An observation of Hume’s has received a lot of attention over the last decade and a half: Although we can standardly imagine the most implausible scenarios, we encounter resistance when imagining propositions at odds with established moral (or perhaps more generally evaluative) convictions. The literature is ripe with ‘solutions’ to this so-called ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance’. Few, however, question the plausibility of the empirical assumption at the heart of the puzzle. In this paper, we explore empirically whether the difficulty we (...) witness in imagining certain propositions is indeed due to claim type (evaluative v. non-evaluative) or whether it is much rather driven by mundane features of content. Our findings suggest that claim type plays but a marginal role, and that there might hence not be much of a ‘puzzle’ to be solved. (shrink)

British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill is the author of several essays, including Utilitarianism - a defence of Jeremy Bentham's principle applied to the field of ethics - and The Subjection of Women, which advocates legal equality between the sexes. This work, arguably his most famous contribution to political philosophy and theory, was first published in 1859, and remains a major influence upon contemporary liberal political thought. In it, Mill argues for a limitation of the power of government (...) and society over the individual, and defines liberty as an absolute individual right. According to the still much debated 'harm principle', power against the individual can only be exercised to prevent harm to others. Full of contemporary relevance, this essay also defends freedom of speech as a necessary condition of social and intellectual progress. (shrink)

Teaching research methods is especially challenging because we not only wish to convey formal knowledge and encourage critical thinking, as with any course, but also to enable our students dream up meaningful research projects, translate them into logical steps, conduct the research in a professional manner, analyze the data, and write up the project in APA style. We also wish to spark interest in the topics of research papers, and in the intellectual challenge of creating a research report, but we (...) have learned just how difficult these goals can be from teaching undergraduates and from serving as journal reviewers: many submissions contain flaws such as elementary errors of logic (e.g., using a null control condition instead of a placebo or dummy treatment), tangled statistics, a lack of graphs, and ungrammatical, unclear writing that violates APA rules. Yet these manuscripts are written by university faculty, often with doctorates and years of experience. Even published papers may contain egregious faults (Standing & McKelvie, 1986). And although we have both published widely, we still hone our skills. It requires optimism to expect that a typical undergraduate will do better, on the basis of just a year or two of studies in psychology. In this paper, we describe a systematic set of methodology courses and two specific practices that we think can help. Methodology Courses as the Backbone of our Psychology Program How can methodology courses promote undergraduate involvem... (shrink)

Reissued in its revised 1866 second edition, this work by John Stuart Mill discusses the positivist views of the French philosopher and social scientist Auguste Comte. Comte is regarded as the founder of positivism, the doctrine that all knowledge must derive from sensory experience. The two-part text was originally printed as two articles in the Westminster Review in 1865. Part 1 offers an analysis of Comte's earlier works on positivism in the natural and social sciences, while Part 2 considers (...) its application in areas such as religion and ethics. Mill states that Comte is the first philosopher who has attempted to extend positivism 'to all objects of human knowledge'. Despite being critical of a number of Comte's views, such as the exclusion of psychology from positivist science, Mill acknowledges his fellow philosopher's influence in the face of common negative perceptions of the positivist movement. (shrink)

Thought experiments are a means of imaginative reasoning that lie at the heart of philosophy, from the pre-Socratics to the modern era, and they also play central roles in a range of fields, from physics to politics. The Routledge Companion to Thought Experiments is an invaluable guide and reference source to this multifaceted subject. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion covers the following important areas: -/- · the history of thought experiments, from antiquity to (...) the trolley problem and quantum non-locality; -/- · thought experiments in the humanities, arts, and sciences, including ethics, physics, theology, biology, mathematics, economics, and politics; -/- · theories about the nature of thought experiments; -/- · new discussions concerning the impact of experimental philosophy, cross-cultural comparison studies, metaphilosophy, computer simulations, idealization, dialectics, cognitive science, the artistic nature of thought experiments, and metaphysical issues. -/- This broad ranging Companion goes backwards through history and sideways across disciplines. It also engages with philosophical perspectives from empiricism, rationalism, naturalism, skepticism, pluralism, contextualism, and neo-Kantianism to phenomenology. This volume will be valuable for anyone studying the methods of philosophy or any discipline that employs thought experiments, as well as anyone interested in the power and limits of the mind. (shrink)

This book intends to establish, against his numerous modern critics, that the ancient philosopher Parmenides was a mystic. Instead of arriving at his conclusions by cold reason, Parmenides found the unity of Being, which he called “the Truth,” by turning to a life of meditation.

From machine learning and computer vision to robotics and natural language processing, the application of data science and artificial intelligence is expected to transform health care (Ce...

When philosophers discuss the possibility of machines making scientific discoveries, they typically focus on discoveries in physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics. Observing the rapid increase of computer-use in science, however, it becomes natural to ask whether there are any scientific domains out of reach for machine discovery. For example, could machines also make discoveries in qualitative social science? Is there something about humans that makes us uniquely suited to studying humans? Is there something about machines that would bar them from (...) such activity? A close look at the methodology of interpretive social science reveals several abilities necessary to make a social scientific discovery, and one capacity necessary to possess any of them is imagination. For machines to make discoveries in social science, therefore, they must possess imagination algorithms. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been increased interest in the role of religion in the reform of nursing during the mid‐nineteenth century. However, less is known about how ‘party’ disputes between evangelicals and followers of the ‘Oxford Movement’ may have affected nursing. This study examines a proposal to create a nursing association for the Diocese of Lichfield in 1864, which leads to a public dispute concerning the ‘ecclesiastical’ nature of the organisation. Leading evangelicals in Derby campaigned against the idea of (...) nurses belonging to a ‘sisterhood’. This resulted in two rival organisations being created in 1865. This paper reports upon the nature and origins of the dispute within the diocese, unsuccessful attempts to draw Florence Nightingale into the dispute and the relative success of the two institutions. The results of this research indicate that the importance of context and of place must be recognised when studying the history of nursing. This research is based mainly, upon newspaper reports, correspondence and miscellaneous sources, including biographies as there are few surviving records from the two organisations under scrutiny. (shrink)

Securitizing Islam examines the impact of 9/11 on the lives and perceptions of individuals, focusing on the ways in which identities in Britain have been affected in relation to Islam. 'Securitization' describes the processes by which a particular group or issue comes to be seen as a threat, and thus subject to the perceptions and actions which go with national security. Croft applies this idea to the way in which the attitudes of individuals to their security and to Islam and (...) Muslims have been transformed, affecting the everyday lives of both Muslims and non-Muslims. He argues that Muslims have come to be seen as the 'Other', outside the contemporary conception of Britishness. Reworking securitisation theory and drawing in the sociology of ontological security studies, Securitizing Islam produces a theoretically innovative framework for understanding a contemporary phenomenon that affects the everyday lives of millions. (shrink)

Philosophical conceptual analysis is an experimental method. Focusing on this helps to justify it from the skepticism of experimental philosophers who follow Weinberg, Nichols & Stich. To explore the experimental aspect of philosophical conceptual analysis, I consider a simpler instance of the same activity: everyday linguistic interpretation. I argue that this, too, is experimental in nature. And in both conceptual analysis and linguistic interpretation, the intuitions considered problematic by experimental philosophers are necessary but epistemically irrelevant. They are like variables introduced (...) into mathematical proofs which drop out before the solution. Or better, they are like the hypotheses that drive science, which do not themselves need to be true. In other words, it does not matter whether or not intuitions are accurate as descriptions of the natural kinds that undergird philosophical concepts; the aims of conceptual analysis can still be met. (shrink)

Stuart Hampshire, one of the most eminent British philosophers of the twentieth century, will be perhaps best remembered for his work on the seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza, all of which is gathered now in this volume. Among the great thinkers of modern times, only Spinoza created a complete system of philosophy that rivals Plato's, with crucial contributions to every major philosophical topic. Hampshire's classic 1951 book Spinoza remains the best introduction to this thinker, and it is reprinted here. But what (...) gives particular interest to this new volume is the first publication of Hampshire's last work 'Spinoza and Spinozism', an extended presentation of a Spinozist philosophical worldview. Hampshire's influential 1962 essay 'Spinoza and the Idea of Freedom' is also included. Spinoza and Spinozism is thus an ideal companion to the study and interpretation of this great philosopher. (shrink)

Imagination is extremely important for science, yet very little is known about how scientists actually use it. Are scientists taught to imagine? What do they value imagination for? How do social and disciplinary factors shape it? How is the labor of imagining distributed? These questions should be high priority for anyone who studies or practices science, and this paper argues that the best methods for addressing them are qualitative. I summarize a few preliminary findings derived from recent interview-based and observational (...) qualitative studies that I have performed. These finding include: (i) imagination is only valued for use in addressing maximally specific problems, and only when all else fails; (ii) younger scientists and scientists who are members of underrepresented groups express less positive views about imagination in general, and have less confidence in their own imaginations; (iii) while scientists seem to employ various epistemological frameworks to evaluate imaginings, overall they appear to be epistemic consequentialists about imagination, and this holds also for their evaluations of the tools they use to extend the power of their imaginations. I close by discussing the epistemic and ethical consequences of these findings, and then suggesting a few research avenues that could be explored next as we move forward in the study of scientific imagination. (shrink)

As Nelson Goodman highlighted, there are two main senses of “abstract” that can be found in discussions about abstract art. On the one hand, a representation is abstract if it leaves out certain features of its target. On the other hand, something can be abstract to the extent that it does not represent a concrete subject. The first sense of “abstract” is well-known in philosophy of science. For example, philosophers discuss mathematical models of physical, biological, and economic systems as being (...) abstract in this sense. However, it is the second sense that dominates discussions of abstract art in aesthetics. For example, abstract art was (and is) considered revolutionary precisely for being non-figurative. Through an analysis of artists including Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian, we develop a reading of this second sense, which we call “generative abstraction,” as opposed to “subtractive” abstraction. Generative abstraction is a process in which a new artifact is created which does not represent the initial concrete target system that inspired it (if there was one), where the artifact’s features are explored for their own sake, and where the “language” of the new artifact is in some way more “universal.” Focusing on this sense of abstraction is helpful in revealing the complexity of the process of crafting an abstract artifact, in problematizing the notion that abstraction can always be un-done (or concretized), as well as revealing new ways for abstractions to be epistemically (un)successful. (shrink)

We conduct an experiment with 459 nonprofessional investors to examine whether they evaluate companies differently based on management’s stated purpose for undertaking corporate social responsibility activities in the presence versus absence of a company-specific negative event. Specifically, we vary whether or not management intends to achieve financial returns from CSR activities in addition to promoting social good. We address investors’ decision processes by investigating whether their judgments are mediated by perceptions of future cash flows and/or the underlying ethical culture of (...) the company. Results show that absent a negative event, investment judgments are stronger when CSR activities are intended to achieve financial returns, through expectations of higher future cash flows. However, when a negative event occurs, we find a moderating effect of independent assurance of CSR disclosures. When disclosures are not assured, investors prefer CSR undertaken only for societal benefit, mediated by perceptions of a stronger ethical culture. However, when disclosures are assured, ethical culture is viewed similarly regardless of management’s intention to achieve financial returns from CSR activities. This suggests that management’s willingness to obtain independent assurance on disclosures is viewed as a positive ethical signal. Thus, assurance complements disclosure of CSR activities by contributing to protection against the impact of negative events. (shrink)

This book investigates the debates around religion and science at the influential Victoria Institute. Founded in London in 1865, and largely drawn from the evangelical wing of the Church of England, it had as its prime objective the defence of 'the great truths revealed in Holy Scripture' from 'the opposition of science, falsely so called'. The conflict for them was not between science and religion directly, but rather what exactly constituted true science Chapters cover the Victoria Institute's formation, its heyday (...) in the late Nineteenth Century, and its decline in the years following the First World War. They show that at stake was more than any particular theory; rather, it was an entire worldview, combining theology, epistemology, and philosophy of science. Therefore, instead of simply offering a survey of religious responses to evolutionary theory, this study demonstrates the complex relationship between science, evangelical religion, and society in the years after Darwin's Origin of Species. It also offers some insight as to why conservative evangelicals did not display the militancy of some American fundamentalists with whom they shared so many of their intellectual commitments. Filling in a significant gap in the literature around modern attitudes to religion and science, this book will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, the History of Religion, and Science and Religion. (shrink)

The Victoria Institute was established in London in 1865. Although billed as an anti-evolutionary organization, and stridently anti-Darwinian in its rhetoric, it spent relatively little time debating the theory of natural selection. Instead, it served as a haven for a specific set of intellectual commitments. Most important among these was the Baconian scientific methodology, which prized empiricism and induction, and was suspicious of speculation. Darwin's use of hypotheses meant that the Victoria Institute members were unconvinced that his work was truly (...) scientific, but even more concerning for them was the specter of biblical criticism. This approach to biblical studies incorporated techniques from literary criticism, treating it as any other document. Since it also relied on hypotheses, the Victoria Institute members were similarly skeptical that biblical criticism was scientific, and spent much of their time attempting to refute it. In this way, they functioned as an incubator for the concerns that would animate the fundamentalist–modernist controversies of the early twentieth century. (shrink)

Since its publication in 1918, Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West has been the object of academic controversy and opprobrium. In their efforts to dispose of it, scholars have resorted to a variety of tactics: bitter invective, icy scorn, urbane mockery, or simply pretending that the book is not there. Yet generations of readers have refused to be warned off, finding in Spengler a prophetic voice and a source of profound intellectual excitement. H. Stuart Hughes's Oswald Spengler offers (...) a judicious and objective reading of Spengler's works that admirably fills the gap between hypercritical invective and naive enthusiasm. This pioneering volume makes clear why Spengler's pessimistic reading of the fate of European civilization continues to resonate with contemporary anxieties. Despite the author's self-imposed intellectual and social isolation, Spengler's work was as Hughes demonstrates, a part of the enormous effort of intellectual reevaluation that has characterized the early twentieth century. Viewing Spengler in the broadest possible perspective, the author places his thought in its cultural relationship to that of such predecessors as Giambattista Vico, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nikolai Danilevsky and contemporaries including Benedetto Croce, Henri Bergson, and Vilfredo Pareto. A chapter of Hughes's book is devoted to Spengler's influence on later cyclical thinkers such as Arnold Toynbee and Pitirim Sorokin. Another chapter clarifies the essentially antagonistic relationship between his thought and Nazi ideology. Throughout, Hughes is carefully attuned to the complex and often bewildering shifts of Spengler's ideas and manner, providing a unified picture of the sober historian; the lofty seer; the cool, detached observer; and the impassioned participant. In his introduction to this new edition, Hughes comments on the timeliness of Spengler's message with respect to technology and environmental issues and draws some unexpected and fascinating parallels between Spengler's thought and that of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Oswald Spengler offers an illuminating view of the achievements and limitations of one of the most influential and representative figures of the twentieth century. It will be of concern to intellectual historians, philosophers, political scientists, and sociologists. (shrink)

Jaswal & Akhtar provide several quotes ostensibly from people with autism but obtained via the discredited techniques of Facilitated Communication and the Rapid Prompting Method, and they do not acknowledge the use of these techniques. As a result, their argument is substantially less convincing than they assert, and the article lacks transparency.

Scientists recognize the necessity of imagination for solving tough problems. But how does the cognitive faculty responsible for daydreaming help in solving scientific problems? Philosophers claim that imagination is informative only when it is constrained to be maximally realistic. However, using a case study from space science, we show that scientists use imagination intentionally to break reality-oriented constraints. To do this well, they first target low-confidence constraints, and then higher-confidence constraints, until a plausible solution is found. This paper exemplifies a (...) new approach to epistemology of imagination that focuses on sets of imaginings (rather than individual imaginings), and responsible (rather than reliable) imaginings. (shrink)

This paper examines structural barriers to the adoption of climate change mitigation practices and the evolution of a climate change ethic among American farmers. It examines how seed corn contracts in Michigan constrain the choices of farmers and allow farmers to rationalize the over-application of fertilizer and associated water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Seed corn contracts use a competitive “tournament” system where farmers are rewarded for maximizing yields. Interviews and a focus group were used to understand fertilizer over-application and (...) barriers to participating in a climate change mitigation program. Results indicate that farmers agree that they over-apply fertilizer but would be unlikely to participate in a mitigation program due to their contracts and lack of support from seed corn companies. Because only a few companies control access to the seed corn market, farmers feel they have few choices. Farmers rationalized their practices as their only option given the competitive nature of their contracts and blamed other sources of pollution. Despite increasing efforts to educate farmers about climate change, structural barriers will continue to constrain participation in mitigation efforts and the development of a climate change ethic. (shrink)

The present dissertation includes three chapters: chapter one 'Challenges to platonism'; chapter two 'counterparts of non-mathematical statements'; chapter three 'Nominalizing platonistic accounts of the predictive success of mathematics'. The purpose of the dissertation is to articulate a fundamental problem in the philosophy of mathematics and explore certain solutions to this problem. The central problematic is that platonistic mathematics is involved in the explanation and prediction of physical phenomena and hence its role in such explanations gives us good reason to believe (...) that platonism is true. On the other hand, we have grounds, essentially epistemological, for avoiding the use of platonistic mathematics. ;This philosophical tension can be relieved only by showing that good non-platonistic explanations of physical phenomena are available or by showing that the epistemological objections to platonism may be overcome. While both options are discussed in some detail, a certain emphasis is placed on the task of fashioning non-platonistic accounts of physical phenomena to replace the usual platonistic accounts. As is suggested in chapter one, the reason for this emphasis is that the referential and more broadly epistemological objections to platonism seem quite convincing. Of paramount interest in regards to an inquiry into the utility of mathematics is the status of biconditional statements connecting non-mathematical statements with their mathematical counterparts. ;In chapters two and three of the dissertation I address certain key philosophical issues surrounding the status of these biconditionals. The upshot of these chapters is that these biconditionals can be used to illuminate the utility of mathematics; and there is good reason to think an account of the utility of mathematics can be given without acknowledging the truth of mathematics. (shrink)

Descartes’s work as a philosopher was inspired by three dreams he had on November 10, 1619, and yet the philosophy that Descartes produced in response to this inspiration included an argument that all dreams are deceptive. This particular incongruity is indicative of a more general ambivalence and anxiety in Descartes’s thought concerning images, which creates a tension that is never fully resolved. In this essay I focus primarily on one side of that tension: the part of Descartes’s philosophy that is (...) distrustful of images. To do this I first reconstruct Descartes’s theory of images, drawing from several of his lesser-known writings on optics, and then I consider how that theory of images leads Descartes to conceptualize true vision as a matter of “insight” rather than “eyesight” and to argue that the blind actually see better than those with working eyes. In the final part of the essay I briefly consider some of the consequences of Descartes’s theory of vision and the suspicion of images that animates it. (shrink)

Descartes’s work as a philosopher was inspired by three dreams he had on November 10, 1619, and yet the philosophy that Descartes produced in response to this inspiration included an argument that all dreams are deceptive. This particular incongruity is indicative of a more general ambivalence and anxiety in Descartes’s thought concerning images, which creates a tension that is never fully resolved. In this essay I focus primarily on one side of that tension: the part of Descartes’s philosophy that is (...) distrustful of images. To do this I first reconstruct Descartes’s theory of images, drawing from several of his lesser-known writings on optics, and then I consider how that theory of images leads Descartes to conceptualize true vision as a matter of “insight” rather than “eyesight” and to argue that the blind actually see better than those with working eyes. In the final part of the essay I briefly consider some of the consequences of Descartes’s theory of vision and the suspicion of images that animates it. (shrink)

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche explores the nature of teaching and learning and concludes that a teacher can do more harm than good in a student's life if she allows her students to become her ‘disciples’. A disciple assigns too much authority to a teacher and thus loses the ability to think independently; this is what Zarathustra means when he warns his students, ‘Beware that you are not killed by a statue!’ In this article I argue that Zarathustra's solution to (...) this problem is to undermine his own authority by performing several different variations of the Liar's Paradox in parts 2 and 3 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (shrink)

I argue for an approach to Philosophical Fragments that allows it to be philosophical and fragmentary, and that pays particular attention to the fragments, or crumbs, that seem least important. One such overlooked crumb is the theory of merely human education in the book—education that does not enlist God as the teacher, where humans simply try to teach and learn from each other. I argue that Philosophical Fragments defends this theory of education with several reductio ad absurdum proofs that are (...) especially useful because they clarify why merely human education so often fails. Finally I apply the theory of merely human education in Philosophical Fragments to Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole and argue that it gives us a paradigm for understanding all of Kierkegaard’s texts that is more fundamental than the distinction between direct and indirect communication. (shrink)

This book is an attempt to write about Kierkegaard's philosophy in the style of Kierkegaard's philosophy: energetic, playful, free spirited, surprising, and joyous. It is a deliberately crumby book in the sense that it seeks out the fragments, scraps, and crumbs of philosophical arguments that are generally ignored or swept away, like so much rubbish, but that are actually the most interesting parts of the meal. The Anti-Assistant-Professor Method that this book follows adopts Kierkegaard's many excellent jokes about assistant professors (...) as a guide to how not to write about Kierkegaard's philosophy; specifically: - Don't cease to be human. - Don't be a parasite, merely feeding off other people's creations and never creating anything new. - Don't reduce or simplify or systematize Kierkegaard's ideas in order to make life easier for everyone (because that was never the point). - Don't kill Kierkegaard's philosophy by lecturing on it, thereby turning it into a collection of dead ideas for nonhumans rather than subjective truths that need to be lived. Following these guidelines, the book attempts to extend and amplify some of Kierkegaard's most important ideas in a way that combats the persistent problem of nihilism--a disease that even Kierkegaard succumbed to at the end of his life. (shrink)