Spatial planning policies are fundamental blocks for the implementation of sustainable development goals. Still, despite the growing adoption of environmental proxies, as it is nature-based solutions, the study of their institutionalization in policy and spatial planning is in the early stages. Simultaneously, the use of discursive and interpretative methods to unfold the social structures related to environmental issues is growing, nonetheless, their application is more common to supranational narratives. This article proposes a conceptual and methodological approach to using critical discourse (...) analysis for studying the institutionalization and conceptualization of nature-related issues in policy and spatial planning at national and local levels. This is done by discussing the ontological relations between the discursive institutionalist theory and critical discourse analysis as a methodology. It contains four main stages: clarifying the analytical focus; mapping policy and planning documents; analyzing macro discourse, which includes critical textual analysis, text-type analysis, and intertextuality analysis, and, at last, the fourth phase, interpretation within the institutional context. It provides a tool for researchers less familiar with linguistics but interested in performing discourse analysis to understand the integration of environmental narratives within policy and spatial planning. (shrink)

This reissue of his collection of early essays, Logico-Linguistic Papers, is published with a brand new introduction by Professor Strawson but, apart from minor ...

A complete system of classical Aristotelian logic intended for honors high school and college.

Ohne Rücksicht auf disziplinäre Schranken bringt dieses Buch verschiedene nicht-reduktionistische Lerntheorien miteinander ins Gespräch. In einem offenen Diskurs, der die Konzepte zueinander in Beziehung setzt, werden die unterschiedlichen Perspektiven kritisch abgewogen und hinsichtlich ihrer Stärken und Schwächen diskutiert.

Delo se loteva vprašanja aktualnosti pojma subjekta v filozofiji in politiki skozi analizo tistih avtorjev, ki so ga domnevno najbolj radikalno pokopali: pokaže, da vznik radikalno novega in problematika subjekta zavzema osrednje mesto v Deleuzovi filozofiji, kakor tudi v Lyotardovi pozni misli posvečeni praznini, v Foucaultovi obravnavi biopolitike in biooblasti, v delu Negrija in Hardta o Imperiju, ter nazadnje v Badioujevi predelavi temeljnih filozofskih kategorij biti, resnice in subjekta, na osnovi katerih je dandanes znova možna renesansa filozofije. Ta ima po (...) Badiouju štiri razsežnosti, ki se v delu Vznik subjekta nenehno prepletajo: »V osnovi želja filozofije implicira razsežnost upora: ni filozofije brez nezadovoljstva mišljenja v njegovem soočenju s svetom, kakršen je. Pa vendar želja filozofije vključuje tudi logiko: to je, prepričanje v moč argumenta in uma.«. (shrink)

While Hermann Levin Goldschmidt didn’t read Yiddish anarchists, there seems to have been a convergent evolution in their thinking. Goldschmidt’s looking up to Jewish lore as a source of liberating creativity is commonly encountered in Yiddish anarchist texts. His view of action as a constant response to internal and external challenges in the struggle for an open future is developed by Isaac Nachman Steinberg on the basis of nineteenth-century vitalism. Goldschmidt’s theory of anarchist individualism as willed self-limiting solidarity has a (...) compelling parallel in Hillel Solotaroff’s view of history. His use of impressionism and photography to eternalize the immediacy of human actuality is akin to Rudolf Rocker’s championing of decadent literature. In both cases, the goal of anarchism is not a dictatorship of the former downtrodden, but a continuous and contradictory evolution of freedom in ever-changing contexts. (shrink)

Metz holds that we can use African communal ethics to constitute global economic practices such as appropriation, production, distribution and consumption in such a way that promotes harmonious relations. In this article, I will show that Metz’s reformist approach to constituting the global economic practices is problematic as it fails to deal with the fundamental problem that pertains to a racialised world order that is structurally configured by coloniality of being. I will show that reformist approaches such as Metz’s use (...) of African communal ethics to constitute global economic practices in a way that promotes harmonious relations are undesirable attempts that are opposed and curtailed by a structural racialised logic/ontology of the world that governs and supervises the evolution of the world economic structures and practices in a way which undermines harmonious relations and in a way which causes economic marginalisation and impoverishment of historically disadvantaged indigenous Africans. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:Karl Marx’s acerbic observation in the opening lines of The Eighteenth Brumaire that “all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” may be profitably applied to a reconsideration of literary farce sui generis, a genre represented in this article by a long-neglected work of utopian fiction, Archibald Marshall’s Upsidonia (1915). Although Upsidonia’s current disregard is arguably undeserved, the article’s chief interest is not to reclaim the novel on aesthetic (...) grounds but to illuminate the mechanics of what Marx would call its “serious buffoonery.” In its persistent reversal of capitalist principles and relations, Upsidonia naturally invites readers to revisit Marx, whose mordant gambit may serve as a key to Marshall’s own farcical plot and praxis, rooted in return and repetition, the essential maneuvers of farce itself. (shrink)

This introduction by leading scholar Peter Trawny is the first to tackle the Black Notebooks, whose recent publication revealed the extent of Heidegger's anti-Semitism. Trawny directly confronts the most problematic aspects of Heidegger's thought, also fully surveying his work, from early writings to his magnum opus, Being and Time.

"How do we go about weighing evidence, testing hypotheses and making inferences? According to the model of 'inference to the Best explanation', we work out what to inter from the evidence by thinking about what would actually explain that evidence, and we take the ability of a hypothesis to explain the evidence as a sign that the hypothesis is correct. In inference to the Best Explanation, Peter Lipton gives this important and influential idea the development and assessment it deserves." (...) "The second edition has been substantially enlarged and reworked, with a new chapter on the relationship between explanation and Bayesianism, and an extension and defence of the account of contractive explanation. It also includes an expanded defence of the claims that our inferences really are guided by diverse explanatory considerations, and that this pattern of inference can take us towards the truth. This edition of Inference to the Best Explanation has also been updated throughout and incudes a new bibliography."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

Do we have introspective access to our own thoughts? Peter Carruthers challenges the consensus that we do: he argues that access to our own thoughts is always interpretive, grounded in perceptual awareness and sensory imagery. He proposes a bold new theory of self-knowledge, with radical implications for understanding of consciousness and agency.

This book is a comprehensive development and defense of one of the guiding assumptions of evolutionary psychology: that the human mind is composed of a large number of semi-independent modules. The Architecture of the Mind has three main goals. One is to argue for massive mental modularity. Another is to answer a 'How possibly?' challenge to any such approach. The first part of the book lays out the positive case supporting massive modularity. It also outlines how the thesis should best (...) be developed, and articulates the notion of 'module' that is in question. Then the second part of the book takes up the challenge of explaining how the sorts of flexibility and creativity that are distinctive of the human mind could possibly be grounded in the operations of a massive number of modules.Peter Carruthers's third aim is to show how the various components of the mind are likely to be linked and interact with one another - indeed, this is crucial to demonstrating how the human mind, together with its familiar capacities, can be underpinned by a massively modular set of mechanisms. He outlines and defends the basic framework of a perception / belief / desire / planning / motor-control architecture, as well as detailing the likely components and their modes of connectivity. Many specific claims about the place within this architecture of natural language, of a mind-reading system, and others are explained and motivated. A number of novel proposals are made in the course of these discussions, one of which is that creative human thought depends upon a prior kind of creativity of action.Written with unusual clarity and directness, and surveying an extensive range of research in cognitive science, this book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the nature and organization of the mind. (shrink)

Claims about consciousness in animals are often made in support of their moral standing. Peter Carruthers argues that there is no fact of the matter about animal consciousness and it is of no scientific or ethical significance. Sympathy for an animal can be grounded in its mental states, but should not rely on assumptions about its consciousness.

How can phenomenal consciousness exist as an integral part of a physical universe? How can the technicolour phenomenology of our inner lives be created out of the complex neural activities of our brains? Many have despaired of finding answers to these questions; and many have claimed that human consciousness is inherently mysterious. Peter Carruthers argues, on the contrary, that the subjective feel of our experience is fully explicable in naturalistic terms. Drawing on a variety of interdisciplinary resources, he develops (...) and defends a novel account in terms of higher-order thought. He shows that this can explain away some of the more extravagant claims made about phenomenal consciousness, while substantively explaining the key subjectivity of our experience. Written with characteristic clarity and directness, and surveying a wide range of extant theories, this book is essential reading for all those within philosophy and psychology interested in the problem of consciousness. (shrink)

The Centered Mind offers a new view of the nature and causal determinants of both reflective thinking and, more generally, the stream of consciousness. Peter Carruthers argues that conscious thought is always sensory-based, relying on the resources of the working-memory system. This system enables sensory images to be sustained and manipulated through attentional signals directed at midlevel sensory areas of the brain. When abstract conceptual representations are bound into these images, we consciously experience ourselves as making judgments or arriving (...) at decisions. However, our amodal propositional attitudes are never actually among the contents of this stream of conscious reflection. Our beliefs, goals, and decisions are only ever active in the background of consciousness, working behind the scenes. They are never themselves conscious.Drawing on extensive knowledge of the scientific literature on working memory and related topics, Carruthers challenges the central assumptions of many philosophers. In addition to arguing that non-sensory propositional attitudes are never conscious, he also shows that they are never under direct intentional control. Written with his usual clarity and directness, The Centered Mind will be essential reading for all philosophers and cognitive scientists interested in the nature of human thought processes. (shrink)

Since its original publication in 1975, this groundbreaking work has awakened millions of people to the existence of "speciesism"—our systematic disregard of nonhuman animals—inspiring a worldwide movement to transform our attitudes to animals and eliminate the cruelty we inflict on them. In Animal Liberation, author Peter Singer exposes the chilling realities of today’s "factory farms" and product-testing procedures—destroying the spurious justifications behind them, and offering alternatives to what has become a profound environmental and social as well as moral issue. (...) An important and persuasive appeal to conscience, fairness, decency, and justice, it is essential reading for the supporter and the skeptic alike. (shrink)

Do animals have moral rights? In contrast to the philosophical gurus of the animal rights movement, whose opinion has held moral sway in recent years, Peter Carruthers here claims that they do not. He explores a variety of moral theories, arguing that animals lack direct moral significance. This provocative but judiciously argued book will appeal to all those interested in animal rights, whatever their initial standpoint. It will also serve as a lively introduction to ethics, demonstrating why theoretical issues (...) in ethics actually matter. (shrink)

The emergence of experimental philosophy was one of the most significant developments in the early modern period. However, it is often overlooked in modern scholarship, despite being associated with leading figures such as Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, David Hume and Christian Wolff. Ranging from the early Royal Society of London in the seventeenth century to the uptake of experimental philosophy in Paris and Berlin in the eighteenth, this book provides new terms of reference for (...) understanding early modern philosophy and science, and its eventual eclipse in the shadow of post-Kantian notions of empiricism and rationalism. Experimental Philosophy and the Origins of Empiricism is an integrated history of early modern experimental philosophy which challenges the rationalism and empiricism historiography that has dominated Anglophone history of philosophy for more than a century. (shrink)

Peter Carruthers's essays on consciousness and related issues have had a substantial impact on the field, and many of his best are now collected here in revised form. The first half of the volume is devoted to developing, elaborating, and defending against competitors one particular sort of reductive explanation of phenomenal consciousness, which Carruthers now refers to as 'dual-content theory'. Phenomenal consciousness - the feel of experience - is supposed to constitute the 'hard problem' for a scientific world view, (...) and many have claimed that it is an irredeemable mystery. But Carruthers here claims to have explained it. He argues that phenomenally conscious states are ones that possess both an 'analog' intentional content and a corresponding higher-order analog content, representing the first-order content of the experience. It is the higher-order analog content that enables our phenomenally conscious experiences to present themselves to us, and that constitutes their distinctive subjective aspect, or feel.The next two chapters explore some of the differences between conscious experience and conscious thought, and argue for the plausibility of some kind of eliminativism about conscious thinking. Then the final four chapters focus on the minds of non-human animals. Carruthers argues that even if the experiences of animals aren't phenomenally conscious, this needn't prevent the frustrations and sufferings of animals from being appropriate objects of sympathy and concern. Nor need it mean that there is any sort of radical 'Cartesian divide' between our minds and theirs of deep significance for comparative psychology. In the final chapter, he argues provocatively that even insects have minds that include a belief/desire/perception psychology much like our own. So mindedness and phenomenal consciousness couldn't be further apart.Carruthers's writing throughout is distinctively clear and direct. The collection will be of great interest to anyone working in philosophy of mind or cognitive science. (shrink)

Throughout the history of the Western world, science has possessed an extraordinary amount of authority and prestige. And while its pedestal has been jostled by numerous evolutions and revolutions, science has always managed to maintain its stronghold as the knowing enterprise that explains how the natural world works: we treat such legendary scientists as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein with admiration and reverence because they offer profound and sustaining insight into the meaning of the universe. In The Intelligibility of Nature (...) , Peter Dear considers how science as such has evolved and how it has marshaled itself to make sense of the world. His intellectual journey begins with a crucial observation: that the enterprise of science is, and has been, directed toward two distinct but frequently conflated ends—doing and knowing. The ancient Greeks developed this distinction of value between craft on the one hand and understanding on the other, and according to Dear, that distinction has survived to shape attitudes toward science ever since. Teasing out this tension between doing and knowing during key episodes in the history of science—mechanical philosophy and Newtonian gravitation, elective affinities and the chemical revolution, enlightened natural history and taxonomy, evolutionary biology, the dynamical theory of electromagnetism, and quantum theory—Dear reveals how the two principles became formalized into a single enterprise, science, that would be carried out by a new kind of person, the scientist. Finely nuanced and elegantly conceived, The Intelligibility of Nature will be essential reading for aficionados and historians of science alike. (shrink)

Peter Baumann develops and defends a distinctive version of epistemic contextualism, the view that the truth conditions or the meaning of knowledge attributions of the form "S knows that p" can vary with the context of the attributor. The first part of the book examines arguments for contextualism and develops Baumann's version. It begins by dealing with the argument from cases and ordinary usage, and then addresses "theoretical" arguments, from reliability and from luck. The second part of the book (...) discusses the problems contextualism faces, to which it must respond, and provides an extension of contextualism beyond epistemology. The third part of the book is focused on some major objections to contextualism and alternative views, namely subject-sensitive invariantism, contrastivism and relativism. (shrink)

This book explores the role of artificial intelligence in the development of a claim that morality is person-made and rational. Professor Danielson builds moral robots that do better than amoral competitors in a tournament of games like the Prisoners Dilemma and Chicken. The book thus engages in current controversies over the adequacy of the received theory of rational choice. It sides with Gauthier and McClennan, who extend the devices of rational choice to include moral constraint. Artificial Morality goes further, by (...) promoting communication, testing and copying of principles and by stressing empirical tests. (shrink)

This book presents the first integrated treatment of the philosophy of Robert Boyle, one of the leading English natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution.

There are at least three things we might mean by "ethics in robotics": the ethical systems built into robots, the ethics of people who design and use robots, and the ethics of how people treat robots. This paper argues that the best approach to robot ethics is one which addresses all three of these, and to do this it ought to consider robots as socio-technical systems. By so doing, it is possible to think of a continuum of agency that lies (...) between amoral and fully autonomous moral agents. Thus, robots might move gradually along this continuum as they acquire greater capabilities and ethical sophistication. It also argues that many of the issues regarding the distribution of responsibility in complex socio-technical systems might best be addressed by looking to legal theory, rather than moral theory. This is because our overarching interest in robot ethics ought to be the practical one of preventing robots from doing harm, as well as preventing humans from unjustly avoiding responsibility for their actions. (shrink)

Do we think in natural language? Or is language only for communication? Much recent work in philosophy and cognitive science assumes the latter. In contrast, Peter Carruthers argues that much of human conscious thinking is conducted in the medium of natural language sentences. However, this does not commit him to any sort of Whorfian linguistic relativism, and the view is developed within a framework that is broadly nativist and modularist. His study will be essential reading for all those interested (...) in the nature and significance of natural language, whether they come from philosophy, psychology or linguistics. (shrink)

: We question the claim, common since Duhem, that sixteenth century astronomy, and especially the Wittenberg interpretation of Copernicus, was instrumentalistic rather than realistic. We identify a previously unrecognized Wittenberg astronomer, Edo Hildericus (Hilderich von Varel), who presents a detailed exposition of Copernicus's cosmology that is incompatible with instrumentalism. Quotations from other sixteenth century astronomers show that knowledge of the real configuration of the heavens was unattainable practically, rather than in principle. Astronomy was limited to quia demonstrations, although demonstration propter (...) quid remained the ideal. We suggest that Osiander's notorious preface to Copernicus expresses these sixteenth century commonplaces rather than twentieth century instrumentalism, and that neither `realism', nor `instrumentalism', in their modern meanings, apply to sixteenth century astronomy. (shrink)

The question of toleration matters more than ever. The politics of the twenty-first century is replete with both the successes and, all too often, the failures of toleration. Yet a growing number of thinkers and practitioners have argued against toleration. Some believe that liberal democracies are better served by different principles, such as respect of, or recognition for, people's ways of life. Others argue that because the liberal state should be entirely neutral or indifferent towards people's ways of life, it (...) can no longer be tolerant - it has no grounds on which it can object, and so there is nothing left to tolerate.Respecting Toleration provides a new, original, and provocative take on the question of toleration and its application to the politics of contemporary diversity. The volume demonstrates how toleration - despite its critics - is essential to any liberal political order. Peter Balint argues that from a conceptual viewpoint, toleration is entirely compatible with liberal politics; and from a normative viewpoint, it is utterly essential. The volume argues that if one cares about people living divergent lives, then it is liberal toleration that should be respected by legislators and policy makers, and not people's differences. It is a book that will shape the debate and demand a response from all who are interested in which political structures most fairly accommodate the competing ways of life that characterise contemporary diversity.Key Features:Develops a new framework of political tolerationProvides a clear demonstration and analysis of complex concepts and argumentsProvides extensive practical and theoretical examples. (shrink)

This book explores the role of artificial intelligence in the development of a claim that morality is person-made and rational. Professor Danielson builds moral robots that do better than amoral competitors in a tournament of games like the Prisoners Dilemma and Chicken. The book thus engages in current controversies over the adequacy of the received theory of rational choice. It sides with Gauthier and McClennan, who extend the devices of rational choice to include moral constraint. _Artificial Morality_ goes further, by (...) promoting communication, testing and copying of principles and by stressing empirical tests. (shrink)

A study of Hannah Arendt's indictment of social science, approaches to totalitarianism (Bolshevism and National Socialism), and of the robust responses of her ...

For historical epistemology to succeed, it must adopt a defensible set of categories to characterise scientific activity over time. In historically orientated philosophy of science during the twentieth century, the original categories of theory and observation were supplemented or replaced by categories like paradigm, research program and research tradition. Underlying all three proposals was talk about conceptual systems and conceptual structures, attributed to individual scientists or to research communities, however there has been little general agreement on the nature of these (...) structures. Recent experimental research in cognitive science has considerably refined the theory of concepts. Drawing upon the results of that research, philosophers can construct more concrete and empirically defensible representations of conceptual systems. I will suggest that this research supports a modest and useful sense of both normal and revolutionary science, not as epistemological continuities or discontinuities, but as particular patterns of conceptual change. (shrink)

In recent years, evolutionary theorists have come to recognize that the reductionist, individualist, gene-centered approach to evolution cannot sufficiently account for the emergence of complex biological systems over time. Peter A. Corning has been at the forefront of a new generation of complexity theorists who have been working to reshape the foundations of evolutionary theory. Well known for his Synergism Hypothesis—a theory of complexity in evolution that assigns a key causal role to various forms of functional synergy—Corning puts this (...) theory into a much broader framework in _Holistic Darwinism_, addressing many of the issues and concepts associated with the evolution of complex systems. Corning's paradigm embraces and integrates many related theoretical developments of recent years, from multilevel selection theory to niche construction theory, gene-culture coevolution theory, and theories of self-organization. Offering new approaches to thermodynamics, information theory, and economic analysis, Corning suggests how all of these domains can be brought firmly within what he characterizes as a post–neo-Darwinian evolutionary synthesis. (shrink)

This article outlines a training activity that can enable both business and governmental professionals to translate the principles in a code of ethics to a specific list of company-related behaviors ranging from highly ethical to highly unethical. It also explores how this list can become a concrete model to follow in making ethical decisions. The article begins with a discussion as to what will improve ethical decision making in business and government. This leads us to explore the factors that can (...) most easily lead to improvement, namely a comprehensive code of conduct and employee training. From there we look at the Critical Incident Technique as a training strategy that has the potential for identifying those behaviors that distinguish really outstanding behaviors from those that go by the book, and can be used to encourage more independent thinking and to set expectations for future decisions. If employees are given the skills and examples that will enable them to make better decisions, they can apply them to any situation. (shrink)

This paper deals with the core version of the Trolley Problem. In one case many people favor an act which will bring about the death of one person but save five other persons. In another case most people would refuse to “sacrifice” one person in order to save five other lives. Since the two cases seem similar in all relevant respects, we have to explain and justify the diverging verdicts. Since I don’t find current proposals of a solution convincing, I (...) propose an alternative one according to which —but not —violates two forms of equality. I also test the underlying egalitarian principle against other cases. I argue that it offers a good explanation and also a normative justification of our intuitive verdicts about the cases. (shrink)

Abstract One of the most popular objections against epistemic contextualism is the so-called ?warranted assertability? objection. The objection is based on the possibility of a ?warranted assertability manoeuvre?, also known as a WAM. I argue here that WAMs are of very limited scope and importance. An important class of cases cannot be dealt with by WAMs. No analogue of WAMs is available for these cases. One should thus not take WAMs too seriously in the debate about epistemic contextualism.

Is knowledge necessary or sufficient or both necessary and sufficient for acceptable practical reasoning and rational action? Several authors (e.g., Williamson, Hawthorne, and Stanley) have recently argued that the answer to these questions is positive. In this paper I present several objections against this view (both in its basic form as well in more developed forms). I also offer a sketch of an alternative view: What matters for the acceptability of practical reasoning in at least many cases (and in all (...) the cases discussed by the defenders of a strong link between knowledge and practical reasoning) is not so much knowledge but expected utility. (shrink)