Naive mereology studies ordinary, common-sense beliefs about part and whole. Some of the speculations in this article on naive mereology do not bear directly on Peter van Inwagen's "Material Beings". The other topics, (1) and (2), both do. (1) Here is an example of Peter Unger's "Problem of the Many". How can a table be a collection of atoms when many collections of atoms have equally strong claims to be that table? Van Inwagen invokes fuzzy sets to solve this problem. (...) I claim that an alternative treatment of vagueness, supervaluations over many-value valuations, provides a better solution. (2) The Special Composition Question asks how parts compose a whole. One who rejects van Inwagen's answer in terms of constituting a life need not provide some alternative answer. Even if all answers to the Special Question fail, there are a multitude of less general composition questions that are not so difficult. (shrink)

Scholars and practitioners alike indicate a movement in corporate philanthropy toward “strategic” giving, for example, giving that improves the firm's strategic position (ultimately the “bottom line”) while it benefits the recipient of the philanthropic act. Although the existence of this trend is widely accepted, it is represented in the literature most often by anecdotal evidence. This article presents the findings of a survey of corporate giving managers of U.S. firms that have had an established giving program of at least 5 (...) years, with annual giving totaling at least $200,000 each year. The data show that corporate giving managers believe their firms are becoming increasingly strategic in their philanthropic activities. The findings also indicate that institutional-, firm-, and individual-level influences combine to precipitate strategic philanthropy. These findings lend support to the belief that the nature of corporate philanthropy is evolving to fit a more competitive marketplace. (shrink)

In this collection of provocative essays, historians and literary theorists assess the influence of Michel Foucault, particularly his History of Sexuality, on the study of classics. Foucault's famous work presents a bold theory of sexuality for both ancient and modern times, and yet until now it has remained under-explored and insufficiently analyzed. By bringing together the historical knowledge, philological skills, and theoretical perspectives of a wide range of scholars, this collection enables the reader to explore Foucault's model of Greek culture (...) and see how well his interpretation accounts for the full range of evidence from Greece and Rome. Not only do the essays bring to light the assumptions, ideas, and practices that constituted the intimate lives of men and women in the ancient Mediterranean world, but they also demonstrate the importance of the History of Sexuality for fields as diverse as Greco-Roman antiquity, women's history, cultural studies, philosophy, and modern sexuality. The essays include "Situating The History of Sexuality" (the editors), "Taking the Sex Out of Sexuality: Foucault's Failed History" (Joel Black), "Incipit Philosophia" (Alain Vizier), "The Subject in Antiquity after Foucault" (Page duBois), "This Myth Which Is Not One: Construction of Discourse in Plato's Symposium" (Jeffrey S. Carnes), "Foucault's History of Sexuality: A Useful Theory for Women?" (Amy Richlin), "Catullan Consciousness, the 'Care of the Self,' and the Force of the Negative in History" (Paul Allen Miller), "Reversals of Platonic Love in Petronius' Satyricon" (Daniel B. McGlathery), and an essay from Dislocating Masculinity (Lin Foxhall). (shrink)

We propose a theory that relates perceived evidence to numerical probability judgment. The most successful prior account of this relation is Support Theory, advanced in Tversky and Koehler. Support Theory, however, implies additive probability estimates for binary partitions. In contrast, superadditivity has been documented in Macchi, Osherson, and Krantz, and both sub- and superadditivity appear in the experiments reported here. Nonadditivity suggests asymmetry in the processing of focal and nonfocal hypotheses, even within binary partitions. We extend Support Theory by revising (...) its basic equation to allow such asymmetry, and compare the two equations’ ability to predict numerical assessments of probability from scaled estimates of evidence for and against a given proposition. Both between- and within-subject experimental designs are employed for this purpose. We find that the revised equation is more accurate than the original Support Theory equation. The implications of asymmetric processing on qualitative assessments of chance are also briefly discussed. (shrink)

In this paper we explore challenges facing leadership in a culture of “all consuming images” from a perspective which claims that images have a moral or normative dimension. The cumulative effect of contemporary image saturation is increased resistance to the normative power of an image. We also suggest that in a culturally diverse global economy, it is necessary to expand the moral aspects of good business leadership beyond providing a basis for productive, coherent group identity within a firm at the (...) expense of seeing outsiders as “others.” We also explore what imagining leadership in business might be like in a world in which visual images shape our understandings of individual and group identity. While our focus is on leadership in business, we also use examples from the political arena. We also suggest that imagining business leadership in the ways we propose may be helpful to women, providing them with an image of business leadership more closely reflective of their experience of corporate culture, its limits, and possibilities. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship between the principle of double effect and justification for separation surgeries for conjoined twins. First, the principle of double effect is examined in light of its historical context. It is argued that it can only operate under an absolutist view of good and evil that is compatible with the Bible. Given this foundation for application, scenarios for separating conjoined twins are considered against the criteria for the principle of double effect. It is concluded that the (...) principle of double effect cannot be applied to cases wherein one of the twins must be killed. However, it is noted that this does not leave decision makers without options. (shrink)

This is the first of two papers that use off-training set (OTS) error to investigate the assumption-free relationship between learning algorithms. This first paper discusses the senses in which there are no a priori distinctions between learning algorithms. (The second paper discusses the senses in which there are such distinctions.) In this first paper it is shown, loosely speaking, that for any two algorithms A and B, there are “as many” targets (or priors over targets) for which A has lower (...) expected OTS error than B as vice versa, for loss functions like zero-one loss. In particular, this is true if A is cross-validation and B is “anti-cross-validation” (choose the learning algorithm with largest cross-validation error). This paper ends with a discussion of the implications of these results for computational learning theory. It is shown that one cannot say: if empirical misclassification rate is low, the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension of your generalizer is small, and the training set is large, then with high probability your OTS error is small. Other implications for “membership queries” algorithms and “punting” algorithms are also discussed. (shrink)

Midrash Genesis Rabbah takes aim at a variety of ideological adversaries, but the most subtle polemic is directed at sages who went beyond standard hermeneutical practices to embrace mystical approaches to Torah learning. This essay seeks to expose the use of satire and other literary forms of critique among passages treating cosmology and Torah study. Analytic tools developed by Pierre Bourdieu, especially as they pertain to exposing the use of the symbolic language intrinsic to the establishment of systems of social (...) authority, will be employed to delineate the ideological conflict among sages developing diverse approaches to ascending the religious hierarchy within early rabbinism. (shrink)

Science fiction is often held up as a particularly philosophical genre. For, beyond actualising mind-experiment-like fantasies, science fiction films also commonly toy with speculative ideas, or else engineer encounters with the strange and unknown. Denis Villeneuve's Arrival is a contemporary science fiction film that does exactly this, by introducing Lovecraft-esque tentacular aliens whose arrival on Earth heralds in a novel, but ultimately paralysing, inhuman perspective on the nature of time and reality. This article shows how this cerebral film invites viewers (...) to confront a counterintuitive model of time that at once recalls and reposes what Gilles Deleuze called a “third synthesis” of time, and that which J. M. E. McTaggart named the a-temporal “C series” of “unreal” time. We finally suggest that Arrival's a-temporal conception of the future as having already happened can function as a key to understanding the fate of humanity as a whole as we pass from the anthropocene, in which humans have... (shrink)

The first important reaction in favor of generic criticism here was that of the Chicago neo-Aristotelians, whose feisty polemics against the "New" critics must have seemed, in the 1940s and 1950s, like voices crying in the wilderness. The popularity of Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism—also ostensibly based upon Aristotle's example—won the concept of genre broader support. And today, if the books covering my desk are anything to go by, genre criticism has emerged in force. The flood has brought forth historical (...) studies of Renaissance genres, analyses of traditional genres like the picaresque or of new ones like "the fantastic," ambivalently generic essays in "thematics," efforts to systemize the genres of narrative fiction, and even attempt, through the philosophic analysis of dozens of generic systems, to go "beyond genre." Indeed, the late sixties spawned a journal entitled Genre entirely devoted to theoretical and practical criticism employing the concept. David H. Richter is the author of a forthcoming book: Fable's End: Completeness and Closure in Rhetorical Fiction, and an article on Jerzy Kosinski. He is assistant professor of English at Queens College of the City University of New York. (shrink)

Explanatory models in psychiatry reflect what clinicians deem valuable in rendering people's behavior intelligible and thus help guide treatment choices for mental illnesses. This article outlines some key scientific and ethical principles of clinical explanation in twenty-first century psychiatry. Recent work in philosophy of science, clinical psychiatry, and psychiatric ethics are critically reviewed in order to elucidate conceptual underpinnings of contemporary explanatory models. Many explanatory models in psychiatry are reductionistic or eclectic. The former restrict options for diagnostic and therapeutic paradigm (...) choice, while the latter lack a well-defined theoretical basis. These two methodological approaches stand in a dialectical relation to one another insofar as clinicians often move from one approach to its antithesis, ultimately seeking a synthesis of the two approaches that satisfies clinical needs. Pragmatic considerations can help to transcend the reductionism/eclecticism dialectic. In the absence of a completed science of mental disorders, psychiatrists must tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty as they strive to integrate diverse explanatory concepts in a rigorous and evidence-based fashion. A pragmatic explanatory model in clinical psychiatry must focus on favorable treatment outcomes for patients by respecting the pluralistic, participatory, and provisional nature of psychiatric explanation. (shrink)

McTaggart argues that the A series, which orders events with reference to past, present, and future, involves an inescapable contradiction. The significant difference between the earlier version of his argument (Mind, 1908) and the version in The Nature of Existence, Volume II, Chapter 33 (1927), has often gone unnoticed. His arguments are all invalid; the conclusion can be rejected without rejecting any premiss. It is therefore unnecessary to adopt any philosophical thesis about time (e.g., that some token-reflexive analysis of tensed (...) statements is adequate) to avoid McTaggart's final conclusion that time is unreal. (shrink)

This paper provides a new approach to inference to the best explanation based on a new coherence measure for comparing how well hypotheses explain the evidence. It addresses a number of criticisms of the use of probabilistic measures in this context by Clark Glymour, including limitations of earlier work on IBE. Computer experiments are used to show that the new approach finds the truth with a high degree of accuracy in hypothesis selection tasks and that in some cases its accuracy (...) is greater than hypothesis selection based on maximizing posterior probability. Hence, by overcoming some of the problems with the previous approach, this work provides a more adequate defence of IBE and suggests that IBE not only tracks truth but also has practical advantages over the previous approach. Applications of the new approach to parameter estimation and model selection are also explored. (shrink)

According to John A Barker, whether an argument begs the question is purely a matter of logical form. According to me, it is also a matter of epistemic conditions; some arguments which beg the question in some contexts need not beg the question in every context. I point out difficulties in Barker's treatment and defend my own views against some of his criticisms. In the concluding section, "Alleged difficulties with disjunctive syllogism," I defend the validity of disjunctive syllogism against the (...) views of Alan Ross Anderson and Nuel D Belnap, Jr., ask pointed questions about the notion of intensional disjunction, and suggest how my treatment of begging the question can be extended to deal with the so-called paradoxes of strict implication. (shrink)

This article answers John Biro's "Knowability, Believability, and Begging the Question: a Reply to Sanford" in "Metaphilosophy" 15 (1984). Biro and I agree that of two argument instances with the same form and content, one but not the other can beg the question, depending on other factors. These factors include actual beliefs, or so I maintain (against Biro) with the help of some analysed examples. Brief selections from Archbishop Whatley and J S Mill suggest that they also regard reference to (...) actual beliefs as essential to explaining begging the question. (shrink)

Two fusions can be in the same place at the same time. So long as a house made of Tinkertoys is intact, the fusion of all its Tinkertoys parts coincides with the fusion of it walls and its roof. If none of the Tinkertoys is destroyed, their fusion persists through the complete disassembly of the house. (So the house is not a fusion of its Tinkertoy parts.) The fusion of the walls and roof does not persist through the complete disassembly (...) because the walls and the roof themselves do not persist. (So the walls and the roof are also not fusions of their Tinkertoy parts.). (shrink)

In "Causes and "If P, Even If X, still Q," Philosophy 57 (July 1982), Ted Honderich cites my "The Direction of Causation and the Direction of Conditionship," journal of Philosophy 73 (April 22, 1976) as an example of an account of causal priority that lacks the proper character. After emending Honderich's description of the proper character, I argue that my attempt to account for one-way causation in terms of one-way causal conditionship does not totally lack it. Rather than emphasize the (...) singularity of an effect, as Honderich does, I emphasize the multiplicity of independent factors in a causal circumstance. (shrink)

This paper discusses the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox from a new point of view. In section II, the arguments by which Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen reach their paradoxical conclusions are presented. They are found to rest on two critical assumptions: (a) that before a measurement is made on a system consisting of two non-interacting but correlated sub-systems, the state of the entire system is exactly represented by: ψ a (r̄ 1 ,r̄ 2 )=∑ η a η τ η (r̄ 1 ,r̄ 2 (...) )=∑ i,k α ik ψ i (r̄ 1 )σ k (r̄ 2 ) (b) that the exact measurement of an observable A in one of the sub-systems is possible. In section III it is shown that assumption (b) is incorrect. Thus we conclude, as did Bohr, that the results of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen are not valid. The arguments of section III are quite distinct from Bohr's, and therefore in Section IV this work is related to that of Bohr. (shrink)

The central text of this article is Thomas Reid’s response to Berkeley’s argument for distinguishing tangible from visual shape. Reid is right to hold that shape words do not have different visual and tangible meanings. We might also perceive shape, moreover, with senses other than touch and sight. As Reid also suggests, the visual perception of shape does not require perception of hue or brightness. Contrary to treatments of the Molyneux problem by H. P. Grice and Judith Jarvis Thomson, I (...) argue that breakdowns of a certain kind between tangible and visible shape are conceivable. (shrink)

In the form of inference known as inference to the best explanation there are various ways to characterise what is meant by the best explanation. This paper considers a number of such characterisations including several based on confirmation measures and several based on coherence measures. The goal is to find a measure which adequately captures what is meant by 'best' and which also yields the truth with a high degree of probability. Computer simulations are used to show that the overlap (...) coherence measure achieves this goal, enabling the true explanation to be identified almost as often as an approach which simply selects the most probable explanation. Further advantages to this approach are also considered in the case where there is uncertainty in the prior probability distribution. (shrink)

Many philosophic arguments concerned with infinite series depend on the mutual inconsistency of statements of the following five forms: (1) something exists which has R to something; (2) R is asymmetric; (3) R is transitive; (4) for any x which has R to something, there is something which has R to x; (5) only finitely many things are related by R. Such arguments are suspect if the two-place relation R in question involves any conceptual vagueness or inexactness. Traditional sorites arguments (...) show that a statement of form (4) can fail to be true even though it has no clear counter-example. Conceptual vagueness allows a finite series not to have any definite first member. I consider the speculative possibilities that there have been only finitely many non-overlapping hours although there has been no first hour and that space and time are only finitely divisible even though there are no smallest spatial or temporal intervals. (shrink)

In Newcomb’s paradox you can choose to receive either the contents of a particular closed box, or the contents of both that closed box and another one. Before you choose though, an antagonist uses a prediction algorithm to accurately deduce your choice, and uses that deduction to fill the two boxes. The way they do this guarantees that you made the wrong choice. Newcomb’s paradox is that game theory’s expected utility and dominance principles appear to provide conflicting recommendations for what (...) you should choose. Here we show that the conflicting recommendations assume different probabilistic structures relating your choice and the algorithm’s prediction. This resolves the paradox: the reason there appears to be two conflicting recommendations is that the probabilistic structure relating the problem’s random variables is open to two, conflicting interpretations. We then show that the accuracy of the prediction algorithm in Newcomb’s paradox, the focus of much previous work, is irrelevant. We end by showing that Newcomb’s paradox is time-reversal invariant; both the paradox and its resolution are unchanged if the algorithm makes its ‘prediction’ after you make your choice rather than before. (shrink)

Everything red is colored, and all squares are polygons. A square is distinguished from other polygons by being four-sided, equilateral, and equiangular. What distinguishes red things from other colored things? This has been understood as a conceptual rather than scientific question. Theories of wavelengths and reflectance and sensory processing are not considered. Given just our ordinary understanding of color, it seems that what differentiates red from other colors is only redness itself. The Cambridge logician W. E. Johnson introduced the terms (...) determinate and determinable to apply to examples such as red and colored. Chapter XI, of Johnson's Logic, Part I (1921), “The Determinate and the Determinable,” is the main text for discussion of this distinction. (shrink)

The poetic art of Edwin Arlington Robinson mirrored remarkably the sources of the American mind of his generation and the growth nurtured by these sources.

This book is about logic and evidence and its antithesis, fallacies, and powerful rhetoric. This book provides a tool box of knowledge about decision-making and evaluating public policy that citizens need to know in order to make informed decisions about policy proposals.

The epistemic arrow of time is the fact that our knowledge of the past seems to be both of a different kind and more detailed than our knowledge of the future. Just like with the other arrows of time, it has often been speculated that the epistemic arrow arises due to the second law of thermodynamics. In this paper, we investigate the epistemic arrow of time using a fully formal framework. We begin by defining a memory system as any physical (...) system whose present state can provide information about the state of the external world at some time other than the present. We then identify two types of memory systems in our universe, along with an important special case of the first type, which we distinguish as a third type of memory system. We show that two of these types of memory systems are time-symmetric, able to provide knowledge about both the past and the future. However, the third type of memory systems exploits the second law of thermodynamics, at least in all of its instances in our universe that we are aware of. The result is that in our universe, this type of memory system only ever provides information about the past. We also argue that human memory is of this third type, completing the argument. We end by scrutinizing the basis of the second law itself. This uncovers a previously unappreciated formal problem for common arguments that try to derive the second law from the “Past Hypothesis”, i.e., from the claim that the very early universe was in a state of extremely low entropy. Our analysis is indebted to prior work by one of us but expands and improves upon this work in several respects. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss what triage is and how it might be applied to the preservation of endangered species. I compare the suggested application oftriage to endangered species with its application to wartime military practice, distribution of food aid, and human population control to show that the situation of endangered species is not analogous to these other suggested uses. I argue that, as far as species preservation is concemed, triage starts with the wrong norms and values: it is “human (...) chauvinistic,” giving primacy to economic, political, and sociocultural aspects that emphasize human interests without recognizing the connection between the survival of other species and the survival of humans. (shrink)

In an anthology on panentheism, Keith Ward assesses the appropriateness of the metaphor of embodiment for God, as well as the viability of the concept of panentheism itself, as he considers the theologies of Ramanuja, Hegel, and process thought. Ward frames polar problems with respect to the analogy of self-body/God-world and to the concept of panentheism. Ramanuja and Hegel’s theologies ultimately deny the freedom and compromise the independence and otherness of the creatures. Process theology compromises divine sovereignty and perfection, making (...) God too passible to the world’s evils. This article attempts to transcend such one-sided approaches as it develops a balanced concept of panentheism and a metaphor of divine embodiment that provide for mutual influence between God and the world, wherein both the suffering and happiness of the world affect God, while maintaining sole divine causal ultimacy with respect to the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 350-353 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing, The Ways of Naysaying: No, Not, Nothing, and Nonbeing, by Eva T. H. Brann; xviii & 249 pp. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001, $35.00. This, the third of Eva Brann's trilogy on imagination, time, and naysaying respectively, is described by one of her colleagues as her (...) "cradle-to-grave book" (p. xvi). The word "naysaying" plays felicitously on the sound of the English word "nay" and the cognate Indo-European root "ne," which gives Brann a convenient starting-point for discerning what various forms of naysaying have in common. Note that this is saying rather than thinking, being, or doing, although the relations among these acts are a recurring concern in her discussion. Unlike some "postmoderns," Brann does not regard language as a self-contained arena with no reference outside of itself. Rather, for her, language is a convenient medium for thinking about what is extralinguistic, whether in the mind or elsewhere.Nor does she think that a word must necessarily have some underlying unity beneath its various meanings. In fact, heeding Wittgenstein's warning, she admits that "it is a pathologically bad craving to want a word to have one ultimate meaning, worse to look for one meaning over many words, and worst to assume that such a meaning may apply to a something beyond the realm of language." Nevertheless, she suggests, "this craving to look for one truth behind many appearances may be simply irradicable, being nothing less than the philosophical impulse" (p. xiv).Where does her "philosophical impulse" focus, on texts or on things? She explicitly tells us that texts are indispensable (at least for her) to get very far with the things themselves (p. 2). And so, in the course of her investigation, she attends to Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Bergson, Frege, Meinong, Russell, Whitehead, Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, among others. Nonetheless, she begins by noticing a sort of willful denial that is pre-linguistic and "speechless" (the contrariness of an infant), and she ends with the nothingness that is void of all language and everything else. These two topics, expressed by the words "No" (Chapter One) and "Nothing" (Chapter Six) respectively, "frame" her inquiry (p. 42). Along the way she always has an eye to what lies behind or beyond language, in the world or in the mind, with a chapter each for "Not," "Nonexistence," "Nonbeing," and "Negativity." She [End Page 350] says that Chapter Four, concerning "Nonbeing," is the center and philosophic focus of her study. Brann's chapters thus represent the six big divisions for organizing her observations. Indeed, for Brann, the plurality of naysayings "seems to fall naturally" into her sixfold division (p. xiv).Thoughtfully pondering this structure takes the reader a long way toward understanding the work (in both senses of "work": the thought itself and the text which records that thought). The chapter divisions progress from the willful, through the logical, the imaginative, the philosophic, and the dialectical, to end, as we noted, in the absolute Nothing, the "antagonist of Being." For instance, the distinction between the first two--the willful and the logical--is the distinction between the personal (denial) and the impersonal (negation). In considering willful denial, Brann understands the will to be a "willingness, inclination, readiness"--usually "determinate," "focused and active" (p. 7). Likewise, negation also has a personal origin: "Negation arises from the human desire and ability to make distinctions; it is (most likely) grounded in the opposition and polarities that belong to beings (of which the first... is surely that of thinking itself to its object, be it ideal or real)" (p. 29f.). Thus, although logical negation seems to originate in the personal subject there is something quite detachable and impersonal about logical formulations, so that Heraclitus "bids people hear his truth 'not listening to me but to the logos,' the cosmic collecting and distinguishing power" (p. 128). So the logos that begins for us as "reason manifested in... (shrink)

This is one of the most significant and serious treatments of the modern roots of the New Age in print.