Scientific specialties are the key unit of analysis in Kuhn’s theory of scientific change. Kuhn believed that scientific specialties, in their normal phases, are characterized by theoretical monism. This is what makes scientists so efficient in realizing their epistemic goals. Recent work in the philosophy of scientific practice raises questions about the extent to which there is or needs to be consensus in science, thus challenging a key dimension of Kuhn’s view. Hasok Chang has been a leader in (...) this project, focusing attention on the benefits of pluralism. I argue that Chang and other pluralists are overcorrecting. I argue that a variety of types of pluralism can be reconciled with theoretical monism, and that theoretical monism serves significant functions, aiding scientists in the effective pursuit of their epistemic goals. Thus, I aim to set limits to pluralism. I argue that Kuhn’s theoretical monism not only has room for the sort of pluralism that Chang and others aims to defend, I also show that it presupposes such forms of pluralism. (shrink)

Existence monism is defended against priority monism. Schaffer's arguments for priority monism and against pluralism are reviewed, such as the argument from gunk. The whole does not require parts. Ontological vagueness is impossible. If ordinary objects are in the right ontology then they are vague. So ordinary objects are not included in the right ontology; and hence thought and talk about them cannot be accommodated via fully ontological vindication. Partially ontological vindication is not viable. Semantical theorizing outside (...) the ontology room and semantical theorizing in the doorway. Existence monism is theoretically preferable to priority monism. (shrink)

Scholars have often thought that a monistic reading of Aristotle’s definition of the human good – in particular, one on which “best and most teleios virtue” refers to theoretical wisdom – cannot follow from the premises of the ergon argument. I explain how a monistic reading can follow from the premises, and I argue that this interpretation gives the correct rationale for Aristotle’s definition. I then explain that even though the best and most teleios virtue must be a single (...) virtue, that virtue could in principle be a whole virtue that arises from the combination of all the others. I also clarify that the definition of the human good aims at capturing the nature of human eudaimonia only in its primary case. (shrink)

Monism, characterized by Jonathan Schaffer as the thesis that the cosmos is the one and only basic actual concrete object, has been the subject of a great deal of recent interest. Spinoza is often taken, rightly, to be an important forebear. This article seeks to explain the distinctive content and basis of Spinoza’s monistic metaphysics and to compare it to contemporary Monism. It then argues that although Spinoza’s monistic metaphysics is not strictly a version of Monism as (...) defined, it has a number of theoretical advantages that make central aspects of it worthy of serious consideration. (shrink)

This is a study of the relation between the fine arts and philosophy in France, from the aftermath of the 1789 revolution to the end of the nineteenth century, when a philosophy of being called "monism" emerged and became increasingly popular among intellectuals, artists, and scientists. Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer traces the evolution and impact of this monist thought and its various permutations as a transformative force on certain aspects of French art and culture-from Romanticism to Impressionism-and as a theoretical (...) backdrop that paved the way to as yet unexplored aspects of a modernist aesthetic. Chapters concentrate on three major artists, Théodore Géricault (1791-1824), Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) and Claude Monet (1840-1926), and their particular approach to and interpretation of this unitarian concept. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, philosophy, and cultural history. (shrink)

Character education is an increasingly discussed topic drawing upon virtue ethics as a moral theory. Scholars have predominantly understood educating character as a process that entails the formation of certain distinct character traits or functions through practice and habituation. However, these approaches present some problems. This paper explores the educational implications of various accounts focusing on the relationship between phronesis and other virtues. In particular, our focus will be on those that Miller (2023) has classified as Standard Model and Eliminativist (...) Model of practical wisdom. Starting from these accounts, we will outline three specific problems that the latter models appear to generate at a theoretical level in character education. Finally, we will address the task of demonstrating why the monist account of moral virtue recently proposed by the Aretai group—which conceives being virtuous in possessing phronesis understood as ethical expertise—might offer a refined response to these challenges. In addition, we will illustrate three educational pathways that can emerge from the same model. (shrink)

What are the parameters that define a posthuman knowing subject, her scientific credibility and ethical accountability? Taking the posthumanities as an emergent field of enquiry based on the convergence of posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism, I argue that posthuman knowledge claims go beyond the critiques of the universalist image of ‘Man’ and of human exceptionalism. The conceptual foundation I envisage for the critical posthumanities is a neo-Spinozist monistic ontology that assumes radical immanence, i.e. the primacy of intelligent and self-organizing matter. This implies (...) that the posthuman knowing subject has to be understood as a relational embodied and embedded, affective and accountable entity and not only as a transcendental consciousness. Two related notions emerge from this claim: firstly, the mind-body continuum – i.e. the embrainment of the body and embodiment of the mind – and secondly, the nature-culture continuum – i.e. ‘naturecultural’ and ‘humanimal’ transversal bonding. The article explores these key conceptual and methodological perspectives and discusses the implications of the critical posthumanities for practices in the contemporary ‘research’ university. (shrink)

Abstract. The neutral monism suggested by Constantin Rădulescu-Motru was a theoretical frame intended to match the general idea of Kant’s apriorism with the results reached by physics and psychology at the beginning of the 20th Key words: transcendental aesthetic; consciousness in general; empirical consciousness; psychophysical parallelism; phenomenal ontology; scientistic ontology.

We would like to thank all the commentators who responded to our target review paper for their thought-provoking ideas and for their initially positive characterization of our theorizing. Our position provoked a broad range of reactions, from enthusiastic support to some kind of opposition. Regardless of the type of the response, one common factor appears to be the plausibility of a presented attempt to apply insights from physics, biology (neuroscience), and phenomenology of mind to form a unified theoretical framework (...) of Operational Architectonics of brain-mind functioning. (shrink)

Recent debates about Hegel's theoretical philosophy are marked by a surprising lack of agreement, extending all the way down to the most basic question:what is Hegel talking about?On the one hand, proponents of ‘metaphysical’ interpretations generally read Hegel as aiming to articulate the overall structure or organisation of reality itself, and the nature of a highest or most fundamental being. Particularly influential is the idea that Hegel is reviving and modifying a form of Spinoza's metaphysical monism, according to (...) which the organised whole of everything is the highest being, providing a ground or reason for everything real. On the other hand, proponents of ‘non-metaphysical’ interpretations argue Hegel's topic is something else entirely. The idea is that Hegel agrees with Kant in finding pre-critical forms of metaphysics to be uncritical or dogmatic. And the topic of Hegel's positive project is supposed to be not the nature of reality itself, nor any most fundamental being, but rather ‘forms of thought’ akin to Kant's categories and the objectivity, legitimacy, or normative authority of those forms of thought.This is of course only a rough sketch of the most basic recent debate, about which there is more to say than can fit in this paper. My focus here is on what Hegel has to say about nature and natural kinds, in ‘Observing Reason’ from thePhenomenology, and also in similar material from theLogicandEncyclopedia. I intend to argue that this material suggests a surprising way of stepping beyond the fundamental debate sketched above. There can of course be no question of elaborating and defending here a complete interpretation of Hegel's entire theoretical philosophy. I will have to restrict myself to arguing for the unlikely conclusion that there is an approach that can combine and integrate the strongest points made by both sides in the most basic debate shaping recent Hegel interpretation. (shrink)

When talking about truth, we ordinarily take ourselves to be talking about one-and-the-same thing. Alethic monists suggest that theorizing about truth ought to begin with this default or pre-reflective stance, and, subsequently, parlay it into a set of theoretical principles that are aptly summarized by the thesis that truth is one. Foremost among them is the invariance principle.

Value pluralism is the metaphysical thesis that there is a plurality of values at the fundamental level of the evaluative domain. Value monism, on the other hand, is the claim that there is just one fundamental value. Pluralists, it is commonly argued, have an edge over monists when it comes to accounting for the conspicuous heterogeneity of the evaluative domain and the rationality of regretting well-justified decisions. Monists, in turn, seem to provide a far more plausible account of rational (...) evaluative decision-making. I argue that the impression of a theoretical stalemate, which is suggested by the exchange of those arguments, is premature. An assessment of the sub-positions in both camps, in conjunction with an analysis of value fundamentality based on the notion of grounding, reveals that certain versions of pluralism and monism—which I call moderate positions—can counter the respective objections. Thus, moderate value pluralism and moderate value monism emerge as the strongest positions in both camps. I conclude that the further debate should center around those two positions. (shrink)

In this book, Jiri Benovsky takes a stand for a variant of panpsychism as being the best solution available to the mind-body problem. More exactly, he defends a view that can be labelled 'dual-aspect-pan-proto-psychism'. Panpsychism claims that mentality is ubiquitous to reality, and in combination with dual-aspect monism it claims that anything, from fundamental particles to rocks, trees, and human animals, has two aspects: a physical aspect and a mental aspect. In short, the view is that the nature of (...) reality is 'phental' (physical-mental). But this does not mean, according to the author, that rocks and photons think or have conscious experiences, in the sense in which human animals have experiences. This is where pan-proto-psychism enters the picture as being a better theoretical option, where the mental aspects of fundamental particles, rocks, and trees are not experiential. Many hard questions arise here. In this book, Benovsky focuses on the combination problem: in short, how do tiny mental aspects of fundamental particles combine to yield macro-phenomenal conscious experiences, such as your complex experience when you enjoy a great gastronomic meal? What makes the question even harder is that the combination problem is not just one problem, but rather a family of various combination issues and worries. Benovsky offers a general strategy to deal with these combination problems and focuses on one in particular – namely, the worry concerning the existence of subjects of experience. Indeed, if standard panpsychism were true, we would need an explanation of how tiny micro-subjects combine into a macro-subject like a human person. And if panprotopsychism is true, it has to explain how a subject of experience can arise from proto-micro-mental aspects of reality. Benovsky shows that understanding the nature of subjectivity in terms of the growingly familiar notion of mineness in combination with a reductionist/eliminativist view of the self, allows us to have a coherent picture, where this type of combination problem is avoided, without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. (shrink)

The focus of this article is the view about fundamental natural properties known as dispositional monism. This is a holistic view about nature, according to which all properties are essentially interrelated. The general question to be addressed concerns what kinds of features relational structures of properties should be thought to have. I use Bird's graph-theoretic framework for representing dispositional structures as a starting point, before arguing that it is inadequate in certain important respects. I then propose a more parsimonious (...) graph-theoretic system, which, among other things, overhauls Bird's distinction between stimulus and manifestation relations. (shrink)

My focus here is on what Hegel has to say about nature and natural kinds, in ‘Observing Reason’ from the Phenomenology, and also in similar material from the Logic and Encyclopedia. I intend to argue that this material suggests a surprising way of stepping beyond the fundamental debate. There can of course be no question of elaborating and defending here a complete interpretation of Hegel’s entire theoretical philosophy. I will have to restrict myself to arguing for the unlikely conclusion (...) that there is an approach that can combine and integrate the strongest points made by both sides in the most basic debate shaping recent Hegel interpretation. What needs explaining is how there could be any single coherent position that in any philosophical sense both cancels and preserves metaphysics. (shrink)

In any survey of recent developments in semantics, the game-theoretic approach to the semantics of both formal and of natural languages which has been developed by Jaakko Hintikka and his associates must loom large. It is indeed well known by this time that the semantics of the usual first-order logic can be spelled out in terms of games. What is not equally generally known is that this game-theoretical semantics can be augmented so as to apply also to natural languages (...) and not only to some of the artificial languages studied by logicians. The results already reached by Hintikka and his associates in this direction nevertheless show that many important phenomena of natural language can be handled in the game-theoretical framework. In this paper I shall first try to outline the basic ideas of the game-theoretical approach to semantics, then discuss briefly some problems which have so far been left untouched and thereby try to provide some new evidence for the naturalness and adequacy of a game-theoretical semantics. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss the new Tweety puzzle. The original Tweety puzzle was addressed by approaches in non-monotonic logic, which aim to adequately represent the Tweety case, namely that Tweety is a penguin and, thus, an exceptional bird, which cannot fly, although in general birds can fly. The new Tweety puzzle is intended as a challenge for probabilistic theories of epistemic states. In the first part of the paper we argue against monistic Bayesians, who assume that epistemic states can (...) at any given time be adequately described by a single subjective probability function. We show that monistic Bayesians cannot provide an adequate solution to the new Tweety puzzle, because this requires one to refer to a frequency-based probability function. We conclude that monistic Bayesianism cannot be a fully adequate theory of epistemic states. In the second part we describe an empirical study, which provides support for the thesis that monistic Bayesianism is also inadequate as a descriptive theory of cognitive states. In the final part of the paper we criticize Bayesian approaches in cognitive science, insofar as their monistic tendency cannot adequately address the new Tweety puzzle. We, further, argue against monistic Bayesianism in cognitive science by means of a case study. In this case study we show that Oaksford and Chater’s (2007, 2008) model of conditional inference—contrary to the authors’ theoretical position—has to refer also to a frequency-based probability function. (shrink)

Existence monism (EM) is a metaphysical view asserting the existence of only one concrete object. EM is well known for its radicalness, and encounters difficulty in terms of its prima facie inconsistency with truisms. This paper aims to propose an alternative (and somewhat easy) way to overcome this difficulty and indicate another means by which the possibility of EM can be defended. I will present a package of theses that are intended to be combined with EM, which I call (...) Linguistic Ontology with the One as Semantic Glue (LOOSG). I will show that this package (in combination with EM) provides a systematic explanation as to why truisms hold while only one concrete object actually exists. In other words, I will argue that if an existence monist embraces LOOSG, the desired explanation for truisms is then available to her. In addition, it will also be noted that LOOSG has a theoretical virtue, in that it only presupposes the framework of standard semantics. Based on these discussions, I offer LOOSG as a viable option for existence monism. (shrink)

This paper explores cosmopsychism’s explanatory aspirations from a programmatic perspective. The bulk of the text consists of an argument in favor of the conclusion that cosmopsychism suffers from no insurmountable individuation problem. I argue that the widespread tendency to view IND as a mirror-image of micropsychism’s combination problem is mistaken. In particular, what renders CP insolvable, namely, the commitment to the coupling of phenomenal constitution with phenomenal inclusion, is, from the standpoint of cosmopsychism, an entirely nonmandatory assumption. I proceed to (...) show that severing this unhappy coupling is the key for defending cosmopsychism against the charge of theoretical incoherence. Moreover, I argue that successful defense against such accusation could be mounted regardless of whether or not we assume cosmic consciousness to be perspectival in nature. In addition, the paper touches upon another foundational issue: cautioning against the popular tendency to identify cosmopsychism’s monism with a mereological unity-in-diversity, and motivating an alternative conception which I call generative monism. Finally, as befitting this volume, I pause to reflect upon the question of which schools of Hindu philosophy might tally best, and connect most fruitfully, with cosmopsychism as I understand it. (shrink)

I contrast two roles for environmental philosophers—“applied philosophy” and “practical philosophy”—and show that the strategy of applied philosophy encourages an axiological and monistic approach to theory building. I argue that the mission of applied philosophy, and the monistic theory defended by J. Baird Callicott, in particular, tends to separate philosophers and their problems from real management issues because applied philosophers and moral monists insist that theoretical exploration occurs independent of, and prior to, applications in particular situations. This separation of (...) theory and practice suggests that philosophers are likely to be effective in policy discussions only to the degree that they can offer unquestioned theories that adjudicate real problems. Callicott offers his monistic, ontological approach as universal guidance to environmental activists and decision makers, arguing that ecosystems and communities are moral subjects that can “own” their own inherent value. Callicott’s theory, however, faces a crucial, unanswered theoretical dilemma which illustrates the impossibility of the dual task Callicott has set for his theory—to provide a single, ontological unification of ethics under nonanthropocentric holism and to capture the fine nuances of ethical obligations as experienced in varied communities. I also show that monistic assumptions have led to an unfortunate interpretation ofAldo Leopold’s land ethic and that a pluralist and pragmatist direction is likely to provide a more efficacious and theoretically defensible direction for further study of environmental philosophy in a more practical mode. (shrink)

In his Grundgesetze, §32, Frege launched the idea that the meaning of a sentence is given by its truth condition, or, in his particular version, the condition under which it will be a name of the True. This, indeed, was only one of the many roles in which truth has to serve within the Fregean system. In particular, truth is an absolute notion in the sense that bivalence holds: every Gedanke is either true or false, in complete independence of any (...) conative activity, whether by God or man. Thus various epistemological notions, such as the correctness of an assertion made, or judgement passed, are reducible to this absolute notion of truth: an assertion made through the utterance of a declarative sentence is correct when the proposition expressed by the sentence in question is true. Given this absolute status of truth it is not surprising that Frege is of the opinion that truth is a sui generis notion which has to be left unanalyzed and, indeed, which is indefinable. (shrink)

We present a new “reason-based” approach to the formal representation of moral theories, drawing on recent decision-theoretic work. We show that any moral theory within a very large class can be represented in terms of two parameters: a specification of which properties of the objects of moral choice matter in any given context, and a specification of how these properties matter. Reason-based representations provide a very general taxonomy of moral theories, as differences among theories can be attributed to differences in (...) their two key parameters. We can thus formalize several distinctions, such as between consequentialist and non-consequentialist theories, between universalist and relativist theories, between agent-neutral and agent-relative theories, between monistic and pluralistic theories, between atomistic and holistic theories, and between theories with a teleological structure and those without. Reason-based representations also shed light on an important but under-appreciated phenomenon: the “underdetermination of moral theory by deontic content”. (shrink)

Eco-Marxism presents a debate between two theoretical schools: metabolic rift theory, developed by John Foster and others, and world-ecology, proposed by Jason W. Moore. The debate refers ultimately to ontology, more precisely to the relation between society and nature. Critical realism plays a central role as the philosophical underlabouring for metabolic rift theory and has implications regarding the Anthropocene/Capitalocene debate as well. Reviewing the debate through CR categories provides clarity about the specifically social character of the causes of ecological (...) disruptions. Using CR, metabolic rift theorists could explain the interdisciplinary character of their analyses. By distinguishing between real transfactual mechanisms and their actual interaction in open systems, I intend to show that neither metabolic rift theory, nor its interdisciplinary approach to the Anthropocene, involve Cartesian Dualism, as Moore claims. World-Ecology provides an alternative historical account of capitalism's environmental history, but it does not critically replace metabolic rift theory. (shrink)

Hempel’s account of thought experiments has been discussed only by a very few authors and, for the most part, with rather cursory remarks. Its importance, however, is not only historical, but also systematic theoretical, because it involves the distinction between discovery and justification, a main pillar of neopositivistic philosophy of science. Hempel raised the question whether thought experiments constitute a methodological component of scientific research or, on the contrary, are merely a heuristic-psychological device for obtaining and/or transmitting new ideas. (...) While conceding a few exceptions in the natural sciences, he argued that thought experiments always have a heuristic character in the social sciences. There is however a fundamental tension in Hempel’s conception of thought experiments, between the thesis of methodological monism and the neopositivistic dichotomy discovery/justification. On the one hand, on the basis of the unity of scientific method, Hempel admits a difference only in degree between the natural and the human sciences, but on the other hand, he draws a principled distinction between thought experiments of the human sciences (which have only a greater or lesser heuristic value) and those of the natural sciences (which may have also a cognitive-justificatory value). If one assumes the unity of method in the minimal sense in which no scientific knowledge can renounce intersubjective controllability, this tension can be removed either by rejecting the discovery/justification dichotomy or by interpreting it differently. Here, following the second path, two senses of the dichotomy are distinguished, one of which must be accepted, while the other rejected. This removes the internal tension in Hempel’s conception of thought experiments and suggests the thesis that any plausible thought experiment, both in the natural and the human sciences, must already contain some justification, implicit or explicit, of the theoretical hypotheses that they formulate. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary embedding and novel conceptual approach offered in the book to address the relationship between legal orders offers a significant and original contribution to the literature. The first part of the book provides a critical account of dominant approaches to explain this relationship where theories of Kelsenian monism, dualism, legal pluralism and constitutionalism are criticized. In the second part, Kirchmair engages with an innovative idea by applying insights from social contract theory to the relationship between international, EU and (...) Member State law and establishes his theoretical approach: Consent-Based Monism. The book focuses on the most important structural characteristics of the external relations law of the EU as well as the primacy of EU law in lieu of national constitutional identity which is demonstrated in part three. (shrink)

The article considers the opposition of the doctrines of pluralism and monism and their related principles of proliferation and unification in the context of the development of modern cognitive sciences in three important respects for philosophy of science: theoretical, methodological, and explanatory. The article criticizes T. Kuhn’s views of theoretical monism and extends the defense of theoretical pluralism undertaken in author’s previous publications devoted to the conception of theoretical complexes, aimed at the correct description (...) of large groups of theories in the cognitive sciences, such as connectionism, moderate embodied cognition, etc. Pluralism is also defended in methodological dimension. Theoretical pluralism and methodological pluralism are represented as an inevitable consequence of the conception of theoretical complexes and its principle of proliferation calling for the creation/improvement of scientific theories and models which are both compatible and incompatible with respect to a number of basic ontological and methodological assumptions. Theoretical pluralism and methodological pluralism should promote progress with respect to a number of the so-called epistemic qualities, both associated with the approximation of the truth (e.g. predictive success, the ability to give unexpected explanations to known facts, etc.) and not so associated (empirical fit, simplicity according to some interpretations, and the broad scope of the proposed explanations). At the same time the author claims that it is currently not possible to draw a similar conclusion in relation to the explanatory context: if the strategy of explanatory monism or explanatory pluralism will turn out be the preferred strategy for the cognitive sciences should become clear in the course of further research. (shrink)

This paper deals with recent work on the role of objects in cognition and the methodological problems created by findings and theories in various strands of the cognitive sciences. The term ‘object’ is here mean to refer to spatially extended items that persist over time. The main theses of this paper are as follows. First, we should ideally consider the various notions and representations of objects and objecthood that emerge from the literature as components of something akin to the notion (...) of internalized language that is at the core of mainstream linguistics. There appear to be as many different I-representations of objects as there are fields of investigation, and this creates some interesting methodological problems. Second, it is important to assess whether these different notions may be traced back to a common ground of underlying principles. Existing unification attempts either underestimate the differences between the I-representations or pave the way to an eliminative position that would dispose of the variety of I-notions altogether. The paper builds on these previous attempts and proposes to use again an analogy from linguistics in order to show how commonalities and differences between the various I-notions can be accounted for. Third, this framework can allow us to make sense of some so far piecemeal analyses of the commonsense notion of an object. (shrink)

Ever since the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996, 1995) first entered the scene in the debate over consciousness many have taken it to show the limitations of a scientific or naturalist explanation of consciousness. The hard problem is the problem of explaining why there is any experience associated with certain physical processes, that is, why there is anything it is like associated with such physical processes? The character of one’s experience doesn’t seem to be entailed by physical processes and (...) so an explanation which can overcome such a worry must (1) explain how physical processes give rise to experience (explain the entailment), (2) give an explanation which doesn’t rely on such physical processes, or (3) show why the hard problem is misguided in some sense. Recently, a rather ambitious and novel theory of consciousness has entered the scene – Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Consciousness (Oizumi et al., 2014; Tononi, 2008; Tononi et al., 2016) – and proposes that consciousness is the result of a specific type of information processing, what those developing the theory call integrated information. The central aim of this dissertation is to philosophically investigate IIT and see whether it has the ability to overcome the hard problem and related worries. I then aim to use this philosophical investigation to answer a set of related questions which guide this dissertation, which are the following: Is it possible to give an information-theoretic explanation of consciousness? What would the nature of such an explanation be and would it result in a novel metaphysics of consciousness? In this dissertation, I begin in chapter one by first setting up the hard problem and related arguments against the backdrop of IIT (Mindt, 2017). I show that given a certain understanding of structural and dynamical properties IIT fails to overcome the hard problem of consciousness. I go on in chapter two to argue that a deflationary account of causation is the best view for IIT to overcome the causal exclusion problem (Baxendale and Mindt, 2018). In chapter three, I explain IIT’s account of how the qualitative character of our experience arises (qualia) and what view of intentionality (the directedness of our mental states) IIT advocates. I then move on in chapter four to show why the hard problem mischaracterizes structural and dynamical properties and misses important nuances that may shed light on giving a naturalized explanation of consciousness. In the last and fifth chapter, I outline a sketch of a novel metaphysics of consciousness that takes the conjunction of Neutral Monism and Information-Theoretic Structural Realism to give what I call Information-Theoretic Neutral-Structuralism. (shrink)

We are now in a position to examine the claim that Pavlovian physiology and Marxist-Leninist philosophy form two complementary systems.There is certainly a similarity between the Leninist theory of reflection and Pavlov's theory of higher nervous activity. Both present so-called psychic phenomena as a reaction of the organism to the stimuli of the outer world and both insist that this reflection is not a passive reception of impressions but is an active response on the part of the organism.Again both systems (...) are monist; they are united in excluding the possibility of having recourse to a non-material substance as the basis for psychic phenomena. But for Pavlov this exclusion is a scientific axiom while for Marxism-Leninism it is founded on philosophical materialism. However, the most important difference between Pavlov's theories and Marxism-Leninism on this point is that Pavlov's approach to psychic is fundamentally mechanistic and reductionist whereas that of Marxism-Leninism is dialectical and consequently anti-reductionist and anti-mechanist. Soviet psychology is, in consequence, founded partly on a mechanist system which is not materialist in the full sense of the word, and partly on a materialist system which is definitely not mechanist. From this point of view there is a definite discrepancy between the two traditions on which Soviet psychology is founded and which goes a long way towards explaining many of the inconsistencies in Soviet psychological theory. (shrink)

With respect to Parmenides’ thought Melissus was regarded as a dissident thinker already in antiquity. His polemical introduction of the concept of void and the relative idea of infinite Being seemed particularly controversial. The aim of the present paper is to examine the origins of the Melissian understanding of void in order to trace its philosophical genesis to the criticism of the Atomist Leucippus. According to the philosopher from Abdera, the Eleatic fundamental principles had to conform to the obviousness of (...) bodies’ motion, which is why the Eleatic not-Being had to be understood as void. Melissus took issue with this view and criticized the idea of the void’s reality by means of a methodical argument. In the course of doing so, the philosopher from Samos distorted the original Parmenidean ontology, which is why his theories were often criticized severely as theoretically weak. (shrink)

Putnam’s model-theoretic arguments for the indeterminacy of reference have been taken to pose a special problem for mathematical languages. In this paper, I argue that if one accepts that there are theory-external constraints on the reference of at least some expressions of ordinary language, then Putnam’s model-theoretic arguments for mathematical languages don’t go through. In particular, I argue for a kind of descriptivism about mathematical expressions according to which their reference is “anchored” in the reference of expressions of ordinary language. (...) These anchors add enough to the content of mathematical expressions to forestall the radical kind of indeterminacy that model-theoretic arguments are purported to show, while still leaving room for a plausible, moderate kind of indeterminacy. (shrink)

I draw on ideas salient in contemporary literate African philosophy to construct two new theoretical ways of capturing the essence of duties to oneself. According to one theory, a person has a foundational duty to “relate” to herself in ways similar to how the African field has often thought that a person should relate with others, viz., harmoniously. According to the second, one has a foundational duty to produce liveliness in oneself. In addition to articulating these novel attempts to (...) capture what all duties to oneself might have in common and showing that each one captures several intuitions about them, I offer some reasons to think that the harmony theory is more attractive than the vitality one. I conclude that there are values prominent in the African tradition that, upon some reformulation, ground comprehensive accounts of what one owes oneself that merit consideration by a global audience as rivals to, say, Kantian-rationalist approaches common in the West. (shrink)

It is a rather remarkable fact that in most discussions of Aquinas’s ethics, Q. 21 of the De Veritate which deals with Aquinas’s notion of Good, is almost entirely overlooked. For example D. J. O’Connor’s book Aquinas and Natural Law refers only once to the De Veritate and that is not a reference to Q. 21. Even the massive work of Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, in the entire third section which deals with Aquinas’s moral theory has (...) only six references to the De Veritate and again none are to Q. 21. H. J. McCloskey in Meta-Ethics and Normative Ethics, provides what he considers two definitive repudiations of Aquinas’s theory but there is no mention or reference to the De Veritate. There may be a reason for this. Thomists like Gilson may not be attuned to or interested in answering the specific problems which contemporary ethical theorists address themselves to, while ethical theorists like O’Connor seem to depend upon traditional Thomistic accounts to locate the pertinent passages in Aquinas’s ethical writings, accounts which follow the order of one or other of the Summas. Be that as it may, some of the most illuminating sections of Aquinas dealing with ethical-theoretical issues are to be found in Question 21 of the De Veritate, for in this question is found a definition of the good as well as explanations of this definition. Consider the following passages where Aquinas lists what seem to be necessary conditions for calling something good. (shrink)