This book presents an historical and conceptual reconstruction of the theories developed by Meinong and a group of philosophers and experimental psychologists in Graz at the turn of the 19th century. Adhering closely to original texts, the contributors explore Meinong's roots in the school of Brentano, complex theories such as the theory of intentional reference and direct reference, and ways of developing philosophy which are closely bound up with the sciences, particularly psychology. Providing a faithful reconstruction of both Meinong's contributions (...) to science and the school that arose from his thought, this book shows how the theories of the Graz school raise the possibility of engaging in the scientific metaphysics and ontology that for so long have been considered off limits. (shrink)

A feminist study of language and its rules argues that men have shaped it in order to instill their own prejudices and viewpoints on society, and shows how male-slanted language affects all women's lives.

This comprehensive, general introduction to Schelling's philosophy shows that it was Schelling who set the agenda for German idealism and defined the term of its characteristic problems.

Perfectionism, or the claim that human well-being consists in the development and exercise of one’s natural or essential capacities, is in growth mode. With its long and distinguished historical pedigree, perfectionism has emerged as a powerful antedote to what are perceived as significant problems in desiderative and hedonist accounts of well-being. However, perfectionism is one among many views that deny the influence of our desires, or that cut the link between well-being and a raw appeal to sensory pleasure. Other views (...) include, for instance, the “objective list” view,1 the so-called “restricted achievement” view,2 and various hybrid views that combine an appeal to desire or pleasure with an objective standard of evaluation of those desires or pleasures. (shrink)

University of Alberta Forthcoming in Utilias Consider Lives for Headaches: there is some number of headaches such that the relief of those headaches is sufficient to outweigh the good life of an innocent person. Lives for Headaches is unintuitive, but difficult to deny. The argument leading to Lives for Headaches is valid, and appears to be constructed out of firmly entrenched premises. In this paper, I advocate one way to reject Lives for Headaches; I defend a form of lexical superiority (...) between values. Based on an inquiry into the notion of human well-being, I argue that no amount of headaches is sufficient to outweigh the disvalue of the loss of a good life. Though this view has been thought subject to devastating objections, these objections are not dispositive against the form of value superiority I advance here. (shrink)

My question, which is central to the business of moral philosophy, is implicitly addressed by many philosophers, yet explicitly addressed by only a few. In this paper I address the question head-on, and propose a qualified affirmative answer.

My goal in this paper is to shed light on how moral progress actually occurs. I begin by restating a conception of moral progress that I set out in previous work, the “Naïve Conception,” and explain how it comports with various normative and metaethical views. I go on to develop an index of moral progress and show how judgments about moral progress can be made. I then discuss an example of moral progress from the past—the British abolition of the Atlantic (...) slave trade—with a view to what can be learned from this for a contemporary struggle for moral progress: the movement to decarbonize the global economy. I close with some thoughts about how moral progress actually occurs. (shrink)

This volume explores the central problems and exposes intriguing new directions in the philosophy of mathematics, making it an essential teaching resource, ...

Consequentialism is the family of theories that holds that acts are morally right, wrong, or indifferent in virtue of their consequences. Less formally and more intuitively, right acts are those that produce good consequences. A consequentialist theory includes at least the following three elements: an account of the properties or states in virtue of which consequences make actions right, wrong, or indifferent; a deontic principle which specifies how or to what extent the properties or states must obtain in order for (...) an action to be right, wrong, or indifferent; and finally, a specification of what is in the domain of the deontic principle. For example, mental state and desire theories provide different accounts of the first element; maximizing and satisficing are distinct deontic principles; and Act and Rule Consequentialism specify different domains over which a deontic principle ranges. A wide range of alternative theories can be generated by modifying these three elements. For example, Hedonistic Act Utilitarianism which requires that each act maximize pleasure, and Perfectionist Lifetime Minimalism which requires that each life satisfy some minimal standard of perfection are both varieties of Consequentialsm. The conceptual space Consequentialism describes is vast, versions of Consequentialism vary radically in their plausibility, and few objections count against all versions of Consequentialism. (shrink)

The consistent formalization of Meinong's object theory in recent mathematical logic requires either plural modes of predication, or distinct categories of nuclear or constitutive and extranuclear or nonconstitutive properties. The plural modes of predication approach is rejected because it is reducible to the nuclear extranuclear property distinction, but not conversely, and because the nuclear extranuclear property distinction offers a more satisfactory solution to object theory paradoxes.

Whatever the finer details, Francis Hutcheson is clearly some form of proto-, quasi-, pseudo-utilitarian. But for any utilitarian, the full picture of their moral theory will only emerge once we understand their theory of the good. What, according to said utilitarian, is the nature of happiness? How do we aggregate happiness across persons? In this paper, I discuss two important aspects of Hutcheson's utilitarian axiology each with their own puzzles of interpretation. The first involves Hutcheson's theory of happiness or the (...) ‘natural good’. Hutcheson appears to vacillate between a quantitative hedonism and a qualitative hedonism. The second concerns Hutcheson's aggregative axiology. Hutcheson appears to offer three inconsistent approaches to understanding the overall good. Bringing these puzzles to light, I think, brings forward a number of challenges in understanding the normative ethics of a key figure in the development of utilitarian moral thought. (shrink)

This essay proposes and defends a general thesis concerning the nature of fallacies of reasoning. These in distinctive ways are all said to be deductively invalid. More importantly, the most accurate, complete and charitable reconstructions of these species and specimens of the informal fallacies are instructive with respect to the individual character of each distinct informal fallacy. Reconstructions of the fallacies as deductive invalidities are possible in every case, if deductivism is true, which means that in every case they should (...) be formalizable in an expressively comprehensive formal symbolic deductive logic. The general thesis is illustrated by a detailed examination of Walter Burleigh's paradox in his c. 1323 work, De Puritate Artis Logicae Tractatus Longior (Longer Treatise on the Purity of Logic), as a challenge to the deductive validity of hypothetical syllogism. The paradox has the form, ‹If I call you a swine, then I call you an animal; if I call you an animal, then I speak truly; therefore, if I call you a swine, then I speak truly'. Several solutions to the problem are considered, and the inference is exposed as an instance of the common deductive fallacy of equivocation. (shrink)

An emerging perspective on human cognition and performance sees it as a kind of self-organizing phenomenon involving dynamic coordination across the body, brain and environment. Measuring this coordination faces a major challenge. Time series obtained from such cognitive, behavioral, and physiological coordination are often complicated in terms of non-stationarity and non-linearity, and in terms of continuous vs. categorical scales. Researchers have proposed several analytical tools and frameworks. One method designed to overcome these complexities is recurrence quantification analysis, developed in the (...) study of non-linear dynamics. It has been applied in various domains, including linguistic data or motion data. However, most previous studies have applied recurrence methods individually to categorical or continuous data. To understand how complex coordination works, an integration of these types of behavior is needed. We aimed to integrate these methods to investigate the relationship between language and motion directly. To do so, we added temporal information to categorical data, and applied joint recurrence analysis methods to visualize and quantify speech-motion coordination coupling during a rap performance. We illustrate how new dynamic methods may capture this coordination in a small case-study design on this expert rap performance. We describe a case study suggesting this kind of dynamic analysis holds promise, and end by discussing the theoretical implications of studying complex performances of this kind as a dynamic, coordinated phenomenon. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate David Hume’s theory of well-being or prudential value. That Hume was some sort of hedonist is typically taken for granted in discussions of his value theory, but I argue that Hume was a hedonist of pathbreaking sophistication. His hedonism intriguingly blends traditional hedonism with a form of perfectionism yielding a version of qualitative hedonism that not only solves puzzles surrounding Hume’s moral theory, but is interesting and important in its own right.

Drawing inspiration from Iris Murdoch, I develop a systematic account of love that countenances love beyond persons. I then show how this account applies to nature, and explain why loving nature matters.

The fundamental idea of a Neoaristotelian inherence ontology of mathematical entities parallels that of an Aristotelian approach to the ontology of universals. It is proposed that mathematical objects are nominalizations especially of dimensional and related structural properties that inhere as formal species and hence as secondary substances of Aristotelian primary substances in the actual world of existent physical spatiotemporal entities. The approach makes it straightforward to understand the distinction between pure and applied mathematics, and the otherwise enigmatic success of applied (...) mathematics in the natural sciences. It also raises an interesting set of challenges for conventional mathematics, and in particular for the ontic status of infinity, infinite sets and series, infinitesimals, and transfinite cardinalities. The final arbiter of all such questions on an Aristotelian inherentist account of the nature of mathematical entities are the requirements of practicing scientists for infinitary versus strictly finite mathematics in describing, explaining, predicting and retrodicting physical spatiotemporal phenomena. Following Quine, we classify all mathematics that falls outside of this sphere of applied scientific need as belonging to pure, and, with no prejudice or downplaying of its importance, ‘recreational’, mathematics. We consider a number of important problems in the philosophy of mathematics, and indicate how a Neoaristotelian inherence metaphysics of mathematical entities provides a plausible answer to Benacerraf’s metaphilosophical dilemma, pitting the semantics of mathematical truth conditions against the epistemic possibilities for justifying an abstract realist ontology of mathematical entities and truth conditions. (shrink)

The paradox of analysis is the problem of formulating analyses that avoid the metaphilosophical dilemma of uninformativeness where analysandum and analysans are identical in meaning, and incorrectness or unsoundness where analysandum and analysans are nonidentical in meaning. Frege's distinction between sense and reference supports an intentional solution to the paradox, incorporating Roderick M. Chisholm's concept of converse intentional properties. Formal definitions of unrestricted Leibnizian or conceptual identity and referential identity or codesignation are provided, under which analysanda and analysantia are referentially (...) identical, guaranteeing informativeness, of philosophically correct analyses. (shrink)

The concept of a dialogue is considered in general terms from the standpoint of its referential presuppositions. The semantics of dialogue implies that dialogue participants must generally have a collective intentionality of agreed-upon references that is minimally sufficient for them to be able to disagree about other things, and ideally for outstanding disagreements to become clearer at successive stages of the dialogue. These points are detailed and illustrated in a fictional dialogue, in which precisely these kinds of referential confusions impede (...) progress in shared understanding. It is only through a continuous exchange of question and answer in this dialogue case study that the meanings of key terms and anaphorical references are disambiguated, and a relevantly complete collective intentionality of shared meaning between dialogue participants is achieved. The importance of a minimally shared referential semantics for the terms entering into reasoning and argument in dialogue contexts broadly construed cannot be over-estimated. Where to draw the line between referential agreement and disagreement within any chosen dialogue, as participants work toward better mutual understanding in clearing up referential incongruities, is sometimes among the dialogue’s main points of dispute. (shrink)

It is shown in this article that many positions that are usually considered incompatible or antagonistic can be synthesized into a unified framework, creating a model of transpersonal development based around plurality and complexity. The model focuses on evolutionary developmental biology as well as around psychological theories. A large degree of variability in the nature of transpersonal experience in the life cycle is to be expected, due to differences in both the “timing of onset” of transpersonal characteristics and the “length (...) of developmental period.” Numerous developmental patterns are identified, using the work of some prominent transpersonal theorists. (shrink)

What is progressive education? -- Origins of progressive education -- Progressive education in action: what really happens -- Broken promises: why progressive education has failed to deliver -- Making progressive education work: perspectives, conclusions, and recommendations.

Drawing on rare sources, many of which have not previously been translated into English, the view of Piaget and his work that emerges in this book is very different from the atheistic view of Piaget that is commonly held in psychology and transpersonal psychology. In both his early and later career Piaget held to an evolutionary view of spirituality reminiscent of the work of Hegel and Bergson. The spiritual future could be precursed by the individual in this life through the (...) experience of "Immanence."Piaget underwent a spiritual emergency in adolescence, reported in early autobiographical writing, in which he encountered an array of experiences described in Eastern and Western mystical cannons. For reasons discussed in this book, Piaget attempted to conceal his spiritual inclinations while tacitly confirming them in informal exchanges. This book not only describes the spiritual aspects of Piaget's life and work, it also builds bridges to both the contemporary transpersonal project and to contemporary psychology, by extending Piaget's own ideas to shed new light on transpersonal psychology and transpersonal philosophy, and on the future orientation of general psychology. The book validates the transpersonal project by showing its concerns to be germane to psychology's most influential figure. The reader will learn as much about the history, present, and future of transpersonal thought as they do about Piaget. (shrink)

Walt Disney is largely responsible for popularizing the princess story in American culture. These stories are the centerpieces of the Disney collection and their flagship theme parks. Indeed, Cinderella's castle itself is at the heart of Disney's Magic Kingdom. The first of Disney's theme parks, the Magic Kingdom was intended to capture the magic and imagination of the Disney movies, and bring to life the settings of Disney stories. Epcot was the second of four parks built at the Walt Disney (...) World Resort location in Florida. While Liberty Square in the Magic Kingdom celebrates the independence of those who live in liberal democracies, the World Showcase at Epcot celebrates multiculturalism, and the possibility of appreciating and learning from a multitude of cultures. The chapter provides a better understanding of the philosophical tensions in Disney's theme park by taking a tour of the underlying political ideas lurking inside the Epcot and Magic Kingdom theme parks. (shrink)