The use of logico-semiotic and systems-structural approaches in the analysis of types of abstraction and forms of generalization of concepts was begun in the '50s and '60s by D. P. Gorskii, who at that time introduced the concept of idealization into the terminology. In the early '70s he continued his analysis of the problem of scientific understanding, delineating the specific features of definitions in the theories of natural sciences and in the social science disciplines. In the book under review, Gorskii (...) in a certain sense sums up his results and develops them further. (shrink)

Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. This doctrine is rooted in Aristotle's conception of the soul, and has antecedents in Hobbes's conception of the mind as a “calculating machine”, but it has become fully articulated (and popularly endorsed) only (...) in the last third of the 20th century. Though the term ‘functionalism’ is used to designate a variety of positions in a variety of other disciplines, including psychology, sociology, economics, and architecture, this entry focuses exclusively on functionalism as a philosophical thesis about the nature of mental states. (shrink)

This book offers solutions to two persistent and I believe closely related problems in epistemology. The first problem is that of drawing a principled distinction between perception and inference: what is the difference between seeing that something is the case and merely believing it on the basis of what we do see? The second problem is that of specifying which beliefs are epistemologically basic (i.e., directly, or noninferentially, justified) and which are not. I argue that what makes a belief a (...) perceptual belief, or a basic belief, is not any introspectible feature of the belief but rather the nature of the cognitive system, or "module", that is causally responsible for the belief. Thus, even zombies, who in the philosophical literature lack conscious experiences altogether, can have basic, justified, perceptual beliefs. -/- The theories of perceptual and basic beliefs developed in the monograph are embedded in a larger reliabilist epistemology. I use this theory of basic beliefs to develop a detailed reliabilist theory: Inferentialist Reliabilism, which offers a reliabilist theory of inferential justification and which solves some longstanding problems for other reliabilist views by demanding inferential support for some—but not all—beliefs. The book is an instance of a thoroughgoingly naturalistic approach to epistemology. Many of my arguments have an empirical basis, and the view that I endorse reserves a central role for the cognitive sciences—in particular, cognitive neuroscience—in filling in the details of an applied epistemological theory. (shrink)

Much current work in the social sciences seeks to understand the effects of trust and social capital on economic and political outcomes. However, the sources of trust remain unclear. In this article, the authors articulate a basic theory of the relationship between institutions and trust. The authors apply this theory to industrial districts, geographically concentrated areas of small firm production, which involve extensive cooperation in the production process. Changes in power relations affect patterns of production;the authors suggest that they also (...) have knock-on consequences for trust and cooperation among actors. (shrink)

Abstract: Type-B materialism is the thesis that though phenomenal states are necessarily identical with physical states, phenomenal concepts have no a priori connections to physical or functional concepts. Though type-B materialists have invoked this conceptual independence to counter a number of well-known arguments against physicalism (e.g. the conceivability of zombies, the ignorance of Mary, the existence of an 'explanatory gap'), anti-physicalists have raised objections to this strategy. My aim here is to defend type-B materialism against these objections, by arguing that (...) they share the common problem of not taking the central features of the view sufficiently seriously. However, I will end by noting that type-B materialism raises other questions, and suggesting that what stands in the way of an adequate naturalistic account of phenomenal states may be the propensity to take type-B materialism more seriously than it deserves. (shrink)

Raftopoulos’s most recent book argues, among other things, for the cognitive impenetrability of early vision. Before we can assess any such claims, we need to know what’s meant by “early vision” and by “cognitive penetration”. In this contribution to this book symposium, I explore several different things that one might mean – indeed, that Raftopoulos might mean – by these terms. I argue that whatever criterion we choose for delineating early vision, we need a single criterion, not a mishmash of (...) distinct criteria. And I argue against defining cognitive penetration in partly epistemological terms, although it is fine to offer epistemological considerations in defending some definitions as capturing something of independent interest. Finally, I raise some questions about how we are to understand the “directness” of certain putative cognitive influences on perception and about whether there’s a decent rationale for restricting directness in the way that Raftopoulos apparently does. (shrink)

Susan B. Levin argues that Plato's engagement with medicine is richer than previously recognized and that he views it as an important rival for authority on nature and flourishing. Levin shows further that Plato's work, particularly the Laws, holds significant promise for bioethics that has so far been nearly untapped.

This is a unique study, contuining the work of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, and using the techniques of phenomenology against the prevailing nihilism of our culture. It expands our understanding of the human potential for spiritual self-realization by interpreting it as the developing of a bodily-felt awareness informing our gestures and movements. The author argues that a psychological focus on our experience of well-being and pathology as embodied beings contributes significantly to a historically relevant critique of ideology. It also provides an (...) essential touchstone in experience for a fruitful individual and collective response to the danger of nihilism. Dr Levin draws on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology to clarify Heidegger's analytic of human beings through an interpretation that focuses on our experience of being embodied. He reconstructs in modern terms the wisdom implicit in western and semitic forms of religion and philosophy, considering the work of Freud, Jung, Focault and Neitzsche, as well as that of American educational philosophers, including Dewey. In particular, he draws on the psychology of Freud and Jung to clarify our historical experience of gesture and movement and to bring to light its potential in the fulfilment of Selfhood. Throughout the book, the pathologies of the ego and its journey into Selfhood are considered in relation to the conditons of technology and the powers of nihilism. (shrink)

Examples cited by Feldman, Lehrer and others of true beliefs that are justified, but not by false lemmas, turn out under scrutiny to involve false lemmas after all. In each case there is an EG inference whose conclusion is unwarranted unless its base instance is false. A shift to non-deductive justification does not avert the difficulty. The relation of this result to non-inferential Gettier cases is suggested.

ABSTRACT Many philosophers who wish to defend abortion, but who have become frustrated by the resistance of the personhood question to yield to any nonarbitrary solution welcomed Judith Thomson's ‘A defense of abortion.’Thomson argues that abortion is sometimes justifiable even if the foetus is a person. In this paper I argue that Thomson's argument is a defense of abortion, rather than merely extraction without death, only because of the current state of medical technology. Once the technology is in place to (...) extract foetuses while preserving their lives and to allow them to develop to full term outside the uterus, Thomson cannot defend the killing of the foetus. If she is right, however, a woman will still have the right to have a foetus extracted from her body. Finally, it is pointed out that the source of the problem with Thomson's argument is the major premise in most arguments for the permissibility of abortion: a woman's right to control her own body. If the defence of abortion is to entail a defence of the termination of the foetus, then this premise, understood as the right to remove an unwanted entity from one's body or the right to alter one's body as one wishes, simply will not do the trick. (shrink)

This collection of original essays by preeminent interpreters of continental philosophy explores the question of whether Western thought and culture have been dominated by a vision-centered paradigm of knowledge, ethics, and power. It focuses on the character of vision in modern philosophy and on arguments for and against the view that contemporary life and thought are distinctively "ocularcentric." The authors examine these ideas in the context of the history of philosophy and consider the character of visual discourse in the writings (...) of Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Habermas. With essays on television, the visual arts, and feminism, the book will interest readers in cultural studies, gender studies, and art history as well as philosophers. (shrink)

Heidegger’s key word Ereignis is frequently translated as “event,” “event of being,” or “event of appropriation.” No ordinary event in the realm of beings, it is an event in which the meaning of being is recognized in difference from beings. In the history of philosophy, this insight into being set in motion the inception of a philosophical discourse within which we are still thinking. Inspired and guided by his philosophy of history, Heidegger hoped our own reflections on being could likewise (...) appropriate and set in motion preparations for another inception, another experience and understanding of what it means for something to be. Whereas, for the early Greek philosophers, their insight was an experience of awe and wonder, and perhaps also dread, for us of today that insight can set in motion a more “inward” turn, a process that puts in question who we are as human beings and who we want to become, and stirs us to acknowledge our responsibility for being in response to a time when being is under assault. (shrink)

To reassure those concerned about wholesale discontinuity between human existence and posthumanity, transhumanists assert shared ground with antiquity on vital challenges and aspirations. Because their claims reflect key misconceptions, there is no shared vision for transhumanists to invoke. Having exposed their misuses of Prometheus, Plato, and Aristotle, I show that not only do transhumanists and antiquity crucially diverge on our relation to ideals, contrast-dependent aspiration, and worthy endeavors but that illumining this divide exposes central weaknesses in transhumanist argumentation. What is (...) more, antiquity’s handling of these topics suggests a way through the impasse in current enhancement debates about human “nature” and helps to resolve a tension within transhumanists’ accounts of what our best moments signify about the ontological requirements for real flourishing. (shrink)

In a study that goes beyond the ego affirmed by Freudian psychology, David Levin offers an account of personal growth and self-fulfillment based on the development of our capacity for listening. Drawing on the work of Dewey, Piaget, Erikson, and Kohlberg, he uses the vocabulary of phenomenological psychology to distinguish four stages in this developmental process and brings us the significance of these stages for music, psychotherapy, ethics, politics, and ecology. This analysis substantiates his claim that the development of (...) our listening capacity is a process that fits Foucault's conception of a practice of the self, forming our character as social beings and moral agents. David Levin contends that our self- development as auditory beings is necessary for the achievement of a just and democratic society. (shrink)

We investigate synonymy in the strong sense of content identity. This notion is central in the philosophy of language and in applications of logic. We motivate, uniformly axiomatize, and characterize several “benchmark” notions of synonymy in the messy class of all possible notions of synonymy. This class is divided by two intuitive principles that are governed by a no-go result. We use the notion of a scenario to get a logic of synonymy which is the canonical representative of one division. (...) In the other division, the so-called conceptivist logics, we find, e.g., the well-known system of analytic containment. We axiomatize four logics of synonymy extending AC, relate them semantically and proof-theoretically to SF, and characterize them in terms of weak/strong subject matter preservation and weak/strong logical equivalence. This yields ways out of the no-go result and novel arguments—independent of a particular semantic framework—for each notion of synonymy discussed. This points to pluralism about meaning and a certain non-compositionality of truth in logic programs and neural networks. And it unveils an impossibility for synonymy: if it is to preserve subject matter, then either conjunction and disjunction lose an essential property or a very weak absorption law is violated. (shrink)

We describe an emerging field, that of nonclassical computability and nonclassical computing machinery. According to the nonclassicist, the set of well-defined computations is not exhausted by the computations that can be carried out by a Turing machine. We provide an overview of the field and a philosophical defence of its foundations.

The distinctly contemporary proliferation of pornography and hate speech poses a challenge to liberalism's traditional ideal of a 'marketplace of ideas' facilitated by state neutrality about the content of speech. This new study argues that the liberal state ought to depart from neutrality to meet this challenge.

In this paper I discuss the claim that the successful reduction of qualitative to physical states requires some sort of intelligible connection between our qualitative and physical concepts, which in turn requires a conceptual analysis of our qualitative concepts in causal-functional terms. While I defend this claim against some of its recent critics, I ultimately dispute it, and propose a different way to get the requisite intelligible connection between qualitative and physical concepts.

Animating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological idea of the body as a pre-reflective organizing principle in perception, consciousness and language has become a productive and popular endeavor within philosophy of mind during the last two decades. In this context Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of an embodied mind has played a central role in the attempts to naturalize phenomenological insights in relation to cognitive science and neuropsychological research. In this dialogue the central role of art and aesthetics in phenomenology has been neglected or at best (...) treated as a peripheral phenomenon. In this article I argue that the failure to place art and aesthetics at the center of thought within phenomenology leads to a neglect of the expressive primacy of the body in movement. In the current naturalization of phenomenology the questions related to expressive movement are often consigned to the notions of motor intentionality or gesture. However, in his book How the Body Shapes the Mind the philosopher Shaun Gallagher interestingly concludes, based on experimental results, that bodily movements of gesture cannot be accounted for by the phenomenologically adapted notions of ‘body image’ and ‘body schema’. Symptomatically, Gallagher ends his chapter on bodily gesture with a section title asking the relevant question that remains unanswered within a phenomenology of mind: Expressive movement from the beginning? The search for an answer to this question points, in my view, to the possibility of a more radical understanding of the embodied mind based on the primacy of expressive experimentation rather than representational experience, which makes the question of art and aesthetics a core issue. Following the image of thought in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze I argue that art, as the production of sensation through experimentation, presents us with a mode of thinking that accounts for expressive bodily movement as a constitutive force in subjective thought and experience. (shrink)

I argue that 'c' occurs extensionally in 'c caused e' and 'D' occurs extensionally in 'c caused e because c is D'. I claim that this has been insufficiently appreciated because the two contexts are often run together and because it has not been clear that the description D of c is among the referents of an explanatory argument. I argue as well that Hume's analysis of causation is consistent with taking causation to be a relation between single events, and (...) that even if events are eliminated as virtual entities, extensionality holds for all terms in the resulting context. (shrink)

The international protest surrounding the Copenhagen Zoo’s recent decision to kill a healthy giraffe in the name of population management reveals a deep moral tension between contemporary zoological display practices—which induce zoo-goers to view certain animals as individuals, quasi-persons, or friends—and the traditional objectives of zoos, which ask us only to view animals as specimens. I argue that these zoological display practices give rise to moral obligations on the part of zoos to their visitors, and thus ground indirect duties on (...) behalf of zoos to their animals. I conclude that zoos might take on interspecies friendship as a new zoological objective. (shrink)

Significant progress in the molecular investigation of endogenous bioelectric signals during pattern formation in growing tissues has been enabled by recently developed techniques. Ion flows and voltage gradients produced by ion channels and pumps are key regulators of cell proliferation, migration, and differentiation. Now, instructive roles for bioelectrical gradients in embryogenesis, regeneration, and neoplasm are being revealed through the use of fluorescent voltage reporters and functional experiments using well‐characterized channel mutants. Transmembrane voltage gradients (Vmem) determine anatomical polarity and function as (...) master regulators during appendage regeneration and embryonic left‐right patterning. A state‐of‐the‐art recent study reveals that they can also serve as prepatterns for gene expression domains during craniofacial patterning. Continued development of novel tools and better ways to think about physical controls of cell‐cell interactions will lead to mastery of the morphogenetic information stored in physiological networks. This will enable fundamental advances in basic understanding of growth and form, as well as transformative biomedical applications in regenerative medicine. (shrink)

One version of virtue epistemology defines knowledge as belief whose truth arises from, or is explained by, the motives that produced it. This version is also intended to solve the Gettier problem, by shielding properly caused beliefs from double accidents. Unfortunately, there is no notion of "explains" or "arises from" which explains in the intended sense the truth of true beliefs.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:David Michael Levin ROUSSEAU'S CURSE Pretext Rousseau is the author of a text he called his Confessions. ' But neither a text nor a confession can exist without a reader, or an other. Like it or not, we readers are participants in the rite of Rousseau's confessions. Do we have anything to confess? When the reading of a confession uncovers the spelling of a curse, so that the (...) self-accused author appears to accuse his readers, the discoverers of the curse can no longer pretend their neutrality and innocence. In fact, the detectives must assume the identity of the accused. In such a special case, then, the inevitable work of textual interpretation magically doubles as the story of a mysteriously elusive "crime" and its final, or anyway presumed detection. But, as in the very best of such stories, neither the skillfully executed crime nor its invisible author—if indeed these terms denote anything at all—need be what they seem. So perhaps the only thing we can say for sure here is that the spelling of the curse is the curse of spelling. And this puts us on the track of a mystery as ancient as the art of writing itself—a mystery whose story the scholars of hermeneutics have thus far preferred to ignore. The mystery I have in mind is the secret affinity between writing and death. A careful hermeneutic approach to Plato's critique of writing, however, may give us a crucial clue. For what binds written language to the power of death is its role in mourning, its incarnation in the form of shadows: black configurations of shadows placed for visibility against the white of the paper. In Plato's Myth of the Cave, the crime of writing is dimly adumbrated. Writing is idolatry, worship of false images, shadows. Rousseau's Confessions, written near the end of his life in the shadow of death, does not escape the shadows of doubt and suspicion which we, his readers, having discovered our own selves inscribed into the darkness of the text, cannot easily refrain from casting. But as soon as we recognize in the shapes of these shadows a suspicion for which 76 David Michael Levin77 we are responsible, we must confess our fatal complicity in the closing of the hermeneutical circle. Commentary on the Text If Rousseau's Confessions does not read like the typical memoir, neither does it read like the typical confession. A final twist awaits us. We read with a certain innocence, or faith, not prepared for the transitive conclusion: the text, as it happens, will bequeath a monstrous and impossible burden. What is the reader to do? How could it be that this man, who seemed to honor us, and won our trust with the candor of his revelations, should so boldly, by one cross conceit, vanish, only to leave us double-crossed and within a labyrinth which, as he would have us believe, we ourselves have wrought? What are we to make of his work? At first, the Confessions appears to be a work of light: with dazzling clarity of mind and courage no less prismatic, Rousseau proposes to take his readers into the gloomy chasms of his soul. "My purpose," he declares, "is to display to my kind a portrait in every way true to nature, and the man I shall portray is myself" (p. 17). That this, however, is not the whole of his intention, we learn through a neighboring sentence. For he says: "Let the last trumpet sound when it will, I shall come forward with this work in my hand, to present myself before my Sovereign Judge, and proclaim aloud: 'Here is what I have done'..." (p. 17). And yet, even this does not fully disclose his design, since he concedes, somewhat later, that "it is as if, feeling my life escaping from me, I were trying to recapture it at its beginnings" (p. 31). But in the end, as in the beginning, darkness and light are one. And indeed, deep into the Seventh Book, we see that the author's light does begin to dim, and that he no longer speaks with much assurance. Nor is... (shrink)

Biology lacks a central organism concept that unambiguously marks the distinction between organism and non-organism because the most important questions about organisms do not depend on this concept. I argue that the two main ways to discover useful biological generalizations about multicellular organization--the study of homology within multicellular lineages and of convergent evolution across lineages in which multicellularity has been independently established--do not require what would have to be a stipulative sharpening of an organism concept.

Revonsuo's evolution-based theory places the nightmare as a prototype dream, which fully realizes its biological function. However, individuals who experience both repetitive (PTSD) nightmares and/or lifelong nontraumatic nightmares demonstrate impaired psychological functioning and attenuated information-processing. The importance of reconciling these discrepancies are addressed and ideas for providing stronger empirical tests of the model are presented. [Revonsuo].