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)

At least since Descartes, philosophers have been interested in the special knowledge or authority that we exhibit when we speak about our own thoughts, attitudes, and feelings. This book contends that even the best work in contemporary philosophy of mind fails to account for this sort of knowledge or authority because it does not pay the right sort of attention to the notion of expression. What's at stake is not only how to understand self-knowledge and first-person authority, but also what (...) it is that distinguishes conscious from unconscious psychological states, what the mental life of a nonlinguistic animal has in common with our sort of mental life, and how to think about Wittgenstein's legacy to the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This new edition includes three new chapters, updating the book to take into account developments in the field over the past fifteen years.

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)

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)

From an ethical point of view, shared decision-making is preferable to either physician paternalism or patient sovereignty. The traditional model of doctor-patient communication is too directive and too unconcerned with the patient's values to support truly shared decision-making. The traditional distinction between rhetoric and sophistic can provide the basis for a new model of mutual persuasion that does not limit communication to information, and that avoids the spectre of manipulation.

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)

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)

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)

To accommodate vague statements and predicates, I propose an infinite-valued, non-truth-functional interpretation of logic on which the tautologies are exactly the tautologies of classical two-valued logic. iI introduce a determinacy operator, analogous to the necessity operator in alethic modal logic, to allow the definition of first-order and higher-order borderline cases. On the interpretation proposed for determinacy, every statement corresponding to a theorem of modal system T is a logical truth, and I conjecture that every logical truth on the interpretation corresponds (...) to a theorem of T. the interpretation is extended to predicate logic. A borderline case of a predicate 'F’ is neither determinately F nor determinately not-F. Traditional sorites arguments are seen to fall apart early in their gradual stepwise passage from truth to falsity. (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.

It is a central claim of the New Atheists that evolutionary theory disproves theism and demonstrates the truth of metaphysical naturalism. This book examines this claim and explores the implications of evolutionary theory for metaphysics.

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 several works on modality, G. H. von Wright presents tree structures to explain possible worlds. Worlds that might have developed from an earlier world are possible relative to it. Actually possible worlds are possible relative to the world as it actually was at some point. Many logically consistent worlds are not actually possible. Transitions from node to node in a tree structure are probabilistic. Probabilities are often more useful than similarities between worlds in treating counterfactual conditionals.

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 the first sustained, whole-Bible treatment on the theme of meeting God face to face. Starting with Genesis and ending with Revelation, the author systematically covers the major events in salvation history, all of which reveal the beauty of encountering God's grace in abundance.

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)

Relationships between patients and psychiatrists are shaped by a complex array of factors. The clinical experience centers on diagnostic and treatment decisions occurring in the context of a structured relationship that is regulated by principles of professional ethics and personal boundaries. At the same, however, patients and psychiatrists are unique and autonomous agents with emotional responses to one another that may evoke a wish for a personal friendship or other sorts of personal relationships that are outside the bounds of the (...) usual professionally defined structures. Negotiating the tension between the need for professional regulation and the desire for developing a friendship with certain patients can present clinical and ethical challenges in psychiatric practice. Pragmatist reasoning can help the psychiatrist and patient to successfully negotiate the dilemma that may arise when either or both of them wishes to develop a personal friendship but still adhere to the ethical tenets of the patient/psychiatrist professional dyad. (shrink)

This study takes a Christian perspective on the entire Bible, rather than simply the New Testament. David Wenkel asks: Why did Jesus have to be beaten before his death on the cross? Christian theology has largely focused on Jesus' death but has given relatively little attention to his sufferings. Wenkel's answer contextualizes Jesus' crucifixion sufferings as informed by the language of Proverbs. He explains that Jesus' sufferings demonstrate the wisdom of God's plan to provide a substitute for foolish sinners. (...) Jesus was beaten as a fool - even though he was no fool, in order to fulfill God's loving plan of salvation. This analysis is then placed within the larger storyline of the whole bible - from the Garden of Eden to the story of Israel and beyond. (shrink)

Ex nihilo nihil fit: PHILOSOPHY'S "STARTING POINT" Periodically, philosophers have had the feeling that somehow the entire weight of the traditional ...

In his temporal philosophy based on the writing of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze describes duration ( durée ) as a becoming that endures in time. Reifications of this complex philosophical concept become artistically expressed, I argue, in the form and content of South African artist William Kentridge's series of 'charcoal drawings for projection.' These exhibited art works provide intriguing and illuminating 'philosophical' examples of animated audio-visual media, which expressively plicate distinct images of movement and time. The composition of Kentridge's films (...) at once illuminate a regime of animated 'movement-images' that can trace their aetiological roots to classical forms of film and animation, whilst concurrently folding in complex philosophical expressions of time as duration which invoke the crystalline 'time-image' concepts of philosophers such as Bergson and Deleuze, as well as literary authors like Marcel Proust. Over and above these co-existent regimes of movement and time, Kentridge's artistic technique and exhibition practices further expose a multifarious 'geology' of other embedded time lines that serve to enrich/complicate these temporal expressions. I argue here that diegetic time- and movement-images ostensibly co-exist alongside different 'archaeologies' of time relevant to the context and creation of the artworks. For this reason, the animated drawings formulate intriguing artistic/philosophical expressions that muse on the nature of matter, memory, time and space. (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)

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)

Haeckel was on Darwin's own admission the major advocate of evolutionary theory in Germany. In a letter to Haeckel on November 19, 1868. ...