In this account of the way in which we understand music, Laird Addis explains how sounds can have such profound effects on those listening to them.

Livings things are so very strange -- The quest for a theory of life -- Understanding 'understanding' -- Stability and instability -- The knotty origin of life problem -- Biology's crisis of identity -- Biology is chemistry -- What is life?

This collection of thirteen original essays by such well-known philosophers as Thomas Nagel, Peter Singer, J.O. Urmson, David A.J. Richards, James Griffin, R.B. Brandt, John C. Harsanyi, T.M. Scanlon, and others discusses the philosophy of R.M. Hare put forth in his book Moral Thinking, including his thoughts on universalizability, moral psychology, and the role of common-sense moral principles. In addition, Professor Hare responds to his critics with an essay and a detailed, point-by-point criticism.

I had a strange dream, or half-waking vision, not long ago. I found myself at the top of a mountain in the mist, feeling very pleased with myself, not just for having climbed the mountain, but for having achieved my life's ambition, to find a way of answering moral questions rationally. But as I was preening myself on this achievement, the mist began to clear, and I saw that I was surrounded on the mountain top by the graves of all (...) those other philosophers, great and small, who had had the same ambition, and thought they had achieved it. And I have come to see, reflecting on my dream, that, ever since, the hard-working philosophical worms have been nibbling away at their systems and showing that the achievement was an illusion. True, their skeletons, indigestible to worms, remained, and were surprisingly similar to one another. But I was led to think again about what one can, and what one cannot, achieve in this direction. (shrink)

Hare has written a clear, brief, and readable introduction to ethics which looks at all the fundamental problems of the subject.

Questions about the relationship between linguistic competence and expertise will be examined in the paper. Harry Collins and others distinguish between ubiquitous and esoteric expertise. Collins places considerable weight on the argument that ordinary linguistic competence and related phenomena exhibit a high degree of expertise. His position and ones which share close affinities are methodologically problematic. These difficulties matter because there is continued and systematic disagreement over appropriate methodologies for the empirical study of expertise. Against Collins, it will be argued (...) that the term ‘expertise’ should be reserved for expertise (esoteric experts) and exclude everyday performance (ubiquitous experts). Wittgensteinian ideas will be employed to maintain that it is mistaken and misleading to derive substantive conclusions about the epistemology of expertise from ordinary linguistic competence and vice versa. Significant attention will be devoted to the notion of following a rule with particular reference to the intelligibility of tacit rule following. A satisfactory theoretical approach to expertise should not involve making important claims about ordinary linguistic competence. (shrink)

My assigned task is to lay out the shape of my father's life and faith. This is daunting, but it is also a privilege because I loved him and admired him, and his life has been central in shaping my own. I am speaking also on behalf of my mother, my three sisters, Bridget, Louise and Ellie, and our children, Catherine and Andrew, Sam and Anisa, Hannah and Matty.

Mental time travel is defined as projecting the self into the past and the future. Despite growing evidence of the similarities of remembering past and imagining future events, dominant theories conceive of these as distinct capacities. I propose that memory and imagination are fundamentally the same process – constructive episodic simulation – and demonstrate that the ‘simulation system’ meets the three criteria of a neurocognitive system. Irrespective of whether one is remembering or imagining, the simulation system: acts on the same (...) information, drawing on elements of experience ranging from fine-grained perceptual details to coarser-grained conceptual information and schemas about the world; is governed by the same rules of operation, including associative processes that facilitate construction of a schematic scaffold, the event representation itself, and the dynamic interplay between the two ; and is subserved by the same brain system. I also propose that by forming associations between schemas, the simulation system constructs multi-dimensional cognitive spaces, within which any given simulation is mapped by the hippocampus. Finally, I suggest that simulation is a general capacity that underpins other domains of cognition, such as the perception of ongoing experience. This proposal has some important implications for the construct of ‘MTT’, suggesting that ‘time’ and ‘travel’ may not be defining, or even essential, features. Rather, it is the ‘mental’ rendering of experience that is the most fundamental function of this domain-general simulation system enabling humans to re-experience the past, pre-experience the future, and also comprehend the complexities of the present. (shrink)

Hare presents his own position, a theory that incorporates all the truths of the other theories that have been discussed, together with ‘prescriptive logic’, which is what makes rationality in moral thinking possible. Hare calls this position ‘universal prescriptivism’, and he identifies it as an adaptation of Kant's Categorical Imperative. Universal Prescriptivism gives a completely formal account of the meanings of moral words such as ‘ought’; i.e. it defines them purely on the basis of their logical properties. Of (...) the theories considered, this is the only one that satisfies all six of the requirements for an adequate ethical theory, and it also guarantees universalizability. Prescriptivity and, in particular, universal prescriptivity, enables us to examine moral intuitions objectively; furthermore, because the prescriptivity of moral statements is culturally invariant, it allows us to avoid relativism. (shrink)

Barzykowski and Moulin's view on involuntary autobiographical memory focuses on automatic activation of representations and inhibitory control mechanisms. We discuss how and when a known neural mechanism – pattern completion – may result in involuntary autobiographical memories, the types of cues that may elicit this phenomenon and consider interactions with future-oriented cognition.

Karen Neander’s (1991a, b) Selected Effects (SE) theory of biological proper functions argues that the function of a trait is the action for which it was “caused” to be selected by natural selection. Her life’s work has already left a lasting impact, however SE theory has yet to be more properly formalized as a conceptual analysis of biological functions. Although other SE theories have sought to build upon Neander’s work (e.g., Garson, 2017), there remains an ambiguity in the theory’s use (...) of causal descriptors. For the success of her successors, delineating the function of causality for SE theory is of utmost importance. Here, I systematize Neander’s theory according to the different senses of causation inherent to it. I argue that structuring SE theory in terms of causal transitivity and intransitivity reveals that Neander’s analysis not only supersedes her detractors but likely exposes areas of vulnerability in others’ SE theory derivatives. (shrink)

Many believe that the Marxist philosophy of history entails that man is not free in a sense in which it seems obvious that he is. In particular it is held to be (1) materialistic, (2) holistic, (3) economistic, and (4) fatalistic. It is claimed, in short, that since the Marxist philosophy of history has these features, man is not capable of shaping his own (social) destiny if it is true. I show for each of these features either that it does (...) not entail what it is believed to entail or that it is not correctly attributed to the Marxist philosophy of history. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that theory in psychology need not be mystifying to non-theorists. I use feminist postmodern theory and the discourses of masculinity to demonstrate how theory can facilitate the exploration of questions and reveal what has been marginalized and obscured. My premise is further illustrated by an examination of the male sex drive discourse. I suggest in conclusion that the question in any theory is always about the choice of question. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

Recognizing the links between childhood trauma and delinquency, many juvenile delinquency systems now emphasize trauma-informed care. This commentary examines established and emerging research on childhood trauma among American Indian and Alaska Native children and contrasts the development and implementation of “trauma-informed” approaches in state and tribal juvenile systems. It identifies three key innovations present in tribal models and calls for further research to identify best practices that work for Native children and tribal communities.

Hare first argues that his theory applies equally to instrumental and intrinsic goodness. He then goes on to show that his theory also holds for ‘good’ in both the non‐moral and moral context. People are falsely led to believe that ‘good’ is used differently in these contexts, Hare claims, because its descriptive meaning differs. Its evaluative meaning, however, is the same: in the moral context ‘good’ is always used to directly or indirectly commend people or human characters.

In this work, the author has fashioned out of the logical and linguistic theses of his earlier books a full-scale but readily intelligible account of moral argument.

Adolf Reinach’s theory of social acts and Czesław Znamierowski theory of the environment can show a new perspective of analysis in the fields of computer science and digital communication. This paper will begin analysing the performance of social acts in two categories of digital environments: (i) fictional digital environment and (ii) real digital environment. The analysis will be supported by examples from the history of computer science. In both kinds of digital environments, organigrams play a significant role and depend on (...) the users’ digital power to perform a real or fictional social act. Finally, the paper will analyse one of the possible roles that AI plays in performing social acts in digital environments. It will show how AI could affect the perception of social acts. (shrink)

One may gather from the arguments of two of the last papers published before his death that J. L. Mackie held the following three theses concerning the mind/body problem : (1) There is a distinct realm of mental properties, so a dualism of properties at least is true and materialism false.

Part I Describing and Prescribing He to whom thou was sent for ease, being by name Legality, is the son of the Bond-woman . . . how canst thou expect by ...

Behaviorism and the philosophy of the act are widely believed to be inconsistent with one another. I argue that both are true, Fulfilling the requirements of scientific psychology and the phenomenology of mind, Respectively. The key to understanding their mutual consistency lies in the idea of parallelism and its corresponding requirement that all descriptive features of mental states be analyzed as properties, None as relations (to anything physical). So the intentional link itself must be a 'logical' and not a descriptive (...) connection. More broadly, It is required to free the act from its origins in the metaphysical notion of 'activity' and the substance ontology from which that motion derives. (shrink)

We consider the relation between past and future events from the perspective of the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, which holds that episodic simulation of future events requires a memory system that allows the flexible recombination of details from past events into novel scenarios. We discuss recent neuroimaging and behavioral evidence that support this hypothesis in relation to the theater production metaphor.

This book is divided into three parts: in Part I, R. M. Hare offers a justification for the use of philosophy of language in the treatment of moral questions, together with an overview of his moral philosophy of ‘universal prescriptivism’. The second part, and the core of the book, consists of five chapters originally presented as a lecture series under the title ‘A Taxonomy of Ethical Theories’. Hare identifies descriptivism and non‐descriptivism as the two main positions in modern (...) moral philosophy. The former he divides into Naturalism and Intuitionism, and the latter into Emotivism and Rationalism. Hare argues that all forms of descriptivism tend to lead to Relativism because the truth conditions of moral statements are culturally variant. Of the positions discussed, only Hare's own position, a form of Rationalism, which he calls Universal Prescriptivism, meets all of the requirements that an adequate ethical theory should meet. Part III consists of Hare's previously published essay ‘Could Kant have been a Utilitarian?’ (Utilitas 5, 1993). Here, Hare puts forward the controversial thesis that Kant's moral philosophy is, in its basic principles, compatible with utilitarianism. (shrink)

In this collection of papers by Laird Addis, published over approximately a quarter century, the main topics are the ontology of mind and the role of mind in the explanation of behavior. Addis defends a theory of natural signs, by which there is, in every conscious state including emotional states, an intrinsically intentional entity. He also argues that explanations of behavior by dispositional mental states, while not themselves causal explanations, presuppose the possibility of such explanations. The theory of dispositions is (...) applied also to the theories of Chomsky and Freud. In broad strokes, Addis holds that, while there is a distinct realm of mental properties, behaviors admit of purely physical explanations. (shrink)