Contents Preface General Introduction 1 | Science and Pseudoscience Introduction Karl Popper, Science: Conjectures and Refutations Thomas S. Kuhn, Logic of Discovery or Psychology of Research? Imre Lakatos, Science and Pseudoscience Paul R. Thagard, Why Astrology Is a Pseudoscience Michael Ruse, Creation-Science Is Not Science Larry Laudan, Commentary: Science at the Bar---Causes for Concern Commentary 2 | Rationality, Objectivity, and Values in Science Introduction Thomas S. Kuhn, The Nature and Necessity of Scientific Revolutions Thomas S. Kuhn, Objectivity, Value Judgment, and (...) Theory Choice Ernan McMullin, Rationality and Paradigm Change in Science Larry Laudan, Kuhn’s Critique of Methodology Helen E. Longino, Values and Objectivity Kathleen Okruhlik, Gender and the Biological Sciences Commentary 3 | The Duhem-Quine Thesis and Underdetermination Introduction Pierre Duhem, Physical Theory and Experiment W. V. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism Donald Gillies, The Duhem Thesis and the Quine Thesis Larry Laudan, Demystifying Underdetermination *Colin Howson and Peter Urbach, The Duhem Problem Commentary 4 | Induction, Prediction, and Evidence Introduction Peter Lipton, Induction Karl Popper, The Problem of Induction Wesley C. Salmon, Rational Prediction Carl G. Hempel, Criteria of Confirmation and Acceptability Peter Achinstein, Explanation v. Prediction: Which Carries More Weight? *Nelson Goodman, The New Riddle of Induction Commentary 5 | Confirmation and Relevance: Bayesian Approaches Introduction Wesley C. Salmon, Rationality and Objectivity in Science *Deborah G. Mayo, A Critique of Salmon’s Bayesian Way *Alan Chalmers, The Bayesian Approach Paul Horwich, Therapeutic Bayesianism Commentary 6 | Models of Explanation Introduction Rudolf Carnap, The Value of Laws: Explanation and Prediction Carl G. Hempel, Two Basic Types of Scientific Explanation Carl G. Hempel, The Thesis of Structural Identity Carl G. Hempel, Inductive-Statistical Explanation Peter Railton, A Deductive-Nomological Model of Probabilistic Explanation *Philip Kitcher, Explanatory Unification *James Woodward, The Manipulability Conception of Causal Explanation Commentary 7 | Laws of Nature Introduction A. J. Ayer, What Is a Law of Nature? Fred I. Dretske, Laws of Nature D. H. Mellor, Necessities and Universals in Natural Laws Nancy Cartwright, Do the Laws of Physics State the Facts? Commentary 8 | Intertheoretic Reduction Introduction Ernest Nagel, Issues in the Logic of Reductive Explanations Paul K. Feyerabend, How to Be a Good Empiricist *Jerry A. Fodor, Special Sciences Philip Kitcher, 1953 and All That: A Tale of Two Sciences Commentary 9 | Empiricism and Scientific Realism Introduction Grover Maxwell, The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities Bas C. van Fraassen, Arguments Concerning Scientific Realism Alan Musgrave, Realism versus Constructive Empiricism Larry Laudan, A Confutation of Convergent Realism *Juha T. Saatsi, On the Pessimistic Induction and Two Fallacies Ian Hacking, Experimentation and Scientific Realism David B. Resnik, Hacking’s Experimental Realism *Martin Carrier, What Is Right with the Miracle Argument Arthur Fine, The Natural Ontological Attitude Alan Musgrave, NOA’s Ark---Fine for Realism Commentary Glossary Bibliography Name Index Subject Index. (shrink)

Publisher's description: The Phenomenology of Religious Life presents the text of Heidegger's important 1920621 lectures on religion. First published in 1995 as volume 60 of the Gesamtausgabe, the work reveals a young Heidegger searching for the striking language that eventually formed the mature expression of his thought. The volume consists of the famous lecture course "Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion," a course on "Augustine and Neoplatonism," and notes for a course on "The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism" that was (...) never delivered. Heidegger's engagements with Aristotle, St. Paul, Augustine, and Luther give readers a sense of what phenomenology would come to mean in his later works. Here, Heidegger reveals an impressive display of theological knowledge, protecting Christian life experience from Greek philosophy and defending Paul against Nietzsche. The appearance of this first English translation marks a significant event in Heidegger scholarship and affords a unique look into his phenomenology. (shrink)

He then argues that (1), (2) and (3) constitute an inconsistent triad as follows (1991, p. 15): Suppose (1) that Oscar knows a priori that he is thinking that water is wet. Then by (2), Oscar can simply deduce E, using premisses that are knowable a priori, including the premiss that he is thinking that water is wet. Since Oscar can deduce E from premisses that are knowable a priori, Oscar can know E itself a priori. But this contradicts (3), (...) the assumption that E cannot be known a priori. Hence (1), (2), and (3) are inconsistent. McKinsey’s conclusion is that ‘anti-individualism is inconsistent with privileged access’ (ibid.). (shrink)

"The condition Buber calls the 'eclipse of God' is the reality that modern life and the teachings of many scholars have in many ways destroyed the opportunity for intimacy with an eternal, ever-present, Thou, or God. Based in part on a series of lectures he gave in the United States in 1951, this book examines Buber's interpretations of Western thinking and belief around this notion of lost intimacy or direct contact with the Divine, focusing particularly on the relationships between religion (...) and philosophy, ethics, and Jungian psychology." --"Reference and Research Book News". (shrink)

. This is thinking that is alive, always green.Ó ÑReview of Metaphysics ÒThis translation . . . enlarges our historical view of the probing advances in Heidegger's thought.Ó ÑInternational Studies in Philosophy This clear translation ...

Martin Bunzl’s book was published in Routledge’s Philosophical Issues in Science series. It concerns the twin issues of objectivity and realism in the writing of history.

In this essay, a translation into English of Martin Heidegger's paper Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry, Paul de Man demonstrates his significant engagement with the work of Heidegger. He considers Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin's five key-passages on the subject of poetry, suggesting that the order in which these passages appear as well as the inner coherence that links them together will reveal the essence of poetry. He first comments on Hölderlin's claim that poetry is ‘the most innocent of (...) all crafts’ and goes on to discuss the four other key-passages: ‘Therefore, man was given language, the perilous of all blessings... that he bear witness to what he is... ’; ‘There is much that men have experienced. They have called the many of the heavenly by name, since we are an exchange of words, and one can hear from another’; ‘The poets found what will endure’; ‘With merit, and yet poetically, man dwells on this earth’. (shrink)

Daniel Taylor and Dawn Goodwin present a case study of the Morecambe Bay Inquiry (MBI), which examined the high rate of maternal and neonatal deaths over a period of 9 years (2004–2013), within the small maternity unit of Furness General Hospital (FGH), one of the three hospitals comprising Morecambe Bay Hospitals Trust.1 They examine this through a conceptual lens, and provide a solution involving changes in medical education. This commentary explores both these elements. First, they use the lens of ‘Normalisation (...) of Deviance’ (NoD) to explain organisational failure. However, other available lenses such as ‘Sociology of Disasters’, ‘Organisational Silence’ and ‘Comfort-seeking Behaviour’ may point to different problems and solutions. More justification for their choice of the lens of NoD would have been useful. Similarly, more justification for their focus on a cluster of five ‘serious untoward incidents’ (SUIs) occurring in 2008 would also have been useful. They suggest that before 2008, the perinatal mortality rate was low, patient satisfaction was high and recent level 2 accreditation of maternity services by the Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts all suggested standards of care within the obstetric department were adequate. This stream of positive signals is likely to have contributed towards a genuine belief of safe operation within the maternity unit by staff and board members. However, as they acknowledge, the first problem can be seen in 2004. According to the MBI,2 there were SUIs in the years before and after 2008, but this …. (shrink)

I discuss two puzzling and neglected passages in the Critique of Practical Reason, namely, V:92 and V:163. In these passages Kant claims that practical philosophers should follow the paradigm of the chemist and conduct experiments on common human reason. I explain Kant’s conception of the chemical experiment, provide a detailed interpretation of the two passages in question, and conclude by applying the structure of the chemical experiment to the Analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason. Chemical experiments as a model (...) of ethics should be understood as a method of confirming that a philosophical theory systematizes and defends ideas that ordinary rational agents are already committed to. (shrink)

A noted author defends his personal attitudes toward the fundamental issues of classical philosophy, discussing the awesome mystery surrounding science and life and explaining why he considers himself a theist.

When making a moral judgment, people largely care about two factors: Who did it (causal responsibility), and did they intend to (intention)? Since Piaget's seminal studies, we have known that as children mature, they gradually place greater emphasis on intention, and less on mere bad outcomes, when making moral judgments. Today, we know that this developmental shift has several signature properties. Recently, it has been shown that when adults make moral judgments under cognitive load, they exhibit a pattern similar to (...) young children; that is, their judgments become notably more outcome based. Here, we show that all of the same signature properties that accompany the outcome‐to‐intent shift in childhood characterize the “intent‐to‐outcome” shift obtained under cognitive load in adults. These findings hold important implications for current theories of moral judgment. (shrink)

Agent-based models (ABMs) are one of the main sources of evidence for decisions regarding mitigation and suppression measures against the spread of SARS-CoV-2. These models have not been previously included in the hierarchy of evidence put forth by the evidence-based medicine movement, which prioritizes those research methods that deliver results less susceptible to the risk of confounding. We point out the need to assess the quality of evidence delivered by ABMs and ask the question of what is the risk that (...) assumptions entertained in ABMs do not include all the key factors and make model predictions susceptible to the problem of confounding. (shrink)

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 78, Issue 1, Page 101-105, Winter 2020.

The influence of Heinrich Hertz's The Principles of Mechanics on Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus has been studied for decades, but it has never become a mainstream topic in the Wittgensteinian literature. This paper focusses on Tractarian notions of objects, elementary facts and elementary sentences and discusses their similarities with Hertz's concepts of mass, its constituents and their mechanistic images. As the paper demonstrates, the Hertzian context provides some fruitful interpretational leads concerning several controversial ideas endorsed by early Wittgenstein, namely propositional (...) analysis, logical independence of elementary facts, logical independence of elementary sentences, and modalities. (shrink)

In a world filled with “ambient violence”, public protest is a vital signal of shared discontent. The essential compulsion at the heart of protest, however, is conventionally not recognised for what it is: solidarity with those suffering injustices. Amid authorities’ often-fierce efforts to curtail gatherings of people whose experiences of injustice propel them into the streets, a sharp rise in public protests has been perceived since the early 2000s. Thousands of column inches dedicated to reporting on protests are rivalled in (...) volume only by the reams of academic theories produced around causes. Despite this overabundance of discourses, it often remains unclear what protest, at heart, constitutes. That is, what are we talking about when we talk about protest, and why does this question matter? In this paper I consider the constituent parts of protest formation in the abstract, including grievances, gestures, and tactics, among other. Developing these constituent parts reveals protest to be, first and foremost, a manifestation of a nonhegemonic ethical commitment to justice, requiring courage and coordination, and whose outcome is always contingent, that is, an act of love. I also reflect on the nature of protest as a direct political action that sits on a continuum that ranges from opposition politics to civil war. This continuum offers a graded view ranking expressions of discontent by severity of outcome. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungVor dem Hintergrund der medialen Debatte um die beiden Therwiler Schüler, die sich mit Verweis auf religiöse Gründe weigerten, ihrer Lehrerin die Hand zu reichen, strebten Politikerinnen und Politiker im Kanton Basel-Landschaft an, die dortige Verfassung zu ändern. Dabei wurde auf rechtliche und erinnerungskulturelle Diskurse aus dem Kulturkampf des 19. Jahrhunderts – und auf solche, die dazu Bezug nehmen – verwiesen. Diese Verweise werden in einem (partiellen) Close Reading des Kommentars zur geplanten (letztlich aber nicht realisierten) Änderung der basellandschaftlichen Kantonalverfassung (...) erörtert und in den konfligierenden Narrativen des liberalen und des konservativen Lagers verortet. Dabei wird der Kommentar als Dokument gelesen, in welchem spezifische Geschichtsbilder, politische Identitäten und das Recht als sozial konstruierte Entitäten verwoben werden – und in welchem spezifische Konstruktionen und Reifikationen von Identität und Alterität angelegt sind. (shrink)

An evolutionary theory of schizophrenia needs to address all symptoms associated with the condition. Burns' framework could be extended in a way embracing behavioural signs such as catatonia. Burns' theory is, however, not specific to schizophrenia. Since no one single symptom exists that is pathognomonic for “schizophrenia,” an evolutionary proposal of psychiatric disorders raises the question whether our anachronistic psychiatric nosology warrants revision.

This paper presents insights into the lived experience of maritime carpentry practices, based on six months of sensory-ethnographic fieldwork as a wooden boat builder’s apprentice. In particular, the author explores the widely-reported experience of tools ‘withdrawing’ from consciousness as craftspeople master their use. Without contradicting these interpretations – many of which are constructed by way of reference to ideas from Merleau-Ponty – the author suggests further theoretical resources to examine the perceptual experience of work after tools cease to be the (...) main focus of the craftsperson’s attention. Heidegger’s idea of ‘circumspection’ is presented as a way to illuminate the relational nature of the subsequent mode of perception, in which the work as a whole fills the consciousness, rather than the individual instruments through which the work is achieved. (shrink)

This paper first appeared in Modern Theology, Vol. 6, No. 3, July 1989. Copyright (c) Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd., Oxford. Reprinted by permission.

This critical interpretation shows Derridian thought to be permeated by a semiology that reduces all meaning to the signification of signs thus challenging the philosophy of deconstruction at its roots.

In a global economic landscape of hyper-commodification and financialisation, efforts to assimilate digital art into the high-stakes commercial art market have so far been rather unsuccessful, presumably because digital artworks cannot easily assume the status of precious object worthy of collection. This essay explores the use of blockchain technologies in attempts to create proprietary digital art markets in which uncommodifiable digital artworks are financialised as artificially scarce commodities. Using the decentralisation techniques and distributed database protocols underlying current cryptocurrency technologies, such (...) efforts, exemplified here by the platform Monegraph, tend to be presented as concerns with the interest of digital artists and with shifting ontologies of the contemporary work of art. I challenge this characterisation, and argue, in a discussion that combines aesthetic theory, legal and philosophical theories of intellectual property, rhetorical analysis and research in the political economy of new media, that the formation of proprietary digital art markets by emerging commercial platforms such as Monegraph constitutes a worrisome amplification of long-established, on-going efforts to fence in creative expression as private property. As I argue, the combination of blockchain-based protocols with established ambitions of intellectual property policy yields hybrid conceptual-computational financial technologies (such as self-enforcing smart contracts attached to digital artefacts) that are unlikely to empower artists but which serve to financialise digital creative practices as a whole, curtailing the critical potential of the digital as an inherently dynamic and potentially uncommodifiable mode of production and artistic expression. (shrink)