Creativity as a Virtue of Character Matthew Kieran V. Philosophy of Mind & Cognitive Science 7. Creativity and Not So Dumb Luck Simon Blackburn 8. The Role of Imagination in Creativity Dustin Stokes 9. Creativity, Consciousness, and Free Will: Evidence from Psychology Experiments Roy F. Baumeister, Brandon J. Schmeichel, and C. Nathan DeWall 10. The Origins of Creativity Elizabeth Picciuto and Peter Carruthers 11. Creativity and Artificial Intelligence: a Contradiction in Terms? Margaret Boden VI. Philosophy of Science 12. Hierarchies of Creative Domains: Disciplinary Constraints on Blind-Variation and Selective-Retention Dean Keith Simonton VII. Philosophy of Education (& Education of Philosophy) 13. Educating for Creativity Berys Gaut 14. Philosophical Heuristics Alan Hájek. (shrink)

The central thesis of this paper is that the scope and structure of Hume's Treatise of Human Nature is modelled, or planned, after that of Hobbes's The Elements of Law and that in this respect there exists an important and unique relationship between these works. This relationship is of some importance for at least two reasons. First, it is indicative of the fundamental similarity between Hobbes's and Hume's project of the study of man. Second, and what is more important, by (...) recognizing this relationship between Hume's and Hobbes's works we can come to appreciate the unity of the project of the Treatise itself. My discussion will proceed in three stages. In section I present the evidence for my central thesis. In the second section I shall consider why Hume does not, as one might expect, acknowledge this important debt to Hobbes in the Introduction to the Treatise or in the Abstract. Finally, in the third section I shall note a few points of some importance to the understanding of Hume's philosophy which this relationship between Hobbes's and Hume's work touches upon. (shrink)

Can we know truth even though certain proof is unattainable? Can we be known by Truth? Is there a relationship between belief and truth, and if so, what is the nature of that relationship? Do we need to have faith in reason and in real meaning to be able to reason towards truth? These are the sorts of questions this book seeks to address. In Faith's Knowledge, Paul Tyson argues that all knowledge that aims at truth is always the (...) knowledge of faith. If this is the case, then--against our modernist cultural assumptions about knowledge--truth cannot be had by proof. Yet, if this is true, then mere information and simply objective facts do not (for us as knowers) exist. Knowledge is always embedded in belief, and knowledge and belief is always expressed in relationships, histories, narratives, shared meanings, and power. Hence, a theological sociology of knowledge emerges out of these explorations in thinking about knowledge as a function of faith."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

This entry introduces the Lockean Thesis and sketches the ways in which the lottery paradox, the preface paradox, and the problem of merely statistical evidence can be used to put pressure on the Lockean Thesis.

Supporters of G.W.F. Hegel's philosophy have largely shied away from relating his logic to modern symbolic or mathematical approaches. While it has predominantly been the non-Greek discipline of algebra that has informed modern mathematical logic, philosopher Paul Redding argues that the approaches of Plato and Aristotle to logic were deeply shaped by the arithmetic and geometry of classical Greek culture. And by ignoring the fact that Hegel's logic also has this deep mathematical dimension, conventional Hegelians have missed some of (...) Hegel's greatest insights. In Conceptual Harmonies, Redding develops an account of Hegel's logic against a classical and modern historical background that is rarely considered. He stresses Hegel's attention to the Platonic background of Aristotle's original syllogistic and beyond. He then links these Platonic elements to Leibniz's modern revitalization of the logical tradition and then to new forms of algebraic geometry emerging in Hegel's lifetime. Redding thereby reestablishes aspects of Hegel's philosophy that are essential if Hegel is to be taken as a thinker relevant not only to contemporary philosophy, but also to current philosophical conceptions of logic. (shrink)

In practice theoretical terms are open-ended in not being attached to anything completely specific. This raises a problem for scientific realism: If there is no one completely specific kind of thing that might be in the extension of “atom”, what is it to claim that atoms exist? A realist’s solution is to say that in theoretical contexts of mature atom-theories there are things that play the role of atoms as characterized in that theory-context. The paper closes with a laundry list (...) of problems that this more careful statement of scientific realism still faces. (shrink)

Conventionality and aptness are two dimensions of metaphorical sentences thought to play an important role in determining how quick and easy it is to process a metaphor. Conventionality reflects the familiarity of a metaphor whereas aptness reflects the degree to which a metaphor vehicle captures important features of a metaphor topic. In recent years it has become clear that operationalizing these two constructs is not as simple as asking naïve raters for subjective judgments. It has been found that ratings of (...) aptness and conventionality are highly correlated, which has led some researchers to pursue alternative methods for measuring the constructs. Here, in four experiments, we explore the underlying reasons for the high correlation in ratings of aptness and conventionality, and question the construct validity of various methods for measuring the two dimensions. We find that manipulating the processing fluency of a metaphorical sentence by means of familiarization to similar senses of the metaphor (“in vivo conventionalization”) influences ratings of the sentence's aptness. This misattribution may help explain why subjective ratings of aptness and conventionality are highly correlated. In addition, we find other reasons to question the construct validity of conventionality and aptness measures: for instance, we find that conventionality is context dependent and thus not attributable to a metaphor vehicle alone, and we find that ratings of aptness take more into account than they should. (shrink)

The present chapter discusses the implications of virtual reality for the theory and practice of embodied cognitive science. The chapter discusses how recent technological innovations are poised to reshape our understanding of the materially-embodied and environmentally-situated mind, providing us with a new means of studying the mechanisms responsible for intelligent behavior. The chapter also discusses how a synthetically-oriented shift in our approach to embodied intelligence alters our view of familiar problems, most notably the distinction between embedded and extended cognition. The (...) chapter concludes by challenging the idea that virtual worlds ought to be seen as nothing more than a scientific ‘sandpit’ for the study of the embodied mind. Some forms of embodied intelligence can, I suggest, exist solely in virtual reality. In this sense, the ‘Matrix’ is not just a means of testing ideas about the forms of embodied intelligence that inhabit our own physical reality; it is also a means of creating entirely new forms of embodied intelligence. It is by building virtual worlds that we open the door to a new reality—one that is home to a potentially infinite variety of embodied, embedded, and perhaps even extended beings. (shrink)

Conservatism about perceptual justification tells us that we cannot have perceptual justification to believe p unless we also have justification to believe that perceptual experiences are reliable. There are many ways to maintain this thesis, ways that have not been sufficiently appreciated. Most of these ways lead to at least one of two problems. The first is an over-intellectualization problem, whereas the second problem concerns the satisfaction of the epistemic basing requirement on justified belief. I argue that there is at (...) least one Conservative view that survives both difficulties, a view which has the further ability to undercut a crucial consideration that has supported Dogmatist views about perceptual justification. The final section explores a tension between Conservatism and the prospects of having a completely general account of propositional justification. Ironically, the problem is that Conservatives seem committed to making the acquisition of propositional justification too easy. My partial defense of Conservatism concludes by suggesting possible solutions to this problem. (shrink)

Countersexual society -- Countersexual reversal practices -- Theories -- Countersexual reading exercise -- On philosophy as a better way of taking it in the ass: deleuze and "molecular homosexuality.