INTRODUCTION When Karl Popper published in' his definition of closer-to-the- truth this was an important intellectual event, but not a shocking one. ...

Recent studies of historical synthesis have denied the possibility of "truth" in historical narratives, which they state impose meaning on a series of events. An historian is, however, capable of writing a true history, true in the sense that his or her narrative provides a fair representation of its central subject. Descriptions represent the world when they give us an idea that resembles part of the world itself. A subject can be said to be fairly represented if an author (...) follows certain procedures: events must be presented chronologically; the main changes that occurred in the subject must be described; there must not be descriptions or omissions which might give a misleading impression of the subject; and the subject should be explained at a consistent level of generality and with a consistent level of detail. An historian motivated by preconceptions rather than the desire to represent a subject fairly, will not write a true history. Preconceptions are not incompatible with writing true histories, however, as long as they are discarded when an historian learns that they are incompatible with a fair representation. Analysis can be supplementary to, but is never a substitute for, accurate historical representation of a subject. (shrink)

This essay discusses the role of mimesis in bringing about the images of the crucified Christ, the self, and the martyr as overlooked parts of Kierkegaard!s pseudonymous texts. With respect to mimesis I focus on imitation, representation and resemblance.3 With regard to Kierkegaard!s “Does a Human Being Have the Right to Let Himself Be Put to Death for the Truth?” I argue that its author H.H. introduces the mimetic concept of self and its textual process of formation. I (...) claim that H.H.'s concept of martyr is deeply mimetic and represents Kierkegaard's own vision of himself. In my exposition I employ Rene Girard's theory of “mimetic desire” and Paul Ricoeur's concept of “mimetic arc.”. (shrink)

"Devoted to the Truth" is a compilation of the most recent articles by renowned Islamic scholar, Fethullah Gülen, since 2016. The themes he covers are commitment to lofty ideals, self-reckoning, and hope.

A recent account of the meaning of 'real' leads to a view of what anti-realism should be that resembles fictionalism, while not being committed to fictionalism as such or being subject to some of the more obvious objections to that view. This account of anti-realism explains how we might 'make up' what is true in areas such as mathematics or ethics, and yet these made-up truths are resistant to alterations, even by our collective decisions. Finally it is argued that the (...) sort of anti-realism suggested explains the appearance that the ethical domain supervenes on the naturalistic. (shrink)

Some of Kepler's works seem very different in character. His youthful Mysterium cosmographicum (1596) argues for heliocentrism on the basis of metaphysical, astronomical, astrological, numerological and architectonic principles. By contrast, Astronomia nova (1609) is far more tightly argued on the basis of only a few dynamical principles. In the eyes of many, such a contrast embodies a transition from Renaissance to early modern science. I suggest that Karl Popper's fallibilist and piecemeal approach, and especially his theory of errors, might prove (...) extremely helpful in resolving such alleged tension. By abandoning the perspective of the inductivist philosophy of science, which is forced by its own standards to portray Kepler as a "sleepwalker", I focus on the method he followed: he never hesitated to discuss his own intellectual journey, offering a rational reconstruction of the series of false starts, blind alleys and failures he encountered. The critical dialogue he managed to establish in private correspondence with fellow astronomers he later transplanted into his printed works, whose structure closely resembles that of a dialogue, however implicit. (shrink)

Saltman and Goodman show how corporate-produced curricula, films, and corporate-promoted books often use depictions of family love, childhood innocence, and compassion in order to sell the public on policies that ironically put the profit of multinational corporations over the well-being of people. In doing so, the authors reveal the extent to which globalization depends upon education and also show how battles over culture, language, and the control of information are matters of life, death, and democracy.

ABSTRACT This article aims to explain the family resemblance between the early socialism that emerged in France from the aftermath of the Revolution and Owenite socialism, which emerged out of the very different political and religious circumstances of late Georgian Britain. While the ‘sciences’ of Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier were conceived to end the crisis produced by the French Revolution, Owen’s newfound principle, what he called the ‘science of the influence of circumstance’, emerged from his A New View (...) of Society and his ideas on formation of character, was directed to the solution of the problems of industrial Britain during the French wars and after. The article shows that, contrary to the arguments of the pathbreaking work of Gregory Claeys, Owen’s ideas had less to do with a Republicanism that, for Claeys in following the work of J.G.A. Pocock, had its roots in the Renaissance, and more to do with the emergence of the science of society whose origins lay in the late Enlightenment and the shared concerns of English, Scottish, and French thinkers on trying to understand an emerging and new social order. (shrink)

Scientific Realists argue that it would be a miracle if scientific theories were getting more predictive without getting closer to the truth; so they must be getting closer to the truth. Van Fraassen, Laudan et al. argue that owing to the underdetermination of theory by data (UDT) for all we know, it is a miracle, a fluke. So we should not believe in even the approximate truth of theories. I argue that there is a test for who (...) is right: suppose we are at the limit of inquiry. Suppose that we then have all the logically possible theories that are adequate to all the actual data. If they all resembled in their theoretical claims, since one of them must be true, all of them would then resemble it, whichever it is. We would thus be justified in saying they all approximated the truth in the degree to which they co-resembled. If they don't all co-resemble, the SRs are wrong; more predictive theories are not necessarily closer to the theoretical truth. Prior to the limit, if, in spite of our best efforts to the contrary, all the theories we can make adequate to current data tend to co-resemble, we have inductive warrant for thinking more predictive theories are closer to the truth. If they don't resemble, we have inductive warrant for thinking that more predictive theories are not necessarily closer to the truth. (shrink)

We often think or say that someone was wrong about something but almost right about it or close to the truth. This can mean more than one thing. Here, I propose an analysis of the idea of being epistemically close to the truth. This idea plays an important role in our practice of epistemic evaluation and therefore deserves some detailed attention. I start with an exposition of the idea of getting things right by looking at the main forms (...) of reliabilism about true belief and belief acquisition. The focus on reliabilism is justified because everyone is a reliabilist in a basic sense. Section 2 develops a notion of closeness to the truth in two steps. Section 3 mentions some ways in which this notion is useful, one having to do with the Gettier problem. (shrink)

One construal of convergent realism is that for each clear question, scientific inquiry eventually answers it. In this paper we adapt the techniques of formal learning theory to determine in a precise manner the circumstances under which this ideal is achievable. In particular, we define two criteria of convergence to the truth on the basis of evidence. The first, which we call EA convergence, demands that the theorist converge to the complete truth "all at once". The second, which (...) we call AE convergence, demands only that for every sentence in the theorist's language, there is a time at which the theorist settles the status of the sentence. The relative difficulties of these criteria are compared for effective and ineffective agents. We then examine in detail how the enrichment of an agent's hypothesis language makes the task of converging to the truth more difficult. In particular, we parametrize first-order languages by predicate and function symbol arity, presence or absence of identity, and quantifier prefix complexity. For nearly each choice of values of these parameters, we determine the senses in which effective and ineffective agents can converge to the complete truth on an arbitrary structure for the language. Finally, we sketch directions in which our learning theoretic setting can be generalized or made more realistic. (shrink)

The prevailing historiographies of Jewish life in England suggest that religious representations of the Jews in the early modern period were confined to the margins and fringes of society by the desacralization of English life. Such representations are mostly neglected in the scholarly literature for the latter half of the long eighteenth century, and English Methodist texts in particular have received little attention. This article addresses these lacunae by examining the discourse of Adam Clarke, an erudite Bible scholar, theologian, preacher (...) and author and a prominent, respected, Methodist scholar. Significantly, the more overt demonological representations were either absent from Clarke‘s discourse, or only appeared on a few occasions, and were vague as to who or what was signified. However, Clarke portrayed biblical Jews as perfidious, cruel, murderous, an accursed seed, of an accursed breed and radically and totally evil. He also commented on contemporary Jews, maintaining that they were foolish, proud, uncharitable, intolerant and blasphemous. He argued that in their eternal, wretched, dispersed condition, the Jews demonstrated the veracity of biblical prophecy, and served an essential purpose as living monuments to the truth of Christianity. (shrink)

In Moonshadows, the Cowherds, a team of ten scholars of Buddhist Studies, address the nature of conventional truth as it is understood in the Madhyamaka tradition deriving from Nagarjuna and Candrakarti. Moonshadows combines textual scholarship with philosophical analysis to elucidate the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical consequences of this doctrine.

Ethical issues around triage have been at the forefront of debates during the Covid‐19 pandemic. This essay compares both discussion and guidelines around triage and the reality of what happened in the United States and in Europe, both in anticipation of and during the first wave of the pandemic. Why did the issue generate so many vivid debates in the United States and so few in most European countries, although the latter were also affected by the rationing of health care (...) resources? Are countries with socialized health care systems better equipped to face the hard choices of triaging? Important lessons in transparency, trust, and accountability for policy‐makers can be drawn from this comparison, demonstrating that fostering public involvement and ethical debate remains a critical element for the sustained acceptance of any triage plan. (shrink)

This paper discusses a puzzle, the heart of which is this question: How is it that real individuals can resemble fictional individuals? It seems that any answer given by one who has taken a stand on the ontology of fictional individuals will come with significant drawbacks. An Anti-Realist will have to explain, or explain away, the apparent truth of our positive assertions of resemblance, while a Realist will have to explain how we are to understand resemblance in (...) light of either the further claim that fictional characters are not associated with properties in the same way real individuals are, or that fictional characters are nonexistent or nonactual. I here survey the different Realist and Anti-Realist strategies in hopes that reflection on (mainly the drawbacks of) each will aid those who are curious about ontologies which may include fictionalia. (shrink)

Must probabilities be countably additive? On the one hand, arguably, requiring countable additivity is too restrictive. As de Finetti pointed out, there are situations in which it is reasonable to use merely finitely additive probabilities. On the other hand, countable additivity is fruitful. It can be used to prove deep mathematical theorems that do not follow from finite additivity alone. One of the most philosophically important examples of such a result is the Bayesian convergence to the truth theorem, which (...) says that conditional probabilities converge to 1 for true hypotheses and to 0 for false hypotheses. In view of the long-standing debate about countable additivity, it is natural to ask in what circumstances finitely additive theories deliver the same results as the countably additive theory. This paper addresses that question and initiates a systematic study of convergence to the truth in a finitely additive setting. There is also some discussion of how the formal results can be applied to ongoing debates in epistemology and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

There is a popular view that the alleged meaning shifts resulting from scientific revolutions are somehow incompatible with the formulation of general norms for scientific inquiry. We construct methods that can be shown to be maximally reliable at getting to the truth when the truth changes in response to the state of the scientist or his society.

In this paper we provide a compact presentation of the verisimilitudinarian approach to scientific progress (VS, for short) and defend it against the sustained attack recently mounted by Alexander Bird (2007). Advocated by such authors as Ilkka Niiniluoto and Theo Kuipers, VS is the view that progress can be explained in terms of the increasing verisimilitude (or, equivalently, truthlikeness, or approximation to the truth) of scientific theories. According to Bird, VS overlooks the central issue of the appropriate grounding of (...) scientific beliefs in the evidence, and it is therefore unable (a) to reconstruct in a satisfactory way some hypothetical cases of scientific progress, and (b) to provide an explanation of the aversion to falsity that characterizes scientific practice. We rebut both of these criticisms and argue that they reveal a misunderstanding of some key concepts underlying VS. (shrink)

[I]t would be absurd for us to hope that we can know more of any object than belongs to the possible experience of it or lay claim to the least knowledge of how anything not assumed to be an object of possible experience is determined according to the constitution that it has in itself.* * *It would be… a still greater absurdity if we conceded no things in themselves or declared our experience to be the only possible mode of knowing (...) things….[Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics]A certain line of skepticism about normative epistemology has become more or less standard in contemporary philosophy of science. It runs like this.Scientific method is a matter of choosing among theories on the basis of evidence.But in “conceptual revolutions”, meaning, truth, and even what counts as observable can all be theory-relative. (shrink)

Evaluative studies of inductive inferences have been pursued extensively with mathematical rigor in many disciplines, such as statistics, econometrics, computer science, and formal epistemology. Attempts have been made in those disciplines to justify many different kinds of inductive inferences, to varying extents. But somehow those disciplines have said almost nothing to justify a most familiar kind of induction, an example of which is this: “We’ve seen this many ravens and they all are black, so all ravens are black.” This is (...) enumerative induction in itsfullstrength. For it does not settle with a weaker conclusion (such as “the ravens observed in the future will all be black”); nor does it proceed with any additional premise (such as the statistical IID assumption). The goal of this paper is to take some initial steps toward a justification for the full version of enumerative induction, against counterinduction, and against the skeptical policy. The idea is to explore various epistemic ideals, mathematically defined as different modes of convergence to the truth, and look for one that is weak enough to be achievable and strong enough to justify a norm that governs both the long run and the short run. So the proposal is learning-theoretic in essence, but a Bayesian version is developed as well. (shrink)

One aspect of truth concerns knowing when to trust others when one’s own knowledge is inadequate. This is an ever more common problem in societies where technological and scientific change seems to be constantly accelerating. There is an increasing need to rely on the expertise of others and consequently to know when others are more likely to be offering an objective opinion as opposed to a biased one. Here, I argue that there are systematic and early emerging cognitive heuristics (...) and biases that profoundly influence our patterns of deference, our ways of assessing expertise, and our sense of when testimony is to be trusted. For the most part, the power and pervasiveness of these biases are ignored or greatly underappreciated. These biases and heuristics can both mislead and inform our understanding and use of others’ expertise; it is therefore critical that we acknowledge their presence and know how to work with them. (shrink)

The resemblance is plain to see between Kripke’s Wittgenstein introducing bizarre rules such as _quaddition_ (in illustrating the _sceptical paradox_ against theories of meaning) and Goodman’s introducing the equally bizarre _grue_ (in generating the _new riddle of induction_). But the two sorts of bizarre cases also differ in interesting respects. For those familiar with Goodman’s case, this similarity sparks a strong temptation to enlist to the meaning sceptic’s cause key elements of Goodman’s new riddle, which are missing from Kripke’s (...) case. In this essay, I characterize a natural way of doing just this, which targets dispositionalist solutions to the sceptical paradox. I also show that, despite initial appearances, this new objection to dispositionalism (the symmetry problem) is not nearly as worrisome as originally thought. The solution offered on behalf of semantic dispositionalists does require a trade-off, though, from the severe form of indeterminacy advanced by the meaning sceptic to a much milder thesis. (shrink)

This article presents a narratological reading of the Gospel of Mark with special attention given to the role, function and rhetorical impact of point of view. It is argued that through the use of ‘witnesses’ ranging from the omniscient narrator, to the character God, to the Old Testament Scriptures, the author of Mark presents a point of view that his implied reader would find difficult to counter. In addition to this, the article demonstrates that the motifs of allegiance, misunderstanding and (...) opposition in the Second Gospel are almost entirely confined to the adoption or rejection of the point of view being advocated for by the author of Mark. In the end, it is shown that only in the death of Jesus on the cross and the subsequent ‘centurion’s confession’ are the motifs resolved and is the point of view of Mark accepted by a human character. (shrink)

Michael Lynch has recently proposed an updated version of alethic functionalism according to which the relation between truth per se and lower-level truth properties is not the realization relation, as might be expected, and as Lynch himself formerly held, but the manifestation relation. I argue that the manifestation relation is merely a resemblance relation and is inadequate to properly relate truth per se to lower-level truth properties. I also argue that alethic functionalism does not justify (...) the claim that truth per se exists, or that truth per se is a functional property. Finally, I suggest a replacement for the manifestation relation. I argue that the resulting theory is a strict improvement over alethic functionalism on two counts, but that the improved theory does not justify the claim that truth per se exists. Since no further improvements to the theory are apparent, the prospects for alethic functionalism are dim. (shrink)

The Mahayana tradition in Buddhist philosophy is defined by its ethical orientation--the adoption of bodhicitta, the aspiration to attain awakening for the benefit of all sentient beings. And indeed, this tradition is known for its literature on ethics, which reflect the Madhyamaka tradition of philosophy, and emphasizes both the imperative to cultivate an attitude of universal care (karuna) grounded in the realization of emptiness, impermanence, independence, and the absence of any self in persons or other phenomena.This position is morally very (...) attractive, but raises an important problem: if all phenomena, including persons and actions, are only conventionally real, can moral injunctions or principles be binding, or does the conventional status of the reality we inhabit condemn us to an ethical relativism or nihilism? In Moonpaths, the Cowherds address an analogous problem in the domain of epistemology and argues that the Madhyamaka tradition has the resources to develop a robust account of truth and knowledge within the context of conventional reality. The essays explore a variety of ways in which to understand important Buddhist texts on ethics and Mahayana moral theory so as to make sense of the genuine force of morality. (shrink)

In this essay, I develop an account of belief as commitment to the truth of a proposition. On my account, to believe p is to represent p as true by way of committing to the truth of p. To commit to the truth of p, in the sense I am interested in, is to exercise the normative power to subject one’s representation of p as true to the normative standard of truth. As I argue, my account (...) of belief as commitment of the truth explains a variety of features of belief that separate it from attitudes like acceptance, supposition, and imagination. Most importantly, it explains the distinctive connection between belief and evidence. Moreover, my account helps solve three further puzzles about belief, regarding doxastic voluntarism, the aim of belief, and Moore’s paradox. (shrink)

The paper examines some remarks Wittgenstein expresses on pragmatism in manuscripts and lectures during the first half of the Thirties. These remarks focus principally on the Jamesian conception of truth, very roughly summarized in the claim that a belief or a proposition is true if it is useful. Wittgenstein acknowledges that this conception is able to capture some characters of ordinary language, but at the same time, he criticizes some aspects of it, and his criticism strongly resembles Frank Ramsey’s (...) attitude towards the same topics. In this sense, it is argued that Ramsey had a role both for Wittgenstein approaching pragmatism, and for the partly negative attitude with which he came to judge it, at least in this period. Yet, the two thinkers’ general perspectives diverge when it comes to the place of theory in philosophical activity. (shrink)

Semantic and soritical paradoxes display remarkable family resemblances. For one thing, several non-classical logics have been independently applied to both kinds of paradoxes. For another, revenge paradoxes and higher-order vagueness—among the most serious problems targeting solutions to semantic and soritical paradoxes—exhibit a rather similar dynamics. Some authors have taken these facts to suggest that truth and vagueness require a unified logical framework, or perhaps that the truth predicate is itself vague. However, a common core of semantic and soritical (...) paradoxes has not been identified yet, and no explanation of their relationships has been provided. Here we aim at filling this lacuna, in the framework of many-valued logics. We provide a unified diagnosis of semantic and soritical paradoxes, identifying their source in a general form of indiscernibility. We then develop our diagnosis into a theory of paradoxicality, which formalizes both semantic and soritical paradoxes as arguments involving specific instances of our generalized indiscernibility principle, and correctly predicts which logics can non-trivially solve them. (shrink)

The Bayesian theorem on convergence to the truth states that a rational inquirer believes with certainty that her degrees of belief capture the truth about a large swath of hypotheses with increasing evidence. This result has been criticized as showcasing a problematic kind of epistemic immodesty when applied to infinite hypotheses that can never be approximated by finite evidence. The central point at issue—that certain hypotheses may forever be beyond the reach of a finite investigation no matter how (...) large one’s reservoir of evidence—cannot be captured adequately within standard probability theory. As an alternative, I propose a nonstandard probabilistic framework that, by using arbitrarily small and large numbers, makes room for the type of fine-grained conceptual distinctions appropriate for a deeper analysis of convergence to the truth. This framework allows for the right kind of modesty about attaining truth in the limit. (shrink)

Studies of academic dishonesty typically rely on potentially inaccurate self-reports or on actual behavior during less realistic tasks. Eliminating the drawbacks of such approaches, we assessed cheating during completion of actual coursework via electronic records of online behavior. Thirty-six college students completed unproctored, online quizzes. The majority of students responding to a follow-up questionnaire reported that they never considered consulting online sources during the quizzes. Computer logs reveal that although some students accessed relevant online information during the quizzes, many did (...) not: 6 instances over 72 quiz attempts are attributable to 3 or 4 individuals. Although online environments may offer more opportunities for academic dishonesty, electronic records of online activity provide a valuable and objective means of detecting such dishonesty. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Belot argues that Bayesians are epistemologically flawed because they believe with probability 1 that they will learn the truth about observational propositions in the limit. While Belot’s considerations suggest that this result should be interpreted with some care, the concerns he raises can largely be defused by putting convergence to the truth in the context of learning from an arbitrarily large but finite number of observations.

I present two counterexamples to the recently back-in-favour truth-tracking account of knowledge: one involving a true belief resting on a counterfactually robust delusion, one involving a true belief acquired alongside a bunch of false beliefs. These counterexamples carry over to a recent modification of the theory due to Briggs and Nolan (2012), and seem invulnerable to a recent defence of the theory against known counterexamples, by Adams and Clarke (2005).

The conception of truth-making, albeit in a rudimentary form, could already be discerned in the writings of G. E. Moore and E. Husserl in the early 1900s. A few years later it was more extensively exploited by William James. It was Wittgenstein, however, who gave the concept a precise meaning. In 1913/1914 Wittgenstein advanced a theory of possible worlds, only one of which was real. Every proposition suggests a part of a possible world which does or does not correspond (...) to parts of the real world. In the first case the proposition is true, in the second case false. Moreover, the part of the real world makes the sentence true. This part is a truth-maker, and the sentence is a truth-bearer. Surprisingly enough, Wittgenstein’s concept of truth-making had its family resemblance with William James’s conception of truth. In 1915 Wittgenstein stopped using the concept of truth-making—it was also not men-tioned in the Tractatus. Unfortunately, Russell did not notice this and in 1918 he adopted the concept of truth-making. In the 1930s, it was used by some second generation analytic philosophers (Schlick, Stebbing, and Wisdom). However, it became rather popular among analytic philosophers only in the 1980s. (shrink)

On an evidentialist position, it is epistemically rational for us to believe propositions that are (stably) supported by our total evidence. We are epistemically permitted to believe such propositions, and perhaps even ought to do so. Epistemic rationality is normative. One popular way to explain the normativity appeals to epistemic teleology. The primary aim of this paper is to argue that appeals to epistemic teleology do not support that we ought to believe what is rational to believe, only that we (...) are permitted to do so. In arguing for that, I defend an epistemic teleological position that is radical in nature. It involves no commitment to aiming at the truth. I conclude by dispelling some worries that have been raised about my position. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian ReformationGiving a Hearing to The Parallax ViewAdrian Johnston (bio)Slavoj Žižek. THE PARALLAX VIEW. Cambridge: MIT P, 2006. [PV]Near the end of a two-hour presentation at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 10, 2006, Slavoj Žižek confesses that, in terms of the intellectual ambitions nearest to his heart, “my secret dream is to be Hegel’s Luther” [“Why Only an Atheist Can Believe”]. This confession comes (...) just months after the publication of his latest major work, The Parallax View, a book described as a new magnum opus. There are ample justifications within this text to license retroactively rereading it through the lens of Žižek’s subsequent public admission that he is now preoccupied with rescuing Hegel from the numerous misinterpretations to which this giant of German idealism (who casts such a long shadow over the Continental European philosophical tradition) has been repeatedly subjected over the past two hundred years. The Parallax View, at certain points explicitly and in other places implicitly, can be seen as centered on an effort to confront aggressively the various received versions of Hegel widely accepted as official and orthodox exegetical renditions. The motif of the “parallax gap,” elaborated in a plethora of guises throughout this 2006 tome, condenses and reflects the axiomatic theses of what could be called Žižek’s Hegelian reformation.The critical assessment of The Parallax View offered here seeks to go straight to its theoretical heart by highlighting a single line of argumentation running through the full span of this text’s different moments and phases. Žižek’s own Hegelian-style conceptions of truth (as fiercely partisan rather than calmly neutral) and universality (as immanently concrete rather than transcendently abstract) validate such an interpretive approach—“universal Truth is accessible only from a partial engaged subjective position” [PV 35]. Deliberately extracting particular conceptual constellations and forcing them to link up with each other according to the plan of a certain directed philosophical agenda promises to be much more revealing of the essential features of Žižekian thought than a comprehensive survey of this latest of his major works.The specific argumentative thread to be isolated here is the new extended engagement with the terrain covered by cognitive science and the neurosciences. Apart from the task of denouncing falsifying popular pictures of Hegel, one of Žižek’s other driving ambitions in this book is the desire to formulate a fundamental ontology appropriate to the theory of subjectivity mapped out over the course of his entire intellectual itinerary (a theory informed by Kant and post-Kantian German idealism combined with Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology). And, herein, the articulation of such an ontology appropriately gets entangled, via reflections on the nature of the brain, with the latest instantiations of the perennial philosophical problem of the relationship between mind and [End Page 3] body. Žižek grants that the central nervous system is, in at least several undeniable and important senses, the material, corporeal ground of the subject, the bodily being without which there cannot be the parlêtre (speaking being). But, in the spirit of Schelling and Hegel (especially their philosophies of “productive” nature), the fashions in which Žižek attempts to tie together systematically a materialist ontology with an account of more-than-material, transontological subjectivity illuminate a normally obscured and ignored set of implied consequences flowing from the gesture of dissolving hard-and-fast dualist distinctions between body and mind, nature and spirit.The past few decades of philosophical engagement with the neurosciences, an engagement almost completely monopolized by the Anglo-American Analytic philosophical tradition and neglected by the Continental European philosophical tradition to an equal degree, has emphasized (to put this in the vernacular of German idealism) the naturalization of spirit resulting from the collapse of any strict nature-spirit dichotomy. The materialisms promoted by those Analytic philosophers amenable to grounding the mental on the neuronal simply assume that the outcome of folding mind and matter into each other is a becoming-material of the mind, namely, a naturalization of the spirit (that is, the mind comes to resemble the brain conceived of as just another part... (shrink)

This article interrogates twelve step practice within Alcoholics Anonymous from the perspective of Foucault’s later work on governance, truth-telling and subjectivity. Recent critical studies of addiction tend to view self-help cultures like that of AA and related twelve step programs as integral parts of contemporary power/knowledge complexes, and thus as agents of the modern “will to knowledge” that Foucault often engages with. In line with the widespread Foucauldian critique of governmentality, addiction self-help culture is thus conceived as one that (...) primarily reproduces abstract, neoliberal norms on health and subjectivity. The argument put forward in this article aims to upset this framework attending to a number of features of twelve step practice that, arguably, bear striking resemblances to Foucault’s later discussions of ethics, care of self and truth-telling. In this, it is suggested that a close study of AA practices, might interrupt assumptions about contemporary addiction discourse and its relationship to issues of truth and power often reproduced in Foucauldian critiques. (shrink)

Post-truth: from the public to the academy -- Post-truth and the person -- Post-Truth and the political.

This chapter takes off from Max Weber’s famous lectures on poli­tics and science as ‘vocations’ to explore the concept of ‘modal power’, that is, the power to determine what is possible. Politics and science are complementarily concerned with modal power, in ways that go to the heart of Michael Dummett’s influential metaphysical characterisation of the antirealism/realism distinc­tion, which the chapter pursues across several philosophical fields, including logic, epistemology, jurisprudence and finally historiog­raphy. The chapter adopts a ‘post-truth’ perspective in the (...) sense that modal power is treated from an ‘antirealist’ standpoint, in which ‘the name of the game’ is to expand one’s own sphere of possible action while constraining that of the opponent. That world of constrained possibilities is the ‘actual’ world, whose rela­tionship to other possible worlds fluctuates over time in ways that resemble quantum effects but are most clearly captured by ‘revi­sionist’ historiography. The chapter ends with a discussion of the contrasting attitudes to such historiography in politics and science. (shrink)

In the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766), Kant remarks that Stahl, with his admission of immaterial forces for the explanation of organisms, was “closer to the truth than Hoffmann and Boerhaave, to name but a few,” although the latter adopted a “more philosophical method.” This puzzling statement is very significant for the understanding of Kant’s reception of animism, as it documents Kant’s reaction to the issues raised by the Leibniz-Stahl controversy and his striking preference (...) for Stahl’s nonmechanistic account of organisms. Kant agrees with Stahl that organisms suggest the existence of immaterial thinking beings, but at the same time, the example of this speculative hypothesis leads him to question the explanatory power of metaphysical hypotheses in natural philosophy in general, as well as the possibility of empirically distinguishing among different hypotheses, such as monadology, materialism, and hylozoism. After the analysis of Kant’s skeptical conclusions in the Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, I discuss how this earlier connection of medicine, life sciences, and metaphysics leaves traces in Kant’s later work, by analyzing Kant’s discussion of Samuel Sömmering’s claim that matter “can be animated” in On the Organ of the Soul (1796) and the preliminary drafts for this essay. (shrink)

In this article I give a naturalistic-cum-formal analysis of therelation between beauty, empirical success, and truth. The analysis is based on the onehand on a hypothetical variant of the so-called `mere-exposure effect'' which has been more orless established in experimental psychology regarding exposure-affect relationshipsin general and aesthetic appreciation in particular (Zajonc 1968; Temme 1983; Bornstein 1989;Ye 2000). On the other hand it is based on the formal theory of truthlikeness andtruth approximation as presented in my From Instrumentalism to Constructive (...) Realism (2000).The analysis supports the findings of James McAllister in his beautifulBeauty and Revolution in Science (1996), by explaining and justifying them.First, scientists are essentially right in regarding aesthetic criteria useful for empiricalprogress and even for truth approximation, provided they conceive of them as less hard thanempirical criteria. Second, the aesthetic criteria of the time, the `aesthetic canon'', maywell be based on `aesthetic induction'' regarding nonempirical features of paradigms of successfultheories which scientists have come to appreciate as beautiful. Third, aestheticcriteria can play a crucial, schismatic role in scientific revolutions. Since they may well be wrong, they may, in the hands of aesthetic conservatives, retard empirical progress and hence truth approximation, but this does not happen in the hands of aesthetically flexible, `revolutionary'' scientists. We may find totallyopposite things beautiful: a simplemathematical principle as well as a series of unrepeatable complex contingencies. It is a matter of psychology.(Stephen Jay Gould, translated passage from (Kayzer 2000, 30)). (shrink)

This chapter presents an overview of the life, work, and philosophical contributions of Śāntarakṣita (c. 725–788), who is known for his synthesis of Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka with elements of the Dignāga-Dharmakīrti tradition of logic and epistemology. His two most important independent treatises, the Compendium of True Principles (Tattvasaṃgraha) and the Ornament of the Middle Way (Madhyamakālaṃkāra), are characterized by an emphasis on the indispensable role of rational analysis on the Buddhist path as well as serious and systematic engagement with competing Buddhist (...) and non-Buddhist schools of thought. Śāntarakṣita employs a pedagogical-rhetorical device of provisionally adopting what he deems to be successively more rational views to reject less rational ones. Using this approach, in the Ornament of the Middle Way, he recommends a gradual path to arrive at an understanding of the Madhyamaka ultimate truth by incorporating Yogācāra idealist ontology into his presentation of conventional truth. In this same text, he presents an influential iteration of the neither-one-nor-many argument for the Madhyamaka ultimate truth, the emptiness of intrinsic nature—i.e., the universal negation of ontologically independent being—leaving a lasting and significant impact on both Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy. (shrink)

In this article I give a naturalistic-cum-formal analysis of therelation between beauty, empirical success, and truth. The analysis is based on the onehand on a hypothetical variant of the so-called `mere-exposure effect' which has been more orless established in experimental psychology regarding exposure-affect relationshipsin general and aesthetic appreciation in particular (Zajonc 1968; Temme 1983; Bornstein 1989;Ye 2000). On the other hand it is based on the formal theory of truthlikeness andtruth approximation as presented in my From Instrumentalism to Constructive (...) Realism (2000).The analysis supports the findings of James McAllister in his beautifulBeauty and Revolution in Science (1996), by explaining and justifying them.First, scientists are essentially right in regarding aesthetic criteria useful for empiricalprogress and even for truth approximation, provided they conceive of them as less hard thanempirical criteria. Second, the aesthetic criteria of the time, the `aesthetic canon', maywell be based on `aesthetic induction' regarding nonempirical features of paradigms of successfultheories which scientists have come to appreciate as beautiful. Third, aestheticcriteria can play a crucial, schismatic role in scientific revolutions. Since they may well be wrong, they may, in the hands of aesthetic conservatives, retard empirical progress and hence truth approximation, but this does not happen in the hands of aesthetically flexible, `revolutionary' scientists.We may find totallyopposite things beautiful: a simplemathematical principle as well as a series of unrepeatable complex contingencies. It is a matter of psychology.(Stephen Jay Gould, translated passage from (Kayzer 2000, 30)). (shrink)