This paper argues that the logical coherence of classical theism can be defended through the traditional free-will defense and argument from divine omniscience and human finitude, but only at the cost of moral scepticism. The above two-pronged defense entails moral scepticism because it demands that we construe clear and undeniable cases of morally unjustifiable evil as merely apparently unjustifiable evils which can be morally justified from some moral point of view. The paper argues that justification is impossible because such basic (...) evils can never be justified from any "moral" perspective. The very conditions necessary for having a moral perspective demand that one recognize certain evils as unjustifiable from any moral point of view. This is the case because moral theories are designed to give us insight into such evils. Moreover, I argue that even if one rejects the above argument, moral scepticism still follows because any intelligible account of moral knowledge requires that its proponents be able at least to point to certain cases of unjustifiable evil if their theory is to have any purchase in the real world and avoid the charge of moral irrelevance and moral scepticism. But this is precisely what the classical theist cannot do. If, however, the classical theist rejects this moral scepticism, then real cases of morally unjustifiable evil must be admitted to exist and a single one of these is sufficient to undermine the logical coherence of classical theism. (shrink)

The traditional thesis of the autonomy of psychology from neuroscience is grounded in a metaphysical thesis; the irreducibility thesis. Anti-reductionism is still dominant nowadays, and, as a consequence, autonomists arguably stand on firmer grounds. Still, an anti-autonomist might have the intuition that even if psychology is not reducible to neuroscience, there is a sense, not metaphysically grounded, but epistemologically grounded, in which psychology clearly is not autonomous from neuroscience. The challenge is then to offer a concept of autonomy which allows (...) for the articulation of a new and significant autonomy thesis, and to show that the thesis is false. The thesis that psychologists need not consider neuroscientific explanations when putting forward psychological explanations is such a thesis. I take it that both this characterization of autonomy and an antiautonomist argument in this sense can already be found in a paper co-authored by Gualtiero Piccinini and CarlCraver. Piccinini and Craver’s attack on this thesis is grounded on the claim that psychologists should support their functional analyses by means ofmechanistic explanations for the former to be justified at all. I also take it that, as Lawrence Shapiro has shown, their argument ultimately fails. But this was a very valuable attempt, and, in this paper, I intend to build on it with the aim of offering a new and hopefully effective anti-autonomist argument. I contend that psychologists do need to consider neuroscientific explanations when putting forward psychological explanations, and this stems from the fact that they provide the same type of explanations of the same kind of phenomena as neuroscientist, or so I argue. (shrink)

In Nature Ethics: An Ecofeminist Perspective, Marti Kheel explores the underlying worldview of "nature ethics," offering an alternative ecofeminist approach. Seeking to heal the divisions between the seemingly disparate movements and philosophies of feminism, animal advocacy, environmental ethics, and holistic health, Kheel proposes an ecofeminist philosophy that underscores the importance of empathy and care for individual beings as well as larger wholes.

The claim that all human thought involves "interpretation," that all human thought is in some way relative to a contingent context of cognitive, theoretical, practical, and aesthetic considerations, has become widely accepted, but waht we understand by "truth" and how we should best pursue it are questions raised with renewed force once a hermeneutical starting point has been embraced. Brice R. Wachterhauser's collection Hermeneutics and Truth is an attempt to contribute to this concersation. No thinkers have wrestled with the (...) issue of truth and interpretation in more illuminating ways for the Continental tradition of philosophy than Heidegger and Gadamer. Hermeneutics and Truth is a dual focus on Heidegger and Gadamer, but it concentrates primarily on Gadamer's efforts to think through the issue of truth for hermeneutics and only secondaily on Heidegger's thought on this issue. (shrink)

Hermeneutics and Modern Philosophy is a collection of interpretive and critical essays on philosophical hermeneutics, focusing on the seminal work of Heidegger and Gadamer.

Exploring Certainty: Wittgenstein and Wide Fields of Thought considers how, where, and to what extent the thoughts and ideas found in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty can be applied to other areas of thought, including: ethics, aesthetics, religious belief, mathematics, cognitive science, and political theory. Robert Greenleaf Brice opens new avenues of thought for scholars and students of the Wittgensteinian tradition, while introducing original philosophies about human knowledge and cognition.

Technologies of democracy are instruments based on material apparatus, social practices and expert knowledge that organize the participation of various publics in the definition and treatment of public problems. Using three examples related to the engagement of publics in nanotechnology in France (a citizen conference, a series of public meetings, and an industrial design process), the paper argues that Science and Technology Studies provide useful tools and methods for the analysis of technologies of democracy. Operations of experiments and public demonstrations (...) can be described, as well as controversies about technologies of democracy giving rise to counter-experiments and counter-demonstrations. The political value of the analysis of public engagement lies in the description of processes of stabilization of democratic orders and in the display of potential alternative political arrangements. (shrink)

In the context of Multiple criteria decision analysis, we present the necessary and sufficient conditions allowing to represent an ordinal preferential information provided by the decision maker by a Choquet integral w.r.t a 2-additive capacity. We provide also a characterization of this type of preferential information by a belief function which can be viewed as a capacity. These characterizations are based on three axioms, namely strict cycle-free preferences and some monotonicity conditions called MOPI and 2-MOPI.

Kant, dans l’Introduction de la seconde édition de la Critique de la raison pure, reconnaît l’universalité et la nécessité comme deux critères extensionnellement équivalents de l’a priori :Nécessité et rigoureuse universalité sont […] des critères sûrs d’une connaissance a priori et renvoient en outre, inséparablement, l’une à l’autre.Le terme de « critère » signifie dans ce passage qu’universalité...

This paper discusses the operations meant to act on situations of ontological uncertainties for chemicals. Using examples related to substances developed as part of nanotechnology programs, it analyses technical and social instruments meant to define the existence of these substances, as « new » or « existing » chemicals. Carbon nanotubes developed by a French company offer an illustration of containment, while the legal disputes about nano silver in the U.S. display oppositions about whether or not these compounds are equivalent (...) to colloïdal silver. The operations meant to deal with the ontological uncertainty of these substances define categories and craft political organizations. As such, they suggest developing an analytical approach able to jointly examine the ontologies of material objects and the forms of political ordering. (shrink)

Ceux qui sont nés, comme l'auteur de ce livre, dans les dernières années du siècle précédent, qui ont eu leurs vingt ans au front, avaient encore grandi non seulement sans autos ni avions, ni radios, mais même, s'ils n'étaient pas riches, sans l'électricité chez eux. Lorsqu'ils sont tombés, à peine sortis de l'enfance, dans la machinerie de l'autre guerre, ils n'avaient eu pour formation que les humanités classiques, la morale de Kant, le symbolisme et les marches à pied. Depuis, en (...) une quarantaine d'années, à un rythme presque infernal, ils ont dû avaler, venant d'ailleurs un peu pêle-mêle, la révolution russe, les guerres civiles en Europe, la psychanalyse, la dialectique hégélienne, le marxisme, la phénoménologie, l'existentialisme, le national-socialisme, l'invasion de la France, la dislocation des empires coloniaux, la physique nucléaire, les bombes atomiques, le retournement contre l'Europe occidentale des idées et des connaissances qu'elle avait produites et qu'elle continuait à produire, la fin de son hégémonie. C'était peut-être beaucoup. C'était peut-être trop? Le résultat en a peut-être été la rupture définitive avec le passé? C'est ce que se demande Brice Parain. Il a eu souvent le sentiment qu'il risquait de se perdre, que courir les routes, se déplacer en avion, téléphoner un peu partout, savoir qu'il existe des camps de concentration en Europe, regarder de la peinture dite abstraite, faire tout dépendre de l'avenir, ne pouvait rien avoir de commun avec la vie qu'il avait menée au temps des gendarmes à cheval et des lampes à pétrole. Ce sentiment lui a fait peur. Il a voulu y réfléchir. L'Occident s'était peut-être trompé, à un moment ou à un autre? La liberté, telle qu'il l'a définie, a engendré la solitude et la solitude engendre le suicide. L'Occident a peut-être sacrifié la vie à ses ambitions? Faudra-t-il qu'il rapprenne à vivre pour éviter de périr? Brice Parain ne se résout pas à s'en tenir à la dialectique comme méthode de raisonnement pour comprendre l'histoire et la vie. Il croit que la dialectique est pareille à une ligne tortueuse qui a pourtant un axe. La connaissance de cet axe rétablirait une logique, qui permettrait de refaire une morale. Ajoutons qu'il sait le russe, s'étant mis à l'apprendre très vite après son retour de la Grande Guerre, en 1920. Depuis, sa réflexion s'est largement alimentée à la confrontation entre l'Occident et la Russie, qui lui était toujours présente. On n'aura pas de peine à en suivre les démarches. Elles nous sont exposées à travers le récit des simples événements d'une enfance et d'une adolescence aussi passionnées de sentiments que de pensée. (shrink)

Svätopluk Štúr is a strong critic of strands of German thought that emphasize the will to power as an organizing principle of human society. Štúr is particularly critical of Nietzsche’s vitalism, which Štúr believes culminated in national socialism and the destruction of the Second World War. This paper describes and examines Štúr’s criticism of a number of German thinkers and focuses especially on Štúr’s criticism of Nietzsche. Štúr criticizes Nietzsche’s emphasis on life over knowledge. Štúr offers a different philosophy of (...) life grounded in the dignity of human beings and the social consequences of ideas and actions. This paper concludes by examining what Štúr means by dignity in terms of a moral agent and as opposed to Nietzsche’s emphasis on vitalism. (shrink)

Perhaps no other aspect of Hans-Georg Gadamer's Wahrheit und Methode has generated more controversy and caustic criticism than his attempt to defend the role of ‘prejudice’ in human understanding. Gadamer's goal in challenging what he calls ‘the Enlightenment's prejudice against prejudice’ is not to defend irresponsible, idiosyncratic, parochial or otherwise self-willed understanding in the human sciences, but to argue that all human cognition is ‘finite’ and ‘limited’ in the sense that it always involves, to borrow Polanyi's phrase, a ‘tacit dimension’ (...) of implicit judgments, concerns, or commitments which shape definitively our grasp of the subject matter in ways we cannot anticipate or control. This implies a ‘finite’ or ‘limited’ view of human understanding in at least two ways. First, Gadamer seems to use the word ‘finite’ in conscious opposition to Hegel's notion of an ‘infinite’ intellect. For Hegel the ‘infinite’ was the ‘unconditioned’ and ‘self-determining’. An ‘infinite’ intellect would be its own master, an autonomous, spontaneous source of all its essential activities and contents. (shrink)

This volume of essays honors the extensive contributions of James M. Edie, the founding editor of the Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy series, to the development of phenomenological thought. Grounded in Edie's emphasis on Husserl's confrontation with skepticism, the essays provide an in-depth analysis of Husserlian and neo-Husserlian responses to skepticism and relativism. Led by an informative introduction by the volume editor, Brice R. Wachterhauser, and featuring essays by thirteen contributors, including Edie himself, this volume confirms both Edie's (...) lasting influence and the continued relevance of Husserlian thought in contemporary philosophical debate. (shrink)

I examine two sets of experimental results about the semantics of general terms, by Genone and Lombrozo (2012) and by Nichols, Pinillos and Mallon (forthcoming) that allegedly reveal significant variations in semantic intuitions as regards the correct application of general terms. The two sets of authors propose two entirely different semantic treatments: Genone and Lombrozo espouse a hybrid semantics whereas Nichols, Pinillos and Mallon are inclined towards an appeal to ambiguity. I cast some doubts on the coherence of a hybrid (...) theory and argue in favor of the ambiguity approach. But I also argue that the sort of ambiguitiy Nichols, Pinillos and Mallon postulate is easy to incorporate to non-descriptivist approaches. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In recent years, debates on same-sex marriage and the recognition of transwomen as women have been raging. These debates often seem to revolve around the meaning of, respectively, the word ‘marriage’ and ‘woman’. That such debates should take place might be puzzling. It seems that if debates on gay and transgender rights revolve around the meaning of these words, then those in favor of same-sex marriage and of the recognition of transwomen as women have no room left to maneuver. (...) However, prima facie, the pro – and anti-, in both cases, have genuine disagreements over the meaning of these words: though the analyses of revisionary theorists are revisionary, they are analyses. Sally Haslanger and other philosophers in her wake have appealed to an anti-descriptivist externalist view of meaning to provide the conceptual foundations of this practice of revisionary theorizing: revisionary analyses bring to light what, unbeknownst to us, these words mean. In this paper, I argue that a descriptivist externalist view should be preferred instead. My argument rests on the thesis that what is contested in these debates is the meaning of the words ‘marriage’ and ‘women’ as used in the law. (shrink)

In his article, “Wittgenstein and Basic Moral Certainty,” Nigel Pleasants argues that killing an innocent, non-threatening person is wrong. It is, he argues, “a basic moral certainty.” He believes our basic moral certainties play the “same kind of foundational role as [our] basic empirical certaint[ies] do.” I believe this is mistaken. There is not “simply one kind of foundational role” that certainty plays. While I think Pleasants is right to affiliate his proposition with a Wittgensteinian form of certainty, he exposes (...) himself to a tension that exists in On Certainty regarding how we acquire it: is certainty natural, is it social? In this paper, I present two ways in which we come to possess certainty: a bottom-up approach, where certainty is part of our instinctual predisposition, and a top-down approach, where certainty is acquired through positive reinforcement by family and culture. (shrink)

English summary: Is universal truth fully necessary? Are all necessary truths universal? From Kant to Tarski, the philosophical tradition as a whole has accepted the existence of a correlation between these two properties. The purpose of this book is to question this assumption and challenge the belief that universality and necessity are basic components of truth. French text. French description: Toute verite universelle est-elle necessaire? Toute verite necessaire est-elle universelle? De Kant a Tarski, la tradition philosophique a dans son ensemble (...) admis, sans la discuter, l'existence d'une correlation entre ces deux proprietes. L'objet de ce livre est de remettre en question ce presuppose et de contester que l'universalite et la necessite soient des proprietes equivalentes de verites, et meme qu'elles soient des proprietes de verites. Correles, l'universel et le necessaire renvoient chacun a une totalite de possibles dont l'origine est nexpliquee. Penses separement, ils peuvent au contraire etre compris dans leur genese. L'universel s'eclaire a la lumiere de l'idee de genericite, qui prevaut sur celle de totalite; le necessaire se definit, non plus par le fait d'etre vrai dans tous les cas possibles, mais en reference a un possible qui apparait n'etre ni totalisable, ni reductible a un seul et meme plan. (shrink)

While typically ignored by the cognitive sciences, Wittgenstein’s later work provides those defending embodied cognition (EC) with essential philosophical tools that serve to strengthen the argument against cognitivism. Cognition, as Wittgenstein’s work demonstrates, is not simply a matter of disembodied intellect, but is actional, time-pressured, body-based, and dependent on the larger environment.

One of the more recent pedagogical debates confronting university instructors is whether liberal education should be replaced with multiculturalism. John Searle has labeled these positions as “traditionalists” and “challengers,” respectively. While not finding “much that is objectionable in the [traditionalists’] assumptions,” Searle argues that the challengers’ assumptions are “weak” and “fallacious.” This negative outcome for the challengers however, is due in large part to Searle’s misrepresentation of their position. Searle presents a flawed, straw-man argument; he unfairly and inaccurately presents the (...) challengers’ assumptions as inadequate. In this paper I shall address some of the assumptions Searle raises on the challengers’ side and offer further elucidation of their position where he fails to do so. (shrink)

In the penultimate chapter of his book, Art as Language, G. L. Hagberg presents an argument against Arthur Danto, George Dickie, and other advocates of the Institutional Theory (IT), arguing that a tension exists within the theory. Through conferral, a spokesperson declares what artifacts are accepted into the artworld. Hagberg finds this problematic because, while the criterion one uses is something that the later Wittgenstein would endorse, it points back to an essentialism that he clearly rejected. But Hagberg believes he (...) can avoid this problem by applying Wittgenstein’s notion of certainty to specific artifacts in aesthetics. By relying on Wittgenstein’s notion of certitude, however, he exposes himself to a tension that exists in On Certainty: is certainty natural, or is it social? Although the propositions Hagberg uses have the potential to become certain, he treats them as if they begin that way. In this paper I present two ways in which Wittgenstein classifies or understands certainty: a bottom-up approach, where certainty is part of our natural and instinctual predisposition, and a top-down approach, where certainty is acquired through positive reinforcement. I believe Hagberg fails to appreciate this distinction as well as the consequences for his claim. (shrink)

The author criticises chapter 5 of r m hare's "the language of morals" in which hare tries to show why naturalism is "untenable." the author concludes that hare's analysis as well as the naturalists' "keep us from saying what we do say and want to say." (staff).

This article traces a path through Bruno Latour’s reflections on politics to propose a constitutional reading, which makes ontological and normative lines of investigation intersect. It starts with a discussion of a central theme in Latour’s work, that of war and, more generally, opposition and conflicts, and connects it with questions of representation, delegation and decision-making. The preoccupation with land and territories found in Latour’s latest work is an invitation to extend his notion of constitution and turn it into a (...) situated matter of critical inquiry. The paper builds on debates and controversies surrounding mineral resources to show the analytical and critical value of constitutional analysis, and the way it can illuminate the ontological and normative issues associated with contemporary problematizations of land and territories. (shrink)