Writing a thesis or dissertation is a challenging procedure as it is one of the requirements of getting a graduate and postgraduate diploma. Writing an abstract like other parts of a thesis or dissertation has its criterion. For this reason, due to globalism, those abstracts written by non-native English speakers may lack some of the features of the abstract genre and move that must be included. This study examines the moves of M.A. and Ph.D. abstracts written (...) by Turkish students between the 2009 and 2019 academic years on foreign language education at Cyprus International University. The data consisted of 50 abstracts chosen randomly from the ELT department. For the analysis, Hyland’s five-move model has been used. The study results reveal that 40 abstracts did not follow the five moves that Hyland has put forward. Moreover, it can be stated that the absence of some moves in the abstracts may cause restraint for readers to comprehend these studies in terms of communicative purposes. (shrink)

This dissertation reconstructs some aspects of the historical development of the concept of the electron from 1891, when the term "electron" was introduced, to 1925, when the notion of spin was put forward, in the light of the relevant historiographical and philosophical problems. The central historiographical tool employed is Karl Popper's notion of a problem situation. Furthermore, some of the historical episodes are reconstructed in terms of a "biographical" approach to theoretical entities that portrays them as active agents that (...) participate in the development of scientific knowledge. Their agency is due to the heuristic resources that they embody and to the resistance that they exhibit to manipulation. The historical analysis begins with a reconceptualization of the "discovery" of the electron and aims at situating the principal historical actors within the wider process which led to the acceptance of the electron as an element of the ontology of physics. I continue with a reconstruction of the discovery of the Zeeman effect in the light of recent work on the history and philosophy of experimental science. The next three chapters are devoted to a reading of the development of the old quantum theory of the atom , which aimed at understanding the behavior and distribution of electrons bound within the atom, from the perspective of the electron's biography. Furthermore, I discuss the chemists' representation of the electron and contrast it with its physical counterpart. The main philosophical problem examined concerns the implications of meaning change for scientific realism . I discuss in detail that issue and argue against the widespread view that meaning variance is incompatible with scientific realism. Thus, I provide a way out for the aspiring realist, without however committing myself to a realist position. Finally, I argue that the historical development of the concept of the electron from 1896 to 1925 is compatible with a realist construal of its ontological status. (shrink)

Causal powers, say, an electron’s power to repel other electrons, are had in virtue of having properties. Electrons repel other electrons because they are negatively charged. One’s views about causal powers are shaped by—and shape—one’s views concerning properties, causation, laws of nature and modality. It is no surprise, then, that views about the nature of causal powers are generally embedded into larger, more systematic, metaphysical pictures of the world. This dissertation is an exploration of three systematic metaphysics, Neo-Humeanism, Nomicism (...) and Neo-Aristotelianism. I raise problems for the first two and defend the third. A defense of a systematic metaphysics, I take it, involves appealing to pre-theoretical commitments or intuitions, and theoretical issues such as simplicity or explanatory power. While I think that Neo-Aristotelianism is the most intuitive of the available general metaphysical pictures of the world, these kinds of intuitions do not settle the matter. The most widely held of the alternative pictures, Neo-Humeanism, is accepted in great part because of its theoretical power. In contrast, a systematic Neo-Aristotelian metaphysic is, at best, nascent. The way forward for the Neo-Aristotelian, therefore, is a contribution to an ongoing research program, generating Neo-Aristotelian views of modality, causation and laws of nature from the Neo-Aristotelian understanding of causal powers. The central argument of this dissertation is that such views are defensible, and so the Neo-Aristotelian metaphysic ought to be accepted. (shrink)

Predictive processing, an increasingly popular paradigm in cognitive sciences, has focused primarily on giving accounts of perception, motor control and a host of psychological phenomena, including consciousness. But higher cognitive processes, like conceptual thought, language, and logic, have received only limited attention to date and PP still stands disconnected from a huge body of research in those areas. In this thesis, I aim to address this gap and I attempt to go some way towards developing and defending a cognitive-computational (...) approach to higher cognition within the predictive processing paradigm. To test its explanatory potential, I apply it to a range of linguistic and conceptual phenomena. I proceed in three steps. First, I lay out an account of concepts and suggest how concepts are represented, how they can be context-sensitively processed, and how the apparent diversity of formats arise. Secondly, I propose how paradigmatic higher cognitive competencies, like language and logical reasoning, could fit into the PP picture. Thirdly, I apply the PP account of concepts and language to a range of linguistic-conceptual phenomena as test cases, namely: metaphor, the semantic paradox (specifically the Liar Paradox) and copredication. Finally, I discuss some challenges and objections to the PP framework as applied to higher cognition and in general. (shrink)

This thesis is guided by the following question: what, if anything, makes a life meaningful? My answer to this question is asymmetric welfarism about meaning in life. According to asymmetric welfarism, the meaning of a life depends upon two factors. First, a life is conferred meaning insofar as it promotes or protects the well-being of other welfare subjects. Second, a life is made meaningless insofar as it decreases or minimises the well-being of other welfare subjects. The meaning of a (...) life is determined by the net balance between these two factors; the more the good outweighs the bad, the more meaningful a life that is. I argue that asymmetric welfarism is the most plausible theory about meaning in life. To do this, I show how such a view captures a variety of intuitions about meaning in life while defending it from objections. This is the business of chapters 1, 2, and 3. Specifically, chapter 1 lays the groundwork, chapter 2 advances the case in favour of asymmetric welfarism, while chapter 3 defends asymmetric welfarism from objections. But some objections cannot be so easily overturned by a mere argument. Such objections do not just count against asymmetric welfarism, but also support competing theories. In order to overcome both, I show how such objections, and the theories they motivate, are best understood as tracking a different, but related, evaluative dimension a life can have. This is the business of chapters 4, 5, and 6. Specifically, chapter 4 argues that subjective theories are best understood as being about fulfilment, chapter 5 argues that purpose theories are best understood as being about purpose, and chapter 6 argues that differing views about the role of morality confuse morality and significance with meaning. These other evaluative dimensions which stand alongside meaning in life are fulfilment, purpose, significance, morality, and prudential value. (shrink)

This thesis consists of two main section – each one of them offers an argument in favour of the evidential use of intuitions in moral philosophy. The aim is to defend the evidential use of moral intuitions. This presupposes that moral intuitions are commonly used as evidence (Cappelen’s Centrality Thesis) and that moral intuitions display the necessary credentials in order to be useful as evidence (reliability). Most recently the use of intuitions as evidence came under attack from two (...) distinct sides. Cappelen (2012) presented an empirically based argument that it is false that intuitions were used as evidence in philosophy. He described the common perception of the central status of intuitions as evidence in philosophy as misguided and unfounded; challenging the discipline to provide an empirical argument to the contrary. The second recent challenge comes from a rather new field of research – experimental philosophy. The so-called negative programme of experimental moral philosophy tries to show by means of experiments that intuitions are sensitive to philosophically irrelevant factors. Such factors include ordering and framing, as well as cultural and demographical variables (gender, age, etc). By showing that moral intuitions are vulnerable to such morally arbitrary factors they try to undermine the use of intuitions as evidence by establishing their unreliability. The first section of this thesis takes up Cappelen’s challenge to provide an argument for Centrality – the thesis that “Contemporary analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence (or as a source of evidence) for philosophical theories” (Cappelen 2012, 3). I will do so by looking at Climenhaga’s (2017) attempt of addressing Cappelen’s challenge. I, initially, focus on Climenhaga’s account because it is instructive how it fails, which provides the foundation for my answer to Cappelen’s challenge. In the second part of this chapter I develop a more accurate account of how intuitions are used as evidence in philosophical practice, improving on Climenhaga’s account. I do so by suggesting that intuitings are used as source of evidence and intuited (propositional content of intuitings) are used as evidence. This proposal allows not only to solve many of the problems Climenhaga’s account is prone to but also allows to offer an explanation for a fourth fact of philosophical practice, which has not been available beforehand. In the final section of this chapter I address three anticipated challenges: Cappelen’s demand for direct empirical evidence, Climenhaga’s claim of evidential transitivity, and Machery’s argument to refocus our attention to the method of cases. After having established that intuitions are used as evidence in philosophy affirming Centrality, and thus philosophers engaged in this practice should accept that intuitions are used as evidence, the remaining question is whether intuitions are a good source of evidence. This is one of my premises for my explanation of the first fact of philosophical practice. Only if intuitings are a good source of evidence, their us as such would be justifiable. The question of the quality of intuitings as a source of evidence is commonly phrased in terms of the reliability-challenge by the negative programme of experimental philosophy. The second section takes up the Reliability Challenge of the negative programme of experimental moral philosophy, which consists of two mutually dependent arguments to challenge the use of moral intuitions as evidence. The first, is an empirical argument; the second a generalisation of the inductive base – both arguments together constitute the Reliability Challenge. In this section, I focus mainly on the first argument. The empirical argument seeks to establish by experimental means that most intuitions elicit by thought experiment vary unsystematically to a statistically significant extent and therefore intuitions are unreliable as evidence. I will analyse the underlying empirical findings, especially the experimental setup to ascertain the relevant data and the subsequently used statistical methods to analyse and interpret these findings. Initially, I will demonstrate how limited the actual supporting experimental evidence is for the conclusion of the empirical argument. Then, I will go on arguing, that even this limited empirical base is riddled with inaccuracies and flaws due to methodological decisions and misleading statistical analysis and associated statistical effects with the result that effects the purported consequences of experimental thought-experiments do not stand up to close scrutiny. I will investigate in detail 15 studies, which were all reported as having large effect sizes, meaning that they uncovered not only a statistically significant effect of morally arbitrary factors, but also a practical significant difference – supporting the negative programmes argumentative aim that moral intuitions are essentially unreliable as evidence. All 15 experiments were found to be fundamentally flawed in either questionnaire design or statistically interpretation. The empirical argument rests upon deeply distorted and restricted foundations and does not adequately reflect established philosophical methodology. Therefore, the Reliability challenge of the negative programme of experimental moral philosophy lost its empirical foundation and with that its argumentative bite. It can be concluded in light of this thesis, that it is neither true that philosophers do not use intuitions as evidence – to the contrary we have good reasons to believe that the evidential use of intuitions in philosophical practice is characteristically and widespread. Moreover, there is no sufficient empirical evidence to support the claim that moral intuitions are substantially affected by morally arbitrary factors, thus, the Reliability Challenge is groundless. To the contrary, some experiments reported a resilience of strong intuitions to any morally arbitrary factors, supporting their reliability and by extension their use as evidence. Looking forward, experimental philosophy especially experimental moral philosophy could help to identify particularly vulnerable or weak intuitions which should be excluded or heavily discounted when used within the method of cases or the reflective equilibrium. (shrink)

This thesis aims to elucidate an apparent paradox about the role of emotion in moral agency. A number of lines of concern suggest emotion may have serious negative impact on moral agency. On the other hand, there are considerations that suggest emotion also plays a crucial role in motivating, informing and even constituting moral agency. Significantly, there is a strong connection between participant reactive attitudes and ascription of moral status as agent or subject. Nonemotional agents could not hold such (...) attitudes. Also, removing participant reactive attitudes imposes a peculiar and incoherent form of solipsism about moral agency. Given this necessary role for emotion, can we give an account of emotion that will also meet the worries? I examine, as crucial examples, three recurrent lines of concern about emotion - that it threatens our capacities for objectivity, rationality, and autonomy - to tease out the descriptive assumptions about emotion, and the normative assumptions about moral agency, that these objections are based on. I then offer three lines of argument towards resolving these worries. The first addresses the worries directly, and the other two shift blame off emotion. First, then, I argue that the normative concerns can largely be met by a descriptive account that views emotion as cognitive. However, “judgementalist” cognitive accounts that assimilate emotion to belief may make emotion metaethically respectable at the cost of making it meta-ethically redundant. Also, such accounts are descriptively less than plausible. A better approach, I argue, is to allow that belief may play a significant role in emotion but to also allow at least a quasicognitive role to the distinctively affective element in emotion: feeling. I also argue for a hrther revision of cognitive accounts to emphasise that emotions reflect features of those who feel them. If we were different, our emotions would be different. So, secondly, I argue that a number of the features that power worries about emotions have their sources in what those who feel them are like, rather than in emotions as such. However, both human nature and emotion are capable of significant plasticity and diversity. We are also capable of a considerable - but not infinite - degree of self-determination both about what we are like and what our emotions are like. Finally, I argue that the normative assumptions that power the objections to emotion are themselves in need of revision - and in some tension with each other. This leads to a McGufin-theory of emotion in moral agency: Problems with emotion’s place in moral agency serve as indicators of unresolved tensions in our thinking about moral agency, rather than just indicators of problems with emotion as such. In view of this, I also argue for caution in any attempts to change emotion to fit particular ideals of moral agency. (shrink)

Doubt is a much-maligned state. We are racked by doubts, tormented by doubts, plagued by them, paralysed. Doubts can be troubling, consuming, agonising. But however ill-regarded is doubt, anxiety is more so. We recognise the significance of doubting in certain contexts, and allow ourselves to be guided by our doubts. For example, the criminal standard of proof operative in the U.K., U.S., as well as in most other anglophone countries, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Israel, requires for conviction to be permissible (...) that the defendant’s guilt is proved beyond reasonable doubt; to feel a doubt about a defendant’s guilt, so long as it is reasonable, is reason to refrain from convicting. But our folk understanding of anxiety ascribes no value to that state. Anxiety is inherently unpleasant and irrational; it prevents us from being able to perform well when it is most important to us that we do; it is an emotion that, if we could, we’d eliminate from our emotional toolbox. Yet in this thesis, I offer a vindication of doubt – a defence of doubt in terms of what it does for us – on which it ultimately turns out to be a kind of anxiety. The basic idea is that the concept of doubt serves a function for us that we couldn’t do without: it signals when we should begin inquiry. I will argue that the concept doubt is able to serve this function because the state it picks out, the state of doubt, is a kind of anxiety: epistemic anxiety. I develop a picture of epistemic anxiety as an emotional response to epistemic risk: potential disvalue in the epistemic realm. Because doubt is a kind of anxiety, it has the right kind of representational and motivational profile to track epistemic risk in our environments, and motivate us to reduce or avoid that risk. This makes it hugely valuable for us, as knowledge-seeking creatures, given the incompatibility of knowledge with high levels of epistemic risk. (shrink)

This thesis develops and defends epistemic fictionalism, according to which knowledge talk is metaphorical. One of the distinctive features of metaphor is that metaphorical sentences have multiple readings: a literal (or ‘face-value’) reading and at least one metaphorical (or ‘non-face-value’) reading. Typically, speakers who utter metaphorical sentences intend to communicate a content that corresponds to the metaphorical meaning. Epistemic fictionalism posits that, as is standard for metaphors, sentences of the form “S knows that P” admit of at least two (...) different readings: a face-value (literal) reading, and a different non-face-value metaphorical reading. A face-value reading of sentences of the form “S knows that P” is that S is infallible with regards to P, and as such are always (or almost always) false at face-value. However, such sentences are not typically used to communicate their typically false face-value content, but some other, typically true metaphorical content. The thesis applies the methods of function-first epistemology (Craig 1990, Hannon 2019a), taking as a starting point the question of what knowledge talk is used for. I argue that understanding knowledge talk as metaphorical coheres with the function that knowledge talk plays, in spite of all (or most) knowledge attributions being literally false: there are advantages to communicating the non-face-value, metaphorical content. Another key advantage of epistemic fictionalism is that it explains the intuitions surrounding sceptical arguments. On the one hand, sceptical infallibilism is compelling because it is the correct analysis of the face-value content of knowledge attributions. On the other hand, sceptical infallibilism is not threatening to everyday knowledge attributions because it does not threaten the truth of the metaphorical content that knowledge attributions are typically used to express. Overall, the main aim of the thesis is to motivate epistemic fictionalism as a serious contender worthy of further investigation and development. (shrink)

Both lay people and scientists organize the world around them by categorizing particular things as belonging to kinds. Scientists speak and theorize about various kinds of things, like hydrogen, gold, and water; electron and neutron; Canis lupus and Felis catus; igneous rock, sedimentary rock, and metamorphic rock; schizophrenia, psychopathy, and autism; Caucasian, African, and Amerindian. Given this variety of scientific kind categories, one fundamental question for philosophers of science is whether any of these kinds really are natural kinds, and if (...) so, what it is that constitutes their naturalness.nbsp;is to say, when we classify particular things as belonging to the same kind, is it ever the case that they really or naturally belong to the same kind? Do we ever carve the world at its joints, so to speak? Or, are there rather just many different ways in which we, humans, decide to classify particulars into kinds, each possible classification as conventional as any other? In this dissertation, a realist account of natural kinds is defended, according to which some kind classifications are more natural than others. It is argued that the naturalness of scientific kinds can be accounted for by the Causal Unification Theory. According to this view, the naturalness of a kind category lies in the contribution this category makes to our epistemic practices, as a result of accommodating these practices to a causally unified group of properties. Because the properties of natural kind-members are causally unified, they ground multiple causally sustained generalizations. Thus, natural kinds are the metaphysical grounds of systematic scientific research by allowing for multiple inductive generalizations and predictions, and for unified explanations. This view is developed in response to the historically most important theories about natural kinds and several more recent ones. The Causal Unification Theory of natural kinds is then put to work to elucidate the naturalness of two controversial humannbsp;classifications, namely the biological classification of human races and the social psychological classification of homophobes. The current metaphysical race debate is criticized for being too dependent on broad philosophical issues, and it is shown that asking about the naturalness of races, rather than about their existence, allows for a more nuanced debate that is to a larger extent dependent on empirical results. The example of homophobia is discussed in relation to the worry that the normative dimension of many human kinds diminishes the extent to which they can be considered natural kinds. It is argued that we should not be too pessimistic, but that there is indeed reason for concern. To illustrate this, a case is made that the measurement of homophobia is inflated as a result of the normative dimension of this kind. (shrink)

This thesis examines some of the legal philosophical issues that are implicated in the problem of outcome luck. In the context of criminal law, the problem asks whether we should hold agents criminally liable for the consequences of their actions given that those consequences are never wholly within anyone’s control. I conclude that outcomes should matter to an agent’s liability and punishment, and I make this argument indirectly by examining some of the foundational questions in legal theory. The (...) class='Hi'>thesis begins by considering a current trend in some areas of philosophy. This trend involves attempts to address philosophical problems surrounding luck by doing conceptual analyses on the nature of luck. Chapter 1 critically examines modal theories, which conceptualize luck, as well as the related concept of risk, in terms of close possible worlds rather than probabilistic likelihood. I argue that not only are modal theories uninformative, but conceptual analyses on luck are unhelpful in addressing philosophical questions surrounding luck. Chapter 2 then returns to the traditional notion of luck as lack of control, and focuses on the relationship between luck, risk, and culpability. Some theorists argue that culpability, for any offence, is in part a function of the degree of risk the agent imposes on others. In the context of criminal law, degrees of luck and risk can both be understood in terms of degrees of control, so the suggestion that culpability is a function of the level of risk imposed (and thus of the degree of control an agent exercises) is attractive for insulating culpability judgments from luck. However, I argue that this view is mistaken because culpability is only sensitive to risk in reckless actions, but not in purposeful actions. The problem of outcome luck may raise different questions for reckless actions and purposeful actions. Chapter 3 looks at the mens rea element of criminal attempts, which is crucial for understanding the problem of luck in the context of purposeful actions. I discuss a variation of what are sometimes referred to as impossible attempts, which have helped shape current English law. I argue that the current doctrine is largely correct, and that perhaps with the exception of few paradigm sexual offences, the mens rea element for attempts should require a direct intention as to the consequence element of an offence, and knowledge or belief as to the circumstance element of that offence. Chapters 4 and 5 then look at normative justifications of criminal punishment. In order to understand whether outcomes should matter for punishment, we must first understand whether and why punishment is an appropriate response to criminal offending. Here, I defend a communicative theory, where punishment is a communicative process between the offender, the political community, and the victim. What punishment communicates is the appropriate degree of censure that is warranted in response to the offender’s wrongdoing. And in doing this, it publicly recognizes the wrong that has been committed by the offender. Chapter 4 offers a detailed explanation of this account, and argues that the political community’s recognition of wrongdoing is a valuable aim of communication. Chapter 5 then takes up a crucial challenge against communicative theories of punishment, which is that such theories fail to take crime prevention seriously. Against this criticism, I will show that general prevention can in fact be an essential part of communicative punishment. And I will show that it is specifically the political community’s recognition of wrongdoing that entails punishment’s preventive aims. (shrink)

Responsibilist epistemic virtues, such as intellectual humility, thoroughness, and inquisitiveness, motivate and inform behaviour to acquire, assess, and share epistemic goods. While existing accounts primarily emphasise the virtues' role in knowledge acquisition, I argue for casting a wider net by redefining responsibilist virtues in their connection to wisdom. I draw upon Sosa's AAA structure of competence – which he employs to support the direct and constitutive relation between reliabilist virtues (e.g., memory and perception) and knowledge – proposing that the same (...) structure can be applied to responsibilist virtues, establishing their direct and constitutive relation to wisdom. The resulting framework provides us with an account of how epistemic agents can responsibly engage with our current sociotechnical environment. The first half of the thesis establishes this framework, arguing for its implementation. The value of this framework is, in part, its ability to uphold the claim that responsibilist virtues are admirable traits of character that aid one’s epistemically responsible engagement with the environment. The AAA structure of competence entails that a performance is Adroit, i.e., resulting from a reliable competence, Accurate, whereby the performance hits the intended target or the functional goal given the competence, and Apt, whereby it is Accurate as it is Adroit. Applying this to responsibilist virtue, an act is adroit when it results from an acquired, admirable, epistemically motivated, and stable disposition to perform behaviour characteristic of the relevant intellectual virtue. This act is accurate when it is successfully virtuous, i.e., admirable. Within this framework, an act from an admirable, virtuous disposition (i.e., an adroit act) can fail to be virtuous by undermining another virtue, or successfully virtuous when it does not. An apt act of intellectual virtue is thereby an act performed from an intellectual virtue (e.g., attentiveness or intellectual humility), that is admirable because it is adroit (e.g., as it was performed from a virtuous disposition to be attentive or intellectually humble, without the act undermining another virtue). The second half of the thesis applies this framework to various phenomena within the digital epistemic environment. It explores how increasingly prevalent epistemic emotions, such as an epistemic fear of missing out (epistemic FOMO) and morbid curiosity, can shape epistemic behaviour to be unwise, despite the knowledge one may acquire through acts motivated by these emotions. For example, ‘doombehaviour’ – entailing the frequent or long-lasting consumption of distressing news – is examined in light of its impact on mental health and other prudential concerns. Moreover, our digital environment supplies us with novel epistemic responsibilities in relation to consuming attention-grabbing information, as well as inadvertently distributing misinformation. By applying the framework of apt intellectually virtuous action on these and similar phenomena, we can give an account of wise engagement with our sociotechnical environment. (shrink)

In this dissertation I defend the claim, long held by Donald Davidson, that truth is a primitive concept that cannot be correctly or informatively defined in terms of more basic concepts. To this end I articulate the history of the primitive thesis in the 20th century, working through early Moore, Russell, and Frege, and provide improved interpretations of their reasons for advancing and eventually abandoning the primitive thesis. I show the importance of slingshot-style arguments in the work (...) of Frege, Church, Davidson, and Gödel for resisting certain versions of the correspondence theory of truth. I argue that most slingshots fail to convincingly establish a collapsing conclusion, but that a Gödelian version of the slingshot is terminal to certain varieties of the correspondence theory of truth. I then provide a Davidsonian theory of truth and interpretation that is consistent with and makes use of the primitive thesis. Finally, I provide an account of predication, properties, and universals that I argue is both serviceable and consistent with Davidson’s overall program. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 123-124 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Textes philosophiques: conclusions philosophiques. Dissertation en deux parties sur la vision des vérités en Dieu et l'amour de la vertu. Régle du bon sens. De la liberté de l'homme Antoine Arnauld. Textes philosophiques: conclusions philosophiques. Dissertation en deux parties sur la vision des vérités en Dieu et l'amour de la vertu. Régle (...) du bon sens. De la liberté de l'homme. Épiméthée. Translated by Denis Moreau. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001. Pp. xi + 333. Cloth, FF 198.00. This collection should prove useful to anyone doing research on Antoine Arnauld, or more generally on philosophical theology in seventeenth-century France. The collection contains excellent French translations of three Latin texts, and a scholarly, if not critical, edition of a fourth text that appeared originally in French. They are accompanied by helpful [End Page 123] introductions and copious scholarly notes. A bibliography of 533 secondary works on Arnauld is provided.Studies of Arnauld's philosophy have concentrated on his polemics with Malebranche and Leibniz. Moreau suggests that Arnauld's philosophy is worth studying in its own right, and the texts he has selected provide a start for such a study. The first text, Conclusiones Philosophicae, is a set of theses composed by Arnauld for defense by one of his students in 1641, when Arnauld himself was twenty-nine years old. It is our only record of Arnauld's early philosophical thought. Moreau points out that Conclusiones anticipates themes developed by Arnauld during the rest of his long career, and that the text is also valuable as an indicator of the sort of philosophical questions being discussed in Paris at the time that Descartes wrote the Meditations. The original Latin and Moreau's French translation are given on facing pages.The second and third texts in the collection, Dissertatio Bipartita and Régles du Bon Sens, were parts of a debate within Jansenist circles near the end of Arnauld's life. Arnauld's friend, and his collaborator in the Port-Royal Logic, Pierre Nicole, had introduced into Port-Royal the speculation that every human being receives a "grace générale" that makes it possible for her to perform morally good actions. Arnauld attacked this theory in the late 1680s. Given the Augustinian assumption that an action is morally good only if it is directed to God as the agent's final end, and given that some people have never thought about God, the theory of a grace générale raised a philosophical question: How could someone who has no knowledge of God act out of the love of God? Nicole's answer was that the grace générale given to every human being brings with it a sort of implicit, confused, and imperceptible knowledge and love of God. In defense of this answer, Nicole refers to a thesis written by the Louvain theologian Gommaire Huygens, also a friend of Arnauld's, and defended by one of Huygens's students in 1688. Huygens says that anyone who has knowledge of a necessary and immutable truth sees that truth "in the first and uncreated truth, which is God," and that anyone who loves chastity or any other moral virtue, by that very fact loves "the eternal reason of chastity, which is in God." These positions seemed to support the notion that everyone might have an implicit knowledge and love of God even if some have never consciously thought about God. Arnauld attacked these claims in 1692 in his Latin Dissertatio bipartita, of which Moreau provides a French translation. Nicole was impressed and disturbed by the Dissertatio, confessing that he did not know how to respond. He asked another mutual friend of his and Arnauld's, the Benedictine François Lamy, to answer Arnauld. In reply to Lamy, Arnauld wrote... (shrink)

Classifications are useful and efficient. We group things into kinds to facilitate the acquisition and transmission of important, often tacit, information about a particular entity qua member of some kind. Whilst it is universally acknowledged that classifications are useful, some scientific classifications (e.g. chemical elements) are held to higher epistemic standards than folk classifications (e.g. bugs). Scientific classifications in terms of ‘natural kinds’ are considered to be more reliable and successful because they are highly projectible and support law-like and inductive (...) generalisations. What counts as a natural kind is, however, controversial: according to essentialists (e.g. Putnam, Kripke, Ellis) natural kinds are mind-independent and possess essential characteristics; according to promiscuous realists (e.g. Dupre ) there are ‘countless legitimate, objectively grounded ways of classifying objects in the world’; and according to scientific realists (e.g. Boyd, Psillos) natural kinds are grounded in the ‘causal structure of the world’. More specifically, realism about kinds can be understood as a commitment to the existence of natural divisions (kinds) in the world that we come to know as a result of mature scientific investigation into the nature of such kinds. Realism about natural kinds is supported and articulated in terms of three main arguments, metaphysical, semantical, and epistemological. In the first part of my thesis I offer a sustained and systematic investigation of these three main arguments, with their respective promises and prospects for the viability of realism about kinds and I find them wanting, whilst in the second part of the thesis I pursue an unexplored line of inquiry regarding natural kinds and propose a mild realism about natural kinds via the ontology of real patterns. (shrink)

Computationalism says that brains are computing mechanisms, that is, mechanisms that perform computations. At present, there is no consensus on how to formulate computationalism precisely or adjudicate the dispute between computationalism and its foes, or between different versions of computationalism. An important reason for the current impasse is the lack of a satisfactory philosophical account of computing mechanisms. The main goal of this dissertation is to offer such an account.
I also believe that the history of computationalism sheds light on (...) the current debate. By tracing different versions of computationalism to their common historical origin, we can see how the current divisions originated and understand their motivation. Reconstructing debates over computationalism in the context of their own intellectual history can contribute to philosophical progress on the relation between brains and computing mechanisms and help determine how brains and computing mechanisms are alike, and how they differ. Accordingly, my dissertation is divided into a historical part, which traces the early history of computationalism up to 1946, and a philosophical part, which offers an account of computing mechanisms.
The two main ideas developed in this dissertation are that (1) computational states are to be identified functionally not semantically, and (2) computing mechanisms are to be studied by functional analysis. The resulting account of computing mechanism, which I call the functional account of computing mechanisms, can be used to identify computing mechanisms and the functions they compute. I use the functional account of computing mechanisms to taxonomize computing mechanisms based on their different computing power, and I use this taxonomy of computing mechanisms to taxonomize different versions of computationalism based on the functional properties that they ascribe to brains. By doing so, I begin to tease out empirically testable statements about the functional organization of the brain that different versions of computationalism are committed to. I submit that when computationalism is reformulated in the more explicit and precise way I propose, the disputes about computationalism can be adjudicated on the grounds of empirical evidence from neuroscience. (shrink)

We can think about ourselves in a variety of ways, but only some of the thoughts that we entertain about ourselves will be thoughts which we know concern ourselves. I call these first-person thoughts, and the component of such thoughts that picks out the object about which one is thinking—oneself—the self-concept. In this thesis I am concerned with providing an account of the content of the self-concept. The challenge is to provide an account that meets two conditions on first-person (...) thought. The account must show how we are aware of ourselves when we entertain first-person thoughts, so that we have an account that establishes the cognitive significance of first-person thoughts. But, in addition, this awareness must be as robust as the thinker’s ability to entertain first-person thoughts if our account is to respect the guaranteed referential success of the self-concept. I introduce both the subject matter of the thesis, and the constraints on a satisfactory account of that subject matter in the first chapter. In the second chapter I then set up a further problem: much of our self-knowledge is knowledge of our current mental states and it is often argued that we know about and can ascribe those mental states on the basis of introspection alone. The first constraint on an account of first-person thought described in the preceding paragraph requires that we be aware of ourselves in some way if our thoughts are to have the special cognitive significance of first-person thoughts. Yet, I argue, we neither do nor can introspectively observe a subject of thought and experience when we come to know about our mental states and experiences. The failure of introspection to supply us with perceptual information about a subject of thought presents us with the further potential problem. According to Fregean semantics sense determines reference: we count on the content of the elements of thought to determine the reference of terms that are used to express those elements. If we do not introspectively observe a subject of thought then we seem to be at a loss to account for the concept and we are at risk of having to accept that neither the self-concept nor the first-person pronoun are referential. In the remainder of my thesis I consider various responses that we can offer to this problem. First, I examine whether we can avoid the problem with an alternative account of first-person reference according to which reference is fixed by a reflexive rule, and whether we can also base an account of first-person thought on this account of first-person reference. Secondly, I look at the descriptivist view of first-person thought which could potentially provide both an account of first-person thought and first-person reference. These two suggestions must be rejected on the grounds that they fail to accommodate the special cognitive significance of first-person thought. A third approach to first-person thought argues that we employ an objective self-concept when we think about ourselves, a concept that is informed by bodily experience, rather than by introspective observation of a subject. Yet such an account cannot make sense of first-person thoughts in which we question our own embodiment. Lastly I consider whether it is possible to explain the cognitive significance of first-person thought in terms of non-conceptual first-person contents. (shrink)

While the search for scientific measures, models and explanations of consciousness is currently a growing area of research, this thesis identifies a series of methodological problems with the field that suggest that ‘consciousness’ is not in fact a viable scientific concept. This eliminativist stance is supported by assessing the current theories and methods of consciousness science on their own grounds, and by applying frameworks and criteria for ‘good’ scientific practice from philosophy of science. A central problem consists in the (...) way that qualitative difference and dissociation paradigms are misused in order to identify measures of consciousness. Another problem concerns the wide range of experimental protocols used to operationalise consciousness and the implications this has on the findings of integrative approaches across behavioural and neurophysiological research. Following from this the way that mechanisms of consciousness have been inadequately demarcated, and how this affects whether ‘consciousness’ refers to any scientific kinds, is discussed. A final problem is the significant mismatch that exists between the common intuitions and phenomenological claims about the content of consciousness that motivate much current consciousness science, and the properties of neural processes that underlie sensory and cognitive phenomena.It is argued that the failure of these methods to be appropriately applied to the concept of consciousness, both in particular cases, and in the way that these methods fail to fulfil their crucial heuristic role in the practise of science, suggests that the concept of ‘consciousness’ should be eliminated from scientific discourse. Aside from the purely negative claim found in eliminativist accounts, the strong empirical grounding of this eliminativist claim also allows positive characterisations to be made about the products of the current science of consciousness, to (re-)identify real target phenomena and valid research questions for the mind sciences, and to suggest how the intuitions that ground the confused research program on consciousness result from real features of our cognitive architecture. (shrink)

I aim to analyze in this dissertation what a desirable basic institutional structure looks like from the perspective of rationality. While the main topic is thus normative in nature, I start by clarifying in the first part what the notion of rationality exactly entails. I do so by focusing explicitly on the economic conception of rationality, according to which a rational individual is motivated to serve his self-interest on the basis of cost-benefit calculations. Such a Homo Economicus is characterized (...) by his intentional and instrumental actions, his perfectly informed beliefs and his exogenously given and egoistic preferences. In my view, however, this model is inadequate if one aims to understand what it means to be rational. The requirements that actions should be instrumental, beliefs should be based on perfect information and preferences should be exogenously given and egoistic in nature turn out to be overly demanding in this respect. That is why I propose to drop these assumptions in what I label the minimal conception of rationality. Since the latter turns out to be very formal indeed, I propose two further alternatives, which focus not so much on the choice of means to achieve certain goals, as they focus on the choice of these goals themselves. According to the first, broad conception, actions are rational if they are based on good reasons, which are further qualified as well-informed beliefs and autonomous preferences. According to the second, expressive conception, actions, beliefs and preferences are rational if they express the things the individual at hand cares about. The latter requires that individuals can reflect upon and identify with their reasons, which implies a capacity to reflect upon and distance themselves from their own bundle of preferences. In the second part of this dissertation, I try to show the value and limitations of these conceptions by applying them to the context of large-scaled elections. In this respect, it becomes immediately clear that the economic conception fails to explain why quite a lot of people go out and vote. After all, since a single vote has only an infinitesimal impact on the electoral result, it does not enable people to serve their interests or realize their goals. This leads to the so-called voting paradox, according to which no rational individual will decide to vote. The standard solution is to assume that individuals vote because they derive satisfaction from the very act itself. However, this strategy is rather ‘ad hoc’ and does not explain how people vote once they find themselves inside the voting booth. The expressive conception of rationality does better in this respect. It suggests that people vote because they care about democracy in general or about a specific political candidate or ideology. Since they conceive of themselves as being a good citizen, they express this aspect of their identity by going out to vote. In the third part of this dissertation, I analyze more fully the normative implications of the different conceptions of rationality. More specifically, I try to answer the question which basic institutional structure is desirable if one assumes that people are by and large rational. This immediately shows that both the normative issue and the explanatory issue are closely connected. In my view, proposals regarding institutional design and reform should be based on empirically adequate models of individual actions and motivations. This search for a realistic utopia goes against the conventional strategy of most economists. They rely on the Homo Economicus model, even if this fails to explain individual behavior. To explain more fully what the normative implications are of the counterfactual assumption that all people are economically rational, I focus on the work of James Buchanan. In his theory of constitutional choice, he argues in favor of a minimal state whose only task is to make sure that the market functions properly. Buchanan thus favors strict constitutional limitations for governments, which tend to expand beyond legitimate borders as soon as politicians and public servants are allowed to serve their own interests. In my view, however, the abovementioned criticisms of the Homo Economicus model have theoretical as well as normative implications. After all, the empirically supported fact that a majority of individuals does not act in economically rational ways creates more room for legitimate government intervention. Expressively rational citizens will, for example, more easily agree on the necessity and desirability of a collective provision of certain public goods. In addition, expressively rational politicians and public servants can be more easily trusted to serve the public interest rather than their narrowly defined self-interest. As an alternative to Buchanan’s one-sided focus on economic rationality and the market, I focus on the work of Samuel Bowles en Herbert Gintis. More specifically, I explore their work on the phenomenon of strong reciprocity, which refers to the widespread tendency of people to reward prosocial behavior and punish antisocial behavior, even if this is costly for themselves. Since this is clearly economically irrational, Bowles and Gintis propose to complement the Homo Economicus model with the Homo Reciprocans model. This model, which comes close to the expressive conception of rationality, is able to incorporate the insight that social norms surrounding reciprocity, cooperation and fairness are crucial in regulating interactions. At the normative level, Bowles and Gintis stress that such norms often lead to socially desirable outcomes, since they enable people to live in harmony without relying on coercive and costly government interventions. This suggests that the debate between proponents of the market on the one hand and the state on the other hand neglects the importance of communities where people spontaneously interact on the basis of generally prosocial norms. As such, the insights of Bowles and Gintis lead to a defense of a basic institutional structure in which markets, states and communities mutually complement and reinforce each other. They also justify a general optimism as regards to the capacity and motivation of people to try and improve the rules and institutions that govern their everyday lives. (shrink)

This dissertation offers a critical discussion of the prioritisation of ‘the right’ in John Rawls’s theory of justice. Rawls’s theory of justice – ‘justice as fairness’ – is arguably one of the best illustrations of the prioritisation of ‘the right’ in current political literature. However, his theory has been criticised by a diversity of thinkers for its implied structural relation between ‘the right’ and ‘the good’. Some theorists argue that conceptually ‘the good’ can never be derived from ‘the right’; (...) others argue that, even if it were possible, the social implications of such a conceptualisation would devastating as it would result in a so-called “community of strangers” (Rorty 1988, 273). In this dissertation, I argue that be on the one hand, theories that prioritise ‘the right’– such as ‘justice as fairness’ – enable the attractive possibility of the multiple coexistence of ‘comprehensive goods’. This is attractive as it upholds the liberating ethos: ‘I have the freedom to determine my own ends’. This possibility is attributed to the fact of neutrality, which characterises the priority of ‘the right’. The claim of neutrality is embedded in the ideal that political principles can be developed prior to and independently of any content of ‘the good’. This is then supposed to justify the claim that political principles are non-reliant on comprehensive moral ideals. In this way, the prioritisation of ‘the right’, as evident in ‘justice as fairness’, supposedly enables citizens to construct impartial universal principles that govern their society. Yet, on the other hand, I question the degree of neutrality present in ‘justice as fairness’. I argue that ‘justice as fairness’, although its justification is independent of a singular moral truth, is not neutral concerning ‘the good’. In fact, the moral values encapsulated in the priority of ‘the right’, I argue, set the conditions of justification of all doctrines of ‘the good’ because any idea of ‘the good’ that embodies contradictory values to those encapsulated in the priority of ‘the right’ would necessarily be excluded from a Rawlsian society. Therefore, I argue that Rawls’s theory of justice cannot be said to take into account “a diversity of conflicting and irreconcilable yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines” (Rawls 2001, 34); as moral values are already implied in the prioritising of ‘the right’. In light of how Rawls’s theory of justice is simultaneously neutral and prescriptive regarding ‘the good’, I suggest a re-problematisation of the debate on the relationship between ‘the right’ and ‘the good’. The literature on theories that prioritise ‘the right’ or ‘the good’ seems to imply such theories either embody the one or the other methodological approach. I argue that this debate has been presented as a false dichotomy and, as such, the debate itself seems to be exhausted, because it creates a kind of natural impasse. Therefore, I suggest recasting the debate in terms of representing ‘the right’ and ‘the good’ as two methodological positions on a continuum, that are at the same time both more or less gradually similar and divergent from one another. The purpose of this continuum is to demonstrate that notions such as neutrality, objectivity and comprehensiveness are not clear-cut. (shrink)

The Ethics of Economic Sanctions Economic sanctions involve the politically motivated withdrawal of customary trade or financial relations from a state, organisation or individual. They may be imposed by the United Nations, regional governmental organisations such as the European Union, or by states acting alone. Although economic sanctions have long been a feature of international … Continue reading Ethics of Economic Sanctions →.

The aim of the present work is to make a plausible case for the phylogenetic origin of self-knowledge, one which is compatible with a prevalent view about its ontogenetic origin, the social-scaffolding view. Essentially, the phylogenetic origin is generally argued to be evaluative metacognition, i.e. a system of cognitive control mechanisms, while the ontogenetic origin is generally argued to be mindreading, i.e. cognitive capacities supporting mental state attribution. So put simply, the present work aims to provide a plausible solution to (...) the problem of how to establish metacognition as a significant precursor to mindreading. Previous attempts to establish metacognition as an evolutionary precursor to mindreading have struggled to account for the exact relevance that metacognition has for the origin of self-knowledge. This present work analyses this struggle as first having to solve ‘the problem of triviality’, explain how metacognitive mechanisms are more sophisticated than mechanisms enabling basic cognitive feats. Once this problem is solved, however, the problem develops into having to show that the added layers of sophistication warrant construing metacognition as a significant precursor to self-knowledge. This latter problem is analysed as the ultimate problem, referred to here as simply ‘the problem of the origin of self-knowledge’. Thus, the present work seeks to offer a plausible solution to both of these problems. The solution to these problems is argued to be embodied metacognition, cognitive control mechanisms that enable conscious self-control of information-seeking behavior through the production of strongly embodied feedback signals. These feedback signals, often called ‘noetic feelings’, are theorized to motivate, demotivate, and guide cognitive acts to be more accurate. Here it is argued that these signals are strongly embodied, characterizing conscious emotional states constituted by psychological imperatives, states with external manifestations in the form of bodily expressions that can be detected, monitored, and regulated by individuals in the subject’s socio-cultural environment. To argue for this, I augment evaluative metacognition in light of evidence from recent interoception-based research in metacognition which reveals the degree to which noetic feelings are strongly embodied. They are thus argued to be cerebrally generated feedback signals produced by cognitive comparators that become intricately intertwined with bodily processes. Recent evidence suggests these signals come to fulfill their role in cognition through the conscious perception (the interoception) of internal bodily changes, specifically cardiovascular changes, and hence the subtitle of the present work, “How We Feel Our Hearts to Know Our Minds”. Reconceptualizing evaluative metacognition as embodied metacognition provides us with the tools for solving the two problems above. Concerning the first, mechanisms enabling conscious self-control of cognition are clearly more sophisticated than mechanisms that enable basic feats of cognition, such as reinforcement learning. Moreover, appealing to strongly embodied noetic feelings offers the possibility of solving the first problem in such a manner that the second problem is also solved. As conscious expressions of emotions, noetic feelings demand robust information-seeking behaviours and manifest feelings of confidence and uncertainty externally, thus they are well-suited to link metacognition to the social-scaffolding view about the origin of self-knowledge. (shrink)

In this thesis I develop an account of how processes of social understanding are implicated in experiences of mental disorder, critiquing the lack of examination of this phenomena along the way. First, I demonstrate how disorder concepts, as developed and deployed by psychiatric institutions, have the effect of shaping the cognition of individuals with psychopathology through setting expectations. Such expectation-setting can be harmful in some cases, I argue, and can perpetuate epistemic injustices. Having developed this view, I criticise enactive (...) accounts of mental disorder for failing to consider how such terms like ‘dysfunction’ are open to interpretation and can come embedded with normative expectations. Enactive accounts consequently run the risk of perpetuating injustices in their account of the sociality of mental disorder. Similar concerns arise when we consider the attachment of enactivism to the medical model, I argue. But by adapting enactivism to consider other experiences of disorder, such as those described as ‘madness’, enactive psychiatry may genuinely provide ethical groundwork for a better conception of disordered experience. Then, I consider a further concern with a distinctly medicalised conception of mental disorder from the perspective of self-illness ambiguity, arguing that self-illness ambiguities appear to form a special class of ambiguities due to their proximity to disorder concepts which mark them as appropriate targets for therapeutic treatment. However, I argue further that we should be critical of the idea that self-illness ambiguities necessitate disambiguation, as, in cases where self and illness are demarcated, individuals may still experience distress because simply having a mental disorder can be socially alienating. The medicalised focus in self-illness ambiguity, and the explicit need from the medical perspective to disambiguate it, might then exacerbate the distress someone experiences in mental disorder. Moreover, drawing on Mad Studies, I suggest that one might not need a coherent self-narrative to live well. Because of this, one may not need to adopt a medicalised view of the self in the case of selfillness ambiguity. In order to support this analysis, I provide a phenomenological account of language and argue that the very thoughts implicated in mental disorder shape the individual’s perception of the world due to the way that language foregrounds particular aspects of our world. This demands a critical examination of the language adopted and used by both clinicians and disordered individuals. I thus conclude with some thoughts on how to approach research and developing understanding of mental disorder given that we, as people, are always implicated in this process and therefore socialisation of some kind will always be taking place. (shrink)

Cognitive abilities have been invoked to do much work in externalist epistemology. An ability condition (sometimes in conjunction with a separate, anti-luck condition) is seen to be key in satisfying direction-of-fit and modal stability intuitions which attach to the accrual of positive epistemic status to doxastic attitudes. While the notion of ability has been given some extensive treatment in the literature (especially John Greco, Alan Millar and Ernest Sosa), the implications for these abilities being particularly cognitive ones has been given (...) less attention. To rectify this oversight, I examine the debate over the nature of cognition from philosophy of cognitive science, paying particular attention to the debate between defenders of internalist theories (Fred Adams, Kenneth Aizawa and Rob Rupert) and externalist theories (so-called “extended mind” positions). Armed with substantive accounts of cognition, I argue that the epistemological externalist’s obligation to repudiate epistemological internalism forces her to adopt some sort of externalist account of cognition. (shrink)

In his dialogues, Plato presents different ways in which to understand the relation between Forms and particulars. In the Symposium, we are presented with yet another, hitherto unidentified Form-particular relation: the relation is Love (Erôs), which binds together Form and particular in a generative manner, fulfilling all the metaphysical requirements of the individual’s qualification by participation. Love in relation to the beautiful motivates human action to desire for knowledge of the Form, resulting in the lover actively cultivating and bringing into (...) being new beauty in the world, and in herself. Chapters 1 and 2 of this thesis offer a survey of the arguments and examples Plato puts forward in the text of the corpus regarding the nature of Forms and the nature of participation, alongside a framework of the traditional interpretations of these two Platonic concepts in the literature. Chapter 3 turns to a close examination of Erôs in the Symposium, arguing that the love Plato presents in this dialogue is of a different sort than appetitive emotion. It is an aesthetic and intellectual attraction, capable of stimulating cognitive achievement. Erôs, however, does not stop there. The lover is led not only to contemplation of beauty, but to the generation of beauty, which is the subject of Chapter 4. The emotive-turn-to-cognitive relation of Erôs, I argue, is the clearest picture Plato paints of how possession of properties can be explained through participation in Forms. Erôs leads the lover to produce beauty in the world and in the soul, which explains how love in relation to the beautiful can lead to becoming beautiful. The object of love is the generation of beauty, the mortal mechanism of participation in the Form by which the lover herself becomes beautiful. Finally, Chapter 5 focusses on beauty itself and its role in moral education. Beauty, for Plato, is required for creative generation and can be understood as a uniquely powerful virtue of soul. (shrink)

This book provides students with a concise introduction to the philosophy of methodology. The book stands apart from existing methodology texts by clarifying in a student-friendly and engaging way distinctions between philosophical positions, paradigms of inquiry, methodology and methods. Building an understanding of the relationships and distinctions between philosophical positions and paradigms is an essential part of the research process and integral to deploying the methodology and methods best suited for a research project, thesis or dissertation.

(Spanish) RESUMEN: La libertad absoluta postulada por Viktor Emil Frankl y Jean-Paul Sartre, la Shoah y la creencia en un dios omnipotente, bueno y justo parecen contradecirse. La pregunta por el sentido del sufrimiento de las víctimas del Holocausto (la verdadera catástrofe, el mayor crimen contra la humanidad), simbolizado por Auschwitz, y como punto de inflexión en la historia, es terriblemente dolorosa y parece no tener una respuesta filosófica ni teológica. A mi juicio, es importantísimo distinguir entre las víctimas inocentes (...) de la Shoah que perecieron y las víctimas inocentes que sufrieron un verdadero infierno y perdieron a sus seres queridos, pero que lograron sobrevivir. Ambas son víctimas, por supuesto, pero así como encontrarle un posible sentido al sufrimiento de las víctimas masacradas y gaseadas podría suponer un insulto a su sufrimiento y agonía –en especial, al horror que sufrieron los niños–, el horrible sufrimiento de los supervivientes pudo dar, tal vez, de alguna manera, un sentido a sus vidas después de la liberación de los campos de concentración y exterminio, ya fuera como voz, como protesta o como simple supervivencia. Frankl apuesta por un sentido último (que abraza el sentido del sufrimiento de las víctimas), y Sartre, aunque parezca no apostar por sentido alguno, volcó su vida al compromiso político después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, y ello parece vislumbrar una minúscula pizca de sentido después de la barbarie. La filosofía de Frankl es un sí a la vida incluso en las situaciones más extremas, un grito casi nietzscheano que exalta el valor de la vida más allá de cualquier sufrimiento. Frankl, padre de la logoterapia y superviviente del Holocausto, abre una puerta a Dios al hablar de un dios inconsciente, una dimensión suprahumana y una fe incondicional, y define la religión como espiritualidad y como la búsqueda del hombre por el sentido último. Según Frankl, la libertad no se contradice con Dios, y la religión existe no a raíz de la barbarie, sino a pesar de la barbarie. El existencialismo sartreano es una filosofía de la libertad radical y de la responsabilidad. El hombre está condenado a ser libre. El ser humano es un ser en el que la existencia precede a la esencia. Somos totalmente responsables de lo que somos. Sartre afirma que la libertad humana es incompatible con Dios. En un mundo sin Dios, la moral la construyen los hombres, con sus propias decisiones y sus acciones, y la existencia y el sufrimiento de las víctimas no tienen sentido alguno. Sartre define al hombre como libertad, responsabilidad, angustia y contingencia. Frankl define al hombre como libertad, responsabilidad, espiritualidad y búsqueda de sentido. Con esta tesis me propongo entrar en la resbaladiza dimensión del dolor, la desesperación, el sentido y sinsentido del sufrimiento de las víctimas (teniendo presente los horrores de Auschwitz, que en teología y filosofía ha simbolizado desde la liberación de los campos la muerte de Dios y la muerte de la moral). Es verdad que no solo los hombres, mujeres y niños judíos fueron víctimas de la barbarie alemana, pero, como reza el mensaje de Elie Wiesel en la exposición permanente del Block 27 del Auschwitz-Birkeanu State Museum: "Not all victims were Jewish in this place, but all Jews were victims". La Shoah no es un episodio dentro de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, sino un punto de inflexión en la historia de la humanidad, y es una catástrofe que nos concierne a todos, hombres y mujeres judíos y no judíos, religiosos e irreligiosos, creyentes e increyentes, como seres libres, responsables y morales que somos –o que deberíamos ser. Muchas de las víctimas del Holocausto, en medio de la desesperación, entraron en las cámaras de gas orando, aferrándose a la esperanza de que ese final espeluznante no era un punto final. Con esta tesis no me propongo de ninguna manera responder a la eterna pregunta de si Dios existe o no, sino que propongo interpretar ese grito hacia Dios como un desesperado anhelo de esperanza. También me propongo encontrar una coherencia en las posturas de estos dos grandes pensadores para quienes la libertad y la responsabilidad definen al hombre: Frankl (quien apuesta por una dimensión suprahumana donde existe un sentido último en el que el sufrimiento de las víctimas tiene que tener algún sentido, aunque ese sentido sea completamente incomprensible en la dimensión humana) y Sartre (el existencialista ateo por excelencia, para quien el mundo, la existencia y el sufrimiento son absolutamente contingentes). En el primer capítulo expongo la logoterapia y el existencialismo sartreano: describo las tres dimensiones del hombre y las tres búsquedas de sentido propuestas por Frankl, y expongo las cinco consecuencias de "l'existence précède l'essence", centrándome en la libertad y la responsabilidad, y hablo del suicidio. El segundo capítulo está dedicado al dios inconsciente frankleano, la dimensión suprahumana, la búsqueda por el sentido último y la fe incondicional. En el tercer capítulo ilustro la libertad sin Dios sartreana, la ontología sartreana, el ateísmo sartreano y el humanismo sartreano, y hablo sobre la responsabilidad, la mauvaise foi, la contingencia, la situation y la angustia. El cuarto capítulo es necesariamente histórico (sin dejar de ser filosófico): me pregunto por la muerte de Dios después de Auschwitz, argumento y defiendo la unicidad del Holocausto (la Shoah es un punto de inflexión en la historia de la humanidad), describo las masacres antes de los campos de exterminio (Einsatzgruppen, Ordnungspolizei y Wehrmacht), el gigantesco complejo de Auschwitz (Stammlager, Auschwitz-Birkenau y Monowitz-Buna), reflexiono sobre Dios y el mal (centrándome en los niños de Auschwitz), describo los días de Frankl en Auschwitz, hablo de Dios como esperanza, de la inmortalidad y la escatología, de la crueldad de Dios, de la relación entre el cristianismo y el antisemitismo, del islam y el antisemitismo, critico el silencio de Dios, hablo de la muerte de Dios y del juicio contra Dios. En el quinto capítulo expongo la moral frankleana (una moral que atañe al hombre y no a Dios), basándome en su teoría del amor y en su única obra de teatro (Synchronisation in Binkerwald), y la moral sartreana (una moral que atañe a una humanidad sin Dios), recordando a Dostoyevsky, analizando la famosa cita de Garcin en Huis clos "L'enfer, c'est les Autres", criticando el marxismo de Sartre y cuestionando (con la mirada de Frankl y Sartre) el verso de Brecht "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral"; al final del capítulo incluyo una reflexión propia y las críticas frankleana y sartreana sobre la impunidad de los verdugos y colaboradores después del Holocausto (con el permiso de Dios). Después de la Conclusión, añado un Apéndice sobre las vidas de Frankl y Sartre, para poder entender mejor su obra. PALABRAS CLAVE: logoterapia, existencialismo sartreano, búsqueda de sentido, libertad, responsabilidad, moral, angustia, sufrimiento, supervivientes, víctimas, contingencia, espiritualidad, religión, Dios, esperanza, antisemitismo, culpa, Auschwitz, Holocausto, Shoah. /// (English) ABSTRACT: The absolute freedom defended by Viktor Emil Frankl and Jean-Paul Sartre, the Shoah and the belief in an omnipotent, benevolent and just God seem to contradict each other. The question of the meaning of the victims' suffering of the Holocaust (the true catastrophe, the biggest crime against humanity), simbolised by Auschwitz and as a turning point in History, is terribly painful and doesn't seem to have an answer. In my opinion, it's crucial to distinguish between the innocent victims of the Shoah who perished and the innocent victims who sufferend a real hell and lost their loved ones, but managed to survive. Both are victims, of course, but just as finding a possible meaning to the suffering of the massacred and gassed victims could result in an insult to their suffering and agony –especially to the horror that the children suffered– the gigantic suffering of the survivors could, maybe, somehow, give a meaning to their lives after the liberation of the concentration and extermination camps, either as a voice, as a protest, or as a simple survival. Frankl believes in an ultimate meaning (that embraces the meaning of the victims' suffering), and Sartre, even if it appears not to embrace any meaning, turned his life to political engagement after War World II, and that attitude seems to give a tiny glimpse of meaning after the barbarity. Frankl's philosophy says yes to life even in the most extreme situations, and it's a Nietzschean-like scream that exalts the value of life beyond any monstrous suffering. Frankl, the father of logotherapy and a Holocaust survivor, opens a door to God when he talks about an unconscious God, a supra-human dimension and an unconditional faith; he defines religion as spirituality and as man's search for ultimate meaning. According to Frankl, freedom is not contradictory with God, and religion exists not because of the barbarity but in spite of the barbarity. Sartrean existentialism is a philosophy of radical freedom and responsibility. Men are condemned to be free. We are beings where the existence precedes the essence. We are completely responsible of what we are. Sartre argues that human freedom is incompatible with God. In a godless world, morality is constructed by people, with their own choices and actions, and human existence and the suffering of the victims don't have any meaning. Sartre defines man as freedom, responsibility, Angst and contingency. Frankl defines man as freedom, responsibility, spirituality and search for meaning. With this dissertation I attempt to enter in the slippery dimension of the pain, despair, meaning and meaninglessness of the victims' suffering (having in mind the horrors of Auschwitz, that in theology and in philosophy have simbolised, since the liberation of the camps, the death of God and the death of morality). It's true that not only Jewish men, women and children were victims of the German barbarity, but, as Elie Wiesel's message from the permanent exhibition from Block 27 of the Auschwitz-Birkeanu State Museum reads: "Not all victims were Jewish in this place, but all Jews were victims". The Shoah is not an episode inside War World II, but a turning point in the history of humankind, and a catastrophe that embraces us all, Jewish and not not Jewish men and women, religious and not religious, believers and not believers, as the free, responsible and moral beings that we all are –or that we should be. A lot of the victims, in the midst of their desperation, entered into the gas chambers praying, holding to the hope that their horrifying end was not the ultimate end. With this dissertation I do not attempt to answer the eternal question of the existence of God, rather, I will try to interpret that scream to God as a longing for hope. I also intend to find a coherence between the thought of these two great thinkers for whom freedom and responsibilty define man: Frankl (who argues that there is a suprahuman dimension where an ultimate meaning exists and where the victims' suffering has to have a meaning, even if this meaning is completely incomprehensible in the human dimension) and Sartre (the atheist existentialist par excellence, for whom the world, human existence and suffering are absolutely contingent). In the first chapter I expose logotherapy and Sartrean existentialism: I describe the three dimensions of man, the three searches for meaning, the five consequences of "l'existence précède l'essence" and I speak about suicide. The second chapter delves into the unconscious God, the supra-human dimension, the ultimate meaning and the unconditional faith. In the third chapter I expose the freedom without God defended by Sartre, Sartre's ontology, Sartre's atheism, Sartre's humanism, and his ideas about responsibility, mauvaise foi, contingency, situation, and Angst. The fourth chapter is necessarily historical (while being philosophical too): I wonder about the death of God after Auschwitz, I argue and defend the uniqueness of the Holocaust (the Shoah is a turning point in the history of humankind), I describe the massacres before the extermination camps (Einsatzgruppen, Ordnungspolizei y Wehrmacht), the gigantic Auschwitz camp complex (Stammlager, Auschwitz-Birkenau y Monowitz-Buna), I reflect on God and evil (focusing on the children of Auschwitz), I describe Frankl's days in Auschwitz, I talk about God as hope, about immortality and escathology, I discuss God's cruelty, the relationship between Christianity and antisemitism and Islam and antisemitism, I question the silence of God, and I talk about the death of God and about the trial against God. In the fifth chapter I talk about the Franklean morality (a morality that concerns man and not God), on the basis of his love theory and his only work of theater (Synchronisation in Binkerwald), and the Sartrean morality (a morality that concerns a humanity without God), remembering Dostoyevsky, analysing Garcin's famous quote in Huis clos "L'enfer, c'est les Autres", crticizing Sartre's marxism and questioning (with Frankl's and Sartre's eyes) Brecht's verse "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral"; at the end of the chapter I include my own reflection (and Frankl and Sartre's critique) about the impunity of the executioners and collaborators after the Holocaust (with God's permission). After the Conclusion, I add an Appendix about the lives of Frankl and Sartre, which helps understanding better their work. KEYWORDS: logotherapy, existentialism, search for meaning, freedom, responsibility, morality, Angst, suffering, survivors, victims, contingency, spirituality, religion, God, hope, antisemitism, guilt, Auschwitz, Holocaust, Shoah. (shrink)

One of the earliest refutations of the Visum et Repertum (1732) by Johann Flückinger was from Johann Wilhelm Nöbling, a young student of philosophy and theology at the University of Jena, who attacked the findings from a position of scientific scepticism enshrouded with Lutheran theology in his thesis Concerning the Blood-Sucking Corpses of those so-called Vampires or People-Suckers. While he is best remembered for first proposing the incubus or nightmare of sleep paralysis as being the real cause of the (...) superstition, his major contribution was theological, concerning the relation between body and soul. And yet while Nöbling provides a rigorous, scripture-based denial of vampirism, his framework necessarily accommodates contemporary medical theory, demonstrating both the adaptation of theology to science and the extent to which pneumatology still inhered in scientific enquiry. (shrink)

Much of the literature directed at the Extended Mind Thesis has revolved around parity issues, focussing on the problem of how to individuate the functional roles and on the relevance of these roles for the production of human intelligent behaviour. Proponents of EMT have famously claimed that we shouldn’t take the location of a process as a reliable indicator of the mechanisms that support our cognitive behaviour. This functionalist understanding of cognition has however been challenged by opponents of EMT (...) [such as Rupert ; Adams & Aizawa ], who have claimed that differences between internal, biological processes and putatively extended ones not only exist but are actually crucial to undermine the idea that inner and outer are functionally equivalent. This debate about how to individuate the functional roles has led to a treacherous stand-off, in which proponents of EMT have been trapped under the persistent accusation of causal/constitution conflation. My strategy for responding to this charge is to look precisely at those functional differences highlighted by critics of EMT. I reckon that extended cognitive systems are endowed with quite different properties from systems that are “brain bound” and argue that it is precisely these differences that allow human minds to transcend their biological limitations. I thus defend a complementarity version of the extended mind, according to which externally located resources and internal biological elements make a different but complementary contribution to bringing about intelligent behaviour [Sutton ]. My defence of complementarity is based on both the phylogeny and the ontogeny of cognitive systems. I initially explore the interrelation between brain and cognitive development from a neuroconstructivist perspective [Quartz & Sejnowski ; Mareshal et al. ] and then argue that our brains do not have fixed functional architectures but are sculpted and given form by the activities we repeatedly engage in. As a result of repeated engagements in socio-cultural tasks, relevant brain pathways undergo substantial rewiring. Development thus scaffolds our brains, which become geared into working in symbiotic partnership with external resources. [Kiverstein & Farina ]. On these grounds, I call into question any tendency to interpret the human biological nature as fixed and endogenously pre-determined and side with proponents of DST [Oyama ; Griffiths & Gray ] and ontogenetic niche construction [Stotz ] in arguing that we should think of natural selection as operating on whole developmental systems composed of living organisms in culturally enriched niches. [Wheeler & Clark]. Complementarity defences of EMT argue that many of the kinds of cognition humans excel at can only be accomplished by brains working together with a body that directly manipulates and acts on the world [Rowlands ; Menary ]. I take Sensory Substitution Devices as my empirical case study. SSDs exploit the remarkable plasticity of our brains and with training supply a novel perceptual modality that compensates for loss or impaired sensory channel. I argue that the coupling with these devices triggers a new mode of phenomenal access to the world, something I propose to label as a kind of “artificial synaesthesia [Ward & Meijer ].This new mode of access to the world transforms our cognitive skills and gives rise to augmented processes of deep bio-technological symbiosis. SSDs therefore become mind enhancing tools [Clark ] and a perfect case study for Complementarity. Having shown the relevance of SSDs for EMT, I then take up the possibility that these devices don’t just relocate the boundaries of cognition but may also stretch the bounds of perceptual awareness. I explore the possibility that perceivers using SSDs count as extended cognitive systems and therefore argue that the experiences they enjoy should be counted as extended conscious experiences.[Kiverstein & Farina, ]. SSDs are quite often said to involve some form of incorporation.[Clark ]. Rupert has challenged this idea and its relevance for EMT on the grounds of his embedded approach. Particularly, he has explained tool-use in terms of the causal interaction between the subject and its detached tool. In the final chapter of my dissertation I critically look at his objections and argue that all his arguments fail to apply to SSDs. In SSD perception in fact the tool becomes geared to work in symbiotic partnership with the active subject and then get factored into its’ body schema so that both of them come to form a single system of cognitive analysis. (shrink)

The Meno has traditionally been viewed as "one of Plato's earliest and most noteworthy forays into epistemology." In this dialogue, and in the course of a discussion between Socrates and his young interlocutor, Meno, about the nature of virtue and whether it can be taught, “Meno raises an epistemological question unprecedented in the Socratic dialogues.” This question - or rather, dilemma - has come to be known in the philosophical literature as Meno’s Paradox of Inquiry, due its apparently containing an (...) easy-to-detect equivocation of the word ‘know’. Immediately after the paradox, and in an apparent response to it, Socrates recounts a myth: a story told by priests and priestesses about the pre-natal existence and immortality of the soul. From this this myth, Socrates concocts the infamous theory of recollection – a theory according to which the soul has acquired knowledge of everything before it was born, while in a disincarnate state. According to the traditional reading of Meno’s paradox, this theory constitutes Plato’s response to it. The traditional reading has come under fire in recent years by advocates of the epistemological reading (ERM), who argue that the theory of recollection is not Plato’s intended response to the paradox. Instead, they suggest, Plato’s distinction between true belief and knowledge – which appears towards the end of the dialogue – is sufficient for solving the paradox; and as such, it ought to be read as Plato’s response to it. In this thesis, I argue against ERM’s claim that a mere epistemological distinction is all it takes to solve the paradox. To do so, I explore the metaphysics of change in Plato’s ontology. From this, I appeal to our everyday notion of ‘memory’ in order to show that Meno’s paradox, in fact, contains a hidden-premise, which when laid bare, reveals two distinct challenges contained within the argument: a superficial one, and a deeper one. I argue that although it appears at first blush as though the former could easily be dismissed as an equivocation, to which the epistemological distinction between belief and knowledge could provide an answer, the latter cannot. This is because the deeper challenge threatens the very preconditions of knowledge itself – that is to say, it renders cognition impossible – and, as such, it cancels out any effort to provide an epistemological response to the superficial challenge. Hence, unless the deeper-level challenge is satisfactorily disarmed, both challenges remain unanswered. I argue that although the major motivation for the theory of recollection in the Meno is indeed to provide an answer to scepticism about knowledge, nevertheless, it ought to be understood, first, as a theory of cognition – i.e. as a theory about the preconditions and atomic building blocks of knowledge – and not a theory of knowledge per se. This answer comes in the form of a radical theory of the mind and cognition – one that stands in stark opposition to our common-sense views about the mind: a view from which, Plato believed, the paradox arises. Drawing on recent debates between Nativists and Empiricists in the Cognitive Sciences, I argue that it was a great achievement of Plato’s to grasp that our common-sense view about the mind, and its concomitant process of learning, language acquisition and knowledge acquisition, might in fact be at the very root of scepticism about our ability to engage in meaningful philosophical practice, and our ability to acquire objective knowledge – especially, objective moral knowledge. The Meno’s paradox, then – so I contend - is not a puzzle whose solution rests upon merely pointing to an epistemological distinction between true belief and knowledge, as advocates of ERM have suggested. Rather, it is a puzzle about cognition. More precisely, it is a puzzle that targets the rudimentary cognitive stages of initial cognition and truth-recognition - one whose solution entails offering an account of the mind that would make these elementary cognitive processes possible. Accordingly, Plato’s theory of recollection in the Meno ought to be read as an attempt to map the structure of the mind, and as such, to provide an account of cognition. In doing so, he intended to put forward a view about the preconditions of knowledge – the sort of preconditions without which language acquisition and knowledge acquisition would simply not be possible. With this theory, Plato has the beginnings of an argument against the kind of relativism and scepticism prevalent at his time. As such, a correct interpretation of the so-called paradox of inquiry (and Plato’s proposed solution to it via the theory of recollection) should approach it as a puzzle about mind and cognition – and not solely as an epistemological one, as it has previously been treated. (shrink)

This essay samples and describes the state of architectural scholarship across various platforms in the age of Cognitive Capitalism. The premise is that, much like scholarship in the Arts and Humanities generally, architectural scholarship suffers from the Either/Or schism between traditional academic research of a non-utilitarian form and the heavily mediatic practices of the mainstream – “mainstream” defined as both online and print publications that eschew the long-form essay or book in favor of the populist modality that serves the neo-liberalization (...) of the discipline. -/- The sampling includes the devolution of the thesis or dissertation to socio-cultural report and/or pseudo-scientific study, with speculative works relegated to the margins of architectural discourse. This shift, while emblematic of the “trade school” mentality of many architecture schools today, also signals a bias at large in the post-recession 2010s where research must be monetized to justify funding, or speculative work must adhere to a format that is dictated from the outside (from the regimes of capitalization imposed by publishers). (shrink)

This thesis presents a novel theory of temporal experience. While time as measured by the clock is a perennially popular topic, the time of experience remains relatively neglected and poorly understood despite its centrality to our existence. This thesis therefore sets out to address the following questions: 1) How should we characterize experiential time and the experienced present? 2) How might such distinctively temporal experience arise in the first place? While the first of these is a “what is (...) it like” question, and thus in the realm of phenomenological analysis, the second is ostensibly closer to the realm of scientific inquiry in that it concerns an empirical phenomenon. The goal of this thesis is to synthesize plausible answers to both of these questions. As to the first question, there is already a lively debate ongoing in the philosophy of mind between various camps, each offering what they see as the most plausible analysis of the phenomenology of time. Regarding the second, there is an interdisciplinary investigation of mechanisms at various levels of abstraction, notably the levels of neurophysiology and information processing. This thesis proposes, among other contentions, that the time of experience is best characterized by a combination of retentional and extensional phenomenological analyses. This means the actual temporal extension of experience and its correlates determines, to some degree, the felt temporal character of experience. At the same time, perhaps the greater part of temporal phenomenology is determined by content: mental processes can be about temporal properties in addition to their primary contents and the way they are so partially determines the temporal character of experience as well. This analysis dovetails nicely with contemporary theories of consciousness that maintain the brain is fundamentally a complex predictive engine actively and adaptively guiding behavior. The thesis thus represents a multi-level framework for understanding the experience of time and the mechanisms underpinning it. It is my hope this perspective advances the debate on time-consciousness and can guide further work towards understanding this most fundamental aspect of our lives. (shrink)

In this work I reconstruct the physical and mental descriptions of perception in Aristotle. I propose to consider the thesis that αἴσθησις is a μεσότης (DA II 11) as a description of the physiological aspect of perception, meaning that perceiving is a physical act by which the sensory apparatus homeostatically counterbalances, and thence measures, the incoming affection produced by external perceptible objects. The proposal is based on a revision of the semantics of the word mesotês in Plato, Aristotle and (...) later Greek mathematicians (mostly Nicomachus of Gerasa). I show how this interpretation fits the text, and how it solves problems that afflict the rival interpretations. I further develop a ‘non-dephysiologizing’ spiritualist reading of the additional description of perception as reception of forms without the matter (DA II 12). I show that Aristotle uses the expression ‘forms without matter’ to describe actually abstracted items in one’s mind rather than the way in which the form are received. In opposition to forms-in-matter, such items are causally powerless and metaphysically sterile: an F-without-matter somewhat determines the subject it is in (one’s mind content F) without qualifying or identifying it as an F-subject. Thus, we have a second ‘mental’ description of perception. Further parts of the thesis are devoted to settle interpretive questions raised by controversial statements about perception found in De Anima II 5 and III 2, and to discuss the question of how the mental and physiological descriptions of perception Aristotle offers are related. My conclusion is that Aristotle’s views combines a form of quasi-dualist vitalism about powers (the faculty of perception, and more generally the soul, are not just irreducible to matter, but also primitive and non-supervenient) which is nonetheless compatible with hylomorphism, and a form of epiphenomenalism (and thence the ‘bottom-up’ determination typical of modern supervenience) with regard to perceptual events (i.e., the activity of perceiving). (shrink)

According to the accepted translation-failure interpretation, the problem of incommensurability involves the nature of the meaning-referential relation between scientific languages. The incommensurability thesis is that some competing scientific languages are mutually untranslatable due to the radical variance of meaning or/and reference of the terms they employ. I argue that this interpretation faces many difficulties and cannot give us a tenable, coherent, and integrated notion of incommensurability. It has to be rejected. ;On the basis of two case studies, I find (...) that the confrontations between many classical incommensurable languages are not confrontations between two untranslatable languages with different distribution of truth values, but rather the confrontations between incompatible fundamental presuppositions at the ontological level. We can always identify a truth-value gap between two incommensurable languages. Such a truth-value gap indicates a communication breakdown between the two language communities on the one hand, and is caused by the incompatible fundamental presuppositions underlying them on the other. ;I thereby identify the truth-value functional relationship between sentences, instead of the meaning-referential relationship between terms, as the dominant semantic relation between two incommensurable languages. According to my presuppositional interpretation of incommensurability, the real secret of incommensurability lies in the ontological setup of two competing presuppositional languages. When two presuppositional languages with incompatible factual commitments encounter with each other, the confrontation leads to a truth-value gap, and consequently a communication breakdown between them. Formally put, two scientific languages are incommensurable when core sentences of one language, which have truth values when considered within its own context, lack truth values when considered within the context of the other due to an ontological gap between them. ;The presuppositional interpretation makes many significant contributions to the discussion of the issue of incommensurability and the related metaphysical and epistemological issues: It confirms the existence of the phenomenon of incommensurability and makes it metaphysically and epistemologically significant. It establishes the tenability and integrity of the notion of incommensurability. It avoids many alleged unattractive epistemological and metaphysical consequences of the translation-failure interpretation. (shrink)

My main aim in my thesis is to show that, contrary to the commonly held belief according to which Aristotle was the first to conceive and develop intellectual virtues, there are strong indications that Plato had already conceived and had begun developing the concept of intellectual virtues. Nevertheless, one should not underestimate the importance of Aristotle’s work on intellectual virtues. Aristotle developed a much fuller (in detail and argument) account of both, the concept of ‘virtue’ and the concept of (...) ‘intellect’, metaphysically, epistemologically and psychologically. Still, the first conception of intellectual virtues is to be found in the Platonic corpus. Such a realization is not only of historic interest, but most importantly, as I am going to show, the Platonic conception of intellectual virtues could prove promising in contemporary debates on virtue epistemology theories and in virtue-based approaches to education. Plato’s discussion of rational desires is the strongest indication of the presence of the concept of intellectual virtues in Platonic dialogues. Rational desires are constitutive of intellectual virtues: desires are dispositional; rational desires are dispositions to pursue rational goods. Intellectual virtues are such dispositions. Additionally, there is further evidence that Plato had conceived of intellectual virtues. His rigorous educational program in the Republic aims at the development of rational desires, while in the Symposium he discusses the intense rational desire to know the Good. Nevertheless, in order to be intellectually virtuous, one must not only have a desire for knowledge; one must also be systematically and reliably successful in achieving the end of their rational desires. I will show that the success component of Plato’s intellectual virtues can be found in his dialectic method. Plato’s dialectic is both a virtue developer and a reliable method used by philosophers in order to reach the objects of their rational desires. I will argue that episteme is one of Plato’s primary intellectual virtues. Towards this end, I will invoke Pritchard’s recent argument according to which understanding, which is distinct from knowledge, is a form of cognitive achievement and therefore what is finally valuable. I will argue, based on textual evidence from the middle Platonic dialogues and recent discussions in the exegetical literature, that Plato’s episteme, although commonly translated as knowledge, is closer to Pritchard’s conception of understanding. I will also show that Plato’s episteme, similarly to Pritchard’s conception of understanding, is a cognitive achievement that cannot be attained by luck or testimony. The Platonic conception of intellectual virtues has something unique to offer to contemporary virtue epistemology. Plato, unlike Aristotle, does not differentiate between theoretical and practical wisdom. A wise agent, according to Plato, is wise in both practical and theoretical matters. Moreover, Plato, unlike Aristotle does not make a sharp distinction between moral and intellectual virtues. Therefore, the Platonic conception of intellectual virtues, in comparison to the Aristotelian, offers a more suitable starting point for scholars who want to argue that intellectual virtues are but a subpart of moral. Furthermore, I will argue that the Platonic conception of intellectual virtues is also of significant merit for virtue-based approaches to education. Plato questioned whether we can attain knowledge but nevertheless went on to develop his Socratically inspired theory of education according to which we can teach learning without knowing. Socrates proclaimed his ignorance numerous times; nevertheless, he went on to educate the youth of Athens. This is what I will suggest that Plato’s notion of intellectual virtues can contribute to theories of education: we should teach children not by transferring knowledge to them directly but by building dispositions into them to seek and acquire the truth. I will argue that although somewhat ignored by contemporary scholars, Plato’s theory of education has much to teach us about epistemic character education today. The Platonic educational program does not advocate the direct transmission of knowledge from the teacher to the student but rather focuses on building the learners’ epistemic dispositions. Building upon the Socratic method, Plato’s educational program does not “spoon-feed” knowledge to the learners but rather fosters the growth of intellectual virtues through problem-solving. The Platonic decades long educational regime aims at training Philosopher-Kings in three types of virtue: (i) Moral Virtue; (ii) the Cognitive Virtue of Abstraction; (iii) the Cognitive Virtue of Debate. I will explain ways in which fostering intellectual virtues through problem-solving could be applied in classrooms today and I will argue that Plato’s rigorous education program is of definite merit for contemporary theories of education, especially given the fact that scholars in the field are looking for alternatives to the traditional methods of teaching. I will also dedicate a section to showing that Socrates was not a moral philosopher but rather an epistemic character builder. Socrates trained his students/interlocutors in desiring the truth without offering them any knowledge-education. I will also briefly highlight some of the most significant differences between the Platonic educational program, as described in the Republic, and the Socratic educational method. I will also discuss, before concluding my thesis, two different accounts of educational failure as presented by Plato in the Republic. The first one is the individuals employing the eristic method (as a result of failure in dialectic education) and the second is the individuals who correspond to the four imperfect societies (brought about again by the lack of proper education). I will argue that these two accounts can inform our understanding of what should be avoided when educating for epistemic (and moral) virtue nowadays. (shrink)

This project is a blend of Africana intellectual history and philosophical anti-humanism. The opening chapter seeks to contextualize the thought of Huey P. Newton in the Black nationalist tradition outline his conceptualization of US empire – ‘Reactionary Intercommunalism’. I use the second chapter to explore counterinsurgency as a historical phenomenon that laid the basis for European colonization and the civilizing mission during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and the modern phenomena understand as racial violence. The third chapter analyzes how (...) gender ideological have been deployed toward this end historically and through contemporaneous Black scholarship before using the final chapter to introduce the theory of killology or MAN3. This theory advances the claim that counterinsurgency as a modality of warfare be understood as the contemporary fountainhead of western humanism and thus as the primary force of social regulation which proleptically organizes modern civilization on a spatially and temporally indeterminate basis to defeat/subvert insurgent populations before they are ever mobilized towards resistance through the application of technology, deadly force to those constructed as threats and control of the information environment towards this end. (shrink)

My thesis examines the nature and value of knowledge and normative implications of its value. With this in mind I examine Greco’s account of knowledge in detail and consider whether it convinces. I argue against the account on a number of fronts; in particular I argue against Greco’s treatment of the Barney and Jenny cases. In doing so I draw on the dialectic in the literature and go beyond it by showing how his treatment of those cases is such (...) as to raise problems for his treatment of other cases. More specifically I argue that Greco’s treatment of the Barney case is such as to threaten his treatment of standard Gettier cases and his treatment of the Jenny case threatens his treatment of the Careless Math Student case. I also consider an alternative virtue epistemic approach offered by Pritchard which I reject. In attempting to overcome the challenges that the Barney and Jenny cases pose I articulate an alternative account according to which what I call “epistemic grace” is a requirement of knowledge. It is via this epistemic grace requirement that I also account for the value of knowledge. Recognition of the value of knowledge serves as the basis for the articulation of the notion of epistemic environmentalism. With epistemic environmentalism in view, trust is analysed and its significance to the gaining of knowledge, albeit knowledge of a certain kind, is considered. Finally, the normative implications of epistemic environmentalism are laid out in a framework to show how findings in epistemic value theory relate to approaches that can provide a basis for justifying intervention or non-intervention in the assisting of the attaining or holding of epistemic goods of value. (shrink)

My dissertation is a systematic defense of the moral relevance of alternative possibilities. As such, it constitutes an attack on semi-compatibilism. ;To begin, then, I defend alternative possibilities against three related but independent lines of criticism. The most prominent of these is Harry Frankfurt's now famous counterexample strategy in which cases are constructed that purport to show that a person can, in fact, be responsible even when he cannot do otherwise. Another line of criticism is John Fischer's "flicker of (...) freedom" argument, which builds on Frankfurt-type argumentation by challenging the "robustness" of alternative possibilities. Finally, some recent critics of alternative possibilities have developed "reasons-responsiveness" accounts of moral responsibility that seem further to invalidate the importance of the power to do otherwise. By extending traditional concerns and developing new objections, I argue that room remains for the possible relevance of an alternative possibilities condition on moral responsibility. ;I try to make a positive case for the plausibility of relevance by offering reasons to think that the ability to do otherwise plays an important role in our moral life. Alternatives are important, I argue, because giving up a "freedom to do otherwise" condition would put us in an epistemic bind with respect to our responsibility. That is, the kind of confidence we ordinarily have in our own moral responsibility would be unjustified if it turned out that we do not have alternatives. A second consideration in favor of the relevance of alternatives is distinctively moral. I explore and exploit the relationship between the ability to do otherwise and the putatively Kantian idea that "ought" implies "can," concluding that the semi-compatibilist must either reject both alternative possibilities and the Kantian thesis, or accept that people would not be blameworthy for their moral failures under determinism. Neither option is attractive. ;I conclude, then, that there is good reason to believe that alternative possibilities are necessary for moral responsibility and that semi-compatibilism should be rejected. Our intuitions about the importance of being able to do otherwise can still factor into the traditional arguments to the conclusion that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism. (shrink)

Human beings who have mastered a natural language are self-conscious creatures: they can think, and indeed speak, about themselves in the first person. This dissertation is about the significance of this capacity: what it is and what difference it makes to our minds. My thesis is that the capacity for self-consciousness is essential to rationality, the thing that sets the minds of rational creatures apart from those of mere brutes. This, I argue, is what Kant was getting at (...) in a famous passage of his Critique of Pure Reason, when he claimed that a representation which could not be “accompanied with the ‘I think’” would be “nothing to me” as a thinking being. I call this claim the Kantian thesis. My dissertation seeks to explain and defend the Kantian thesis, to show how it entails that the advent of self-consciousness brings with it a new kind of mind, and to sketch the implications of this point for a philosophy of mind that seeks to understand the minds of rational creatures. This involves, on the one hand, an investigation of the kinds of capacities that characterize a rational creature, and, on the other hand, an argument connecting reason with self-consciousness. I show that a rational creature, in the interesting sense, is one capable of conceptual representation, and I argue that (1) to represent conceptually is to represent in a way that decouples information from any particular context or purpose, (2) this special form of representation is possible only in a creature that can reflect explicitly on grounds for judging a proposition true, and (3) to have this capacity to reflect explicitly on grounds is necessarily to have the crux of self- consciousness. If this is right, then the representations of a rational creature must differ from those of a nonrational creature not merely in complexity but in kind. The dissertation sketches the implications of this point for various forms of naturalism and reductionism in the philosophy of mind, for debates about how to explain “first person authority,” and for our understanding of the sort of failure of self-consciousness involved in self-deception. (shrink)

My dissertation defends the importance of epistemic norms on what I call ‘inquiring further.’ Inquiring further is a familiar practice we engage in when we redeliberate, gather more evidence, or double-check our beliefs. Nonetheless, many philosophers have argued that norms governing further inquiry are at most practical or moral norms. Against this, I argue that norms on inquiring further are central to our understanding of responsible epistemic agency. I do this by appealing to both the roles of epistemic evaluations (...) and our practices of holding agents epistemically accountable. My dissertation thereby expands and deepens our understanding of epistemic evaluations and normativity. Each chapter of my dissertation focuses on a different practice of inquiring further. The first, “A Puzzle About Fickleness,” motivates a puzzle about changes of mind resulting from redeliberation. The puzzle is to explain the asymmetry between one-off changes of mind, which often seem permissible, and multiple changes of mind—or fickleness—which often seem problematic. After motivating an epistemic solution to the puzzle, I propose and defend the Ratifiable Reasoning Account. On this solution, as agents redeliberate, they gain two types of evidence. First, they gain inductive evidence that they will not stably settle their belief. Second, this inductive evidence affords higher-order evidence that they are unreliable at assessing the matter at hand. The fact that fickle agents gain this higher-order evidence explains why fickleness can be epistemically—not just practically—irrational. The second chapter turns to our practices of evidence-gathering. In “Epistemic Norms on Evidence-Gathering,” I and my co-author, Carolina Flores, argue that there are epistemic norms on evidence-gathering. Though this view is intuitive, it has found surprisingly little defense. Rather, many philosophers have argued that norms on evidence-gathering can only be practical or moral. On a prominent evidentialist version of this position, epistemic norms only apply to responding to the evidence one already has; justified or rational beliefs are those based on appropriate responses to that evidence. Here we challenge the orthodoxy. First, we argue that there is no significant normative difference between responding to evidence you have and gathering more evidence. Second, we argue that our practices of epistemically criticizing agents for their poor evidence-gathering indicate the existence of epistemic norms on evidence-gathering. Finally, we show that our thesis has important implications for recent debates about the relationship between epistemic norms and inquiry. The third chapter, “Why Double-Check?”, explores the relationship between double-checking and knowledge. I argue that agents can simultaneously know that p and rationally double-check that p. Call this view the Synchronic Compatibility Thesis. Although intuitive, this thesis faces two challenges. First, some have argued that agents who double-check ought to suspend judgment while inquiring; they thus lose knowledge while double-checking, if only temporarily. Second, some have argued that if it is rational to double-check that p, then one does not know that p. This claim is motivated by strong conceptions of belief or pragmatic encroachment. I argue that these competing views fail to accommodate the many reasons why agents might double-check, ranging from seeking certainty to making one’s beliefs more resilient. Moreover, the alternative views rely on overly strong assumptions about what inquiry, knowledge, or belief requires. By exploring fickleness, evidence-gathering, and double-checking—three phenomena that traditional epistemology has neglected—this dissertation enriches epistemology by making it more relevant to real-world agents. (shrink)

This dissertation is about the role that conditionals play in uncertain reasoning and deliberation. Specifically, I attempt to show that, by appealing to a particular semantics for conditionals---a contexutalist, sequence semantics, which has recently become popular in philosophy of language---several open problems in decision theory and epistemology can be solved. -/- Chapter 1 is introductory. I set out the semantic view of conditionals in question, and I describe some of its historical background. -/- Chapter 2 turns to a striking (...) problem faced by causal decision theorists. A popular formulation of causal decision theory (CDT) appeals to counterfactual conditionals. However, the standard theory of these conditionals has unintuitive consequences in deterministic worlds. In particular, it says that if anything---including the choice you make---were different in the present, then either the laws or nature would be violated, or the distant past would be changed. And as several authors have recently shown, it's easy to transform this consequence of the standard theory of counterfactuals into full-blown counterexamples to CDT. In response to these counterexamples, I develop a contextualist version of CDT, which makes use of the sequence semantics. I then show that the deterministic counterexamples don't arise for my version of CDT. -/- In Chapter 3, I deal with a different puzzle, about whether or not the so-called Desire-as-Belief (DAB) thesis is consistent with decision theory---something that famous arguments of David Lewis seem to show isn't the case. Once again, I show that, if we understand the DAB thesis in a contextualist way---and spell it out using the sequence semantics---then Lewis's arguments against that thesis don't go through. In fact, we can prove a tenability result for the DAB thesis, which shows that it's compatible with decision theory after all. -/- Finally, in Chapter 4, I transition from decision-theoretic issues to epistemological ones. More precisely, I tackle the question of how our credences should change when we learn indicative conditionals. Several famous cases in the literature---notably, Bas van Fraassen's Judy Benjamin problem---seem to show that the standard Bayesian update rules deliver implausible results when we learn conditionals of this kind. However, in the chapter, I show that, if we adopt the sequence semantics, then the Bayesian update rules turn out to deliver the correct results after all. Better still, alternatives to these rules which have been put forward in the literature turn out to be equivalent to the Bayesian rules in my framework---at least in many contexts. Thus, what we end up with is a nice, unified account of how rational agents should update on conditional information: one which fits in well with recent work on the semantics of conditionals. My proposal also relates, in interesting ways, to discussions that have been happening elsewhere in the literature, like discussions about the tenability of the notorious Stalnaker's thesis. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the question of how to reconceptualize “women” in order to do a more intersectional feminism. Intersectionality—the idea that gender, race, class, sexuality, and so on operate not as separate entities but as mutually constructing phenomena—has become a gold standard in contemporary feminist scholarship. In particular, intersectionality has achieved success in showing that the old conception of women as a single, uniform concept marginalizes women and others who exist at the intersecting axes of multiple oppressions (e.g., women (...) of color, women in the global South, working-class women, and/or queer and trans people), and thus, demonstrating the need to develop a new way of conceptualizing women. However, the question of what such a new conception would be remains unanswered. Specifically, if feminist theory today is to destabilize the old notion of “women” that relegates multiply oppressed women to the margin of feminism, and yet still needs to use some notion of “women” to critically analyze how the social structure of sexist oppression operates to subordinate women and to dismantle this oppression, how should the concept “women” be reformulated? In this dissertation, I argue that we need to understand women as a concept that is open to constant redefinition, which is socio-historically situated in the actualities of oppression. This is what I refer to as the “situated redefinition” model of women, which is formulated in more detail as follows: -/- The Situated Redefinition Model of Women (SR) – The concept “women” should be always open to being redefined in a way that it could better serve political goals grounded in the actual, daily lives of the marginalized. That is, “women” should be always open to new meanings and provisional definitions that the marginalized would find more useful to achieve political goals, which grow out of their concrete experiences in the current intersecting structures of oppression. -/- My central argument is that we need to understand the concept “women” according to the situated redefinition model, in order to employ this concept for doing intersectional feminism. To support this thesis, the dissertation is divided into two main parts. By engaging with the intersectionality literature, critical race feminisms, Asian/American feminisms, and recent critiques of intersectionality, the first part of the dissertation elucidates what exactly it means for feminism to be more “intersectional.” The second part develops the situated redefinition model and articulates why this model is needed to do intersectional feminism, drawing on the social/political philosophy literature on non-ideal theory, postmodern discussions of universality, and feminist discussions of identity politics. Broadly, this dissertation seeks to shed new light on how we understand and use the concept women for feminist ends. My conceptual model offers a way for feminist scholar-activists to subvert the essentialist/exclusionary notion of “women” without abandoning altogether feminist-political deployments of the concept “women” for the purpose of ending sexist and intersecting oppressions. (shrink)

This textbook describes and explains the fundamentals of applying empirical methods for theory building and theory testing in marketing research. The authors explain the foundations in philosophy of science and the various methodological approaches to readers who are working empirically with the purpose of developing and testing theories in marketing. The primary target group of the book are graduate students and PhD students who are preparing their empirical research projects, e.g. for a master thesis or a dissertation.

The thesis most central to my dissertation is the claim that thinking is a spatio-temporal process, that "knowing" is an event which, like all others, happens or occurs. It is not an original thesis. It is an implication of materialism, and just as old. However, until the last century there was no way of explaining the development of mental phenomena. Even today, the mind is usually considered different in kind from the rest of nature, as removed from (...) the causal order of things. Such a conception is implied by metaphysical realists, and openly articulated by theists. It is the motivation for the philosophical projects of epistemology and metaphysics, continuing into the scientific age as a rationalist hope of checking the results of empiricism through non-empirical means. ;A generation ago, Richard Rorty claimed that this conception of the mind as a "mirror of nature" was misguided, that modeling mental activity on the transparent process of sight had outlived its usefulness and led to problems both theoretical and practical. Eliminating the visual metaphors on which traditional conceptions of the mind had depended would mean abandoning philosophical aspirations to the Truth . Unwilling to accept the notion that the mind is a physical phenomenon, Rorty's work was largely disparaged as relativistic, since it made objectivity a matter of intersubjective agreement. ;Such a democratic approach was what the Sophists had advocated, what Plato sought to refute, and what the tradition of philosophy was designed to replace. However, as Rorty's predecessor John Dewey pointed out, a "spectator theory of knowledge" requires a subject which is detached from the world he observes, a subject beyond the constraints of space and time. It is therefore necessary to choose between the truth of philosophy and the consequences of pragmatism: the view that the mind, like everything else in nature, is a product of space and time. ;The present dissertation is a defense of Rorty's position. It claims that the bulk of that position is not original with him, but is indicative of pragmatism generally, and that in turn the tenets of pragmatism are consequences of Darwinism. That is, the pragmatist claims Rorty makes are nothing other than what Dewey called "the influence of Darwin on philosophy". As a result, any effective refutation of Rorty's position will require either a refutation of Darwinism or an explanation as to why the constraints of space and time do not apply to the human ability to think. (shrink)

My dissertation consists of two main parts. In the first part, I begin by assuming the plausibility of the libertarian thesis that agents sometimes could have done otherwise than they did given the very same history of the world. In light of this assumption, I undertake to develop a model of agency which does not employ the concept of agent-causation. My agency theory is developed in three main stages: I suggest that any agency theory must satisfy four desiderata: (...) It must adequately account for the freedom and responsibility of human agents. It must provide an adequate answer to the question of what distinguishes human actions from mere happenings. It must adequately account for the epistemological fact that human agents have an immediate and nonobservational awareness of their actions. It should have the support of a respectable philosophical tradition. I argue that agent-causation provides a theory of agency which fails adequately to satisfy these four desiderata. I claim both that human actions are uncaused exercisings by agents of their powers and that human agents typically act for reasons. I maintain that the central issue dividing agency theorists and nonagency theorists is whether reasons for performing actions cause the latter. I maintain that the sense of 'because' in 'I did x because...' is not causal in nature, but teleological. ;Having developed my model of agency, in the second part of my dissertation I investigate what are some of the paradigmatic actions human agents perform. I claim that bodily actions, such as moving an arm, are psychological in nature. Essential to my argument is the concept of a body-image. A normal agent 'feels' as if she is present in her physical arm. The way a normal agent feels is revealed in the case of a phantom limb. The subject of a phantom arm feels as if her amputated physical arm is still there and she can move while feeling armishly. I maintain that the bodily action of moving an arm is the agent's movement as a psychological arm-image of her physical arm, whether the physical arm is present or not. (shrink)

This dissertation argues for a "bundle thesis" of phenomenal consciousness: that the ways things seem to subjects are constituted by bundles of representational and functional properties. I argue that qualia are determined not only by intrinsic properties, but also by relational properties to other bodily and mental states . The view developed on the basis of this claim is called "phenomenal holism." ;Part I examines the current literature on phenomenal consciousness, sorting out various conceptual and historical issues. In (...) particular, I show that current research falls into two camps: that claiming there is no coherent view of phenomenal consciousness or of how it can be studied, and that claiming that phenomenal consciousness is constituted by non-relational and non-causal/functional/representational properties. Neither camp believes that materialist theories of consciousness are possible. ;Part II counters the specific objections these writers raise against materialist theories. First I show that some of the most prominent objections are founded upon an implicit and misguided assumption: that qualia are non-relational simples, based on what I call the segregationist intuition. Then, more specifically, I argue: that while Kripke's argument from a posteriori necessity against the identity-theory is committed to the absence of an appearance/reality distinction, its presumptions entail this distinction; and that the symmetrical development of the possibility of "hidden qualia" shows that absent qualia and zombie arguments against functionalism are absurd. This last argument is extended to argue against the possibility of inverted spectra. It is concluded that none of the standard objections to materialist theories carry significant weight. ;Part III turns to relational theories of consciousness, and supports an "integrationist intuition" about the mind. I first show that higher-order perception and higher-order thought theories are inadequate, in spite of correctly construing consciousness relationally. I then go on to develop the bundle theory, drawing support from empirical research on vision and pain. The dissertation concludes by defending phenomenal holism and integrationist views of mind more generally, and setting directions for future research. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the nature, the phenomenal character and the philosophical significance of attention. According to its central thesis, attention is the ongoing mental activity of structuring the stream of consciousness or phenomenal field. The dissertation connects the scientific study of attention in psychology and the neurosciences with central discussions in the philosophy of mind. Once we get clear on the nature and the phenomenal character of attention, we can make progress toward understanding foundational issues concerning the (...) nature and the structure of conscious mentality itself. We understand better how consciousness is connected to self-awareness and to agency, and we get a better grip on the nature of perceptual experience, the unity of consciousness, and its subjective character. The dissertation also aims at showing that the current empirical investigation of attention should be complemented with work at the level of generality that a philosophical analysis can provide; it shows how such an analysis is relevant for the scientific study of attention by providing a new conceptual framework and suggesting several new areas of research. (shrink)

The dissertation seeks to gain a comprehensive understanding of Frege's watershed work of logic, the 1879 Begriffsschrift . The treatise is the first since Aristotle's instauration of the discipline to have succeeded in completely recasting logic. Very generally stated, the dissertation aims at making explicit the conceptual origins of modern logic. To do that will require that each of the achievements of Concept-script be examined from one or more vantage points: either within the perspective of Frege's larger and (...) guiding ambition, that of providing a logical justification of arithmetic; or with respect to the horizon of modernity; or in relation to later developments in logical theory and the philosophy of language, developments stimulated, albeit not exclusively, by Frege's very work. The vantage point adopted in each case will depend on the nature of the topic and the extent to which it requires to be made explicit. One perspective will have preponderance, that of Frege's relationship to his early modern ancestors, a group that includes philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians. Since modernity is constituted in a nearly constant critical, if not polemical, relationship to the Ancients, they will also at times be drawn into the discussion. The elucidation of Frege's breakthrough work will be guided by the following thesis: Frege's attempt to justify arithmetic logically and the fine work of clarification he produced in actualizing this project; his discovery of function-theoretic logic and his fashioning of a concept-script ; and his critique of natural language and the attendant semantics developed over the course of that critique constitute an unfolding and an extension of the primacy of universal method over ontology that is the signature of modern inquiry. (shrink)