Christopher Franklin argues that the hard luck view, which I have recently defended, is misnamed: the arguments turn on absence of control and not on luck. He also argues that my objections to agent-causal libertarianism depend on a demand, for a contrastive explanation that guarantees the choice the agent makes, which would be question-begging in the dialectical context. In response to the first objection, I argue that though Franklin may be right that it is absence of control that (...) matters to freedom and not luck, we often are unable to discern whether an agent lacks sufficient control without asking whether the event is lucky for the agent; hence we cannot dispense with worries about luck in favor of concern about control. In response to the second worry, I argue that though Franklin is right in claiming that there is a perfectly good explanation regarding how the agent-causal power is exercised, it is not an adequate explanation given the context, because the same kind of explanation is available on event-causal theories. Agent-causal libertarians aim to avoid the luck objection which they acknowledge is powerful against event-causal libertarians; if it is true that they can offer nothing more than the latter kinds of theories in the way of control over actions, they fail in their aim. (shrink)

I offer a brief review of, and critical response to, Neil Levy’s fascinating recent book Hard Luck, where he argues that no one is ever free or morally responsible not because of determinism or indeterminism, but because of luck. Two of Levy’s central arguments in defending his free will nihilism concern the nature and role of explanation in a theory of moral responsibility and the nature of akrasia. With respect to explanation, Levy argues that an adequate theory of moral responsibility (...) must be able provide contrastive explanations of why an agent performs one action rather than another, and that libertarians lack the resources to provide such explanations. With respect to akrasia, Levy argues that it is impossible to be directly morally responsible for akratic actions. In response I argue that any sense of contrastive explanation that can reasonably be thought to be a requirement on an adequate theory of moral responsibility is a sense that agent-causal libertarians can secure. I then argue that the agent-causal theory of free will offers an alternative and attractive understanding of motivation and self-control that makes it plausible to think that we can be morally responsible for akratic actions. (shrink)

Whether or not quantum physics can account for molecular structure is a matter of considerable controversy. Three of the problems raised in this regard are the problems of molecular structure. We argue that these problems are just special cases of the measurement problem of quantum mechanics: insofar as the measurement problem is solved, the problems of molecular structure are resolved as well. In addition, we explore one consequence of our argument: that claims about the reduction or emergence of molecular structure (...) cannot be settled independently of the choice of a particular resolution to the measurement problem. Specifically, we consider how three standard putative solutions to the measurement problem inform our under- standing of a molecule in isolation, as well as of chemistry’s relation to quantum physics. (shrink)

Defends and transforms naturalism and materialism to show how culture itself is formed by nature. Bryant endorses a pan-ecological theory of being, arguing that societies are ecosystems that can only be understood by considering nonhuman material agencies such as rivers and mountain ranges alongside signifying agencies such as discourses, narratives and ideologies.

Volume 20 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_ ably traverses the analytic canvas with sections on "Theoretical Studies," "Clinical Studies," "Applied Psychoanalysis," and "Psychoanalysis and Philosophy." The first section begins with Arnold Modell's probing consideration of the paradoxical nature of the self, provocatively discussed with John Gedo. Modell focuses on the fact that the self is simultaneously public and private, dependent and autonomous. Alice Rosen Soref next explores innate motivation and self-protective regulatory processes from the standpoint of recent infancy research; her (...) notion of a lifelong two-track model of self and relatedness helps establish a normative baseline that can anchor psychoanalytic theory. George Mahl makes an interesting contribution to Freud studies in the form of a new chronology of Freud's works and the number of pages they contain in the _Standard Edition_. The section ends with Robert Galatzer-Levy and Mayer Gruber's "quasi-experiment about disgust." They test and disconfirm the hypothesis that disgust is an affective response to an abstract sense of disorder rather than a transformation of a concrete, bodily experience by systematically exploring references to concepts of disgust in the Old Testament. Section II, on "Clinical Studies," opens with Henry Smith's fascinating elaboration of Freud's notion of "screen memories" into a theory of screening that denotes the general process by which mental content is organized. He illustrates his thesis by invoking the "screen language" employed by a patient throughout her analysis. Ernest Wolf next explores the tension between being a "scientist" and a "healer" in Freud and his followers to illuminate struggles within the psychoanalytic movement and to help account for current attitudes toward abstinence, neutrality, and gratification. Kenneth Newman focuses on this same triptych of technical precepts. He argues, in the spirit of Winnicott and Kohut, that analysts can only alter the hostile internal environments of their patients by becoming "usable" objects and cultivating an optimally responsive analytic environment. A particularly rich collection of applied analytic studies forms Section III of the volume. Individual chapters focus on the childhood of Vincent van Gogh ; the psychological healing process depicted in George Eliot's _Silas Marner_ ; the self-psychological meaning of "blood brotherhood" in D. H. Lawrence's _Women in Love_ ; ecstatic mysticism in the 19th-century Indian saint Sri Ramakrishna ; the disintegration of the Tyrone family in Eugene O'Neill's _Long Day's Journey into Night_ ; and the nature and analytic significance of Freud's aesthetic response to Michelangelo's _Moses_. Finally, in Section IV, George Brook examines the commonsense psychological knowledge of everyday life, that is, the nonpsychoanalytic knowledge on which much of clinical psychoanalysis ultimately depends. Taken together, the four sections of Volume 20 of _The Annual_ offer an exciting overview of contemporary psychoanalysis. Section I highlights recent trends in psychoanalytic theorizing and the testing of psychoanalytic propositions; Section II explores the relevance of new theoretical perspectives to clinical work; Section III demonstrates the applicability of these new perspectives to psychobiographical and literary analysis; and Section IV provocatively explores the points of connection between everyday ideas and attitudes and the tenets of psychoanalytic practice. (shrink)

Le bilan d'une vie marquée par la littérature, la peinture et la musique, et une introduction à l'oeuvre de l'anthropologue. Il évoque son itinéraire intellectuel, ses voyages et ses rencontres, ses goûts et ses aversions. Publié à l'occasion de son centenaire.

In The Enterprise of Knowledge, I proposed a general theory of rational choice which I intended as a characterization of a prescriptive theory of ideal rationality. A cardinal tenet of this theory is that assessments of expected value or expected utility in the Bayesian sense may not be representable by a numerical indicator or indeed induce an ordering of feasible options in a context of deliberation. My reasons for taking this position are related to my commitment to the inquiry-oriented approach (...) to human knowledge and valuation favored by the American pragmatists, Charles Peirce and John Dewey. A feature of any acceptable view of inquiry ought to be that during an inquiry points under dispute ought to be kept in suspense pending resolution through inquiry. (shrink)

Kierkegaard famously declared that life is lived forwards but understood backwards. The retrospective look at one's career necessarily takes the form of a narrative reconstruction. Our lives are messier than the stories we tell about them.I first took up serious study of philosophy as a sophomore at Columbia College in 1967. The extensive core curriculum at Columbia exposes all students to a sampling of classic texts in philosophy. Some inkling of a more than passing interest in philosophy, which I can't (...) now recall, must have induced me take an elective course devoted to that subject. It was taught in the old-fashioned way of detailed examination of classic texts—the way that I believe it is best to learn about... (shrink)

The “learning health care system” is being heralded as offering great potential for improving the quality and cost-worthiness of medical care by closely integrating the care of patients with the accumulation of aggregate data that can guide evidence-based medicine. By using electronic medical records, routine patient care and administrative data will be available for systematic observational studies. With the aid of these electronic medical records, quality-improvement studies of institutional practices and pragmatic, comparative effectiveness randomized trials of individual treatments could become (...) standard features of the medical care environment in the LHS. In this.. (shrink)

Event-causal libertarians maintain that an agent’s freely bringing about a choice is reducible to states and events involving him bringing about the choice. Agent-causal libertarians demur, arguing that free will requires that the agent be irreducibly causally involved. Derk Pereboom and Meghan Griffith have defended agent-causal libertarianism on this score, arguing that since on event-causal libertarianism an agent’s contribution to his choice is exhausted by the causal role of states and events involving him, and since these states and events leave (...) it open which decision he will make, he does not settle which decision occurs, and thus “disappears.” My aim is to explain why this argument fails. In particular, I demonstrate that event-causal libertarians can dismantle the argument by enriching the reductive base in their analysis of free will to include a state that plays the functional role of the self-determining agent and with which the agent is identified. (shrink)

The debate over whether Frankfurt-style cases are counterexamples to the principle of alternative possibilities has taken an interesting turn in recent years. Frankfurt originally envisaged his attack as an attempting to show that PAP is false—that the ability to do otherwise is not necessary for moral responsibility. To many this attack has failed. But Frankfurtians have not conceded defeat. Neo-Frankfurtians, as I will call them, argue that the upshot of Frankfurt-style cases is not that PAP is false, but that it (...) is explanatorily irrelevant. Derk Pereboom and David Hunt’s buffer cases are tailor made to establish this conclusion. In this paper I come to the aid of PAP, showing that buffer cases provide no reason for doubting either its truth or relevance with respect to explaining an agent’s moral responsibility. (shrink)

What are the roles of semantic and pragmatic processes in the interpretation of sentences in context? And how do we attain such interpretations when sentences are deemed indeterminate? Consider a sentence such as “Lisa began the book” which does not overtly express the activity that Lisa began doing with the book. Although it is believed that individuals compute a specified event to enrich the sentential representation – yielding, e.g., “began [reading] the book” – there is no evidence that a default (...) event meaning is attained. Moreover, if indeterminate sentences are enriched, it is not clear where the information required to generate enriched interpretations come from. Experiment 1 showed that, in isolation, there is no default interpretation for indeterminate sentences. The experiment also showed that biasing contexts constrain event interpretations and improve plausibility judgments, suggesting that event representations for indeterminate sentences are generated by context. In Experiment 2, participants heard biasing discourse contexts and later falsely recognized foil sentences containing the biased events (“Lisa began reading the book”) at the same proportion and with the same confidence as the original indeterminate sentence (“Lisa began the book”). We suggest that indeterminate sentences trigger event-enriching inferences but only in sufficiently constraining contexts. We also suggest that indeterminate sentences create two memory traces, one for the proposition consistent with the denotational, compositional meaning, and another for the proposition that is enriched pragmatically over time. (shrink)

This book contains 22 essays on the ethics of research involving human subjects written over a 15-year period. Topics addressed include the ethics of clinical trials, controversial study designs, and informed consent.

One can sympathize with [Leo] Strauss' ultimate aim—to protect the validity of moral judgment against that form of relativism which would assess the value of great philosophic works simply in terms of how they satisfied the needs of the times for which they were written. But in believing that "historicism " meant "relativism," and that all attention to the temporal relevance of great doctrines in the history of ideas was somehow perverse, Strauss was profoundly mistaken. Hermeneutics is not axiology. Questions (...) of truth and validity are fundamental, but they are dependent upon a prior solution of the problem of meaning. And for the establishment of meaning, contextual analysis is crucial. For it is not as if ideas were the ghostly inhabitants of another world, logically cut off from human purposes and intentions. All three things exist: ideas, agents, and social contexts, and the best history of ideas is, I believe, constituted by the careful consideration of the multiple interrelationships between them. It is false to believe that texts exhaust their own meaning. For there is always an historical grounding and a web of person and social events that give them wider and deeper significance. And this is precisely why we must ask such questions as: What sort of society was the author writing for and trying to persuade? What were the conventions of communication and the literary forms of discourse current at the time? What was the author's class affiliation, his place in the social hierarchy of his age? And perhaps above all: What were his moral commitments, the structure of his ideals? Albert William Levi, David May Distinguished University Professor of the Humanities at Washington University, Saint Louis, is the author of Philosophy and the Modern World; Literature, Philosophy and the Imagination; Humanism and Politics; and Philosophy as Social Expression, and The Idea of Culture. His "Culture: A Guess at the Riddle" appeared in Critical Inquiry, Winter 1977. (shrink)

Similarity underlies fundamental cognitive capabilities such as memory, categorization, decision making, problem solving, and reasoning. Although recent approaches to similarity appreciate the structure of mental representations, they differ in the processes posited to operate over these representations. We present an experiment that differentiates among extant structural accounts of similarity in their ability to account for patterns of similarity ratings. These data pose a challenge for transformation‐based models and all but one mapping‐based model, the Similarity as Interactive Activation and Mapping (SIAM) (...) model of similarity. (shrink)

This paper suggests that the flaw in the enthymeme approach to argument analysis is in the requirement, as I come to formulate it, that an argument be restated as a premises-and-conclusion sequence. The paper begins by investigating how logicians show that there are problems with the enthymeme approach. That investigation reveals a failure on the part of logicians to appreciate the importance of the rhetorical context of an argument. This failure, it is argued, is a consequence of what I refer (...) to as the Premise-Conclusion Requirement. (shrink)

Interpretations of recollection in the "Phaedo" are divided between ordinary interpretations, on which recollection explains a kind of learning accomplished by all, and sophisticated interpretations, which restrict recollection to philosophers. A sophisticated interpretation is supported by the prominence of philosophical understanding and reflection in the argument. Recollection is supposed to explain the advanced understanding displayed by Socrates and Simmias (74b2-4). Furthermore, it seems to be a necessary condition on recollection that one who recollects also perform a comparison of sensible particulars (...) to Forms (74a5-7). I provide a new ordinary interpretation which explains these features of the argument. First, we must clearly distinguish the philosophical reflection which constitutes the argument for the Theory of Recollection from the ordinary learning which is its subject. The comparison of sensibles to Forms is the reasoning by which we see, as philosophers, that we must recollect. At the same time, we must also appreciate the continuity of ordinary and philosophical learning. Plato wants to explain the capacity for ordinary discourse, but with an eye to its role as the origin of philosophical reflection and learning. In the "Phaedo", recollection has ordinary learning as its immediate explanandum, and philosophical learning as its ultimate explanandum. (shrink)

We give several characterizations of Schnorr trivial sets, including a new lowness notion for Schnorr triviality based on truth-table reducibility. These characterizations allow us to see not only that some natural classes of sets, including maximal sets, are composed entirely of Schnorr trivials, but also that the Schnorr trivial sets form an ideal in the truth-table degrees but not the weak truth-table degrees. This answers a question of Downey, Griffiths and LaForte.

The Tree of Life has traditionally been understood to represent the history of species lineages. However, recently researchers have suggested that it might be better interpreted as representing the history of cellular lineages, sometimes called the Tree of Cells. This paper examines and evaluates reasons offered against this cellular interpretation of the Tree of Life. It argues that some such reasons are bad reasons, based either on a false attribution of essentialism, on a misunderstanding of the problem of lineage identity, (...) or on a limited view of scientific representation. I suggest that debate about the Tree of Cells and other successors to the traditional Tree of Life should be formulated in terms of the purposes these representations may serve. In pursuing this strategy, we see that the Tree of Cells cannot serve one purpose suggested for it: as an explanation for the hierarchical nature of taxonomy. We then explore whether, instead, the tree may play an important role in the dynamic modeling of evolution. As highly-integrated complex systems, cells may influence which lineage components can successfully transfer into them and how they change once integrated. Only if they do in fact have a substantial role to play in this process might the Tree of Cells have some claim to be the Tree of Life. (shrink)