I argue in this article that there is a mistake in Searle's Chinese room argument that has not received sufficient attention. The mistake stems from Searle's use of the Church-Turing thesis. Searle assumes that the Church-Turing thesis licences the assumption that the Chinese room can run any program. I argue that it does not, and that this assumption is false. A number of possible objections are considered and rejected. My conclusion is that it is consistent with Searle's argument to hold (...) onto the claim that understanding consists in the running of a program. (shrink)

It seems true to say that Sherlock Holmes is a detective, despite there being no Sherlock Holmes. When asked to explain this fact, philosophers of language often opt for some version of Lewis’s view that sentences like ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective’ may be taken as abbreviations for sentences prefixed with ‘In the Sherlock Holmes stories …’. I present two problems for this view. First, I provide reason to deny that these sentences are abbreviations. In short, these sentences have aesthetic (...) properties that we should not expect of abbreviations. Second, I argue that the apparent truth of these sentences would not be explained even if they were abbreviations. An alternative is presented that avoids these problems. Following Walton, talk about fiction is viewed as a game of make-believe; following Lewis, interpretations of fiction are modelled using possible worlds. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:166 BOOK REVIEWS Those who read this handsome book and study the paintings and sculptures of Zarlenga in excellent color will be able to follow the phases of his artistic development and find many subjects for medita· tion and enjoyment. Aquinas Institute of Theology St. Louis, Missouri BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. The Thought of Thomas Aquinas. By BRIAN DAVIES, O.P. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 (cloth); Oxford: Clarendon Press, (...) 1993 (paper). Pp. xv + 391. An establishing circumstance of the ' restoration ' of Christian philosophy at the end of the last century, and the turn of this century, was that the medieval authors whom Christian philosophers turned to were, by profession, theologians whose appropriation of philosophy was for explicitly theological ends. By and large, however, the modern authors who set about retrieving medieval thought had an agenda quite different from that of their medieval luminaries. Still reeling from the philosophical fall-out of the Enlightenment, and encountering rationalism, idealism, and empiricism on all sides, committed Christian thinkers sought a source of philosophical reflection and, perhaps more importantly, justification, that could buttress the claims made by Christianity for those who were within the believing community, and defend the faith from the intellectual attacks of those who were not. The enduring philosophical inheritance of the Middle Ages, and particularly the philosophia perennis of St. Thomas Aquinas, was that source, wrote Leo XIII in his Aeterni patris, and Catholic philosophers soon collected. But the inheritance was not fully collected. With distinctive philosophical goals in mind, Christian philosophers focused upon the putative philosophy of medieval writers, particularly Aquinas, and largely left theological reflection alone. And, when theological contentions on the part of medieval authors did make their way into the discussion, they were almost inevitably appropriated as a legitimate incorporation of revealed teaching into what somehow remained the philosophical project. The result was 'Christian Philosophy.' Although this resulted in the flurry of Catholic philosophical study during the first half of this century, the picture that emerged of the medieval authors, and of Thomas in particular, was inevitably one-sided, and incomplete. An overly pessimistic assessment of the situation would be to say that, for all the hard work of the Gilsons and Maritains, Van Steenberghens and DeKonincks, we are no nearer to Thomas today than we were in the 1870s. BOOK REVIEWS 167 Brian Davies's endeavor seeks to change that, because it attempts to provide the modern reader with a comprehensive introduction to the great expanse of Thomas's thought according to the manner in which Thomas himself presented it in his mature theological masterpiece, the Summa theologiae. Fr. Davies has succeeded magnificently, and his book will become, as it should, a mainstay on the bookshelves of university libraries, students, and teachers alike. Professional philosophers whose work never leads them to Thomas's discussion on Christ, say, can readily get a good working knowledge of how Thomas approaches this center of Christian faith and practice. And the student who is altogether new to Aquinas can grasp something of the ' movement ' of Thomas's thought by reading, and re-reading, Davies judicious renderings of Thomas's doctrine on human acts. This is a book of many uses, all of them instructive and helpful. Considering this book to be an introduction, as Fr. Davies does (p. viii), does not do justice to the quantity of his achievement in writing it, or of the student's investment in reading it. The work occupies some 391 pages, reading made difficult by the tightly-knit character of Thomas's thought, though Davies' easy writing helps to allay the burden. The physical constitution of the book, in slightly off-white octavo paper and an 11-point base font, makes for comfortable reading. Davies has avoided excessive footnoting, giving references to Thomas's text judiciously, and he also provides a well-tailored and impressively diverse bibliography at the end.of the volume which can be effectively consulted by his reader. The author himself is a foundational theologian at Blackfriars in Oxford, so one might expect him instinctively to address the particular audience he encounters in his work. But, save on a very few occasions, Fr. Davies is mindful that in... (shrink)

In the second volume of his Wissenschaftslehre from 1837, the Bohemian philosopher, theologian, and mathematician Bernard Bolzano introduced his concept of consequence, named derivability, together with a variety of theorems and further considerations. Derivability is an implication relation between sentences in themselves, which are not meant to be linguistic symbols but the contents of declarative sentences as well as of certain mental episodes. When Schmidt utters the sentence ‘Schnee ist weiß’, and Jones judges that snow is white, the sentence in (...) itself expressed by Schmidt is the same as the one to which Jones agrees in thought. This sentence in itself is an abstract entity: in some sense, it exists; but it is unreal insofar as it lacks a position in space and time, does not stand in causal relationships, and is independent of the existence of thinking beings and languages. (shrink)

This paper describes and defends the view that minimal chemical life essentially involves the chemical integration of three chemical functionalities: containment, metabolism, and program (Rasmussen et al. in Protocells: bridging nonliving and living matter, 2009a ). This view is illustrated and explained with the help of CMP and Rasmussen diagrams (Rasmussen et al. In: Rasmussen et al. (eds.) in Protocells: bridging nonliving and living matter, 71–100, 2009b ), both of which represent the key chemical functional dependencies among containment, metabolism, and (...) program. The CMP model of minimal chemical life gains some support from the broad view of life as open-ended evolution, which I have defended elsewhere (Bedau in The philosophy of artificial life, 1996 ; Bedau in Artificial Life, 4:125–140, 1998 ). Further support comes from the natural way the CMP model resolves the puzzle about whether life is a matter of degree. (shrink)

This study investigates how dispute-mediators handle impasse in the re-negotiation of divorce decrees by divorced couples. Three sources of impasse and three strategies for handling impasse are identified based on analysis of mediation transcripts. The concern here lies not so much in the disputant's arguments but in the discussion procedures dispute-mediators use to craft the disputant's argumentation into a tool to solve conflict. Their moves are understood here as a practice of reconstructing argumentative discourse that is neither naïve nor critical (...) but reconstruction as design. Mediator's reconstruction reveals a type of communication work in contemporary societies involved in the crafting of forums and formats that mediate argumentative communication. This work is often invisible and strategic which makes its interpretation, judgment, and development a challenge for pragma-dialectical theory. How reconstruction as design can be understood is discussed by building on prior pragma-dialectical theory and research. (shrink)

A Clearly argued and easy to read defense of Karl Popper's philosophy.

Bolzano holds that every sentence can be paraphrased into a sentence of the form "A has b". Bolzano's arguments for this claim are reconstructed and discussed. Since they crucially rely on Bolzano's notion of paraphrase, this notion is investigated in detail. Bolzano has usually been taken to require that in a correct paraphrase the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence express the same proposition. In view of Bolzano's texts and systematical considerations this interpretation is rejected: Bolzano only holds (...) that the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence must be equipollent ("gleichgeltend"). It is shown that even this modest view of paraphrase does not help Bolzano in sustaining his claim that all sentences have the form "A has b". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Note on Thomas and the Divine MercyMark JohnsonA PUZZLING THING about the topic of the divine mercy as presented in the early part of the Prima pars, especially in light of the detailed commentaries presented by Cessario and Cuddy, 1 is how relatively little Thomas speaks about it. Pope Francis devoted the entire 2016 year to a Jubilee of Mercy. The Catholic Theological Society of America followed suit (...) by devoting its 2016 conference to the topic. Yet Thomas does not devote a single Scholastic question to it in the Summa. The topic of the divine names gets question 13 (12 articles), the divine knowledge gets question 14 (16 articles), and the divine will gets question 19 (12 articles). Our anchor text, question 21, is a four-article-long question that emerges from the larger issue of God’s will in itself (absolute). Yet the question is not about the divine mercy on its own, but is rather about features or properties of the divine act of love, a topic to which the whole of question 20 is devoted. God’s justice and mercy are considered in question 21 as quasi-virtues that perfect the divine act of love (question 20), which in turn is the proper act of God’s will (question 19).2 The divine will of question 19 [End Page 355] is Halley’s Comet, and mercy is the tail of dust trailing in its wake. When God’s mercy does appear it seems to vie with God’s justice for our attention.Cessario and Cuddy help us understand why this is, both with their two-part structure and with the sources they employ, the commentators. My focus here will be on the original text in its own light, before the varnish of the commentators. Thomas’s original is a dense chiaroscuro, which both raises questions and offers opportunities.First, while Thomas is still well within the consideration of the divine being and action (STh I, qq. 3–26), he is sensitive to our human understanding. For us humans an element of suffering seems to be built into any consideration of mercy. It is the first hurdle that needs to be jumped in question 21, article 3; objection 1 frets about mercy because it is a subset, a species, of sorrow—and that cannot be in God. In the body of the article, Thomas alludes to sorrow via a consideration of the quid nominis of mercy. The term misericordia means having a miserum cor, a heart afflicted by the sufferings of another. Thomas dismisses this right away; in the body of the article he says “being saddened at the misery of another does not befit God” (tristari... de miseria alterius non competit Deo). He does not say more. Similarly, in addressing the first objection he notes that the objection was invoking mercy as a kind of “being affected by suffering” (obiectio illa procedit de misericordia, quantum ad passionis affectum). Again, he gives no further commentary.3 [End Page 356]With the concern about God’s “co-suffering” with us dispatched, Thomas addresses a second objection, the satisfying of which will allow for the existence and procedure of the next article (a. 4). The objection focuses upon the divine justice and worries that mercy seems to mean some kind of “loosening up” of the divine justice (relaxatio iustitiae), in which God seems to act contrary to himself, to his utterances or dictates (dicta sua). Thomas addresses this concern head-on; there is no loss or relaxation of the divine justice, but rather a fulfilling and indeed exceeding of the dictates of divine justice. An example both explains and foreshadows: the man who owes someone a hundred dollars but who fulfills the debt when he pays him two hundred dollars of his own money, has both met the demands of justice and acted with liberality and mercy. He has acted above and beyond justice (supra iustitiam operando). 4 Remembering that objection 2 had included a concern about acting against one’s own self and dictates, Thomas adds that remitting an offense made against oneself by another—he may have had peccatum originale originans in mind—has the... (shrink)

We explore the lexical choices made by authors published in Administrative Science Quarterly, a major academic journal in business and management studies. We do so via a corpus constructed from all the articles published in ASQ from its first publication in 1956 up until the end of 2018. Specifically, our focus is on lexical items that represent social actors. Our findings suggest that, compared with earlier work, recent articles typically ascribe greater status and prestige to organizational elites. Relatively contemporary papers (...) are also more likely to use language that obfuscates or ignores unpalatable aspects of organizational life, such as power asymmetries, hierarchy and control through identity regulation. We suggest that these changes in word choices can be understood to reflect a wider trend towards neo-liberal rhetoric – a rhetoric increasingly pervading contemporary social life more generally. (shrink)

Rebellions and Peripheries in the Cuneiform World. Edited by Seth Richardson. American Oriental Series, vol. 91. New Haven: American Oriental Society, 2010. Pp. xxxii + 109. $35.

This article argues thatἡμεροσκόποςatLys. 849 constitutes a pun based on iotacism, a well-known feature of female speech in fifth-century Athens aptly illustrated by Socrates in Plato'sCratylus. By describing herself asἡμεροσκόπος‘day watch’ pronounced asἱμεροσκόπος‘lust watch’, Lysistrata perverts the military term associated with the occupation-plot to a sexually charged word associated with the strike-plot. Its use would be very appropriate in a scene in which theφαλληφόριαof the men (not just Cinesias’ but later on also the Spartan herald's and the Spartan and Athenian (...) delegates’) become the subject of aφαλλοσκοπίαby the women (not just Lysistrata but later on also the chorus of women) and perforce also by the onlooking audience. Additional contemporary evidence from orthographic mistakes made by schoolboys suggests that Athenian elite women of the late fifth century were the avant-garde of socially prestigious innovations such as iotacism, which would definitively catch on with the male population in the fourth century and change the face of Greek phonology forever. (shrink)

If temporal parts are bona fide parts, then it is fitting to clarify and extend that notion (and related ones) using the resources of a theory of parts. But it often seems that those engaged in the 3D/4D debate appear to take for granted that, aside from introducing a welcome measure of rigor to the discussion, issues regarding theories of parthood can be allowed to recede into the background. What follows challenges that assumption — I demonstrate that the nature of (...) the fundamental mereological relation1 can decisively influence the outcome of the debate over persistence. In short, I show that if the fundamental mereological relation is proper parthood-at-atime then four-dimensionalism is false.2 Recognizing this does at least two things for us. First, it supplies a framework in which three-dimensionalists can clarify two things they have tended to say all along, namely that persisting things are ‘wholly present’ throughout their careers and that they do not have temporal parts. Second, it re-focuses the debate on a narrower and perhaps more tractable question: “What is the nature of the fundamental mereological relation?”. (shrink)

I here examine the underlying order of Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris, following compositional cues the author uses to highlight its themes, in order to draw out distinctive features of Plutarch’s philosophical agenda. After placing the text in the context of Plutarch’s general themes and his other main Platonic-hermeneutical works, I follow the indications of key framing devices to bring to the surface his structuring concerns first with the erotic character of the cosmos, in which human eros is at home, and (...) second with the intentions of ancient lawgivers to civilize human communities, both of which he sees represented in the Isis myth. The text thus exemplifies both Plutarch’s recovery of the unity in Plato of metaphysics and political philosophy and his manner of achieving that recovery through a coordinated threefold hermeneutics of wisdom traditions and human and cosmic phenomena. (shrink)

In this paper, which is situated in the broad stream of the confluence between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, I shall attempt to articulate the relation between self-consciousness and time consciousness. I shall show that the primary meaning of time entails a self-conscious being, and that time and change are related, but in an analogous way. Different forms of life—with concomitant different forms of self-consciousness—are qualitatively different in their capability of experiencing the flow of time. In making this claim, I shall (...) discuss Husserl’s distinction between pre-reflective or tacit self-awareness (inner-consciousness) and reflective self-consciousness (inner perception), and I shall show that this view is similar to Augustine’s distinction between nosse and cogitare and Aquinas’ distinc­tion between ”habitual” and “actual” self-knowledge. It will also be intimated that simultaneity is associated with empathy. (shrink)

This chapter investigates into what makes Captain America a great role model by describing some of his basic virtues. By looking at how Captain America embodies virtues such as courage and humility, he serves as a role model not only in terms of the virtues themselves but also in how he puts them into practice. The chapter argues that Captain America's supposed “black‐and‐white” ethics weren't simplistic in the 1940s, they are just as applicable now as they were then. One persistent (...) wrong about which Cap expresses righteous indignation is prejudice towards minorities. Captain America's tremendous willingness to sacrifice can be traced to his oversized sense of responsibility. Perseverance is what philosophers call an executive virtue because it helps people follow through on their judgment made in light of their virtues and principles. The virtues described in this chapter are only the ones most commonly attributed to Captain America in the comics. (shrink)

The multiverse is a hypothesis for which there is no evidence, and perhaps can never be any evidence. It is only since 1998 that it has leapt off the blackboards of a few physicists doing esoteric mathematics and lodged itself in the popular imagination. As is the way with popular science, it is easy to move from speculating that there might have been more than one big bang to proceeding on the basis that there has been more than one big (...) bang. (shrink)

The contemporary canon of what constitutes ancient political thought was fixed in the course of the nineteenth century by the then newly reigning discipline of the philosophy of history. It made little difference whether this discipline was positivistically or dialectically inclined. Whatever the methodological commitment there was general agreement that the sources of ancient wisdom on the nature and ends of social and political life were to be found in the political and ethical writings of Plato and Aristotle and, to (...) a lesser extent, Cicero. Here Cicero was read, in part, as a repository of a Stoic political wisdom that had not survived in the original texts. According to this tradition, genuine, if not final, political wisdom is to be found in the reflections of these ancient thinkers -- not a totally unexpected conclusion to come from philosophers. For these nineteenth-century practitioners of Geistesgeschichte the essence of ancient experience is distilled in its inner life, its art, literature, religion, and above all in its philosophical speculation, but not, for instance, in its political experience as recorded in its history. (shrink)

What is human freedom? By addressing a number of theological 'limit situations', Robert Greystones, while at Oxford University in the 1320s, developed his own philosophical theory. This volume is the first Latin critical edition, with a clear English translation. There is an extensive introduction describing his life and teaching on human freedom.

Community of inquiry is most often seen as a dialogical procedure for the cooperative development of reasonable approaches to knowledge and meaning. This reflects a deep commitment to normatively based reasoning that is pervasive in a wide range of approaches to critical thinking and argument, where the underlying theory of reasoning is logic driven, whether formal or informal. The commitment to normative reasoning is deeply historical reflecting the fundamental distinction between reason and emotion. Despite the deep roots of the distinction (...) and its canonization in current educational thought, contemporary cognitive neuroscience presents a fundamental challenge to the viability of the distinction and thus to any effort that sees education for reasonable judgment to be based on the remediation of cognition in isolation from its roots in the emotions. Cognitive neuroscience looks at the deep connections between emotion and memory, information retrieval, and resistance to refutation. This conforms with earlier studies in experimental psychology, which showed resistance to changing beliefs in the face of evidence, including evidence based on personal experience. This paper will look at the recent research including speculations from neurological modeling that shows the depth of connection between, emotions, memory and reasoning. It will draw implications for dialogic thinking within a community of inquiry including systematic self-reflection as an essential aspect of critical thinking. (shrink)

In this chapter, the author talks about some of the finer points concerning Captain America and his eligibility to serve as a moral exemplar. The chapter explores three issues. 1) Fictional characters are simply not real. 2) Fictional characters can be perfect and we can't. 3) Fictional characters can be depicted inconsistently over the years by different writers. Fictional characters can model virtuous character traits by demonstrating their consequences in an imaginary world that readers identify with. While real‐world people can't (...) be perfect, fictional characters can be: writers just have to write them that way! Depending on how they are written, fictional characters don't have to experience difficult choices or moral weakness, and they can stick to their principles come what may. Each writer and fan will have a personal conception of a character like Captain America that leads them to regard certain behaviors as mistakes, aberrations caused by writers. (shrink)

In this chapter, we address the roles that exemplars might play in a comprehensive response to epistemic injustice. Fricker defines epistemic injustices as harms people suffer specifically in their capacity as (potential) knowers. We focus on testimonial epistemic injustice, which occurs when someone’s assertoric speech acts are systematically met with either too little or too much credence by a biased audience. Fricker recommends a virtue­theoretic response: people who do not suffer from biases should try to maintain their disposition towards naive (...) testimonial justice, and those who find themselves already biased should cultivate corrective testimonial justice by systematically adjusting their credence in testimony up or down depending on whether they are hearing from someone whom they may be biased against or in favor of. We doubt that the prominent admiration-­emulation model of exemplarism will be much use in this connection, so we propose two ways of learning from negative exemplars to better conduct one’s epistemic affairs. In the admiration-­emulation model, both the identification of what a virtue is and the cultivation of virtues identified thusly proceed through the admiration of virtuous exemplars. We show that this model has serious flaws and argue for two alternatives: the envy-­agonism model and the ambivalence-avoidance model. (shrink)

ed individuals. Total diversity D is the sum of two fundamental principles governing broad classes of such..

Thinking Life is a narrative exploration of such themes as the decline of the contemporary university, man’s alienation from nature, modern melancholia, Dionysian intoxication, the relative value of knowledge, truth, and artistry in the life of the philosopher, and the creative construction of self. The author engages throughout with Plato and Nietzsche, with the Phaedo and The Gay Science in particular.