The paper presents a dialogical approach applied to the analysis of argumentative strategies in philosophy and examines the case of the critical comments to the Tanner Lectures given by the Dutch biologist and primatologist, Frans de Waal, at Princeton University in November 2003. The paper is divided into five parts: the first advances the hypothesis that what seem puzzling aspects of philosophical argumentation to scholars in other academic fields are explained by the global role played by a series of (...) arguments within a broader argumentative strategy, e.g. arguing that a question that seems important is not really worthwhile; the second presents five groups of dialectical operations, making use of concepts and tools from the dialectical dialogical approach (WaltonWalton and Krabbe, Commitment in Dialogue: Basic Concepts of Interpersonal Reasoning, SUNY Press, Albany, 1995), Hubert Marraud's Argument dialectic (Marraud, En buena lógica. Una introducción a la teoría de la argumentación, Editorial Universidad de Guadalajara, Guadalajara, 2020) and from the vast tradition of formal dialectics and dialogical logic. In the remaining three sections, the comments of philosophers Christine M. Korsgaard, Philip Kitcher and Peter Singer to de Waal's Tanner Lectures are analyzed dialectically. (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas asserts, in the Preface to Knowledge and Human Interests, that a radical critique of knowledge, that is a metacritique of epistemology, is only possible as a social theory. In this essay, Garbin Kortian discusses the implications and philosophical import of this thesis, which is central to Habermas's work, through a critical account of the German philosophical tradition in which it stands. He relates the 'metacritical dimension' of Haberbas's thought to Hegel's critique of Kant, Marx's critique of (...) Hegel, and the Frankfurt school's critique of positivism. Kortian presents his perspective on the philosophical problems Habermas's argument faces: the primacy of practice, this philosophy of understanding and the hermeneutic concept of understanding. This book, which was originally published in French, will interest students of philosophy and of the social and political sciences. (shrink)

Exploring philosophy through detailed argument analyses of texts by philosophers from Plato to Strawson using a novel and transparent method of analysis. The best way to introduce students to philosophy and philosophical discourse is to have them read and wrestle with original sources. This textbook explores philosophy through detailed argument analyses of texts by philosophers from Plato to Strawson. It presents a novel and transparent method of analysis that will teach students not only how to understand and evaluate (...) philosophers' arguments but also how to construct such arguments themselves. Students will learn to read a text and discover what the philosopher thinks, why the philosopher thinks it, and whether the supporting argument is good. Students learn argument analysis through argument diagrams, with color-coding of the argument's various elements—conclusion, claims, and “indicator phrases.” (An online “mini-course” in argument diagramming and argument diagramming software are both freely available online.) Each chapter ends with exercises and reading questions. After a general introduction to philosophy and logic and an explanation of argument analysis, the book presents selections from primary sources, arranged by topics that correspond to contemporary debates, with detailed analysis and evaluation. These topics include philosophy of religion, epistemology, theory of mind, free will and determinism, and ethics; authors include Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Ryle, Fodor, Dennett, Searle, and others. What Is the Argument? not only introduces students to great philosophical thinkers, it also teaches them the essential skill of critical thinking. (shrink)

Full-text of this article is not available in this e-prints service. This article was originally published [following peer-review] in Hume Studies, published by and copyright Hume Society.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos: The Philosophical Arguments by Simon TruwantTobias EndresSimon Truwant. Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos: The Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. viii + 266. Hardback, $99.99.Simon Truwant has written a very well-researched study of Cassirer’s and Heidegger’s 1929 encounter in Davos. Because of its historical setting at the origin of the analytic-continental divide, this book is of interest (...) to everyone working in contemporary philosophy. As there is already a considerable mass of secondary literature on this topic, Truwant acknowledges he needs to show that his book sheds new light on it. He does so by stressing his choice to focus exclusively on the philosophical arguments that were at stake in the Cassirer-Heidegger encounter rather than considering its reception and so adding to other scholars’ “non-philosophical assessments” (6). Truwant argues that the “Cassirer-Heidegger dispute” is an exchange that goes well beyond the Davos encounter (15), supposedly extending from 1923 until 1946 (8, 10–11). Its core topics are (a) the Kantian legacy, (b) the conditio humana, and (c) the role of philosophy. Accordingly, the book, which comprises ten chapters, an introduction, and a conclusion, is structured into three parts. In the introduction, Truwant presents his guiding hypothesis and its positioning in the scholarly literature. Against the standard view that Cassirer and Heidegger did not have a genuine debate, Truwant claims that a careful reconstruction of the philosophical content of the Davos encounter shows that “a true philosophical debate” (14) took place between the two thinkers. This reading is accompanied by a critical assessment of most other works on the topic, which, according to Truwant, strive either to give “an exhaustive overview” (8) of the encounter by focusing on a merely chronological reconstruction of the events or to single out just one topic of the debate to the exclusion of all the others.In the first chapter, Truwant presents evidence of a dispute transcending the Davos encounter by pointing the reader to all the occasions where Cassirer and Heidegger were in dialogue, either through their works or in person (15–18). Then, Truwant proceeds, first, to establish the philosophical core of the 1929 debate along lines (a)–(c) listed above (18–36); and, second, to map that brief and, at first sight, failed debate onto the longer dispute between the two thinkers running from 1923 through 1946 (36–44). The first [End Page 515] chapter thus serves to introduce the general structure of what follows by arguing that the Davos debate must be considered against this wider context.The first part of the book, which deals with the Kantian heritage in both Heidegger and Cassirer, includes chapters 2–4. The second part includes chapters 5–7, devoted to the philosophical anthropology of the two thinkers, which Truwant sees as centered on the questions of subjectivity and of selfhood in both Cassirer and Heidegger (73, 112, 126, 151, 167–75). The third and final part of the book includes chapters 8–10. This third part presents first a reconstruction of Cassirer’s normative stance on philosophy as an “ethical task” aimed at “deconstructing ideologies” (195), on the basis of his early writings on the history of ideas (181–86) and the philosophy of culture (186–92). Then, Truwant proceeds to situate Heidegger’s “recovery of the Seinsfrage, the analysis of Dasein, and the reinterpretation of Kant’s thought” (197) within a “hermeneutical conception of philosophy” (219). Finally, he sets Cassirer’s enlightenment view of philosophy (220–32) against Heidegger’s (non-Wittgensteinian) therapeutic conception of philosophy (232–44). In the conclusion, Truwant both sums up the evidence in support of his hypothesis about the philosophical nature of the Davos exchange and argues that Heidegger and Cassirer agree that a correlation between a terminus a quo and a terminus ad quem is essential to any philosophical project, although they differ in their determinations of those terms (247).Truwant’s attempt to give a systematic reconstruction of the Cassirer-Heidegger debate is commendable and, for the most part, a thorough success, which adds a significantly new viewpoint to the existing scholarly literature. Nevertheless, one might wonder whether... (shrink)

Among the various approaches to the question of the nature of the mind , Augustine’s philosophical arguments for the existence of an incorporeal and spiritual substance in man and against materialism are here thoroughly examined on their merits as a source of insight for contemporary discussion. This book, originally published in 1986, employs Augustine’s method of introspection, and argues that, as a philosopher, Augustine can teach the modern mind how to detect the reality of such a spiritual subject (...) in and through basic human acts and faculties, such as imagination, memory, knowledge, free-will and self-knowledge. It presents a critical dialogue with various materialistic anthropologies directly addressed by Augustine himself, or those which have arisen at later periods, including epiphenomenalism, mind-brain identity theory, Marxism and others. (shrink)

This book develops a novel argument which combines the Kalam with the Thomistic Cosmological Argument. It approaches an ongoing dispute concerning whether there is a First Cause of time from a radically new point of view, namely by demonstrating that there is such a First Cause without requiring the controversial arguments against concrete infinities and against traversing an actual infinite (although the book presents original defenses of these arguments as well). This book also develops a novel (...) class='Hi'>philosophical argument for the Causal Principle, namely that ‘everything that begins to exist has a cause’, and offers a detailed discussion on whether a First Cause of time can be avoided by a causal loop. It also addresses epistemological issues related to the Cosmological Argument which have been relatively neglected by recent publications, and demonstrates (contra Hawking et al) the continual relevance and significance of philosophy for answering ultimate questions. -/- . (shrink)

This chapter discusses methodology in feminist history of philosophy and shows that women philosophers made interesting and original contributions to the debates concerning the cosmological argument. I set forth and examine the arguments of Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Catherine Trotter Cockburn, Emilie Du Châtelet, and Mary Shepherd, and discuss their involvement with philosophical issues and debates surrounding the cosmological argument. I argue that their contributions are original, philosophically interesting, and result from participation in the ongoing debates (...) and controversies about the cosmological argument, causal principles, and necessary existence. (shrink)

The origin of paraconsistent logic is closely related with the argument, ‘from the assertion of two mutually contradictory statements any other statement can be deduced’; this can be referred to as ex contradictione sequitur quodlibet (ECSQ). Despite its medieval origin, only by the 1930s did it become the main reason for the unfeasibility of having contradictions in a deductive system. The purpose of this article is to study what happened earlier: from Principia Mathematica to that time, when it became well (...) established. The two main historical claims that I am going to advance are the following: (1) the first explicit use of ECSQ as the main argument for supporting the necessity of excluding any contradiction from deductive systems is to be found in the first edition of the book Grundzüge der Theoretischen Logik (Hilbert, D. and Ackermann, W. 1928. Grundzüge der Theoretischen Logik. Berlin: Julius Springer Verlag); (2) Łukasiewicz's position regarding the logical constraints against contradictions varies considerably from his studies on the principle of (non-) contradiction in Aristotle, published in 1910 and what is stated in his `authorized lectured notes' on mathematical logic that appeared in 1929. The two texts are: 1) a paper in German (Łukasiewicz, J. 1910. `Über den Satz des Widerspruchs bei Aristotles'. Bulletin International de l'Académie des sciences de Cracovie, Classe d'Histoire et de Philosophie, pp. 15–38) [English translation: Łukasiewicz, J. 1971. ‘On the principle of contradiction in Aristotle’, Review of Metaphysics, XXIV, 485–509]; and 2) a book in Polish. Łukasiewicz, J. 1910. O zasadzie sprzecznosci u Aristotelesa Studium krytyczne, Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe [German translation: Łukasiewicz, J. 1993. Über den Satz des Widerspruchs bei Aristotles. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag]. The lecture notes were then published as a book (Łukasiewicz, J. 1958. Elementy Logiki Matematycznej. Warszawa: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe [PWN] and then translated into English (Łukasiewicz, J. 1963. Elements of Mathematical Logic. Oxford, New York: Pergamon Press/the Macmillan Company). The second half of this article will concentrate on Łukasiewicz's position on ECSQ. This will lead me to propose that to regard him as a forerunner of paraconsistent logic by virtue of those early writings is accurate only if his book published in Polish is considered but not if the analysis is restricted to the paper originally published in German (as has been the case for the principal reconstructions of the history of paraconsistent logic). Furthermore, I will stress that in the 1929 book he presented one formalization of ECSQ as an axiom for sentential calculus and, also, he used ECSQ to defend the necessity of consistency, apparently independently of Hilbert and Ackermann's book. At the end, I will suggest that the aim of twentieth century usage of ECSQ was to change from the centuries-long philosophical discussion about contradictions to a more ‘technical’ one. But with paraconsistent logic viewed as a technical solution to this restriction, then, the philosophical problem revives but having now at one's disposal an improved understanding of it. Finally, Łukasiewicz's two different positions about ECSQ open an interesting question about the history of paraconsistent logic: do we have to attempt a consistent reconstruction of it, or are we prepared to admit inconsistencies within it? (shrink)

ArgumentBy the year 1720, one could visit at least three large-scale wooden models of Solomon's Temple in the cities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Halle. For short periods of time, the Amsterdam and Hamburg Temple models were exhibited in London, where they attracted a great deal of attention. The Halle model, on the other hand, never moved from its original location: a complex of schools known today as the Francke Foundations (die Franckesche Stiftungen). This article explores the reasons for the (...) Halle model's striking immobility by considering its position at the center of a long-distance network, also referred to as the Danish-Halle mission. In this article I argue that the Halle Temple model functioned as an effigy and memory theater that helped proponents of this mission make a case for the Temple's status as the world's first information technology. Young people moved around the wooden model; they took virtual pilgrimages with it and internalized its infrastructure by memorizing its various components. The model's position at the center of the complex's striking ethnographical collection and curricula exposes relations between the Danish-Halle mission, Christian philosophy, and an irenical turn as public policy in early eighteenth-century Brandenburg-Prussia. (shrink)

The celu of the philosophical literature on the hole argument is the 1987 paper by Earman \& Norton ["What Price Space-time Substantivalism? The Hole Story" Br. J. Phil. Sci.]. This paper has a well-known back-story, concerning work by Stachel and Norton on Einstein's thinking in the years 1913-15. Less well-known is a connection between the hole argument and Earman's work on Leibniz in the 1970s and 1980s, which in turn can be traced to an argument first presented in 1975 (...) by Howard Stein. Remarkably, this thread originates with a misattribution: the argument Earman attributes to Stein, which ultimately morphs into the hole argument, was not the argument Stein gave. The present paper explores this episode and presents some reflections on how it bears on the subsequent literature. (shrink)

The social rate of discount--that is, the way decision makers today evaluate future consequences of collective activity--raises difficult issues of intergenerational justice. When benefits are discounted at the present rate the United States government requires, serious efforts to promote public health over the long term will fail cost-benefit tests. No consensus exists among theorists to establish fair rates; philosophers support discounting with economic arguments that economists reject, while economists no less paradoxically support the concept using philosophical arguments (...) that philosophers disavow. A new emphasis on the role of consumers' and citizens' time preferences, however, will keep open rather than close debates on the social discount rate. (shrink)

The central recommendation of this article is that philosophers trained in the analytic tradition ought to add the sensibilities and skills of the historian to their methodological toolkit. The value of an historical approach to strictly philosophical matters is illustrated by a case study focussing on the medieval origin of conceivability arguments and contemporary views of modality. It is shown that common metaphilosophical views about the nature of the philosophical enterprise as well as certain inference patterns found (...) in thinkers from Descartes to Chalmers have their origin in the theological concerns of the Scholastics. Since these assumptions and inference patterns are difficult to motivate when shorn of their original theological context, the upshot is that much post-Cartesian philosophy is cast in an altogether unfamiliar, and probably unwelcome, light. The methodological point, however, is that this philosophical gain is born of acquaintance with the history of ideas. (shrink)

Various claims have been made, recently, that Darwin's argumentation in the Origin instantiates and so supports some general philosophical proposal about scientific theorizing, for example, the "semantic view". But these claims are grounded in various incorrect analyses of that argumentation. A summary is given here of an analysis defended at greater length in several papers by the present author. The historical and philosophical advantages of this analysis are explained briefly. Darwin's argument comprises three distinct evidential cases on behalf (...) of natural selection, cases, that is, for its existence, its adequacy and its responsibility. Theorizing, today, about evolution by natural selection involves a similar structure of evidential and explanatory concerns. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE ORIGINALITY OF ST. THOMAS'S POSITION ON THE PHILOSOPHERS AND CREATION TIMOTHY B. NOONE The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. AS IS WELL KNOWN, Thomas Aquinas stands out from his contemporaries in his apparent willingness to defend the possibility of an eternal but created universe, although, like all orthodox Christian believers, he affirmed that the world had a temporal beginning in the light of Scriptural teaching. That Thomas Aquinas (...) defended the possibility of an eternal creation was amply demonstrated over a decade ago by Fr. John Wippel, who pointed to Aquinas's discussion of creation and endless temporal duration in the De aeternitate mundi, a work written in 12 71 or earlier.1 More recently, Professor Mark Johnson wrote an article in which he concluded that, no matter what doctrine the historical Aristotle may have held, St. Thomas consistently attributes a doctrine of creation to Aristotle.2 Most recent of all have come a pair of important studies by Wilks and Macintosh defending the coherence of Thomas's claim that the 1 John F. Wippel, "Did Thomas Aquinas Defend the Possibility of an Eternally Created World? (The De aeternitate mundi Revisited)," The Journal of the History of Philosophy 19 (1981): 21-37; on the date for Aquinas's De aeternitate mundi, see James A. Weisheipl, "The Date and Context for Aquinas' De aeternitate mundi," in Lloyd P. Gerson, ed., Graceful Reason: Essays in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy Presented to Joseph Owens, C.S.S.R., Papers in Medieval Studies, 4 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983), 270. Arguments for an earlier dating can be found in Thomas Bukowski, "An Early Dating for Aquinas' De aeternitate mundi," Gregorianum 51 (1970): 277-303 and more recently, "Understanding St. Thomas on the Eternity of the World: Help from Giles of Rome?" Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale 58 (1991): 113-25. The main thesis of this paper is unaffected by the dating of the De aeternitate mundi. 2 Mark F. Johnson, "Did St. Thomas Attribute a Doctrine of Creation to Aristotle?" The New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 129-55. 275 276 TIMOTHY B. NOONE world could be both eternal and created, while another pair of studies by Aersten and van Veldhuijsen have begun to explore from a more historical perspective the importance of Aquinas's formulation of the doctrine of creation for understanding his thought and its distinctiveness.3 The present paper is intended not so much to challenge the conclusions of any of these admirable studies as to put their findings into a wider historical framework through which we may hope to discover what is unique in Aquinas's doctrine of creation. In reading the Scriptum super Sententias of Thomas Aquinas, one is immediately struck by the novelty of Aquinas's claim that the philosophers and thus reason itself may reach the conclusion that the world is created. Such a claim seems quite different from the account of the philosophical knowledge of creation given by several of St. Thomas's immediate predecessors and contemporaries. What, then, emboldens Aquinas to make such a claim? Is Aquinas's reading of the philosophers so original and so superior to that of his contemporaries that he is capable of seeing in the philosophers a doctrine of creation that they missed? Or does Aquinas's originality on the philosophical demonstrability of creation have more to do with a reformulation of the doctrine of creation? Or does Aquinas both have an original interpretation of the philosophers and a different understanding of the doctrine of creation? In an attempt to answer these questions, the present paper will survey early and mid-thirteenth century views on the philosophers and the doctrine of creation and compare those views to Aquinas's position in the Scriptum super Sententias. The thirteenth-century authors included in this survey are chosen for their prominence in thirteenth-century thought, not 3 See Ian Wilks, "Aquinas on the Past Possibility of the World's Having Existed Forever," The Review of Metaphysics 48 (1994): 299-329; J. J. Macintosh, "St. Thomas and the Traversal of the Infinite," The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1994): 157-77; J. A. Aertsen, "The Eternity of the World: The Believing... (shrink)

In current theology the possibility of conclusive arguments for the existence of God is largely rejected by reference to Hume or Kant. Purportedly post-metaphysical surrogates are put in place of a metaphysically founded theology, where either the existence of God may be believed in only as a rational possibility, or else a radical constructivism about the existence of God is fallen into. Nevertheless, in the following, a conclusive metaphysical argument for the existence of God in the tradition of scholastic (...) metaphysics is formulated. It is shown that theological talk of creatio ex nihilo is only the other side of this metaphysical argument: Whoever accepts creatio ex nihilo cannot consistently deny the soundness of the argument. (shrink)

In his Enquiry Edmund Burke overturned the Platonic tradition in aesthetics and replaced metaphysics with psychology. His revolutions in method and sensibility influenced later philosophers and literary and artistic movements from the Gothic novel to Romanticism and beyond. This new edition guides the reader through Burke's arguments.

Taking as his point of departure Heidegger’s description of hermeneutics as the “process of making things clear in talking about them,” Smith sets out to “lay bare” or “lay out” the nature of argument by presenting a tightly interwoven series of readings of the great philosophical works that have shaped our understanding of demonstration, dialectic, and rhetoric. His interpretations of the relevant works of Plato and Aristotle focus on explicit and implicit references to argument as it actually occurs in (...) conversations and discussions rather than as it is filtered through abstractive theories. In the process the author discloses heretofore unnoticed or deemphasized themes in these ancient texts. (shrink)

The dissertation analyzes the ontological and epistemological arguments that motivate Plato's theory of Forms.

This paper is based on the comments I gave to Alfred Mele regarding his original Zygote Argument during my presentation at a small workshop on manipulation arguments in Budapest back in 2012. After those comments, Mele changed the conclusion of his original Zygote Argument (OZA) from a positive, explanatory conclusion to a negative, non-explanatory conclusion--and, correspondingly, redefined 'incompatibilism' so that it would no longer refer in his work to the view that determinism precludes (undermines, eliminates, destroys, etc.) (...) free will, but refers narrowly to the perhaps spurious association claim that appears in the conclusion of the revised Zygote Argument (Mele 2013+). Yet, over the last decade, Mele has made no comment in print about the changes he made, the invalidity objection that led to them, nor to the fact that his revised Zygote Argument was originally presented by me as a (non-optimal) reaction to my invalidity objection to his original Zygote Argument. To my knowledge, Mele has only mentioned this 2015 paper once, at it was not in the context of understanding manipulation arguments; it was, rather, in the context of defending his revised, non-explanatory definition of 'incompatibilism' at the opening of Aspects of Agency (p. 6, n. 4). There, Mele singles out *just this 2015 paper* as a place where they'll find what Mele degrades as a type of nonstandard/nontraditional definition of 'incompatibilism' that he rejects. This is notable because Mele provides no empirical evidence that his preferred definition is standard, and most (including Lehrer, who coined the term) reject the negative, non-explanatory, association-based definition that Mele came to endorse in the aftermath of my invalidity objection to OZA. So, if Mele had a genuine concern about philosophers who use the term 'incompatibilism', then Mele could have--and should have--named almost any leading figure in free will for this purpose (since most--including Pereboom, Vihvelin, Haji, etc.) reject the non-explanatory definition that Mele-2013+ now endorses. Yet, for untold reasons, Mele isolated the working definition of 'incompatibilism' used in one paper by one unemployed junior researcher to use as his example--even though Neil Levy had used this same definition in previously published work (eg. Levy 2011). Moreover, if Mele were genuinely interested in helping his readers understand the ambiguity of terms like 'compatibilism' and 'incompatibilism' it is a mystery that he referenced a paper in which nothing of substance hung on the definitions given to these terms -- especially considering that he might have instead pointed them to my OTHER 2015 paper, "A Critique of Vihvelin's Three-Fold Classification" in which the MAIN AIM of the paper is to expose the difficulties facing anyone who wants to define the terms 'compatibilism' and 'incompatibilism' in a way that everyone will accept (including a critique of the negative, non-explanatory "incompossibilist" definition that Mele adopted after my objection to OZA). By all appearances, Mele's main aim in citing specifically THIS paper and none of my other work was to give readers the false impression that my working definition of 'incompatibilism' played some role in my charge that his argument is invalid (which it doesn't, given that the term doesn't appear in either the premises or conclusion of that argument). Mele adds to this unseemly rhetorical campaign in his book *Manipulation Agents* where he mentions an invalidity objection in the intro (p. 84) and then discusses that objection in the final lines of Chapter 5 of the book (p. 120-121). The invalidity objection discussed here is completely pedantic, has never been seriously raised in the primary literature (and was previously addressed in multiple places my multiple philosophers, including me), and has nothing whatever to do with my invalidity objection. In other words, Mele was content to discuss an invalidity objection that no one has ever had to an argument that is clearly valid while completely ignoring the ONLY substantive invalidity objection to his argument in print. This is unfortunate, because it has led to serious confusion --including the patently false description of my invalidity objection to OZA as an objection to the revised version of the Zygote Argument that Mele adopted in *response* my objection (e.g., Capes mistakenly claims "Mickelson (2015) contends that arguments like this [i.e. like the revised Zygote Argument] are invalid. But that’s because she defines “incompatibilism” differently than I’ve defined it here" in his "Manipulation Arguments and Direct Arguments" chapter in the 2023 Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Free Will; I did not say this, and the definition of 'incompatibilism' is irrelevant to my objection). In "The Zygote Argument Is Invalid--Now What?", I simply use the invalidity of the simple 2-premise Zygote Argument as a foil to make a series of more philosophically significant points (e.g. regarding the dialectical structure of the free-will debate, the role of best-explanation reasoning, and to develop the first-ever "master manipulation argument"). Mele has yet to address my reasons for calling attention to the non-trivial invalidity of his OZA or to any of my answers to the "Now What?" question in this paper, even though this question and my proposed answers to this question are the paper's main point. For those interested in a more recent discussion of how the logical and metaphilosophical observations made in this "Now What?" paper have helped to move the free-will debate forward, I suggest looking at the discussions of the "paradigm shift" in the free-will debate that helps to explain why the free-will debate has become mired in stalemates and empty verbal disputes that are found, for example, in my contributions to the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Free Will (Intro and Chapter 4, 2023) and my paper "Free Will, Self-Creation, and the Paradox of Moral Luck" (2019). (shrink)

In this paper I show that one of the most fruitful ways of employing paradoxes has been as a philosophical method that forces us to reconsider basic assumptions. After a brief discussion of recent understandings of the notion of paradoxes, I show that Zeno of Elea was the inventor of paradoxes in this sense, against the background of Heraclitus’ and Parmenides’ way of argumentation: in contrast to Heraclitus, Zeno’s paradoxes do not ask us to embrace a paradoxical reality; and (...) in contrast to Parmenides, Zeno shows common assumptions to be internally problematic, not just in light of Eleatic positions. (shrink)

"Anselm of Canterbury gave the first modal "ontological" argument for God's existence. Yet, despite its distinct originality, philosophers have mostly avoided the question of what modal concepts the argument uses, and whether Anselm's metaphysics entitles him to use them. Here, Brian Leftow sets out Anselm's modal metaphysics. He argues that Anselm has an "absolute", "broadly logical", or "metaphysical" modal concept, and that his metaphysics provides acceptable truth makers for claims in this modality. He shows that his modal argument is committed (...) to the Brouwer system of modal logic, and defends the claim that Brouwer is part of the logic of "absolute" or "metaphysical" modality. He also defends Anselm's premise that God would exist with absolute necessity against all extant objections, providing new arguments in support of it and ultimately defending all but one premise of Anselm's best argument for God's existence"--. (shrink)

There are several interpretations of the argument structure of Darwin's Origin of Species, representing Covering-Law, Inference-to-the-Best-Explanation, and (more recently) Semantic models. I argue that while all three types of interpretation enjoy some textual support, none succeeds in capturing the overall strategy of the Origin, consistent with Darwin's claim that it is 'one long argument'. I provide detailed criticisms of all three current models, and then offer an alternative interpretation based on the view that there are three main argument strategies in (...) the Origin, all supporting the 'causal efficacy' of Darwin's theory. This interpretation provides both a more unified treatment of the text, and some important implications concerning the relation between general philosophical models of scientific theory support and specific historical cases. (shrink)

This study is an examination of the manner in which intelligence mediates desire. Its central claims are that all desire is necessarily determined as such by the capacity of intelligence and that the specific quality of desire as animal or human is therefore conditioned by the specific power of intelligence possessed by the desiring creature. In looking at human desire, it is further argued that the presence of rational intelligence introduces instability in the natural soul that in turn conditions its (...) desire as potentially unreasonable and reasonable. Developing this argument first in light of Aristotle's moral psychology, attention is then turned to Hegel's philosophical psychology, as found in his Philosophy of Mind, and to his account of desire, as it is found in his Phenomenology of Spirit. By examining sections of these works, it is shown that Hegel revives significant aspects of this classical account of moral psychology and desire, which have for the most part been neglected in modern philosophical psychology. It is also suggested, however, the Hegel introduces significant variations to this classical view in his appropriation of it that have rendered him vulnerable to much of the post-modern criticism that he has received. (shrink)

This paper is an evaluation of C. S. Peirce’s late essay “A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God”, based on the two logical values that he calls “productiveness” and “security.” After reviewing the unique logical form of “abduction” and noting that it is a formal fallacy—and so enjoys less “security” than deduction or induction—I turn to the extraordinary case of abduction that is found in “A Neglected Argument.” I argue that the productiveness of the Neglected Argument is found in (...) its ability to instigate practical results. The security of the Neglected Argument, on the other hand, is rooted in an activity Peirce calls “musement,” a kind of rational intuition. Moreover, I suggest that Peirce’s notion of “musement,” which has remained something of a mystery in Peirce studies, arose from hisearly reading of Friedrich von Schiller’s aesthetics. (shrink)

What, if anything, is the correlation between the specialized or technical ideas of the philosopher and the rest of his existence? His everyday life outside his philosophical role. In the specialized reality and reality constitution, when employing the discourse and discipline of philosophy, the philosopher subscribe to many things in an explicit manner and he employs a number of implicit things and assumptions that are not stated explicitly. These things concern the different branches, areas and domains of the (...) class='Hi'>philosophical discourse, for example metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, ontology, cognition, consciousness, mind, perception, thinking, etc. Is there a relation between these technical 'beliefs' of the philosopher and other, not philosophical areas of his existence? Does and can all of his non-philosophical existence reflect his philosophical beliefs, statements and expressions? Is it possible that the everyday existence or life world of the philosopher can resemble, confirm and express his philosophical ideas? If this is not the case, what are the factors that are involved in such discrepancies? Do they imply a lack of integrity, of wholeness of integration on behalf of the philosopher? What are the causes of such an illogical or surprising lack of compatibility or similarity between these sets of two or more facts? What are the things that we can look for in such a lack of compatibility – things such as the following? - inconsistency, difference, disparity, variance, variation, deviation, divergence, -/- disagreement, dissimilarity, dissimilitude, mismatch, lack of similarity, contrariety, contradictoriness, disaccord, discordance, incongruity, -/- lack of congruence, incompatibility, irreconcilability, conflict, opposition? -/- I illustrate the above by means of four examples. 1 Let us assume that the embodied human person consists of both voluntary and involuntary processes and activities. Do the philosophy of an individual reflect or express these activities or is it completely or partially unrelated to them? Do the voluntary processes and activities or the voluntary aspects of perception, cognition, brain processes and other activities resemble or express the philosophy of a thinker? 2 Some thinkers are seriously concerned about the importance of discourse and dialogue and the equality of all those involved. We find their concern about the ideal discourse and dialogue described in their written work and talks, but to what an extend do their own discursive and dialogical actions and behaviour reflect the ideal situation they preach? 3 Ethics and morality can be find in and are emphasized in all sorts of disciplines, of course they are major subjects in providing ways to live off for philosophers and we even find institutions devoted to their teaching and investigation. Do the lives, the lived morality and ethics of those individuals who preach the ideals of ethics or ethical ideals reflect the ideals they preach and that provides them with ways to earn a living? Or, is it the case that morality and ethics are merely faked by those individuals living off their preaching of ethics? And, that they merely employ the values, norms, customs and attitudes of a culture, sub-culture, community, group or another social grouping? In other words are the preachers of ethics really more ethical than the rest of the community and society? 4 When the philosopher expresses his ideas by means of all sorts of philosophical tools he is aware of the fact that he employs them, or at least aware of some of them being intentionally employed by him while he is unaware of others that he employs. Do the tools the philosopher employs to theorize (identify problems, the nature of the questions he asks, the nature of his ways of questioning, the assumptions he makes, the forming and testing of hypotheses, the making of generalizations, etc) or philosophize (perceive things, think, think about things, reason, argumentation etc) resemble what he beliefs, asserts and says about thinking, perception, cognition, understanding, subjects, objects, relationships between subjects and objects and other features and processes of epistemology? In short – does the lived philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics etc of the philosopher resemble, represent, confirm, substantiate, back, endorse, support, authenticate and corroborate the ideas, assertions and speculations that are expressed by the statements his philosophy or philosophizing consist of? Does he walk the walk of his talk? Are they similar and identical, the same things and merely expressions of the same things in different mediums? (shrink)

All’origine della sovranità is a critical reflection on the complex and articolated sequence of events which, in the first half of the fourteenth century, brought to the crisis of Dyonisian hierarchical system and to the modern conception of sovereignty. In fact, the principle superiorem non recognoscere appears for the first time in juridical experience during the dispute about the two powers, when opponents of papal claims perceived the need to create new models of order, by which to replace the hierocratic (...) representation of the hierarchical system. After having considered the different conceptions of Dyonisian order in the late Middle Ages, the Author dwells on the two main contrasting paradigms: Marsilio’s organicism and Dante’s humanism. The first was coupled with clearly conventionalist theses, and led to the supremacy of the sovereignty principle and to a total submission of citizens to the public will; on the contrary, the second heightened persons’ capacity for self-regulation in accordance with a law that is given them with their being, and that directs them both to the beatitudo huius vite and, above all, to the beatitudo vite ecterne. Because of this contrast, through the philosophical arguments of the disputants, the problem of the relation between the two powers emerges in all its dramatic complexity. It wasn’t only a question to recognize preeminences or supremacies, autonomies or subjections, but to pronounce upon the conception itself of political community, of its ordering principle, and of its juridical shape. For this reason the alternative between Dante and Marsilio will mark out the whole subsequent juridical and political experience, up to our days. (shrink)

Imagine slicing your hand with a steak knife. Inevitably, this leads to a characteristic unpleasant sensation, and just as reliably, to a withdrawal of the wounded limb. But can this rather mundane fact--and other similar facts--shed any light on the mind-body problem or the issue of the role of experience in causing behavior? In my dissertation, I explore this issue head on, and in the process clarify and criticize the arguments of philosophers who have given an affirmative answer to (...) this question--philosophers such as William James and Herbert Spencer. These arguments have coupled evidence like the above with the fact that human beings have evolved, in order to make the case that epiphenomenalism with respect to qualia is false. My first task will be to formulate a rigorous version of a James-Spencer style argument, which will occupy us in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 is dedicated to answering a number of objections to the argument, in an effort to show that if there is a problem with it, this problem lies elsewhere. Chapter 3 explores alternative arguments in the spirit of the original one formulated in Chapter 1, and discusses any resulting effects on the plausibility of the conclusion. Chapter 4 is the capstone chapter of the dissertation. In it, I discuss a crucial objection to all arguments in the spirit of that given in the first chapter--namely, that physicalism has analogous flaws to epiphenomenalism where accommodating the relevant evidence is concerned. My conclusions in this final chapter are twofold. First, that even if there is no fatal flaw in the general strategy the evolutionary argument employs, it works against all forms of dualism, not just epiphenomenalism. And second, the accusations made in the objection are correct; physicalism suffers from problems analogous to those faced by epiphenomenalism. Although the primary findings of the dissertation are negative, there are many lessons we can take from them along the way. Most prominent among them is an improved perspective on the appropriate roles of empirical findings and armchair philosophical theorizing in debate over the mind-body problem. (shrink)

Outlining an original philosophical argument on the place of visuality in Levinas' ethics, Kenaan looks at the concepts of his work and articulates his vision of 'otherness' together with the visual tropes of the human face as symbolic of alterity and transcendence.

Bernard Williams is remembered as one of the most brilliant and original philosophers of the past fifty years. Widely respected as a moral philosopher, Williams began to write about politics in a sustained way in the early 1980s. There followed a stream of articles, lectures, and other major contributions to issues of public concern--all complemented by his many works on ethics, which have important implications for political theory. This new collection of essays, most of them previously unpublished, addresses many (...) of the core subjects of political philosophy: justice, liberty, and equality; the nature and meaning of liberalism; toleration; power and the fear of power; democracy; and the nature of political philosophy itself. A central theme throughout is that political philosophers need to engage more directly with the realities of political life, not simply with the theories of other philosophers. Williams makes this argument in part through a searching examination of where political thinking should originate, to whom it might be addressed, and what it should deliver. Williams had intended to weave these essays into a connected narrative on political philosophy with reflections on his own experience of postwar politics. Sadly he did not live to complete it, but this book brings together many of its components. Geoffrey Hawthorn has arranged the material to resemble as closely as possible Williams's original design and vision. He has provided both an introduction to Williams's political philosophy and a bibliography of his formal and informal writings on politics. Those who know the work of Bernard Williams will find here the familiar hallmarks of his writing--originality, clarity, erudition, and wit. Those who are unfamiliar with, or unconvinced by, a philosophical approach to politics, will find this an engaging introduction. Both will encounter a thoroughly original voice in modern political theory and a searching approach to the shape and direction of liberal political thought in the past thirty-five years. (shrink)

I outline a heretofore neglected difference between manipulation scenarios and merely deterministic ones. Plausible scientific determinism does not imply that the relevant prior history of the universe is independent of us, while manipulation does. Owing to sensitive dependence of physical outcomes upon initial conditions, in order to trace a deterministic history, a microphysical level of analysis is required. But on this level physical laws are time-symmetrically deterministic, and causality, conceived asymmetrically, disappears. I then consider a revised scenario to resurrect the (...) threat of manipulation even in the presence of time-symmetry and sensitive dependence upon initial conditions. To do so we posit a manipulator containing all the information of the manipulated and time-symmetrically related to him. The new scenario violates special relativity, but even waiving that objection, the scenario faces a dilemma. I argue that the manipulator either lacks agency enough to manipulate the target, or can integrate thoughts separated by long time spans into a single decision. In the latter case, the 'manipulated agent' disappears into the manipulator, making it the story of just one agent. (shrink)

Exploring philosophy through detailed argument analyses of texts by philosophers from Plato to Strawson using a novel and transparent method of analysis. The best way to introduce students to philosophy and philosophical discourse is to have them read and wrestle with original sources. This textbook explores philosophy through detailed argument analyses of texts by philosophers from Plato to Strawson. It presents a novel and transparent method of analysis that will teach students not only how to understand and evaluate (...) philosophers' arguments but also how to construct such arguments themselves. Students will learn to read a text and discover what the philosopher thinks, why the philosopher thinks it, and whether the supporting argument is good. Students learn argument analysis through argument diagrams, with color-coding of the argument's various elements—conclusion, claims, and “indicator phrases.” (An online “mini-course” in argument diagramming and argument diagramming software are both freely available online.) Each chapter ends with exercises and reading questions. After a general introduction to philosophy and logic and an explanation of argument analysis, the book presents selections from primary sources, arranged by topics that correspond to contemporary debates, with detailed analysis and evaluation. These topics include philosophy of religion, epistemology, theory of mind, free will and determinism, and ethics; authors include Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Ryle, Fodor, Dennett, Searle, and others. What Is the Argument? not only introduces students to great philosophical thinkers, it also teaches them the essential skill of critical thinking. (shrink)

This thesis presents a communicative account of personhood that argues for the inseparability of the metaphysical and the practical concepts of a person. It connects these two concepts by coupling the question “what is a person” with the question "how does one become a person". It argues that participation in social interactions that are characterized by mutual recognition and giving-and-taking reasons implied by the practical concept of a person is in fact an ecological and developmental condition for an entity to (...) possess the kind of characteristics and capacities such as reflexive self-consciousness addressed by the metaphysical concept. The chief theoretical contribution of the dissertation research lies, accordingly, in demonstrating that an adequate metaphysical concept of a person has to make reference to the kind of social processes that are necessary for the emergence and development of the distinguishing attributes of persons among other moving, perceiving, desiring and cognizing agents. Methodologically, it undertakes an original philosophical analysis that is enriched by an interdisciplinary investigation of several notions and insights from semiotics, comparative and developmental psychology, cognitive science and anthropology. The main argument of the thesis is that one becomes a person through internally recreating a social, communicative process; namely, that of dialogical transformation of habits. We find the paradigmatic case of this social process in mutual persuasion. The internalization of this process in the form of an inner dialogue cultivates a social self that is in ongoing communication with the embodied, organismic self of uncritically habituated attitudes, convictions and desires. This inner dialogue can be conceived as a temporally extended process of self-persuasion, which is characterized by an ongoing strive for attaining higher degrees of self-control; that is, for achieving a more coherent alignment between our habits and the kind of person we would like to be. It starts with self-interpretation and self-evaluation, and culminates in the formation of higher-order desires that facilitate habit-change and novel habit formation in accordance with certain social, moral, aesthetical or intellectual categories and norms one comes to endorse. For this reason, self-induced, deliberate habit-change is also a process of appropriation or self-appropriation, through which we strive to cultivate habits of feeling, thinking, acting that we can deem more truly ours. The thesis demonstrates that the capacity for engaging in this kind of self-persuasion consists chiefly in the capacities for metasemiosis, perspective-taking, and for cultivating habits of reflexivity. It explicates how all these capacities have a social origin and ultimately a social function by showing that they all presuppose certain higher-order communicative patterns that arose through an evolutionary and cultural history, and develop through the internal reconstruction of these patterns as cognitive-semiotic processes. The thesis concludes that becoming a kind of being who can engage in self-persuasion, thus a person, consists ultimately in internalizing the patterns of communicative social interactions in the form of an ongoing auto-communication. (shrink)

This chapter discusses methodology in feminist history of philosophy and shows that women philosophers made interesting and original contributions to the debates concerning the cosmological argument. I set forth and examine the arguments of Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Catherine Trotter Cockburn, Emilie Du Châtelet, and Mary Shepherd, and discuss their involvement with philosophical issues and debates surrounding the cosmological argument. I argue that their contributions are original, philosophically interesting, and result from participation in the ongoing debates (...) and controversies about the cosmological argument, causal principles, and necessary existence. (shrink)

This book, originally published in 1989 discusses an issue central to all philosophical argument – the relation between persuasion and truth. The techniques of persuasion are indirect and not always fully transparent. Whether philosophers and theoreticians are for or against the use of rhetoric, they engage in rhetorical practice none the less. Focusing on Plato, Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, this book uncovers philosophical rhetoric at work and reminds us of the rhetorical arena in which philosophical (...) writings are produced and considered. (shrink)

The paper engages in two metaphilosophical disputes. The first concerns the importance of studying original texts to establish the methods used by philosophers. The second addresses the role of intuitions in philosophical arguments. In this paper, I argue that a close reading of original texts is crucial for the methodological dispute on the role of intuitions in philosophy. I refer to the critique of this stance proposed by Landes, discuss it, and justify my claim by presenting (...) the results and benefits of a corpus study concerning the practice known as “intuition-talk” in the theory of reference. The study consists of an in-depth qualitative analysis of this practice with respect to four parameters: indicators of intuition-talk, the subject of that talk, the mode of that talk (whether intuition-talk is used by formulating a judgment on a particular case or ascribing a general property to a given phenomenon), and the issue of whether intuitive claims are supported by arguments. I discuss the results, their consequences, and outline some challenges that need to be addressed in future studies conducted within the proposed approach and thereby demonstrate why such a study, focused on the content of original texts, should be seen as metaphilosophically valuable. (shrink)

Kripke argues for origin essentialism, the view that the same individual cannot have multiple origins. Sober hypothesises that Kripke's origin essentialism applies to biological species. This paper shows that Sober's hypothesis fails. Because Kripke's original argument is invalid, it cannot vindicate Sober's proposal. Salmon offers an influential reformulation of Kripke's argument but his argument fails to extend to species: the notion of an individual's origin is too narrow to apply to species, and Salmon's argument rests on a thought experiment (...) that conflicts with how species evolve. Thus, Sober and others are wrong to think that Kripke's origin essentialism can save species essentialism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Solitude: A Philosophical EncounterRobert D. CottrellSolitude: A Philosophical Encounter, by Philip Koch; xiv & 375 pp. La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1994, $39.95 cloth, $17.95 paper.A professor of philosophy at the University of Prince Edward Island (an attractively solitary spot, I should imagine), Philip Koch divides his book into two parts, asking in Part I: what is solitude? and in Part II: what role does solitude (...) play in our lives? At the beginning of his inquiry, Koch identifies two primary modes of human experience: solitude, the core definition of which is social disengagement, and encounter, that is to say, interaction with others. Both are essential for human completion; indeed, the inescapable link between solitude and encounter is illustrated in the book’s full title, which contains both words. Still, in today’s society solitude is probably less understood and appreciated than encounter, for we tend to stress the supposed primacy of relationships and bonds. Calling himself a partisan of solitude, Koch sets out to correct the imbalance he discerns between solitude and encounter by focusing on how solitude (different, he insists, from loneliness, isolation, privacy, or alienation) contributes to our physical, moral, and emotional well-being.Koch is a philosopher; he defines his terms and then, as he moves along, makes subtle distinctions in his original definitions, rendering each term ever more precise and accurate. Conscious of the slippage of meaning that often occurs in language and of the mischief that can be caused by using terms improperly, Koch points out how Tillich (p. 164) and Mijuskovic (p. 173) go astray by gliding confusedly from one term to another, the result being that their arguments drift into muddle. Koch’s own thinking is pellucidly clear. The major part of his book is a discussion of the value of solitude. He identifies five primary virtues linked to solitude: freedom, attunement to self, attunement to nature, reflective perspective, and creativity. After discussing each of the virtues, Koch answers the objections that have been raised throughout the centuries to the claims he has made for the positive tole of solitude in our lives.Ranging over the whole history of human thought, Koch draws on a vast array of writers, including Tao Tze, Plotinus, Seneca, Augustine, Petrarch, Saint Teresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, Montaigne, Descartes (always a key figure in any discussion of the evolution of Western thought), Goethe, Wordsworth, Hugo, Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman, Proust, Lawrence, Rilke, Sartre, Eiseley, Woolf, and Sarton. A meticulously learned book, Solitude is also a deeply meditative and an intensely personal one. In this, it resembles the work of Montaigne and of Loren Eiseley, where philosophical or (in the case of Eiseley) scientific knowledge is inseparable from imaginative vision; inseparable, too, from the distinctive voice of the author, for Koch, like Montaigne and Eiseley, moves easily from meditation to recollection, recounting moments of joy or sorrow in his own life. Even Koch’s prose bears some resemblance to that of Montaigne or Eiseley for, like theirs, it vibrates with the peculiarly poetic [End Page 155] intensity that a great writer can find in plain, unadorned speech. Indeed, what remains with the reader of this book, beyond the philosophical arguments and the erudite explanations, relegated wisely to the footnotes at the back of the volume where they are available to serious students without intimidating casual readers, is the seductive charm of the author’s voice, the sense of being addressed directly and intimately. To encounter this marvelous book, written in solitude, read in solitude, is to move beyond solitude and to experience, in the strange way that only a good book can provide, intimacy with another mind, another spirit that is engaged—it, too—in the process of encountering other minds, other spirits.Robert D. CottrellOhio State UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In this crisply written book, Hanno Sauer offers the first book-length treatment of debunking arguments in ethics, developing an empirically informed and philosophically sophisticated account of genealogical arguments and their significance for the reliability of moral cognition. He breaks new ground by introducing a series of novel distinctions into the current debate, which allows him to develop a framework for assessing the prospects of debunking or vindicating our moral intuitions. He also challenges the justification of some of our (...) moral judgments by showing that they are based on epistemically defective processes. His book is an original, cutting-edge contribution to the burgeoning field of empirically informed metaethics, and will interest philosophers, psychologists, and anyone interested in how - and whether - moral judgment works. (shrink)

Phenomenal knowledge is knowledge of what it is like to be in conscious states, such as seeing red or being in pain. According to the knowledge argument (Jackson 1982, 1986), phenomenal knowledge is knowledge that, i.e., knowledge of phenomenal facts. According to the ability hypothesis (Nemirow 1979; Lewis 1983), phenomenal knowledge is mere practical knowledge how, i.e., the mere possession of abilities. However, some phenomenal knowledge also seems to be knowledge why, i.e., knowledge of explanatory facts. For example, someone who (...) has just experienced pain for the first time learns not only that this is what pain is like, but also why people tend to avoid it. Some philosophers have claimed that experiencing pain gives knowledge why in a normative sense: it tells us why pain is bad and why inflicting it is wrong (Kahane 2010). But phenomenal knowledge seems to explain not (only) why people should avoid pain, but why they in fact tend to do so. In this paper, I will explicate and defend a precise version of this claim and use it as a basis for a new version of the knowledge argument, which I call the explanatory knowledge argument. According to the argument, some phenomenal knowledge (1) explains regularities in a distinctive, ultimate or regress-ending way, and (2) predict them without induction. No physical knowledge explains and predicts regularities in the same way. This implies the existence of distinctive, phenomenal explanatory facts, which cannot be identified with physical facts. I will show that this argument can be defended against the main objections to the original knowledge argument, the ability hypothesis and the phenomenal concept strategy, even if it turns out that the original cannot. In this way, the explanatory knowledge argument further strengthens the case against physicalism. (shrink)

Philosophical Anthropology is one of the post-Husserlian splinters -- a dizzying mix and match of phenomeno-psycho-anthro-philosophical hyphenated schools of thought. It arose first in the 1920's out of the same intellectual promptings as existentialism, which it briefly rivaled. It differs from existentialism and other phenomenologies in fine ways which Landmann combs scrupulously, along with distinctions among the sub-specialties that have proliferated within the field itself. Fortunately, two more general premises distinguish it from other forms of anthropology. First, taking (...) anthropology in its broadest sense as man's search for a self-conception, it allows a signal, shaping importance to its own formulations: culturally speaking, and psychologically too, man tries, tends to fit his self-image. Second, embracing man and everything human as its focus, it assumes phenomenology's grandest claims: reconciliation of the inward and the outer, and, by inference at least, a proper holistic restoration of the essential human sphere. The impulse and the method are widely evident now and several disciplines seem to be quivering toward some such point of convergence. But it is a moot point whether Philosophical Anthropology will stake out the ground. Landmann traces it from its substantive origins with the Greeks down through its most niggling modern self-assertions in a strictly academic survey of high-philosophical or similarly accredited propositions, The argumentative appeals (Freud, Nietzsche) seem rather dated now; and there is a further difficulty in that the action and its object are one and the same, the medium, so to speak, is the message -- i.e., thought about man. While this is a necessary aspect of the method, it can be disorienting. Scholars, however, will know where they are, and this will admit admirably to conventional, general uses. (shrink)

On the Origin of Objects is the culmination of Brian Cantwell Smith's decade-long investigation into the philosophical and metaphysical foundations of computation, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. Based on a sustained critique of the formal tradition that underlies the reigning views, he presents an argument for an embedded, participatory, "irreductionist," metaphysical alternative. Smith seeks nothing less than to revise our understanding not only of the machines we build but also of the world with which they interact. Smith's ambitious project (...) begins as a search for a comprehensive theory of computation, able to do empirical justice to practice and conceptual justice to the computational theory of mind. A rigorous commitment to these two criteria ultimately leads him to recommend a radical overhaul of our traditional conception of metaphysics. Everything that exists - objects, properties, life, practice - lies Smith claims in the "middle distance," an intermediate realm of partial engagement with and partial separation from, the enveloping world. Patterns of separation and engagement are taken to underlie a single notion unifying representation and ontology: that of subjects' "registration" of the world around them. Along the way, Smith offers many fascinating ideas: the distinction between particularity and individuality, the methodological notion of an "inscription error," an argument that there are no individualswithin physics, various deconstructions of the type-instance distinction, an analysis of formality as overly disconnected ("discreteness run amok"), a conception of the boundaries of objects as properties of unruly interactions between objects and subjects, an argument for the theoretical centrality of reference preservation, and a theatrical, acrobatic metaphor for the contortions involved in the preservation of reference and resultant stabilization of objects. Sidebars and diagrams throughout the book help clarify and guide Smith's highly original and compelling argument. A Bradford Book. (shrink)

In a famous footnote in Naming and Necessity, Kripke offered “something like a proof” of the thesis that material things have their material origins essentially (EMO). Although the sketch of a proof Kripke gave was incomplete in important respects, many philosophers have since endeavoured to develop Kripke’s style of argument so that it reaches its intended conclusion.1 In particular, a number of philosophers have attempted to complete Kripke’s argument sketch by appealing to some sort of “sufficiency principle” – a principle (...) that gives sufficient conditions for the identity of objects across possible worlds. These developments of Kripke’s argument face a number of problems, as pointed out by Mackie (1987, 2002), Robertson (1998, 2000) and others.2 Recently, however, Rohrbaugh and deRosset (2004, 2006) have offered a new route to origin essentialism that develops a Kripke-style argument without appeal to a sufficiency principle. While this argument has also not escaped criticism3, the argument suffers from a crucial flaw which has not been noticed. More interesting, though, is that the problem the argument faces is the same problem facing the arguments that appeal to sufficiency principles, and indeed Kripke’s original “proof” – all these arguments over-generalize. This strongly suggests that there is no Kripkestyle route to origin essentialism. (shrink)

Apparently alone among medieval Christians, Eriugena argues that all life is immortal. He relies on Plato’s Timaeus as his primary source for this claim, but he modifies the argument of the Timaeus considerably. He turns Plato’s cosmic soul into the genus of life, thereby taking a treatise that originally dealt with cosmology and using it to explore the ontological significance of definition. All species that fall under the genus of life must be immortal, because a mortal species would contradict the (...) genus. No later medieval author would take up Eriugena’s arguments explicitly, although Aquinas comes close. The two thirteenth-century thinkers to address universal immortality seriously—Aquinas and Bonaventure—argue against it, but they are more faithful than Eriugena himself to a literal reading of the Timaeus. (shrink)

At the centre of John Rawls's political philosophy is one of the most influential thought experiments of the twentieth century: which principles of justice would a group of individuals choose to regulate their society if they were deprived of any information about themselves that might bias their choice? In this collection of new essays, leading political philosophers examine the ramifications and continued relevance of Rawls's idea. Their chapters explore topics including the place of the original position in rational choice (...) theory, the similarities between Rawls's original position and Kant's categorical imperative, the differences between Rawls's model and Scanlon's contractualism, and the role of the original position in the argument between Rawls and other views in political philosophy, including utilitarianism, feminism, and radicalism. This accessible volume will be a valuable resource for undergraduates, as well as advanced students and scholars of philosophy, game theory, economics, and the social and political sciences. (shrink)

It seems that every so often in philosophy some argument widely accepted as conclusive is challenged, and those who have accepted it as well as he who originated it are alleged to have committed serious errors. Of late this sort of challenge has been levelled against Kant’s criticism of cosmological arguments, and has taken two forms. In its first form it is the claim that Kant’s criticism is irrelevant to those cosmological arguments of which Aquinas’s “third way” is (...) paradigmatic. In its second form this challenge is the claim that Kant’s criticism of such arguments is vitiated by a logical error. The first two things to be shown in this essay are that these two claims are mistaken. The re-examination of Kant’s argument involved here is important not merely because it returns Kant’s criticism to its accustomed status. It is also important because it shows two further things. One of these is not too surprising; this is that Kant’s criticism extends to attempts to prove the existence of God which do not involve the use of a scholastic or rationalist philosophical terminology. The other, however, may be fairly surprising to many; this is that Kant’s criticism equally extends to attempts to prove the existence of any ultimate source of things, no matter how un-Platonic or non-Aristotelian or “scientific” that source may be. Thus this essay shows that what Kant has given us is not merely a successful criticism of cosmological arguments to prove the existence of God, but a successful criticism of cosmological arguments. Every such argument includes an ontological one and thereby either fails or begs the question. This in turn sheds some light on why metaphysical systems and religious positions must be presented for consideration rather than proved beyond objection. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe Necessity of Origins is the thesis that, necessarily, if a material object wholly originates from some particular material, then it could not have wholly originated from any significantly non-overlapping material. Several philosophers have argued for this thesis using as a premise a principle that we call ‘Single Origin Necessity’. However, we argue that Single Origin Necessity is false. So any arguments for The Necessity of Origins that rely on Single Origin Necessity are unsound. We also argue that the (...) Necessity of Origins itself is false. Our arguments rely on a thesis in the ontology of art that we find plausible: Multi-Work Materialism. It is the thesis that works of art that have multiple concrete manifestations are co-located with those manifestations. (shrink)