This essay explores the concept of knowledge as it emerges in the development of sigmund freud's thought by clarifying his academic understanding of the problem and contrasting that with the actual view of knowledge which became operative in his work. The study suggests that freud's statements about knowledge were pervasively ambiguous, And that this ambiguity is such that freud can be shown to have transcended his initial cartesian perspective and brought forth a new understanding of knowledge as a doing rather (...) than a thinking, Which arises out of the relations between persons and which intrinsically involves the entire range of psychosexual activities. (shrink)

This article is a collective writing experiment undertaken by philosophers of education affiliated with the PESGB (Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain). When asked to reflect on questions concerning the Philosophy of Education in a New Key in May 2020, it was unsurprising that the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on society and on education were foremost in our minds. We wanted to consider important philosophical and educational questions raised by the pandemic, while acknowledging that, first and foremost, it (...) is a human tragedy. With nearly a million deaths reported worldwide to date, and with everyone effected in one way or another by Covid-19, there is a degree of discomfort, and a responsibility to be sensitive, in reflecting and writing about it academically. Members of this ‘Covid Collective’ come from various countries, with perspectives from Great Britain and Ireland well represented, and we see academic practice as a globally connected enterprise, especially since the digital revolution in academic publishing. The concerns raised in this article relate to but move beyond Covid-19, reflecting the impact of neoliberalism [and other political developments] on geopolitics with educational concerns as central to our focus. (shrink)

Combining knowledge of social policy and practice with insights from poststructural and feminist theory, the text demonstrates how democratic citizens and the political are continually recreated.

Fundamental to spatial knowledge in all species are the representations underlying object recognition, object search, and navigation through space. But what sets humans apart from other species is our ability to express spatial experience through language. This target article explores the language ofobjectsandplaces, asking what geometric properties are preserved in the representations underlying object nouns and spatial prepositions in English. Evidence from these two aspects of language suggests there are significant differences in the geometric richness with which objects and places (...) are encoded. When an object is named (i.e., with count nouns), detailed geometric properties – principally the object's shape (axes, solid and hollow volumes, surfaces, and parts) – are represented. In contrast, when an object plays the role of either “figure” (located object) or “ground” (reference object) in a locational expression, only very coarse geometric object properties are represented, primarily the main axes. In addition, the spatial functions encoded by spatial prepositions tend to be nonmetric and relatively coarse, for example, “containment,” “contact,” “relative distance,” and “relative direction.” These properties are representative of other languages as well. The striking differences in the way language encodes objects versus places lead us to suggest two explanations: First, there is a tendency for languages to level out geometric detail from both object and place representations. Second, a nonlinguistic disparity between the representations of “what” and “where” underlies how language represents objects and places. The language of objects and places converges with and enriches our understanding of corresponding spatial representations. (shrink)

It is widely thought that focusing on highly skilled movements while performing them hinders their execution. Once you have developed the ability to tee off in golf, play an arpeggio on the piano, or perform a pirouette in ballet, attention to what your body is doing is thought to lead to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis. Here I re-examine this view and argue that it lacks support when taken as a general thesis. Although bodily awareness may often interfere (...) with well-developed rote skills, like climbing stairs, I suggest that it is typically not detrimental to the skills of expert athletes, performing artists, and other individuals who endeavor to achieve excellence. Along the way, I present a critical analysis of some philosophical theories and behavioral studies on the relationship between attention and bodily movement, an explanation of why attention may be beneficial at the highest level of performance and an error theory that explains why many have thought the contrary. Though tentative, I present my view as a challenge to the widespread starting assumption in research on highly skilled movement that at the pinnacle of skill attention to one's movement is detrimental. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a concerted and systematic move towards a school-led system of initial teacher training in England. The role of universities, and particularly their part in engaging new teachers with educational theory, has been radically challenged. Only around half of new entrants to the profession now follow university-based training routes. These seismic changes to teacher education have been driven through with a minimum of formal consultation or public debate. In this urgent and compelling pamphlet, Janet Orchard and (...) Christopher Winch argue for a conception of teachers as professionals who require a deep understanding of the conceptual, empirical and normative dimensions of educational practice. They explain why university education departments are better placed than schools to help beginning teachers acquire that understanding. And they propose a significant expansion of initial teacher education, with full licensure contingent on completion of both a preliminary teaching qualification and a higher grade apprenticeship in the first two years of employment. Teachers need educational theory because they must understand what they are doing and why they are doing it, and must be able to think intelligently about how to do it better. At present, universities have the capacity and the expertise to meet this need. But they may not have it for much longer if the shift to school-based teacher education continues unabated. (shrink)

This paper, which is based on an extensive analysis of the literature, gives a brief overview of the main ways in which solidarity has been employed in bioethical writings in the last two decades. As the vagueness of the term has been one of the main targets of critique, we propose a new approach to defining solidarity, identifying it primarily as a practice enacted at the interpersonal, communal, and contractual/legal levels. Our three-tier model of solidarity can also help to explain (...) the way in which crises of solidarity can occur, notably when formal solidaristic arrangements continue to exist despite ‘lower tiers’ of solidarity practices at inter-personal and communal levels having ‘broken away’. We hope that this contribution to the growing debate on the potential for the value of solidarity to help tackle issues in bioethics and beyond, will stimulate further discussion involving both conceptual and empirically informed perspectives. (shrink)

In recent years, critical scholarship has drawn attention to increasing power differentials between corporations that use data and people whose data is used. A growing number of scholars see digital data and information commons as a way to counteract this asymmetry. In this paper I raise two concerns with this argument: First, because digital data and information can be in more than one place at once, governance models for physical common-pool resources cannot be easily transposed to digital commons. Second, not (...) all data and information commons are suitable to address power differentials. In order to create digital commons that effectively address power asymmetries we must pay more systematic attention to the issue of exclusion from digital data and information commons. Why and how digital data and information commons exclude, and what the consequences of such exclusion are, decide whether commons can change power asymmetries or whether they are more likely to perpetuate them. (shrink)

Strategic nonviolent action has reasserted itself as a potent force in shaping public debate and forcing political change. Whether it is an explosive surge of protest calling for racial justice in the United States, a demand for democratic reform in Hong Kong or Mexico, a wave of uprisings against dictatorship in the Middle East, or a tent city on Wall Street that spreads throughout the country, when mass movements erupt onto our television screens, the media portrays them as being as (...) spontaneous and unpredictable. In This is an Uprising, political analysts Mark and Paul Engler uncover the organization and well-planned strategies behind such outbursts of protest, examining core principles that have been used to spark and guide moments of transformative unrest. This is an Uprising traces the evolution of civil resistance, providing new insights into the contributions of early experimenters such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., groundbreaking theorists such as Gene Sharp and Frances Fox Piven, and contemporary practitioners who have toppled repressive regimes in countries such as South Africa, Serbia, and Egypt. Drawing from discussions with activists now working to defend human rights, challenge corporate corruption, and combat climate change, the Englers show how people with few resources and little influence in conventional politics can nevertheless engineer momentous upheavals. Although it continues to prove its importance in political life, the strategic use of nonviolent action is poorly understood. Nonviolence is usually studied as a philosophy or moral code, rather than as a method of political conflict, disruption, and escalation. This is an Uprising corrects this oversight. It argues that if we are always taken by surprise by dramatic outbreaks of revolt, and if we decline to incorporate them into our view of how societies progress, then we pass up the chance to fully grasp a critical phenomenon-and to harness its power to create lasting change. (shrink)

Metaphysicians of modality are increasingly critical of possible-worlds talk, and increasingly happy to accept irreducibly modal properties – and in particular, irreducible dispositions – in nature. The aim of this paper is to provide the beginnings of a modal semantics which uses, instead of possible-worlds talk, the resources of such an 'anti-Humean' metaphysics. One central challenge to an anti-Humean view is the context-sensitivity of modal language. I show how that challenge can be met and a systematic modal semantics provided, given (...) an independently plausible metaphysics of dispositional properties or potentialities. (shrink)

This article challenges a key tacit assumption underpinning legal and ethical instruments in health care, namely, that people are ideally bounded, independent, and often also strategically rational individuals. Such an understanding of personhood has been criticized within feminist and other critical scholarship as being unfit to capture the deeply relational nature of human beings. In the field of medicine, however, it also causes tangible problems. I propose that a solidarity-based perspective entails a relational approach and as such helps to formulate (...) new solutions to complex ethical and regulatory questions, ranging from caring for people at the end of their lives to improving policies for organ donation and better governance of health data. It also underscores the importance of universal health care. Although a solidarity-based perspective does not require health to be seen as an individually enforceable right, it does influence our understanding of individual rights: it draws attention to how their meaning is shaped by shared social practices. I conclude by arguing that, in light of current pressures for medicine to become more personalized, using a relational understanding of personhood to shape policies and practices is a much needed endeavor. (shrink)

Over the past two decades, modal epistemology has turned its attention to ordinary modal knowledge. This paper brings to the fore a neglected but central form of ordinary modal knowledge: knowledge of agentive modality, and in particular of our own abilities, which I call ‘ability knowledge’. I argue that modal epistemology as it is does not account for ability knowledge, by looking at the most promising candidate theories: perception-based, counterfactual-based, and similarity-based modal epistemologies. I then outline a more promising epistemology (...) for our ability knowledge, which relies on the experience of our own agency, and draw out some lessons for modal epistemology in general. (shrink)

Male aggression against females in primates, including humans, often functions to control female sexuality to the male’s reproductive advantage. A comparative, evolutionary perspective is used to generate several hypotheses to help to explain cross-cultural variation in the frequency of male aggression against women. Variables considered include protection of women by kin, male-male alliances and male strategies for guarding mates and obtaining adulterous matings, and male resource control. The relationships between male aggression against women and gender ideologies, male domination of women, (...) and female sexuality are also considered. (shrink)

Teaching, irrespective of its geographical location, is fundamentally a relational practice in which unique ethically complex situations arise to which teachers need to respond at different levels of ethical decision-making. These range from ‘big’ abstract questions about whether or not what they teach is inherently good, through to seemingly trivial questions about everyday issues, for example whether or not it is right to silence children in classrooms. Hence, alongside a wide range of pedagogical skills, new teachers also need to develop (...) personal qualities, knowledge and understanding that will enable them to navigate successfully these professional ethical demands. ‘Philosophy for Teachers’, or ‘P4T’, is one promising approach to teachers’ pre-service professional preparation which has been piloted in England, adapted from the more familiar idea of ‘P4C’. Drawing on the model of learning through dialogue within a community of fellow enquirers, an ethical retreat was s... (shrink)

Manley and Wasserman (2008) have provided a convincing case against analyses of dispositions in terms of one conditional, and a very interesting positive proposal that links any disposition to a ‘suitable proportion’ of a particular set of precise conditionals. I focus on their positive proposal and ask just how precise those conditionals are to be. I argue that, contrary to what Manley and Wasserman imply in their paper, they must be maximally specific, describing in their antecedents complete centred worlds. This (...) suggests a natural semantics for dispositional expressions, which I briefly explore to argue that it lacks uniformity. I end by suggesting a variation on Manley and Wasserman's view which would preserve uniformity, though at the cost of some new puzzling questions. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate central temporal and spatial notions in the second part of Plato’s Parmenides and argue that also these notions, and not only the metaphysical ones usually discussed in the literature, can be understood as a response to positions and problems put on the table by Parmenides and Zeno. Of the spatial notions examined in the dialogue, I look at the problems raised for possessing location and shape, while with respect to temporal notions, I focus on the (...) discussion of ‘being in time’ and exaiphnês (the latter notion will be shown to be also an important influence for Aristotle’s Physics). In displaying a paradoxical character and taking up crucial notions from Parmenides, the second part of the Parmenides seems to display some resemblance to Zeno’s paradoxes. I will show, however, that in contrast to Zeno, the second part of Plato’s Parmenides also demonstrates Parmenides’ One to be problematic on its own terms. Furthermore, the dialogue presents not only important problems that these spatial and temporal notions seem to lead us into, but also establishes some positive features necessary to think of time and space. In this way, Plato’s Parmenides can be seen as contributing to the development of temporal and spatial conceptualisations in ancient Greek thought. (shrink)

This article reviews existing empirical research on the peak-and-end rule. This rule states that people's global evaluations of past affective episodes can be well predicted by the affect experienced during just two moments: the moment of peak affect intensity and the ending. One consequence of the peak-and-end rule is that the duration of affective episodes is largely neglected. Evidence supporting the peak-and-end rule is robust, but qualified. New directions for future work in this emerging area of study are outlined. In (...) particular, the personal meanings associated with specific moments and with specific emotions should be assessed. It is hypothesised that moments rich with self-relevant information will dominate people's global evaluations of past affective episodes. The article concludes with a discussion of ways to measure and optimise objective happiness. (shrink)

In this article I draw on personal experience to explore the kinds of relationships that can develop between human and nonhuman animals. The first part of the article describes my encounters with wild baboons, whom I studied in East Africa over the course of many years. The baboons treated me as a social being, and to gain their trust I had to learn the troop's social conventions and behave in accordance with them. This process gave me a feeling for what (...) it means to be a baboon. Over time, I developed a sense of belonging to their community, and my subjective identity seemed to merge with theirs. This experience expanded my sense of the possible in interspecies relations. The second part of the article describes a mutual exploration of such possibilities in my relationship with my dog, Safi. I describe how Safi and I co-create systems of communication and emotional expression that permit deep 'intersubjectivity', despite our very different biological natures. In my relationships with baboons, dogs, and other animals, I have encountered the presence in another of something resembling a human 'self'. I emphasize the importance of recognizing and honoring this presence in other animals as well as in humans. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Amidst trends that emphasize languishing patterns in teen mental health, there is a bright spot: social science research indicates that adolescents who develop relationships with adult mentors demonstrate increased signs of flourishing. This social science research on mentors, though limited to school performance outcome goals, offers a lifeline to character educators. I offer a theoretical framework based on Aristotelian principles, informed by anecdotal case studies of authentic moral dilemmas that emerged from the direct experiences of mentees, to suggest a (...) framework to explain why adolescents with adult mentors have an advantage. Patterns of conversation in trusted mentoring relationships developed over time, and in a school context that provides sufficient professional development for mentors, support the youth: (1) to advance in practical wisdom (phronesis) by honing skills for emotional regulation as well as cognitive skills to recognize goods in conflict and (2) to learn how to engage in civic friendship through these friendships of inequality with mentors. (shrink)

The article argues that the relationship to time is at the root of what makes us human and that culture arises with and from efforts to transcend death, change and the rhythmicity of the physical environment. Time can be tracked through systems of time measurement and later transformed from a process of nature into clock time, a time to human design that is abstracted from context and content. In this form time can be traded with all other times. With contemporary (...) science and new information and communications technologies, which operate in a new all-encompassing temporal spectrum that extends from nanoseconds to millennia, clock time is no longer appropriate to the associated present-oriented transactions and futures are traversed in the dual sense of the word. By historically locating temporal relations, the article provides both a new understanding of socio-cultural relations and a perspective on social change. (shrink)

How should biological behaviour be modelled? A relatively new approach is to investigate problems in neuroethology by building physical robot models of biological sensorimotor systems. The explication and justification of this approach are here placed within a framework for describing and comparing models in the behavioural and biological sciences. First, simulation models – the representation of a hypothesis about a target system – are distinguished from several other relationships also termed “modelling” in discussions of scientific explanation. Seven dimensions on which (...) simulation models can differ are defined and distinctions between them discussed: 1. Relevance: whether the model tests and generates hypotheses applicable to biology. 2. Level: the elemental units of the model in the hierarchy from atoms to societies. 3. Generality: the range of biological systems the model can represent. 4. Abstraction: the complexity, relative to the target, or amount of detail included in the model. 5. Structural accuracy: how well the model represents the actual mechanisms underlying the behaviour. 6. Performance match: to what extent the model behaviour matches the target behaviour. 7. Medium: the physical basis by which the model is implemented. No specific position in the space of models thus defined is the only correct one, but a good modelling methodology should be explicit about its position and the justification for that position. It is argued that in building robot models biological relevance is more effective than loose biological inspiration; multiple levels can be integrated; that generality cannot be assumed but might emerge from studying specific instances; abstraction is better done by simplification than idealisation; accuracy can be approached through iterations of complete systems; that the model should be able to match and predict target behaviour; and that a physical medium can have significant advantages. These arguments reflect the view that biological behaviour needs to be studied and modelled in context, that is, in terms of the real problems faced by real animals in real environments. Key Words: animal behaviour; levels; models; neuroethology; realism; robotics; simulation. (shrink)

Essays by Jurgen Habermas on truth, objectivity, normativity, naturalism, and realism after the linguistic turn.

Einstein's theories of special and general relativity are unanimously praised by scientists for their extraordinary beauty to the extent that some consider the latter to be the most beautiful theory in physics. The grounds for these assertions are assessed here and it is concluded that the beauty of Einstein's theories can be attributed to two of their aspects. The first is that they incorporate all possible ingredients that constitute the beauty of theories: simplicity, symmetry, invariance, unification, etc. The second concerns (...) the perfect logical consistency of Einstein's theories, a crucial factor in the unanimous praise of their beauty. Theories other than Einstein's are also assessed here, namely, electromagnetism and the various quantum theories, and it is concluded that all these suffer from logical flaws. This has resulted in a lack of consensus among scientists with respect to their beauty. Consequently, the unanimous claim that Einstein's theories are of superior beauty as compared to other theories in physics is hereby substantiated. (shrink)

How does evolution grow bigger brains? It has been widely assumed that growth of individual structures and functional systems in response to niche-specific cognitive challenges is the most plausible mechanism for brain expansion in mammals. Comparison of multiple regressions on allometric data for 131 mammalian species, however, suggests that for 9 of 11 brain structures taxonomic and body size factors are less important than covariance of these major structures with each other. Which structure grows biggest is largely predicted by a (...) conserved order of neurogenesis that can be derived from the basic axial structure of the developing brain. This conserved order of neurogenesis predicts the relative scaling not only of gross brain regions like the isocortex or mesencephalon, but also the level of detail of individual thalamic nuclei. Special selection of particular areas for specific functions does occur, but it is a minor factor compared to the large-scale covariance of the whole brain. The idea that enlarged isocortex could be a a by-product of structural constraints later adapted for various behaviors, contrasts with approaches to selection of particular brain regions for cognitively advanced uses, as is commonly assumed in the case of hominid brain evolution. (shrink)

This paper presents problems for Stalnaker’s common ground theory of presupposition. Stalnaker (Linguist and Philos 25:701–721, 2002) proposes a 2-stage process of utterance interpretation: presupposed content is added to the common ground prior to acceptance/rejection of the utterance as a whole. But this revision makes presupposition difficult to distinguish from assertion. A more fundamental problem is that the common ground theory rests on a faulty theory of assertion—that the essence of assertion is to present the content of an utterance as (...) new information. Many examples are presented of utterances which are felicitous but not informative in this way. (shrink)

Chronic and current epistemological controversies, with particular attention to the development of pragmatist/historicist/constructivist reconceptions of knowledge and science in the 20th century and the scandalized responses to them by defenders of more traditional rationalist/objectivist/realist conceptions. Individual chapters deal with complex and confused relations among epistemic skepticism, relativism, and constructivist epistemology ; 20th-century "postmodern" relativism and anti-relativism; Ludwik Fleck and constructivist views of truth, science, and knowledge; attacks on and disavowals of constructivism and/or relativism by established and feminist philosophers; the Science (...) Wars and fraught relations between the humanities and the sciences; the problematic claims of Evolutionary Psychology; and chronic problems and contemporary views of animal-human relations. (shrink)

English summary: Fynn Ole Engler investigates the two main positions in the modern philosophy of science from an historical and a systematic point of view, thereby separating the realistic and the naturalistic program from each other.

The conservation of energy law, a law of physics that states that the total energy of any closed system is always conserved, is a bedrock principle that has achieved both broad theoretical and experimental support. Yet if interactive dualism is correct, it is thought that the mind can affect physical objects in violation of the conservation of energy. Thus, some claim, the conservation of energy grounds an argument for physicalism. Although critics of the argument focus on the implausibility of causation (...) requiring the transference of energy, I argue that even if causation requires the transference of energy, once we accept the other required premises of the argument that lie behind any supposed argument from the conservation of energy the law of the conservation of energy is revealed as irrelevant to the question of whether the mental is physical. (shrink)

This article focuses on how young children acquire concepts for exact, cardinal numbers. I believe that exact numbers are a conceptual structure that was invented by people, and that most children acquire gradually, over a period of months or years during early childhood. This article reviews studies that explore children’s number knowledge at various points during this acquisition process. Most of these studies were done in my own lab, and assume the theoretical framework proposed by Carey. In this framework, the (...) counting list and the counting routine form a placeholder structure. Over time, the placeholder structure is gradually filled in with meaning to become a conceptual structure that allows the child to represent exact numbers A number system is a socially shared, structured set of symbols that pose a learning challenge for children. But once children have acquired a number system, it allows them to represent information that they had no way of representing before. (shrink)

The role of agape in Christian ethics has been a major concern for twentieth century ethicists. In America, the dominant ethical position has stressed other-regard--often pressed to the point of significant personal sacrifice--as the content of agape. Feminist ethicists are now criticizing an exclusive emphasis on other-regard. They are stressing the need for a healthy self-regard and hence they are exploring mutuality as the most appropriate image of Christian love.

An extended analysis and account of the psychological/social/cognitive dynamics of intellectual controversy. The immediate focus is the recurrent failure of intellectual engagement, in encounters having to do with with truth, knowledge, language, science, and/or objectivity, between, on the one hand, rationalist-realist-objectivist philosophers and/or those they have instructed and, on the other hand, constructivist-pragmatist ("postmodern") theorists and/or those persuaded by their critiques and/or alternative views. Individual chapters examine critiques and defenses of objectivist-rationalist views in law, politics, literary studies, ethics, communication theory, (...) and philosophy of science. Theorists whose views are discussed critically at some length include legal scholar Robin West and philosophers Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel, and Philip Kitcher. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:20. HUME ON REASON1 One of the main concerns of Hume's Treatise of 2 Human Nature (T) is the investigation of the role that reason plays in belief and action. On the standard interpretation, Hume is taken to argue that neither our beliefs nor our actions are determined by reason; Books I and III are thus seen as sharing a common theme: the denigration of reason's role in human (...) affairs. Arguing for this view, Kemp Smith claims that "Hume's principle of the subordination of reason to the passions runs through his whole philosophy ", not merely through Books II and III. This interpretation of Hume's enterprise presupposes that the faculty of reason whose role in action is discussed in Book III is the same faculty which has been shown not to determine belief in Book I. In this paper I argue that a univocal reading of 'reason' and related terms like 'reasoning' throughout the Treatise has the consequence that there are major internal inconsistencies in Hume's philosophy, cannot account for some important sections of the work, and leads to misinterpretation of the nature of his overall argument. In its place I develop an interpretation which avoids these difficulties and emphasizes the radical nature of Hume's naturalism. The Argument of the Treatise Let me begin by reviewing the salient features of the main argument of the Treatise. In Book I, Hume is concerned to show that our most fundamental beliefs — e.g., about the continued and distinct existence of object, about what we are not presently observing, and in the existence of the self — are not acquired by reason, but instead by the imagination, influenced by custom and habit. In a typical passage, he argues: Reason can never shew us the connexion of one object with another, tho' aided by experience, and the observation of their constant conjunction in all past instances. When the mind, 21. therefore, passes from the idea or impression of one object to the idea or belief of another, it is not determin'd by reason... (T92)4 In Book III, and in Book II, Part III, Section III (Of the influencing motives of the will), Hume is concerned to show that reason alone can never produce any action, or give rise to volition (T414), and the same faculty is as incapable of preventing volition, or of disputing the preference with any passion or emotion (T414-415). Hume uses this result in Book III, Part I, Section I, to show that the rules of morality...are not conclusions of our reason (T457). Proponents of the univocal reading of 'reason' would hold that the Treatise thus constitutes a continuous attack on reason, showing that it causes neither our most fundamental beliefs nor our actions and moral judgments. But if this reading were correct, Hume would fail to avail himself of an obvious and persuasive argument for the conclusion he reaches in Books II and III, and in the latter books he would contradict the results of Book I. Conflict between Book I and Books II and III If Hume did have the same faculty in mind throughout the Treatise, a strong argument to show that reason does not cause action would be available to him in Books II and III, utilizing the results he has established in Book I. The principal way in which reason would be thought to influence action is by informing us of facts about efficient means to achieve our ends and about the possible effects of actions — facts about causal relations. Since the conclusion of Book I is that judgments about causal relations do not result from reason, it follows that even if such beliefs did cause action, it would still not be the case that reason caused action. But Hume not only does not make such an argument in Books II and III, he denies one of its premises — the claim that beliefs about causal relations do not result from reason — which was the main conclusion of Book I. In the 22. later books he asserts repeatedly that reason can cause beliefs about causal relations. For example, in Book III, he says:...reason, in a strict and philosophical... (shrink)

The theoretical physicist Paul Dirac rejected, explicitly on aesthetic grounds, a successful theory known as quantum electrodynamics (QED), which is the prototype for the family of theories known as quantum field theories (QFTs). Remarkably, the theoretical physicist Steven Weinberg, also largely on aesthetic grounds, supports QED and other QFTs. In order to evaluate these opposing aesthetic views a short introduction to the physical properties of QFTs is presented together with a detailed analysis of the aesthetic claims of Dirac and Weinberg. (...) It turns out that Dirac rejected QED, without regard to its success, because this theory fails to yield to what he perceived as beautiful mathematics, whereas Weinberg's support of QFTs is founded primarily on the physical concepts of the theories. In particular, he relies on symmetries that are the basis for the construction of the extremely successful current fundamental theories of particles physics. This success was decisive in leading to Weinberg's conviction of the beauty of QFTs. As a result of the evaluation of these approaches, the factors causing scientists to perceive a theory as being a fundamentally beautiful theory are discussed in detail. (shrink)

I give an analysis of Dummett’s interpretation of the philosophical significance of the incompleteness theorem and its possible application to a rejection of the law of the excluded middle ( \(\textsf{LEM}\) ). According to Dummett, Gödel’s results question the general specifiability of a ‘principle for recognizing something true about the natural numbers’. He takes the incompleteness theorems to show that our collection of such principles is indefinitely extensible, and therefore warrant a rejection of \(\textsf{LEM}\). First, I argue that for this (...) claim to be successful, Dummett needs to understand general specifiability as ‘being part of a recursively enumerable collection of arithmetic truths’. I then provide a formal framework to model this notion’s indefinite extensibility. To do so, I apply potentialist ideas to extensions of theories (rather than to extensions domains) and test whether a suitable formulation of \(\textsf{LEM}\) holds in the resulting framework. (shrink)

The role of prefrontal cortex (PFC) in influencing creative thinking has been investigated by many researchers who, while succeeding in proving an effective involvement of PFC, reported suggestive but sometimes conflicting results. In order to better understand the relationships between creative thinking and brain activation in a more specific area of the PFC, we explored the role of dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC). We devised an experimental protocol using transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS). The study was based on a 3 (kind of stimulation: (...) anodal vs. cathodal vs. sham) × 2 (priming: divergent vs. convergent) design. Forty-five healthy adults were randomly assigned to one stimulation condition. Participants’ creativity skills were assessed using the Product Improvement subtest from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). After 20 min of tDCS stimulation, participants were presented with visual images of common objects. Half of the participants were instructed to visualize themselves using the object in an unusual way (divergent priming), whereas the other half were asked to visualize themselves while using the object in a common way (convergent priming). Priming was aimed at inducing participants to adopt different attitudes toward the creative task. Afterwards, participants were asked to describe all of the possible uses of the objects that were presented. Participants’ physiological activation was recorded using a biofeedback equipment. Results showed a significant effect of anodal stimulation that enhanced creative performance, but only after divergent priming. Participants showed lower skin temperature values after cathodal stimulation, a finding which is coherent with studies reporting that, when a task is not creative or creative thinking is not prompted, people show lower levels of arousal. Differences in individual levels of creativity as assessed by the Product Improvement test were not influential. The involvement of DLPFC in creativity has been supported, presumably in association to shift of attention modulated by priming. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophical analysis and a new edition of an anonymous Epitome of John Dumbleton’s solution to the semantic paradoxes. The first part of this paper briefly presents Dumbleton’s cassationist solution to the semantic paradoxes, which the English philosopher proposes in his Summa Logicae, written in the 1330s–40s. The second part investigates the solution to various types of insolubles proposed by the anonymous author of the Epitome. The third part provides a new critical edition of the Latin text (...) – a first edition was edited by Bottin in 1978 – and an English translation. (shrink)