Proust prend donc le chemin de l’«esprit représentation». À la suite de la discussion du débat entre Montaigne et Descartes au sujet de la pensée chez les animaux, elle met au jour deux dimensions de ce que l’on appelle traditionnellement la «pensée», soit la capacité complexe à gérer des informations et la capacité à former des représentations internes. Comme l’a montré Searle dans le célèbre exemple de la chambre chinoise, la manipulation de représentations n’est pas une condition suffisante pour la (...) pensée. C’est plutôt la capacité de former des représentations possédant une intentionnalité intrinsèque sur laquelle il faudra se pencher si on veut trouver la marque minimale du mental. Après avoir critiqué les positions respectives de Searle, qui maintient que la conscience sous la forme de l’aspectualité est nécessaire au caractère intrinsèque des représentations, et de Dennett, pour qui il n’y a d’intentionnalité que dérivée, Proust considère les arguments de ceux qui croient que l’intentionnalité ne constitue pas un objet d’étude de bon aloi. Elle s’intéresse principalement à la position de Davidson pour qui la normativité inhérente à l’attribution d’attitudes propositionnelles pose un frein à la tentative de naturalisation de l’intentionnalité. Mais, selon elle, la conception de Davidson de la rationalité à l’œuvre dans l’attribution est trop forte: une conception qui ne poserait que l’existence de liens nomiques entre les représentations et la réalité est suffisante à l’interprétation. D’autre part, la théorie davidsonnienne pose que le mental est co-extensif à l’ensemble des attitudes propositionnelles. Cette hypothèse empêche, toujours selon Proust, de comprendre les conditions plus générales de la représentation dont le langage n’est qu’un cas. Elle est donc amenée à critiquer cette idée en montrant que le passage des contraintes portant sur la théorie de l’interprétation à l’ontologie des états mentaux n’est pas justifié. Ces deux critiques appellent le dépassement des pratiques interprétatives fondées sur la psychologie ordinaire et l’établissement d’une méthode d’interprétation scientifique des états mentaux. (shrink)

Textbooks Ta‘lîm al-muta‘allim can be an alternative solution to the problems of character education in Indonesia. Inside the book there are methods that specifically leads to holistic learning code like the concept of learning objectives, choose a teacher or school, choosing friends, even mastered a learning method such as learning itself, deliberation, mutharahah, and mudzakarah. This study aimed to analyze the text book Ta‘lîm al-muta‘allim works of Sheikh Az-Zarnuji then compare it with several books of Plato’s philosophy idealism. The method (...) used is the analysis of documents by grouping clauses-clauses in the textbook Ta‘lîm al-muta‘allim in category: metaphysics, epistemology, axiology, the purpose of education, curriculum, method, the position of the students and teachers. Then compare it with documents from various sources about the Platoidealism. The study shows that there are some similarities between SheikhAz-Zarnuji thought with Plato. For example, the similarity between the two is the concept of metaphysics in Ta‘lîm al-muta‘allim called ma’rifatullah, while the concepts included in the Plato called the idealistic concept of macrocosm and microcosm. The similarity was impacted on shared educational goals from SheikhAz-Zarnuji, students and revitalize direction, into individual for himself, to achieve goodness and union with God. The difference mainly stated in the concept of metaphysics specific aspects in their respective reviews. For example, Sheikh Az-Zarnuji said that reality comes from God, while idealism states that the reality can be dug in God through contemplation or idea or reason. (shrink)

Linda Zagzebski’s book on epistemic authority is an impressive and stimulating treatment of an important topic. 1 I admire the way she manages to combine imagination, originality and argumentative control. Her work has the further considerable merit of bringing analytic thinking and abstract theory to bear upon areas of concrete human concern, such as the attitudes one should have towards moral and religious authority. The book is stimulating in a way good philosophy should be -- provoking both disagreement and emulation. (...) I agree with much of what she says, and have been instructed by it, but it will be of more interest and relevance here if I concentrate upon areas of disagreement. Perhaps they are better seen as areas, at least some of them, where her emphases suggest a position that seems to me untenable, but that she may not really intend. In that event, I will be happy to have provoked a clarification or the dispelling of my misunderstanding. My focus will be upon problems in her account of communal authority and autonomy, especially with respect to religious and political authority. Here my worry is that she places too much trust in trust and not enough in what I call selective mistrust. (shrink)

We first state a few previously obtained results that lead to general undecidability and incompleteness theorems in axiomatized theories that range from the theory of finite sets to classical elementary analysis. Out of those results we prove several incompleteness theorems for axiomatic versions of the theory of noncooperative games with Nash equilibria; in particular, we show the existence of finite games whose equilibria cannot be proven to be computable.

This book is based on the Stewart Lectures given at Princeton in 1971. It argues the importance and the legitimacy of a scientific study of religion, and proposes Smart’s strategy for conducting such an enterprise. In brief, Smart wishes to look at religion as an aspect of human existence, to emphasize its intertraditional pluralism and intra-traditional complexity, to admit its lack of clear boundaries vis-à-vis other phenomena, and to draw on a variety of methods both to describe and to explain (...) it. This approach is scientific and broadly phenomenological, but in a way which is appropriate to the subject and which does not seek to reduce it to something else. Hence, Smart seeks to avoid both a theological commitment to the actuality of the object of belief, and the methodological atheism and projectionism of a Peter Berger. Against the former, which also typifies the apologetic preoccupation of much philosophy of religion, Smart proposes to bracket the existence of the object, while respecting the reality it manifests in the life of religious people. Against the latter, Smart prefers a stance of methodological neutralism or agnosticism. Thus, he criticizes Berger’s implicit theory of independent access to the "true" universe, and commends a context-dependent theory of rationality in religion. (shrink)

Many philosophers have appealed to the PSR in arguments for a being that exists a se, a being whose explanation is in itself. But what does it mean, exactly, for something to have its explanation ‘in itself’? Contemporary philosophers have said next to nothing about this, relying instead on phrases plucked from the accounts of various historical figures. In this article, I analyse five such accounts – those of Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz – and argue that none are (...) satisfactory. Should we abandon or restrict the PSR, then? I think that would be hasty, for many reasons. I therefore consider the prospects of explaining everything, including God, given the constraints of certain features of good explanations, and conclude with several observations about future approaches. (shrink)

The Three Papers comprising this series, together with my earlier [34] also published in this journal, constitute an attempt to set out the major issues in the theoretical domain of reduction and to develop a general theory of theory reduction. The fourth paper, [34], though published separately from this trio, is integral to the presentation and should be read in conjunction with these papers. Even so, the presentation is limited in scope – roughly, to intertheoretic reduction among empirical theories – (...) and informal in presentation – not least because a satisfying formal account of theories has yet to be offered. And despite the length, the treatment is still condensed; often corroborating and/or intuitively helpful detail has had to be consigned to footnotes or omitted. I approach the problem from within my own naturalistic realist philosophy of science and formal analysis of abstract hierarchy in theory. The sources for the former are [25], [29], [31], and [32] and those for the latter essentially [27] and [30]. Hierarchical notions played a significant role in the already published [34]. (shrink)

In this volume C.A. (Chet) Bowers, whose pioneering work on education and environmental and sustainability issues is widely recognized and respected around the world, brings together a carefully curated selection of his seminal work on the ideological, cultural, and linguistic roots of the ecological crisis; misconceptions underlying modern consciousness; the cultural commons; a critique of technology; and educational reforms to address these pressing concerns. In the World Library of Educationalists, international scholars themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to (...) be their finest pieces - extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and/practical contributions - so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands of their work and see their contribution to the development of a field, as well as the development of the field itself. Contributors to the series include : Michael Apple, James A. Banks, Joel Spring, William F. Pinar, Stephen J. Ball, Elliot Eisner, Howard Gardner, John Gilbert, Ivor F. Goodson, Peter Jarvis. (shrink)

Any theory of reduction that goes only so far as carried in Parts I and II does only half the job. Prima facie at least, there are cases of would-be reduction which seem torn between two conflicting intuitions. On the one side there is a strong intuition that reduction is involved, and a strongly retentive reduction at that. On the other side it seems that the concepts at one level cross-classify those at the other level, so that there is no (...) way to identify properties at one level with those at the other. There is evidence to suggest that there will be no unique mental state/neural state association that can be set up, because, e.g., many different parts of the nervous system are all capable of taking over ‘control’ of the one mental function. And it is alleged that infinitely many, worse: indefinitely many, different bio-chemo-physical states could correspond to the economic property ‘has a monetary system of economic exchange’; and similarly for the property ‘has just won a game of tennis’. Yet one doesn't want an economic system or a game of tennis to be some ghostly addition to the actual bio-chemo-physical processes and events involved. Similarly one hopes that neurophysiology allied with the rest of natural science will render human experience and behaviour explicable. (shrink)