This chapter contains sections titled: 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5.

David Lewis's position, often called analytic functionalism, was inspired by Ryle's analytic behaviorism, which took psychological predicates to express complex sets of behavioral dispositions. In this chapter, the author reviews some tenets of Lewis's philosophy of mind and begins with some comments on the methodology Lewis employed in his analysis of psychological terms, which has become standard in functionalist accounts across philosophy. Then, he discusses the difference between what are often called “realizer functionalism” (...) and “role functionalism,” and argues that Lewis made the wrong choice. In Lewis's argument for the identity theory, the identity of mental states with biological states follows logically from folk‐psychological definitions and broadly physical facts. A central part of folk psychology concerns the interaction of beliefs, desires, and choices. The chapter presents Lewis's often misunderstood account of intentionality. It also presents few pessimistic remarks on the prospect of analyzing phenomenal truths in terms of functional role. (shrink)

If pantheism is by definition the belief in impersonal deity, then there is little point in exploring any inter-connection with personalistic theism. Theism would exclude pantheism, and pantheism theism. To be sure, there are strong reasons why pantheism has insisted upon divine impersonality, and these need to be explored and assessed. That is our task in the first part of the paper, while the second part will introduce a way of considering the correlation of pantheism and theism in a new (...) light. It will presuppose a different way of understanding the temporal modalities, but for the time being, in this first part, we shall make the ordinary assumption that only the present is fully real. The past is no longer, and the future is not yet. (shrink)

The High Court continues to exercise its inherent jurisdiction to make declarations about interventions into the lives of situationally vulnerable adults with mental capacity. In light of protective responses of health care providers and the courts to decision-making situations involving capacitous vulnerable adults, this paper has two aims. The first is diagnostic. The second is normative. The first aim is to identify the harms to a capacitous vulnerable adult’s autonomy that arise on the basis of the characterisation of situational (...) vulnerability and autonomy as fundamentally opposed concepts or the failure to adequately acknowledge the conceptual relationship between them at common law. The second part of this aim is to draw upon developments in analytic feminist philosophy to illustrate how standard approaches to autonomy are ill-equipped to capture the autonomy issues of capacitous vulnerable adults when their decisions regarding care and treatment are at stake. The second (normative) aim is to develop an account of self-authorised, intersubjective autonomy on the basis of analytic feminist insights into the relational practices of recognition. This account not only attempts to capture the autonomy of capacitous vulnerable adults and account for the necessary harms to their autonomy that arise from standard common law responses to their situational vulnerability, it is also predicated on the distinctions between mental capacity, the satisfaction of conditions for informed consent and the exercise of autonomy, meaning that it is better placed to fulfil the primary aim of the inherent jurisdiction – to facilitate the autonomy of vulnerable adults with capacity. (shrink)

David Lewis (1941–2001) was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th Century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science, decision theory, epistemology, meta-ethics and aesthetics. In most of these fields he is essential reading; in many of them he is among the most important figures of recent decades. And this list leaves out his two most significant contributions. -/- In philosophy of mind, Lewis developed and defended (...) at length a new version of materialism (see the entry on physicalism). He started by showing how the motivations driving the identity theory of mind and functionalism could be reconciled in his theory of mind. He called this an identity theory, though his theory motivated the position now known as analytic functionalism. And he developed detailed accounts of mental content (building on Davidson’s interpretationism) and phenomenal knowledge (building on Nemirow’s ability hypothesis) that are consistent with his materialism. The synthesis Lewis ended up with is one of the central positions in contemporary debates in philosophy of mind. -/- But his largest contributions were in metaphysics. One branch of his metaphysics was his Hume-inspired reductionism about the nomological. He developed a position he called “Humean supervenience”, the theory that said that there was nothing to reality except the spatio-temporal distribution of local natural properties. And he did this by showing in detail how laws, chances, counterfactual dependence, causation, dispositions and colours could be located within this Humean mosaic. The other branch of his metaphysics was his modal realism. Lewis held that the best theory of modality posited concrete possible worlds. A proposition is possible if and only if it is true at one of these worlds. Lewis defended this view in his most significant book, On the Plurality of Worlds. Alongside this, Lewis developed a new account of how to think about modal properties of individuals, namely counterpart theory, and showed how this theory resolved several long-standing puzzles about modal properties. (shrink)

Gottfried Martin has recently reminded us of a useful distinction between two possible ways of doing metaphysics. We may proceed by framing a “theory of principles” or by proposing a “theory of being”. Aristotle explicitly formulates both possibilities as the task of metaphysics, formulating a theory of principles in his doctrine of the four types of causal explanation in the first book of the Metaphysics, while exploring the theory of being in a number of other passages, such as Book I, (...) chapters 6 and 9; Book X, chapter 2; and Book XIII. These passages do not elaborate principles whereby we can analyze the structure of certain entities, be they causes, substances or forms, but rather concern themselves with the ontological status of these entities—in what sense can they be said to be? In Plato this distinction is more implicit, but we may contrast the theory of forms developed in the Phaedo and the Republic with the subsequent probing investigation of the being of these forms in the Parmenides and the Sophist. Kant “explicitly claims to have discovered and presented a complete and necessary system of the basic concepts and principles. The proof of the completeness and necessity of this system is the aim of the middle part of the Critique of Pure Reason, the Transcendental Analytic.” Yet. (shrink)

Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell (whom Maher aptly calls the “Pittsburgh School”) have tremendous influence on the current shape of the analytic tradition. Despite their differing views on philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, and epistemology, their shared application of ‘normative functionalism’ highlights important similarities in their approaches to the aforementioned disciplines. Normative functionalism interprets the ability to form judgments, possess concepts, rationally defend or be critical of judgments, and consequently act (...) as an agent, as largely guided by one’s responsiveness to norms. In this article, I argue for two related claims. First, I argue that the Pittsburgh School’s normative functionalism has germinated from the seed of Sellars’ ‘psychological nominalism’ and cannot be separated from it. Second, no philosophical question or approach can be free of competing claims as to the manner in which human beings think, communicate, act, and know. As a result, normative functionalism (insofar as it is a natural extension of psychological nominalism) is relevant to many philosophical disciplines, because it opposes nearly all the traditional views concerning how the human intellect comes into being and functionally operates. (shrink)

Philosophers usually have been anxious to avoid solipsism. A large number of good and great philosophers have tried to refute it. Of course, these philosophers have not always had the same target in mind and, like everything else, solipsism over the centuries has become increasingly elusive and subtle. In this book I undertake to state the position in its most modern and what I take to be its most plausible form. At some points in the history of philosophy (...) the solipsist has been one who denied the existence of everything except himself or even the existence of everything except his own present sensations. At other times, the solipsist instead of doubting these things has merely insisted that there could be no good reason for believing in the existence of anything beyond one's own present sensations. Roughly, this doubt is aimed at reasons rather than at things. A solipsist of this sort appears in Santayana's Scepticism and Animal Faith. (shrink)

The purpose of this text is to introduce students to great philosophy and great philosophers through an intense focus on argument. Like other topically organized introductory philosophy readers, this book is organized around the existence of God, knowledge and skepticism, mind and body, free will and determinism, ethics, and contemporary ethical debates, including abortion, euthanasia, and global hunger and poverty. 78 selections are grouped into six topical chapters-and the selections within those chapters are organized by argument. (...) Vaughn's approach focuses students' attention on argumentation, where much of the philosophical work gets done. (shrink)

These seven short essays record several recent explorations together with some corrections to earlier views which need revision in the light of further evidence. Topics considered include temporal atomism, a critique of nontemporal concresence, divine subjectivity and conceptual activity, a reexamination of physical purpose and negative prehension, and an alternate theory of life and mind.

David Kellogg Lewis (1941-2001) was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He made significant contributions to almost every area of analytic philosophy including metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science, and set the agenda for various debates in these areas which carry on to this day. In several respects he remains a contemporary figure, yet enough time has now passed for historians of philosophy to begin to (...) study his place in twentieth century thought. His philosophy was constructed and refined not just through his published writing, but also crucially through his life-long correspondence with fellow philosophers, including leading figures such as D.M. Armstrong, Saul Kripke, W.V. Quine, J.J.C. Smart, and Peter van Inwagen. His letters formed the undercurrent of his published work and became the medium through which he proposed many of his well-known theories and discussed a range of philosophical topics in depth. A selection of his vast correspondence over a 40-year period is presented here across two volumes. The letters offer an organic story of the origins, development, breadth, and depth of his philosophy in its historical context, as well as a glimpse into the influence of his many interlocutors."-- OCLC OLUC. (shrink)

Normally, activity is regarded as discernible, but according to relativity theory whatever is discernible lies in the past of the discernible. Only the present subjective immediacy is properly active. Subjectivity is properly understood as present becoming; objectivity as past being. I propose that we extend the domain of subjective immediacy to include the future as well as the present. This future universal activity is pluralized in the present in terms of the many actualities coming into being. Subjectivity is the (...) individualization of becoming, and so can apply to the future as a whole as well as to particular present subjects. The future as divine grows out of Whitehead's revisions of traditional notions of omnipotence and omniscience. But he separates creativity from the God of Western theism. This separation can be overcome if God is future creativity individualized in its own realm, which is the source of the creativity within each of us. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Controversy Between Schelling and Jacobi LEWIS S. FORD SCHELLING, ALONGWITH FICHTE, has suffered the fate of being labelled one of tIegel's predecessors. Richard Kroner provides the classic expression of this viewpoint in his monumental study, Von Kant bis Hegel, which examines Schelling's thought primarily for its contribution to Hegel's final synthesis.I In English we have Josiah Royce's sympathetic and lively account of Schelling's early romantic exuberance, regarded as (...) a transitional stage in the development of German idealism. 2 But this emphasis on the early ScheUing has led to an unfortunate neglect of his work subsequent to the break with Hegel in 1807. Schelling's romanticism, so ably documented by E. D. Hirsch, Jr., 3 can only be regarded as one phase in the total sweep of his thought, for, after the break with Hegel, Schelling produced at least three major works: the essay •ber das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit,4 wrestling with the problem of evil and human freedom, the fragmentary Weltalter, 5 which in scope and dialectical intricacy should be compared with Hegel's Logic, and the Philosophie der Mythologie und Offenbarung, 6 furnishing a fundamental critique of the whole dialectical enterprise. Save for the essay on human freedom, however, none of these works were published during his lifetinm, as Schelling withdrew from the public eye after his controversies with Hegel and Jacobi. Thus the publishing histories of Schelling and Hegel are exactly reverse. Schelling rushed into print his early speculative gropings, while Hegel suppressed his/making the Ph~nomenologic des Geistes his first major publication. Then while Hegel's Logic and Encyclopedia were being publicly acclaimed, Schelling remained silent. This accident of history is largely responsible for the illusion that Schelling is the older of the two x (Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1921-24),2 vols. 2The Spirit of Modern Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), Lecture VI, 164-189. Wordsworth and ScheUing, A Typological Study of Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960),Yale Studies in English, Vol. CXLV. 4Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph yon Sehelling, Philosophische Untersuchungen i~berdas Wesen der menschlichen Freyheit und die damit zusaramenhdngenden Gegenstdnde, 1809. Reprinted in the Sdmmtliche Werke, Erste Abtheilung, VII. Band (Stuttgart und Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1856), 331-416. English translation by James Gutmann: Of Human Freedom (Chicago: Open Court, 1936). 5Three fragmentary versions of the Weltalter have been published. The Urfassungen of 1811 and 1813were edited by Manfrcd SehrSter and published as a separate Naehlassband to the M~nchener Jubildumsausgabe of the collected works: Die Weltalter, Fragmente (Munich: Biederstein, Leibniz, 1946). A later version is published in S.W. I: 8, pp. 195-344,which has been translated by Frederick de Wolfe Bolman, Jr. : The Ages of the World (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1942). 6Philosophie der Mythologie is published in S.W. II: 1-2; Philosophie der Offenbarung in S.W. II: 3-4. These essays were first collected and published by Herman Nohl in Hegels theologische Jugendschriften (Tiibingen: 1907).T. M. Knox translated them into English, with an introduction by Richard Kroner: GeorgWilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Early Theological Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). [75] 76 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY thinkers (actually he was five years Hegel's junior), who retired from the philosophical scene after making his contribution to the Hegelian synthesis. Paul Tillich's doctoral dissertations s and Ernst Cassirer's studies in post-Kantian thought 9 made serious inroads on this conception, yet the iIInsion persisted. Their insistence on the importance of the later Schelling has been brilliantly sustained by two recent studies: Horst Fuhrmans's Schellings Philosophie der Weltalter1~and Walter Schulz's Die Vollendung des deutschen Idealismus in der Spdtphilosophie Schellings, ~ and we may hope that the conventional estimate of Schelling will be drastically revised. Fuhrmans has demonstrated that the split between the early and the later Schelling must be placed in the year 1806 when he came in contact with Franz yon Bander in Munich, who encouraged him to delve deeper into the theological and cosmological ramifications of Jacob Boehme's thought. TM The reorientation this caused is apparent in the essay on human freedom, published in 1809, but it was not fully exploited until the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, and ShakespearePeter B. LewisNear the middle of the first of his 1938 Lectures on Aesthetics, Wittgenstein talks about what he calls "the tremendous things in art"(LC, I 23 8, italics in original).1 Apart from a brief indication of the way in which our response to the tremendous differs from the non-tremendous, he does not refer again in this way to the tremendous things in art, though he (...) does refer elsewhere to what he calls "supreme art." But he does provide a couple of examples of the tremendous in art, the symphonies of Beethoven and Gothic Cathedrals. Suppose, now, like the student in the Investigations §185, we are asked to continue the series. I take it that, even given the lack of information, we could safely propose, say, Homer—the Iliad and the Odyssey—and Michelangelo—the Sistine Chapel—as further examples of the tremendous things in art. The idea is that the tremendous things in art are not works that are just very good or very fine, but rather they are great, supremely great; works of stature; special cases; instances of the highest kind of artistic achievement, occupying a distinctive place in the history of (Western) civilization.Another obvious candidate for the list of the tremendous things in art would be Shakespeare, where the name is shorthand for the great plays, the tragedies in particular, Lear, Hamlet, Othello,and so on. So it comes as something of a surprise to discover on reading that miscellaneous compendium of remarks known as Culture and Value that Wittgenstein himself had serious doubts about including Shakespeare in the pantheon of the tremendous things in art. There are seven passages in Culture and Value in which Wittgenstein reflects on Shakespeare.2 The earliest is dated 1939–40, though this passage does not appear to be critical of Shakespeare. The next two passages are [End Page 241] dated August 1946, the remainder coming in 1949 and 1950. The remarks critical of Shakespeare are, then, all very much late Wittgenstein.It is well-known that lots of people dislike Shakespeare's plays. Generations of school children have developed indifference or boredom or hatred that persists throughout their lives. And yet that does not count against Shakespeare's greatness; for, to borrow Hume's remark on those who would prefer Ogilby to Milton, "no one pays attention to such a taste; and we pronounce without scruple the sentiment of these [people] to be absurd and ridiculous."3 That rhetoric is, however, not available, at least not immediately, when the "pretended critic" (Hume's phrase) has the intellectual clout and aesthetic sensibility of a Wittgenstein; nor, for that matter, the artistic achievement of a Tolstoy.I have particular grounds for bringing Tolstoy into this discussion. In the first place, there is the importance of Tolstoy in the development of Wittgenstein's thinking about religious, moral and aesthetic issues. Secondly, it is by contrast with Tolstoy's criticism of Shakespeare that we can gain further understanding of Wittgenstein's remarks on Shakespeare. These two points are related. For it seems to me that it is partly through his reflections on Tolstoy's theories about art that Wittgenstein is led into commenting upon Shakespeare.Tolstoy famously attacks Shakespeare in his pamphlet, "Shakespeare and the Drama,"4 published in 1903 when Tolstoy was seventy-five years of age. Some have taken this essay as evidence that Tolstoy was in his dotage, his mind warped by religious-moralistic fervor. Not only does this fail to do justice to Tolstoy's reasons for criticizing Shakespeare—reasons that Howard Mounce has recently argued are by no means ridiculous5 —it also neglects the fact that the essay is the culmination of Tolstoy's life-long antagonism to Shakespeare. Nevertheless, that very slur on Tolstoy's sanity attests to Shakespeare's status in our culture as something tremendous. His achievement is a standard against which others are measured. And this, I think, is at least partly what Wittgenstein is hinting at in his remarks about the contrast between the tremendous and the non-tremendous in art when he says of the tremendous that "it plays an entirely different role... (shrink)

It is common in the history of science to try to extend an idea first demonstrated in one domain into others. Sometimes the extension is literal, and sometimes it is frankly metaphorical. Sometimes, however, when an extension is claimed to be literal, it is far from easy to see that it is. If an extension does not make use of entities and mechanisms involved in the original domain, and introduces novel entities and mechanisms, then it is not unreasonable to (...) doubt the claim of its authors that it is a literal extension of a well-established theory. IT is, therefore, not surprising that many who accept that the cultural transmission of information is unique to out species nevertheless balk at Dawkins's and Dennett's contention that there are units of cultural evolution, called 'memes', which can be used to explain the development and diversity of human culture, and whose survival is explicable in terms of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Our aim in this paper is to argue that scepticism about Dawkins's and Dennett's proposal is indeed justified; though it of course does not follow that there is not another way of explaining human culture in evolutionary terms. (shrink)

Andy Clark and David Chalmers claim that cognitive processes can and do extend outside the head.1 Call this the “hypothesis of extended cognition” (HEC). HEC has been strongly criticised by Fred Adams, Ken Aizawa and Robert Rupert.2 In this paper I argue for two claims. First, HEC is a harder target than Rupert, Adams and Aizawa have supposed. A widely-held view about the nature of the mind, functionalism—a view to which Rupert, Adams and Aizawa appear to subscribe— entails (...) HEC. Either HEC is true, or functionalism is false. The relationship between functionalism and HEC goes beyond support for the relatively uncontroversial claim that it is logically or nomologically possible for cognition to extend (the “can” part of HEC); functionalism entails that cognitive processes do extend in the actual world. Second, I argue that the version of HEC entailed by functionalism is more radical than the version that Clark and Chalmers suggest. I argue that it is so radical as to form a counterexample to functionalism. If functionalism is modified to prevent these consequences, then HEC falls victim to Rupert, Adams and Aizawa’s original criticism. An advocate of HEC has two choices: (1) accept functionalism and radical HEC; (2) give up HEC entirely. Clark and Chalmers’ intermediate position of a modest form of HEC is unsustainable. The argument of this paper, although initially appearing to support Clark and Chalmers, ultimately argues against their position. The price of HEC is rampant expansion of the mind into the world, and the implausibility of such expansion is indicative of deep-seated problems with functionalism. The argument of this paper consequently speaks to wider issues than just the status of HEC. The reasons for.. (shrink)

A renegade positivist himself, Quine eschewed apriority, necessity, and analyticity, while (for a time) adopting a holistic version of verificationism. Despite similarities in their opposition to Quine, the differences between Lewis and Kripke were large ‐ especially in the semantics and metaphysics of modality. They also had different philosophical styles. Lewis's (1970b) was one of the cutting‐edge texts of its time ‐ along with work by Richard Montague, David Kaplan, and Robert Stalnaker. Together, they laid out a powerful framework (...) for the use of intensional logic in semantic theories of natural language. Lewis was, of course, the author of many more influential articles in the philosophy of language. A final one that must be mentioned is Lewis (1975a). In it, he argues that sentence adverbs such as ′always′, ′usually′, ′often′, sometimes′, and ′never′ are unselective quantifiers that bind all free variables in their scope. (shrink)

It is widely believed that a study of the dynamics of capitalist development eventuates in a determinate law of economic evolution. If we trace the origins of this assumption, we find that it stems from the influence of the Hegelian dialectic upon economic theory. The metaphysic of determinism has thus obtruded its way into social science, and brought with it the corollary that economic analysis yields an insight into the necessary pattern of capitalist development.

Whitehead’s initial decision to treat actual occasions as unqualifiedly indivisible rendered the notion of succession in becoming highly problematic. Temporal phases would divide the indivisible. Thus Whitehead had originally recourse to genetic analysis. Many have interpreted this as nontemporal becoming, which is not clearly distinguished from the eternity of eternal objects. Besides, Whitehead reserved the term ‘nontemporal’ for the primordial nature. Finally Whitehead came to see that the indivisibility of occasions meant only that they could not be divided into (...) smaller actual occasions (PR 69), which allowed for genetic division. (shrink)

Schopenhauer is famous for his pessimism. Many people are surprised to learn that he articulated an important theory of laughter. While this theory has been scrutinised by aestheticians exploring the nature of humour, little has been written on the role of laughter in Schopenhauer’s pessimistic vision of the world. Admittedly, this latter topic is only a minor theme in Schopenhauer’s work: yet I contend that what he has to say illuminates the human predicament.

The topic of homonymy, especially the variety of homonymy that has gone under the title, “focal meaning,” is of fundamental importance to large portions of Aristotle’s work-not to mention its central place in the ongoing controversies between Aristotle and Plato. It is quite astonishing, therefore, that the topic should have gone so long without a book-length treatment. And it is all the more gratifying that the new book on homonymy by Christopher Shields should be so comprehensive, and of such uniformly (...) high quality.’ Everyone who cares about Aristotle will be in his debt. Shields’s book falls into two parts. In the first, he is concerned to lay out the basic structure of Aristotle’s views about homonymy; in the second part, we are led through the various applications of the idea, to the analysis of friendship, for example, the homonymy of the body, the account of goodness and, not least, the homonymy of being. Shields’s book brings out well how the topic of homonymy weaves in and out of the fabric of Aristotle’s thinking in a variety of areas. I will resist the temptation to follow Shields through these various subject-matters, and instead take up essentially two topics. First, (I), the basic outline of Aristotle’s notion of homonymy, more or less independently of its different applications (here, I follow Shields’s example in the first half of his book). Thereafter, I discuss a single application: the homonymy of being (this is the subject of Shields’s last and longest chapter). Here, I will be interested (II) in how homonymy relates to the theory of the categories; and (III) in the application of homonymy to the analysis of substance in the Metaphysics. (shrink)

By the early 1970s, and continuing through 2001, David Lewis and Saul Kripke had taken over W.V.O. Quine’s leadership in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophical logic in the English-speaking world. Quine, in turn, had inherited his position in the early 1950s from Rudolf Carnap, who had been the leading logical positivist -- first in Europe, and, after 1935, in America. A renegade positivist himself, Quine eschewed apriority, necessity, and analyticity, while (for a time) adopting a holistic version (...) of verificationism. Like Carnap, he placed philosophical logic and the philosophy of science at the center of philosophy. (shrink)

Stolz's primary concern is to interject Whitehead's thought into the contemporary scientific situation. He holds that Whitehead's development primarily proceeds out the scientific discussion of his time and only secondarily from the current philosophical discussion. He believes that the scientific community will be more open to this foundational reflection, so he has concentrated on the earlier material.

David Pears's contention that the Tractatus is to be understood as advancing a form of metaphysical realism is defended against McGuinness's view that Tractatus 1-2.063 is to be treated just as introducing a metaphysical myth that may be employed to bring into prominence salient features of propositions. Starting with a discussion of the involved difficulties, e.g., determining (1) whether Wittgenstein does in fact provide an argument for the existence of simple objects (2) what this object is and (3) what (...) role the existence of simple objects plays within the Picture Theory of the Proposition, Wittgenstein's argument for the existence of simple objects is reconstructed, augmenting Pears's existing account by providing further details of why Wittgenstein held that determinacy of sense requiresthe existence of simple objects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.4 (2005) 325-329 [Access article in PDF] Psychoanalysis as Natural Philosophy R. D. Hinshelwood Keywords evolution, psychopathology, ethics, unconscious phantasy Andreas De Block has offered us a most fascinating paper. We do not have to agree with all his points to be profoundly stimulated by them. His core proposition is that Freud pathologizes ordinary psychology and personalities, as well as the abnormal. There (...) has been a perennial debate about whether, psychoanalytically speaking, there is a continuum from pathology to normality or if there is a discontinuity at some point between the two. Freud's famous quote—"much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness" (Breuer and Freud 1895, 305)—is ambiguous. Interestingly, De Block takes a hard stand on this; he not only assumes a continuum, but further he reads Freud as saying that all normality is neurotic. This is not a usual reading of Freud. De Block then expands this into a philosophical position. It is, he says, Freud's philosophy on the nature of mind.Freud himself was not interested in philosophy, and thought it largely irrelevant to psychoanalysis. In fact, he mused about the traffic being inevitably in the opposite direction—that philosophy might come to psychoanalysis. In discussing the work of a philosophically inclined analyst, he remarked, The decisive reason for the rejection of Putnam's proposals was the doubt as to which of the countless philosophical systems should be accepted, since they all seem to rest on an equally insecure basis.... It seemed more prudent to wait, and to discover whether a particular attitude towards life might be forced upon us with all the weight of necessity by analytical investigation itself. (Freud 1921, 270) Psychoanalysis, Freud thought, might be the very substance from which a philosophical system could emerge. De Block has followed that route; he has gone to Freud's writing to discovery a weltanshaung on which we might develop a philosophy of life. He has come back from his intellectual expedition with Freud's fascinating paper, published only in 1987 (discovered in 1983), "A Phylogenetic Phantasy." This was actually written in 1914, but Freud never published it and in fact destroyed his own copy of the draft. The paper has been called a "metabiology" (Gubrich-Simitis 1987), and deals with Freud's speculation on how a threatened species during the ice age developed certain biological and biopsychological traits1 necessary to survive the harsh environmental conditions. These traxits, which included the repression of libido, had significant side effects, namely, the pathologies arising from repression: the neuroses, perversions and psychoses. Moreover, today the environmental conditions no longer apply, so we are left with the side effects of traits that are no longer biologically useful. [End Page 325]So, De Block indicates at least the possibility of an evolutionary theory of the nature of mind. Even if Freud's Lamarckianism makes his particular speculative metabiology implausible, it is a way of thinking that suggests that a theory of mind can arise from biological understanding of its evolutionary development. However, De Block goes further. As a corollary, because Freud's view of the evolution of mind is to involve the evolutionary nature of psychopathology, then Freud's psychoanalysis can suggest an evolutionary psychiatry—that is to say, psychiatry can look for distant causes of mental disturbance in the vagaries of evolutionary influence.This way of approaching philosophy is interesting because it starts with the outcome of a scientific investigation of the human mind, just as Freud suggested in the passage quoted (Freud 1921, 270). The prospect is for a natural philosophy of mind, just as the physics of fundamental particles and the "big bang" prompt us toward a kind of natural ontology of the universe and its contents, arising from empirically tested facts.However, De Block is on rather uncertain ground with the evidence for his argument; he commits Freud to this biological speculation on the basis of a paper that Freud did not in fact publish and tore up.2 Even if Freud's reading of the evolutionary origins of man... (shrink)

German scholarship with respect to Whitehead is currently quite vigorous, more so than American, at least in philosophical circles. British scholarship, on the other hand, is nearly nonexistent. French scholarship is in between. Adventures of Ideas was translated into French in 1993, and the translation of Process and Reality should be out shortly. But there are few books or collections of essays about his philosophy. Now, however, Isabelle Stengers, co-author with Ilya Prigogine of Order Out of Chaos, has (...) edited a book of essays on The Impact of Whitehead, providing the introductory essay and the translation into French of two essays. (shrink)

The diverse essays in this volume speak to the relevance of phenomenological and psychological questioning regarding perceptions of the human. This designation, human, can be used beyond the mere identification of a species to underwrite exclusion, denigration, dehumanization and demonization, and to set up a pervasive opposition in Othering all deemed inhuman, nonhuman, or posthuman. As alerted to by Merleau-Ponty, one crucial key for a deeper understanding of these issues is consideration of the nature and scope of perception. Perception defines (...) the world of the perceiver, and perceptual capacities are constituted in engagement with the world – there is co-determination. Moreover, the distinct phenomenology of perception in the spectatorial mode in contrast to the reciprocal mode, deepens the intersubjective and ethical dimensions of such investigations. -/- Questions motivating the essays include: Can objectification and an inhuman gaze serve positive ends? If so, under what constraints and conditions? How is an inhuman gaze achieved and at what cost? How might the emerging insights of the role of perception into our interdependencies and essential sociality from various domains challenge not only theoretical frameworks, but also the practices and institutions of science, medicine, psychiatry and justice? What can we learn from atypical social cognition, psychopathology and animal cognition? Could distortions within the gazer’s emotional responsiveness and habituated aspects of social interaction play a role in the emergence of an inhuman gaze? -/- Perception and the Inhuman Gaze will interest scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and social cognition. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction -/- Part I. The Gaze in Classical Phenomenology: Perspectives on Objectification -/- 1. Defending the Objective Gaze as a Self-transcending Capacity of Human Subjects -/- Dermot Moran -/- 2. Two Orders of Bodily Objectification: The Look and the Touch -/- Sara Heinämaa -/- 3. On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze -/- Timothy Mooney -/- 4. Not wholly human. Reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Jacques Lacan. -/- Dorothée Legrand -/- 5. Disclosure and the Gendered Gaze in Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics -/- Christinia Landry -/- Part II. Vision, Perception and Gazes -/- 6. Inside the gaze -/- Shaun Gallagher -/- 7. Perception and its Objects. -/- Maurita Harney -/- 8. Technological Gaze: Understanding How Technologies Transform Perception -/- Richard Lewis -/- 9. The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts: The Making and Unmaking of Others and Worlds -/- Anya Daly -/- Part III. Psychiatry, Psychopathology and Inhuman Gazes -/- 10. Values and Values-based Practice in Psychopathology: Combining Analytic and Phenomenological Approaches -/- G Stanghellini and K.W.M. (Bill) Fulford -/- 11. The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry, Psychopathology and Schizophrenia. -/- Matthew Broome -/- 12. Overcoming the Gaze: Psychopathology, Affect, and Narrative. -/- Anna Bortolan -/- 13. From excess to exhaustion : The rise of burnout in a post-modern achievement society. -/- Philippe Wuyts -/- 14. Blackout Rages: The Inhibition of Episodic Memory in Extreme Berserker Episodes -/- John Protevi -/- Part IV. Beyond the Human: Divine, Posthuman and Animal Gazes -/- 15. Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze -/- Sean. D. Kelly -/- 16. What Counts as Human/ Inhuman Right Now? -/- Rosi Braidotti -/- 17. Beyond Human and Animal: Metamorphosis in Merleau-Ponty -/- Dylan Trigg -/- Part V. Sociality and Boundaries of the Human -/- 18. Voice and gaze considered together in ‘languaging’. -/- Fred Cummins -/- 19. Ethics Beyond the Human: Disability and The Inhuman -/- Jonathan Mitchell -/- 20. Social Invisibility and Emotional Blindness -/- James Jardine -/- 21. What are you looking at? Dissonance as a window on the autonomy of participatory sense-making frames. -/- Mark James. (shrink)

The most eminent exponents of the ontological argument for the existence of God have been characterized as well by a common emotional ingredient — a concern with individual guilt. Anselm, Josiah Royce, Karl Barth, and Norman Malcolm in their respective ways have made the experience of guilt a central one in their metaphysical standpoints. The hypothesis is therefore advanced that the validity which such thinkers have found in the ontological argument is the expression of a frame of mind which (...) we can call 'logical masochism'; under the influence of such emotions, the ontologian bows his logical powers submissively before an entity the existence of which he cannot question because of the guilt that such questioning would arouse. Under such social circumstances, on the other hand, as during the eighteenth century, when the psychology of individual guilt subsided, the appeal of the ontological argument likewise declines. (shrink)

Nicholas Wolterstorff has claimed that David Hume hinted at a proper functionalist account that anticipates the epistemology of Alvin Plantinga. In this paper, I shall argue that we should refrain from attributing a proper functionalist epistemology to Hume. I shall first raise doubts as to how one could fit a notion of proper functioning into Hume's descriptive project. Next, I shall argue that adopting a proper functionalist epistemology would undermine some of Hume's most famous claims about causal inferences.

Writing Philosophy: A Student's Guide to Writing Philosophy Essays is a concise, self-guided manual that covers the basics of argumentative essay writing and encourages students to master fundamental skills quickly, with minimal instructor input. Opening with an introductory chapter on how to read philosophy, the book then moves into the basics of writing summaries and analyzing arguments. It provides step-by-step instructions for each phase of the writing process, from formulating a thesis, to creating an outline, to (...) writing a final draft, supplementing this tutorial approach with model essays, outlines, introductions, and conclusions. Skills essential to evaluating arguments, citing sources, avoiding plagiarism, detecting fallacies, and formatting final drafts are dealt with in detail. The final two chapters serve as a reference guide to common mistakes and basic skills in sentence construction, writing style, and word choice. Employing a rulebook format similar to that of the classic Elements of Style (by Strunk, White, and Angell), Lewis Vaughn distills helpful writing advice into simple rules that students can easily remember and apply--and that instructors can refer to when reviewing student papers. These rules cover essay organization, sentence structure, documentation styles, plagiarism, grammar, usage, and more. Written in a clear and engaging style and incorporating samples of student writing, Writing Philosophy is an indispensable resource for virtually any philosophy course. (shrink)

David Pears's contention that the Tractatus is to be understood as advancing a form of metaphysical realism is defended against McGuinness's view that Tractatus 1-2.063 is to be treated just as introducing a metaphysical myth that may be employed to bring into prominence salient features of propositions. Starting with a discussion of the involved difficulties, e.g., determining (1) whether Wittgenstein does in fact provide an argument for the existence of simple objects (2) what this object is and (3) what (...) role the existence of simple objects plays within the Picture Theory of the Proposition, Wittgenstein's argument for the existence of simple objects is reconstructed, augmenting Pears's existing account by providing further details of why Wittgenstein held that determinacy of sense requiresthe existence of simple objects. (shrink)

Martin Luther King Jr. said and wrote as much or more about the meaning, nature, and power of truth as any other prominent figure in the 1950s and '60s. King was not only vastly influential as an advocate for and defender of truth; he also did more than anyone in his time to organize truth into a movement for the liberation, uplift, and empowerment of humanity, efforts that ultimately resulted in the loss of his life. Drawing on King's published (...) and unpublished sermons, speeches, and writings, The Arc of Truth explores King's lifelong pilgrimage in pursuit of truth. Lewis Baldwin explores King's quest for truth from his inquisitive childhood to the influence of family and church, to Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary, Boston University, and other academic institutions in the Northeast. Continuing on, the book follows King's sense that he was involved in experiments of truth within the context of the struggle to liberate and empower humanity, to his understanding of the civil rights movement as unfolding truth, to his persistent challenge to America around its need to engage in a serious reckoning with truth regarding its history and heritage. Baldwin investigates King's determination to speak truth to power, and his untiring efforts to actualize what he envisioned as the truthful ends of the beloved community through the truthful means of nonviolent direct action. King believed, taught, and demonstrated by example that truth derives from a revolution in the heart, mind, and soul before it can be translated into institutions and structures that guarantee freedom, justice, human dignity, equality of opportunity, and peace. Ultimately, King's significance for humanity cannot be considered only his contributions as a preacher, pastor, civil rights leader, and world figure--he was and remains equally impactful as a theologian, philosopher, and ethicist whose life and thought evince an enduring search for and commitment to truth. (shrink)

Ginger Hoffman and Jennifer Hansen’s study of gender dynamics in psychiatric disability memoirs makes several fruitful moves for the study of psychic diversity. Perhaps the most important is that the article encourages analytic philosophers to contribute to understanding how individual mental life is affected by the larger cultural context—which we can think of as the “mind/culture” problem. This is an important move because, for the most part, analytic philosophers have paid more attention to the mind/body problem than they (...) have to the mind/culture problem. Hoffman and Hansen are right that it would be valuable for analytic philosophy to join in the study of this equally complicated conceptual problem.... (shrink)

Two articles by Lewis Feuer caught my attention in the '40s when 1 was wondering, asa student physicist, about the relations of physics to philosophy and to the world in turmoil. One was his essay on 'The Development of Logical Empiricism' (1941), and the other his critical review of Philipp Frank's biography of Einstein, 'Philosophy and the Theory of Relativity' (1947). How extraordinary it was to find so intelligent, independent, critical, and humane a mind; and furthermore he (...) went further, as I soon realized when I looked for his name on other publications. I recall arguing with myself over his exploration of 'Indeterminacy and Economic Development' (1948), and even more when I read his 'Dialectical Materialism and Soviet Science' (1949). More papers, and then the fascinating, sometimes irritating, always insightful, books. His monograph on Psychoanalysis and Ethics 1955, the beautiful sociological and humanist study of Spinoza and the Rise of Liberalism (1958), his essays on 'The Social Roots of Einstein's Theory of Relativity' (1971) together with the book on Einstein and the Genera tions of Science (1974), the splendid reader from the works of Marx and Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (1959) which was a major text of the '60s, the stimulating essays on the social formation which seems to have been required for a modern scientific movement to develop, set forth most convincingly in The Scientific Intellectual (1963). (shrink)

Data-driven historiography of philosophy looks to objective modeling tools for illumination of the propagation of influence. While the system of David Lewis, the most influential philosopher of our time, raises historiographic puzzles to stymie conventional analytic methods, it proves amenable to data-driven analysis. A striking result is that Lewis only becomes the metaphysician of current legend following the midpoint of his career: his initial project is to frame a descriptive science of mind and meaning; the transition to metaphysics (...) is a rhetorically breathtaking escape from this program's (inevitable) collapse. Understanding this process both aids a more focused debate whether it counts as progress, and also presents novel affordances for partisans on both sides to learn from Lewis's right and wrong steps. (shrink)

In _A Companion to David Lewis_, Barry Loewer and Jonathan Schaffer bring together top philosophers to explain, discuss, and critically extend Lewis's seminal work in original ways. Students and scholars will discover the underlying themes and complex interconnections woven through the diverse range of his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language, logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, ethics, and aesthetics. The first and only comprehensive study of the work of David Lewis, one of (...) the most systematic and influential philosophers of the latter half of the 20th century Contributions shed light on the underlying themes and complex interconnections woven through Lewis's work across his enormous range of influence, including metaphysics, language, logic, epistemology, science, mind, ethics, and aesthetics Outstanding Lewis scholars and leading philosophers working in the fields Lewis influenced explain, discuss, and critically extend Lewis's work in original ways An essential resource for students and researchers across analytic philosophy that covers the major themes of Lewis's work. (shrink)