Three years ago, my body began to slowly, incrementally, go haywire. Sometimes, I would wake up at night and my right arm would be alarmingly numb, taking several minutes to regain feeling. My right hand would ache for hours after I had been working on my laptop. I experienced numbness in the fingers of my right hand after pressing them against a hard surface. Tingling radiated down the back of my legs and into my calves, which I referred to as (...) "zings" or "fireworks."I was chronically constipated and had reoccurring hemorrhoids and anal fissures that produced blood in my stool. I saw dark specks in my eyes that an optometrist called "floaters." The glands in my neck were chronically swollen, and I was prone to... (shrink)

Sharon Street (2006) has argued that, given certain plausible evolutionary considerations, normative realism leads to normative skepticism. Street calls this ‘the Darwinian dilemma’. This paper considers the two most popular responses to the Darwinian dilemma and argues that both are problematic. According to the naturalist response, the evolutionary account of our normative dispositions reveals that there was selection for normative dispositions that were reliable with respect to normative truth. According to the minimalist response, the evolutionary account reveals that there was (...) selection of normative dispositions that were reliable with respect to normative truth. This paper argues that the minimalist response is in principle unacceptable, and that the naturalist response faces a very serious difficulty. (shrink)

Both common sense and dominant traditions in art criticism and philosophical aesthetics have it that aesthetic features or properties are perceived. However, there is a cast of reasons to be sceptical of the thesis. This paper defends the thesis—that aesthetic properties are sometimes represented in perceptual experience—against one of those sceptical opponents. That opponent maintains that perception represents only low-level properties, and since all theorists agree that aesthetic properties are not low-level properties, perception does not represent aesthetic properties. I offer (...) a novel argument—what I call the argument from seeing-as—against that sceptic which moves from consideration of ambiguous figures to consideration of visual art. It concludes that aesthetic properties are sometimes perceived and delivers a general lesson for philosophy of perception. Contrary to extant theories of rich perceptual content, aesthetic properties are far better candidates for high-level perceptual contents than standardly theorized rich contents like natural kinds. (shrink)

This book describes how scientists bring their own interests and passions to their work, illustrates the dynamics between researchers and the research community ...

This chapter argues that we are irremediably ignorant about the identities of the fundamental properties that figure in the actual realization of the true final theory. Of the three published responses to Lewis’s work, each argues that even if Lewis’s metaphysical assumption, the thesis known as “quidditism,” is accepted, we need not accept his epistemic conclusion, the thesis of Humility. The aim of this chapter is to defend Lewis against these critics. Ann Whittle attempts to refute Humility by an appeal (...) to a more lenient account of identification. Following is a defense of Lewis carried by showing that his taxing account of identification is a perfectly good account of at least one perfectly legitimate sense of identification. (shrink)

Dustin McWherter defends the possibility of critical ontology by pitting Roy Bhaskar's attempt to rehabilitate ontology in the philosophy of science against Kant's attempt to replace traditional ontology with an account of cognitive experience.

According to a number of recent philosophers, knowledge has an intimate relationship with rationality. Some philosophers hold, in particular, that rational agents do things for good motivating reasons, and that p can be one’s motivating reason for -ing (acting/believing/fearing/etc.) only if one knows that p. This paper argues against this view and in favor of the view that p cannot be one’s motivating reason for -ing—in the relevant sense—unless there is an appropriate explanatory connection between the fact that p and (...) one’s -ing. I argue that this view offers a better account of the cases alleged to support the knowledge view. (shrink)

Perception is typically distinguished from cognition. For example, seeing is importantly different from believing. And while what one sees clearly influences what one thinks, it is debatable whether what one believes and otherwise thinks can influence, in some direct and non-trivial way, what one sees. The latter possible relation is the cognitive penetration of perception. Cognitive penetration, if it occurs, has implications for philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This paper offers an analysis of the phenomenon, (...) its theoretical consequences, and a variety of experimental results and possible interpretations of them. The paper concludes by proposing some constraints for analyses and definitions of cognitive penetrability. (shrink)

Conventional approaches to pluralistic thinking in bioethics usually attempt in one fashion or another to isolate and choose between the different perspectives. I would argue, however, that the essentialist and existentialist perspectives on the embryo each are internally self-consistent and ethically correct within their own framework and at the same time mutually exclusive. Therefore, we will Žnd no ethical high ground on which to base a choice. Rather, human embryo research will continue to be characterized by a multiplicity of views (...) that together create a state of holistic, dynamic tension, what has been called bioethical complementarity (Grinnell, Bishop, and McCullough 2002). (shrink)

This paper surveys historical and recent philosophical discussions of the relations between imagination and creativity. In the first two sections, it covers two insufficiently studied analyses of the creative imagination, that of Kant and Sartre, respectively. The next section discusses imagination and its role in scientific discovery, with particular emphasis on the writings of Michael Polanyi, and on thought experiments and experimental design. The final section offers a brief discussion of some very recent work done on conceptual relations between imagination (...) and creativity. (shrink)

Nick Bostrom has famously defended the credibility of the simulation hypothesis – the hypothesis that we live in a computer simulation. Barry Dainton has recently employed the simulation hypothesis to defend the ‘simulation solution’ to the problem of natural evil. The simulation solution claims that apparently natural evils are in fact the result of wrong actions on the part of the people who create our simulation. In this way, it treats apparently natural evils as actually being moral evils, allowing them (...) to be explained via the free will theodicy. Other theodicies which assimilate apparently natural evils to moral ones include Fall theodicies, which attribute apparently natural evils to the biblical Fall, and diabolical theodicies, which attribute them to the activity of demons. Unfortunately, Dainton fails to give compelling reasons for preferring the simulation solution to Fall or diabolical theodicies. He gives one argument against diabolical theodicies, but it has no force against their best version, and he does not discuss Fall theodicies at all. In this article, I attempt to rectify this. I discuss several problems faced by Fall and diabolical theodicies which the simulation solution avoids. These provide some reason to prefer the simulation solution to these alternatives. (shrink)

In Being Another Way, Dustin Klinger recounts the history of how medieval Arabic philosophers in the Islamic East grappled with the logical role of the copula 'to be,' an ambiguity that has bedeviled Western philosophy from Parmenides to the analytic philosophers of today. Working from within a language that has no copula, a group of increasingly independent Arabic philosophers began to critically investigate the semantic role that Aristotle, for many centuries their philosophical authority, invested in the copula as the (...) basis of his logic. Drawing on extensive manuscript research, Klinger breaks through the thicket of unstudied philosophical works to demonstrate the creativity of postclassical Islamic scholarship as it explored the consequences of its intellectual break with the past. Against the still widespread view that intellectual ferment all but disappeared during the period, Klinger shows how these intellectuals over the centuries developed and refined a sophisticated philosophy of language that speaks to core concerns of contemporary linguistics and philosophy. (shrink)

In this book, Dustin Peone analyzes the role of shame and fame in the contemporary world, showing that these ideas have lost their roots in social virtue. He then criticizes the technological mentality, demonstrating its responsibility for changing the human condition.

This paper considers an orectic penetration hypothesis which says that desires and desire-like states may influence perceptual experience in a non-externally mediated way. This hypothesis is clarified with a definition, which serves further to distinguish the interesting target phenomenon from trivial and non-genuine instances of desire-influenced perception. Orectic penetration is an interesting possible case of the cognitive penetrability of perceptual experience. The orectic penetration hypothesis is thus incompatible with the more common thesis that perception is cognitively impenetrable. It is of (...) importance to issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, epistemology, and general philosophy of science. The plausibility of orectic perception can be motivated by some classic experimental studies, and some new experimental research inspired by those same studies. The general suggestion is that orectic penetration thus defined, and evidenced by the relevant studies, cannot be deflected by the standard strategies of the cognitive impenetrability theorist. (shrink)

There are good, even if inconclusive, reasons to think that cognitive penetration of perception occurs: that cognitive states like belief causally affect, in a relatively direct way, the contents of perceptual experience. The supposed importance of – indeed as it is suggested here, what is definitive of – this possible phenomenon is that it would result in important epistemic and scientific consequences. One interesting and intuitive consequence entirely unremarked in the extant literature concerns the perception of art. Intuition has it (...) that knowledge about art changes how one aesthetically evaluates artworks. A profound explanation of this intuitive fact is that perceptual experiences vary with artistic expertise. Cognitive penetration provides an explanatory mechanism for this latter effect. What one knows or otherwise thinks about art may affect, in one of two ways sketched below, how one perceives art. Differences in aesthetic evaluation may follow, either because high-level aesthetic properties can be perceptually represented or because they causally depend on low-level perceptible properties. All of this lends credence to the hypothesis that the expert better judges art because she better perceives art. And she better perceives art because she better knows art. (shrink)

This book critiques Ayn Rand’s secular philosophy of religion while simultaneously highlighting the fundamental contradiction of the Tea Party movement’s dual basis, that is, Randian economics and conservative Christianity.

The _Critique of Religion and Religion’s Critique: On Dialectical Religiology_, is a book compiled in honour of Rudolf J. Siebert, Critical Theorist of Society and Religion. It is meant to both illuminate and interrogate his critical approach to the study of religion: Dialectical Religiology.

Generating new ideas—innovation and novelty—is central to what those of us practicing science hope to accomplish. We call it research, but what we really aim for is new-search—learning new things about the world and how it works. Charles Peirce gave the name “abduction” to what he described as the only logical operation that introduces any new idea. In this paper, I will focus on an unconventional understanding of abduction, one that goes beyond its usual meaning and concerns the situation when (...) a surprising observation becomes reconfigured as an unintended experiment about a new research problem that previously was not being studied and possibly was unknown. For science, the consequences can be the beginning of a new field of investigation. For the researcher, the consequences can be life-changing. (shrink)

Everyday experiences include many mundane activities such as getting up, washing, dressing, eating, and going to work. Although most people take these activities for granted, it is possible to reflect on and experience them in special ways [I]. One can, for instance, adopt a scientific attitude. According to this view, there are universal laws that can account for the content of experience, and these laws can be revealed through scientific investigation. In this case, a scientific domain is superimposed on life (...) experience. Alternatively, one can adopt a religious attitude, in which case the mundane activities of life become full of religious meaning, reflections of God's creation of the universe and of life. In this case, a religious domain is superimposed on the experiences of everyday life. Of singular importance, the scientific and religious domains are derived from and then imposed back upon the world of experience. (shrink)

Cooperation during territorial defense allows social groups of African lions to defend access to resources necessary for individual reproductive success. Some forms of cooperation will be dependent upon cognition: reciprocity places greater cognitive demands on participants than does kinship or mutualism. Lions have well-developed cognitive abilities that enable individuals to recognize and interact with others in ways that seem to enhance their inclusive fitness. Male lions appear to cooperate unconditionally, consistently responding to roaring intruders regardless of their male companions’ kinship (...) or behavior. Female lions, however, do keep track of the past behavior of their female companions, apparently using the reliability of a companion as one means of assessing the risks posed by approaching intruders. Some “laggard” females may exploit the cooperative tendencies of “leaders” during territorial encounters. Although leader females clearly recognize laggards as such, the costs of tolerating laggards may be less than the benefits leaders gain through territorial defense behavior. Thus, although lions clearly have the cognitive ability to base cooperation on reciprocity, territorial defense cooperation appears instead to be based primarily on mutual benefits to participants for both male and female lions. (shrink)

The Scientific Attitude presents a systematic account of the cognitive and social features of science. The work is unique in its attempt to understand science in terms of day-to-day practice. The book goes beyond the traditional description of science, which focuses on method and logic, to characterize the scientific attitude as a way of looking at the world.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 221 Seiten: 71-103.

“When citizens can associate only in certain cases, they regard association as a rare and singular process, and they hardly think of it. When you allow them to associate freely in everything, they end up seeing in association the universal and, so to speak, unique means that men can use to attain the various ends that they propose. Each new need immediately awakens the idea of association. The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone (...) studies it and applies it”When Alexis De Tocqueville visited the United States from France in the 1830s, he noted that many voluntary associations existed among citizens throughout the American landscape, something that did not exist in the... (shrink)

“The difficulty of discussion between people brought up in different frameworks is to be admitted,” Karl Popper writes. “But nothing is more fruitful than such a discussion; than the culture clash which has stimulated some of the greatest intellectual revolutions.”71 Certainly Kirby and Darwin were brought up in different cultures — Kirby with his Anglican-Tory orientation, Darwin with his Whig-liberal background — and certainly the clash generated some interesting theories; but it also resulted in the revival of Lamarck's discredited habit (...) theory, which took another century of careful experimentation to weed out. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Werndl and Frigg discuss the relationship between the Boltzmannian and Gibbsian framework of statistical mechanics, addressing in particular the question when equilibrium values calculated in both frameworks coincide. In this comment, I point out serious flaws in their work and try to put their results into proper context. I also clarify the concept of Boltzmann equilibrium, the status of the "Khinchin condition" and their connection to the law of large numbers.

Why is it hard to solve the climate crisis, and what can we do? This book answers these questions, which are of interest to the public, academics, and businesspeople. Using stories from the front lines of the energy transition, we show how to unlock the climate impasse.

Propositions are more than the bearers of truth and the meanings of sentences: they are also the objects of an array of attitudes including belief, desire, hope, and fear. This variety of roles leads to a variety of paradoxes, most of which have been sorely neglected. Arguing that existing work on these paradoxes is either too heavy-handed or too specific in its focus to be fully satisfactory, I develop a basic intensional logic and pursue and compare three strategies for addressing (...) the paradoxes, one employing truth-value gaps, one restricting propositional quantification, and one restricting our ability to have attitudes like belief and desire. This results in four distinct resolutions of the paradoxes, all but one of which are novel and all of which receive novel and general implementations. While resolving the paradoxes is of course the ultimate goal, I do not here argue that any one of the resolutions is superior. These paradoxes have been so little studied that my primary goal is only to identify the most fundamental costs and benefits of the various approaches one can take to addressing them. Each resolution I develop has significant drawbacks, which I argue highlight tensions between the different roles propositions play. Past researchers have skirted these tensions, and the issues raised by these paradoxes more generally, by focusing on non-propositional paradoxes, such as the most familiar forms of the Liar paradox. At the least, then, I hope this dissertation establishes that the propositional paradoxes deserve attention not only because of their consequences for intensional logic, but also because of their consequences for our understanding of content, truth, quantification, and a host of mental attitudes. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy has adopted an increasingly tragic point of view. Tragedy, though, is only a partial truth of the human condition. Comedy is another partial truth. The nature of human existence is neither wholly the one nor the other, but tragi-comic. Philosophy must be attuned to both despair and laughter if it is to understand its own world. In Making Philosophy Laugh, the philosopher Dustin Peone makes an apology for the comic side of existence and its use in philosophy. (...) He demonstrates the social and moral uses of humor and analyzes its significance for speculative thinking. Folly and irony are shown to be vital facets of dialectical philosophy. The reader is introduced to the comical side of Socrates and Homer, Descartes and Vico, Kant and Hegel, and many others. Finally, a doctrine of the tragi-comic sense of life is presented that does justice to all aspects of human existence and liberates the spirit from the grimness of serious thought. (shrink)

Debates about female genital mutilation/cutting have polarized opinion between those who see it as an abuse of women’s health and human rights, to be ‘eradicated’, and those who may or may not oppose the practice, but see a double standard on the part of western campaigners who fail to challenge other unnecessary surgical interventions — such as male circumcision or cosmetic surgery — in their own communities and cultures. This article interrogates these debates about FGM/c in the context of measures (...) to reduce it in the UK over recent decades. It does not suggest that FGM/c is a legitimate practice, seeing it, rather, as an abuse of women’s and children’s rights that should be combated using a combination of measures. However, it argues that reduction strategies are undermined by inconsistencies in the law and the failure to back up the law with research and education. (shrink)

This paper attempts to answer two questions: What is epistemic agency? And what are the motivations for having this concept? In response to the first question, it is argued that epistemic agency is the agency one has over one’s belief-forming practices, or doxastic dispositions, which can directly affect the way one forms a belief and indirectly affect the beliefs one forms. In response to the second question, it is suggested that the above conception of epistemic agency is either implicitly endorsed (...) by those theorists sympathetic to epistemic normativity or, at minimum, this conception can make sense of the legitimacy of the normative notions applicable to how and what one should believe. It is further contended that belief formation in some respects is a skill that can be intentionally developed and refined. Accepting this contention and the existence of certain epistemic norms provide inconclusive yet good reasons to endorse this concept. Recent challenges to this concept by Hillary Kornblith and Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij are also considered. (shrink)

Richard Swinburne and Travis Dumsday have defended what J. L. Schellenberg calls “the responsibility argument” as a response to the problem of divine hiddenness. Schellenberg, meanwhile, has levied various objections against the responsibility argument. In this paper, I develop a version of the responsibility argument and discuss some advantages it has over those defended by either Swinburne or Dumsday. I then show how my version can withstand Schellenberg’s criticisms.

Dustin Peone argues that memory is the foundation of philosophical thought. This may seem strange to the contemporary reader, but it is something that philosophers themselves have known since before Socrates. Peone advocates a doctrine of "memory as philosophy" that ties philosophical recollection back to the wisdom of the Muses, daughters of Memory, who sing of "what was, is, and shall be." Part One draws on the work of philosophers from Cicero to Vico to Bergson to articulate the meaning (...) and significance of memory. Peone understands memory not merely in its psychological sense, but as the key to metaphysical and moral thinking. Part Two takes up the philosophical history of memory. Peone gives an overview of its role as both a speculative and technical instrument from ancient Greece through Renaissance Europe. Then with the rise of modernity and the critical philosophy of Descartes, the memory tradition falls into disrepute. Why did this happen? Was it accidental? Is a philosophical system grounded in memory possible after Descartes? In the final chapters, Montaigne and Hegel are analyzed as practitioners of "memory as philosophy" in the modern world. (shrink)

No consensus has been reached about the reconstruction of Euripides' fragmentary tragedyBellerophon, but two suggestions have not received the serious attention they deserve. The first is that Stheneboea is a character in the play, and the second that Euripides does not depict Bellerophon as an atheist or an impious hero. In this paper, I shall reconsider both of these suggestions. In fact, the addition of Stheneboea to thedramatis personaeallows us to correct the second problem, as I shall propose that Stheneboea, (...) not Bellerophon, speaks the infamous atheistic fragment. (shrink)

We offer a brief characterization of creativity, followed by a review of some of the reasons people have been skeptical about the possibility of explaining creativity. We then survey some of the recent work on creativity that is naturalistic in the sense that it presumes creativity is natural (as opposed to magical, occult, or supernatural) and is therefore amenable to scientific inquiry. This work is divided into two categories. The broader category is empirical philosophy, which draws on empirical research while (...) addressing questions that have traditionally been regarded as philosophical. The second category is experimental philosophy, a special branch of empirical philosophy in which experiments are designed (by philosophers) with the explicit purpose of addressing philosophical questions. All of this highlights the relative theoretical neglect of creativity, while at the same time suggesting ample opportunity for experimentally minded philosophers to break new ground. (shrink)

One sceptical rejoinder to those who claim that sensory perception is cognitively penetrable is to appeal to the involvement of attention. So, while a phenomenon might initially look like one where, say, a perceiver’s beliefs are influencing her visual experience, another interpretation is that because the perceiver believes and desires as she does, she consequently shifts her spatial attention so as to change what she senses visually. But, the sceptic will urge, this is an entirely familiar phenomenon, and it hardly (...) involves some special or theoretically important cognitive effect on sensory perception. Even supposing that the sceptic is correct about cases that are accurately described in this way, the rejoinder oversimplifies the possible roles that attention may play in mediating cognition and perception. This paper aims to identify these different roles, and by emphasis on empirical research on feature-based and object-based attention. What emerges is a plausible and well- evidenced mental schema that describes attention -mediated cognitive penetration. At the very least, the burden of proof is shifted to the sceptic, as he then must show that there are no mental phenomena involving attention in the more nuanced ways described here. One additional benefit of this analysis is that it illuminates various features of attention and its relation to both cognition and phenomenal consciousness. Therefore the analysis should be of interest to a broad range of theorists of the mind, and not just those invested in the cognitive penetration debate. (shrink)

In recent decades, postmodernists and sociologists of science have argued that science is just one of many human activities with social and political aims -- comparable to, say, religion or art. They have questioned the objectivity of science, and whether it has any unique ability to find the truth. Not surprisingly, such claims have evoked a negative response from proponents of the traditional view of science; the debate between the two sides has been called the science wars. In the debate, (...) scientists have made few attempts to meet the postmodern critique on its own grounds, through serious reflection on the everyday practice of science. Yet that is the only way to understand the nature of science and the features that distinguish science from other activities. (shrink)

A Review of Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy, panel report, Responsible Science: Ensuring the Integrity of the Research Process Volume I, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1992.

[File is the introduction to the monograph] -/- Abstract to monograph -/- How and whether thinking affects perceiving is a deeply important question. Of course it is of scientific interest: to understand the human mind is to understand how we best distinguish its processes, how those processes interact, and what this implies for how and what we may know about the world. And so in the philosopher’s terms, this book is one on both mental architecture and the epistemology of perception. (...) But there is a more human interest. How we make contact with the world, and with one another, is of the most basic of importance. We can make both sensory contact and cognitive contact with the world. The first is traditionally supposed to be determined by the biological nature of our sensory systems, while the second is at least partly determined by us, what we have learned, our experiences, and so on. The most basic claim of the book is that this is mistaken and importantly so. Our sensory contact with the world can also change and in a way that is importantly affected by the cognitive contact that we have, or have had, with the world. Thinking does not just affect perceiving, thinking improves perceiving. If this is true, it changes not only how we should theorize the mind, it changes how we should understand, as individuals, our place in and contact with the world. (shrink)