In this paper I want to propose that we see solipsism as arising from certain problems we have about identifying ourselves as subjects in an objective world. The discussion will centre on Wittgenstein’s treatment of solipsism in his Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus. In that work Wittgenstein can be seen to express an unusually profound understanding of the problems faced in trying to give an account of how we, who are subjects, identify ourselves as objects in the world. We have in his (...) compressed remarks, the kernels of a number of arguments which all come together to form what can be called the problem of self-identification. I want to argue that the solipsism of the Tractatus arises at least in part as a solution to, or – to put it less optimistically – as a symptom or articulation of this problem. In approaching Wittgenstein’s early discussion of solipsism in this way I will obviously be in disagreement with some other interpretations of the work. For example, there are those who think that there is no ‘solipsism of the Tractatus’.1 In fact, the Tractarian arguments presented below as motivating solipsism have been seen as fulfilling the quite opposite function of refuting it. I do not intend in this piece to engage with alternative interpretations. Let me say a little bit about why I have granted myself the licence not to do so. First, the focus of my concern with solipsism is on how it connects with what I have called the problem of self-identification. While it is a concern that emerged in an attempt to make sense of Wittgenstein’s remarks in. (shrink)

In Connectionism and the Philosophy of Psychology, Horgan and Tienson (1996) argue that cognitive processes, pace classicism, are not governed by exceptionless, “representation-level” rules; they are instead the work of defeasible cognitive tendencies subserved by the non-linear dynamics of the brain’s neural networks. Many theorists are sympathetic with the dynamical characterisation of connectionism and the general (re)conception of cognition that it affords. But in all the excitement surrounding the connectionist revolution in cognitive science, it has largely gone unnoticed that connectionism (...) adds to the traditional focus on computational processes, a new focus – one on the vehicles of mental representation, on the entities that carry content through the mind. Indeed, if Horgan and Tienson’s dynamical characterisation of connectionism is on the right track, then so intimate is the relationship between computational processes and representational vehicles, that connectionist cognitive science is committed to a resemblance theory of mental content. (shrink)

Hitherto reconstructions of Empedocles' cosmic cycle have usually been offered as part of a larger work, a complete history of Presocratic thought, or a complete study of Empedocles. Consequently there has perhaps been a lack of thoroughness in collecting and sifting evidence that relates exclusively to the main features of the cosmic cycle.

O'Brien provides a critical assessment of Ernest Mandel's 1975 monograph Late Capitalism. In so doing, he offers a historical narrative that puts into question Mandel's framing of 'waves' of capitalist development as a process of capital accumulation that was dependent upon uneven development in the Third World. O'Brien starts by problematising Mandel's argument that an initial concentration of money, capital and bullion in the hands of Europeans explains combined and uneven development. He goes on to demonstrate that Mandel's (...) notion of imperialism as a necessary conduit for the flow of surplus capital from industrialising Europe does not stand up to the historical evidence. In fact, O'Brien maintains an alternative thesis, namely that these marginalised regions were insuffciently penetrated by European capital. (shrink)

How is it that we think and refer in the first-person way? For most philosophers in the analytic tradition, the problem is essentially this: how two apparently conflicting kinds of properties can be reconciled and united as properties of the same entity. What is special about the first person has to be reconciled with what is ordinary about it. The range of responses reduces to four basic options. The orthodox view is optimistic: there really is a way of reconciling these (...) apparently contradictory properties as contained within the same thing. The heretical views are pessimistic and content to be so: there is no such way, and that is because there is simply nothing to reconcile – because there is really nothing special about what is in question; or there is really nothing ordinary about it; or there is really nothing …. (shrink)

In recent work Irigaray has continued to meditate on the myopic (we might say ‘monadic’) focus of the Western tradition when it comes to its failure to acknowledge sexuate difference. Irigaray has successfully diagnosed the patriarchally over-determined nature of that tradition masquerading behind a façade of objectivity and neutrality in ways that continue to open up interpretive and critical possibilities in terms of reading the canon today. In some of her work, Irigaray levels a powerful challenge against Heidegger’s conception of (...) Dasein and his point of entry into ‘phenomenological ontology’. Thus, Heidegger, the thinker that Irigaray, arguably, engages with most positively in some of her recent work is charged not just with the ‘exsanguination’ of his conception of Dasein, as it were, but with having neutered Dasein in a way that is all too characteristic of the monadic tendencies of the Western tradition and its enduring suppression of sexuate difference. Part of what we will examine in some depth in this section of the book is a blindspot in Heidegger’s account of Dasein which, for all of his insights concerning the social constitution of Dasein, leaves him open to some of the criticisms which Irigaray has successfully levelled against an entire tradition. As part of our efforts to tease these issues out in some detail, we will consider Derrida’s first Geschlecht essay where he looks to exonerate Heidegger from the charge of phallogocentrism (a charge he had levelled against him in a 1982 interview), along with more recent efforts to artificially cross-pollinate between Heidegger, Derrida and Irigaray. We will further examine the problematic ways that Heidegger looks to ‘neutralise’ Dasein in 1928 as well as his attempts in a series of 1930s texts to introduce a distinction between Dasein and the being of the human being. These attempts dovetail with a series of bizarre and illegitimate moves to exclude “whole peoples and races” from the domain of meaningful historical existence in the 1930s in particular. (shrink)

Dienes & Perner offer us a theory of explicit and implicit knowledge that promises to systematise a large and diverse body of research in cognitive psychology. Their advertised strategy is to unpack this distinction in terms of explicit and implicit representation. But when one digs deeper one finds the “Higher-Order Thought” theory of consciousness doing much of the work. This reduces both the plausibility and usefulness of their account. We think their strategy is broadly correct, but that consensus on the (...) explicit/implicit knowledge distinction is still a fair way off. (shrink)

Lucy F. O'Brien; XII*—The Problem of Self-Identification, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 95, Issue 1, 1 June 1995, Pages 235–252, https://doi.o.

Doctors have an ethical and legal duty to respect patient confidentiality. We consider the basis for this duty, looking particularly at the meaning and value of autonomy in health care. Enabling patients to decide how information about them is disclosed is an important element in autonomy and helps patients engage as active partners in their care.Good quality data is, however, essential for research, education, public health monitoring, and for many other activities essential to provision of health care. We discuss whether (...) it is necessary to choose between individual rights and the wider public interest and conclude that this should only rarely be necessary. The paper makes some recommendations on practical steps which could help ensure that good quality information is available for work which benefits society and the public health, while still enabling patients’ autonomy to be respected. (shrink)

All communities have common resources that are vulnerable to selfish motives. The current paper explores this challenge in the specific case of the urban commons, defined as the public spaces and scenery of city neighborhoods. A theoretical model differentiates between individual incentives and social incentives for caring for the commons. The quality of a commons is defined as the level of physical (e.g., loose garbage) and social (e.g., public disturbances) disorder. A first study compared levels of disorder across the census (...) block groups of a single city; the second compared the disorder generated by individual addresses in two neighborhoods. Each study found that homeownership, an individual incentive, was the main predictor of disorder. Owner-occupied parcels generated less disorder than their renter-occupied neighbors, but both parcel types produced less disorder in a neighborhood with greater homeownership. The results emphasize the need for considering both individual and social incentives for group-beneficial behaviors. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question “what connection is there between our answer to the question of what we are, and the question, what our actions are?” Suppose that actions are reflexive changes of agents. On that supposition, there would be a direct connection between the answers to those two questions. An action of mine will be a reflexive change of me, and what I am will fix the nature of those changes. I hold that supposition to be true and consider (...) reasons in favor of believing it. However, the paper is not primarily aimed at defense of that thesis. It rather concerned with exploring what consequences accepting it has for the competing notions of what we are, given what we ordinarily think actions are, and bringing to light a tension between thinking of actions as reflexive changes of agents in this way, and a kind of causal understanding of actions that is prevalent. What emerges is that we should shift where we start our theorizing: we cannot assume that action theory primarily involves the task of characterizing the relation between an agent and changes caused, rather than a characterization of a particular kind of relation between the agent and herself. (shrink)

One kind of successful communication involves the transmission of knowledge from speaker to hearer. Such testimonial knowledge transmission is usually seen as conforming to three widely held epistemological approaches: reliabilism, impartialism and evidentialism. First, a speaker must be a reliable testifier in order that she transmits knowledge, and reliability is cashed out in terms of her likelihood of speaking the truth. Second, if a certain speaker's testimony has sufficient epistemic weight to be believed by hearer1, then it should also be (...) believed by hearer2. Third, the normative constraint here is evidentially grounded: whether or not a hearer should believe a speaker depends on the evidence the hearer has that the speaker is telling the truth. I argue that there are cases of testimonial knowledge transmission that are incompatible with these three claims. This is when one accepts the testimony of an intimate friend. (shrink)

Kubovy and Epstein distinguish between systems that follow rules, and those that merely instantiate them. They regard compliance with the principles of kinematic geometry in apparent motion as a case of instantiation. There is, however, some reason to believe that the human visual system internalizes the principles of kinematic geometry, even if it does not explicitly represent them. We offer functional resemblance as a criterion for internal representation. [Kubovy & Epstein].

1. This review intends to consider what Keywords in Education Policy Research can do in terms of the contribution it can make to the work of an educator, teacher educator and researcher in teacher...

The first introduction of the Yogsutra to present the Sanskrit text as a classic of world philosophy.

_"The Essential Plotinus_ is a lifesaver. For many years my students in Greek and Roman Religion have depended on it to understand the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages. The translation is crisp and clear, and the excerpts are just right for an introduction to Plotionus's many-layered view of the world and humankind’s place in it." --F. E. Romer, University of Arizona.

Lucy O'Brien argues that a satisfactory account of first-person reference and self-knowledge needs to concentrate on our nature as agents. Clearly written, with rigorous discussion of rival views, this book will be of interest to anyone working in the philosophy of mind and action.

This article explores ways pre-service teachers learn to work upon their positive emotional conduct during an initial teacher education course. The article argues that education practice today promotes the acting out of positive emotions, creating conditions within which pre-service teachers ethically shape their emotional conduct. Utilising Foucault’s four-part ethical framework, the article draws on longitudinal research of pre-service teachers in Western Australia to analyse the crafting of emotional conduct through techniques of the self. The techniques the participants came to employ (...) during their course learning aligned with a telos of the resourceful, positive, and professional teacher. The article argues that this ethical enterprise relies on a certain model of teacher subjectivity which is inseparably linked with normalising governmental power. Such disciplining of emotions, however, is neither one-dimensional nor deterministic; rather, work at the intersection of the government of others and of oneself. We argue this allows pre-service teachers the freedom to care for the self as they seek to foster their own ethical practices as teachers. (shrink)

This paper focuses on Sāṃkhya-Yoga and Buddhist Abhidharma ontologies and their engagement. A close reading of two hitherto uncompared passages from _Pātañjalayogaśāstra_ 2.13 and Vasubandhu’s _Abhidharmakośabhāṣya_ 4.94 suggests that they are intertextual or interdiscursive. A mirrored argument form in the texts explains ethical causality (karma) in relation to rebirth (_punarjanman_). The arguments in both texts are similar in form, sequence, and even conclusion, although not in terms of the doctrinal basis of reasoning. On first examination, both arguments analyse how action (...) (karma) sustains patterns of moral repercussion across life and beyond death in terms of singular and plural causes and effects. But a close reading shows that the level of conceptual engagement on this issue is more nuanced – centred on ‘projecting’ and ‘completing’ mechanisms of karmic retribution (_ākṣepaka karman_ and _paripūraka karman_) as well as determinate or indeterminate (_niyata_ and _aniyata_) maturation of karmic effects. The paper suggests that the function of Patañjali’s passage was to serve as a structured engagement with Buddhist Sarvāstivāda karma theory. (shrink)

THIS article concerning Mr. Marshall's open letter to Governor Smith does not pretend to be an answer. It suggests some philosophical considerations on the point at issue. The Editor.

In this paper I describe the imaginary community of Gullible. Gulliblians are led by moral pressures to believe whatever they are told and, in the scenario that I sketch, this leads to them having widespread contradictory beliefs. This community is nevertheless intelligible to us given what we know about their situation and their moral code. Davidson, however, holds there to be what I call a logicist constraint on interpretation: thinkers can only be interpreted if a good proportion of their beliefs (...) are rational and, for Davidson, rationality entails logical consistency. The possibility of Gullible therefore forces us to reject this logicist aspect of Davidson’s account of interpretation and intelligibility. (shrink)

I am sorry to have annoyed Dr Dicks by criticising two articles of his in one of my footnotes. I limit myself to the four specific points raised, in the hope that Dr Dicks may one day be kind enough to substantiate his more general criticisms.Pseudo-GalenFive separate doxographical sources attribute to Anaxagoras the statement that the sun is larger, or many times larger, than the Peloponnese. Galen, or pseudo-Galen, notes that Anaxagoras' sun is larger than the earth. I suggested that (...) this second formula, although it may not misrepresent the substance of Anaxagoras' theory, was ‘probably in Galen simply a random error, arising from the fact that the preceding sentence, on Anaximander, twice makes a comparison of sun and earth’. It is hard to know what motivates Dr Dicks to omit my reasoning and to stigmatise my conclusion as ‘curious’ and ‘eccentric’. (shrink)

In Just Fodder, Milburn argues for a relational account of our duties to animals. Following Clare Palmer, he argues that, though all animals have negative rights that we have a duty not to violate, we only gain positive obligations towards animals in the contexts of our relationships with them, which can be personal or political. He argues that human beings have collective positive duties towards domesticated animals, in virtue of the kind of relationship between us established by domestication. However, when (...) it comes to wild animals, he argues that we have no such morally relevant relationships, and so we have only negative duties towards them. I argue that throughout history and even prehistory human beings have morally entangled themselves with wild animals sufficiently that we may in fact have collective positive duties towards many, if not all, wild animals. (shrink)