In this article I develop a phenomenological model of the dynamics of mind-wandering based on Aron Gurwitsch's (1964) field theory of consciousness. Specifically, I articulate these dynamics in terms of conscious field transformations resulting from particular interactions between the attentional focus, contextual background, and non-contextual background -- structures that Gurwitsch understood as invariantly present. According to the model, during guided thought the conscious context that escorts the focus of attention behaves like an autonomous self-defining system, as the primary determinant of (...) its own subsequent states. Often, during episodes of mind-wandering this autonomy is lost as the theme interacts preferentially with the margin. Additionally, I explain the relevance of mind-wandering to Varela's (1999) neurophenomenology of time consciousness. When the stream of consciousness is guided and constrained, as in cases of deliberate or ruminative thinking, retentions are derived primarily from information contained in the thematic field. When the stream of consciousness wanders, moment-to-moment retentions often derive mainly from marginal cognitive information stored in the outskirts of the field of consciousness. (shrink)

As I write this, in November 1971, people are dying in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical caxc. The suffering and death that are occurring there now axe not inevitable, 1101; unavoidable in any fatalistic sense of the term. Constant poverty, a cyclone, and a civil war have turned at least nine million people into destitute refugees; nevertheless, it is not beyond Lhe capacity of the richer nations to give enough assistance to reduce any further suffering to (...) very small proportions. The decisions arid actions of human beings can prevent this kind of suffering. Unfortunately, human beings have not made the necessary decisions. At the individual level, people have, with very few exceptions, not responded to the situation in any signihczmt way. Generally speaking, people have not given large sums to relief funds; they have not written t0 their parliamentaxy representatives demanding increased government assistance; they have not demonstrated in the streets, held symbolic fasts, or done anything else directed toward providing thc refugees with the means to satisfy their essential needs. At thc government level, no govcrmmcnt has given the sort of massive aid that would enable the refugees to survive fm: more than a few days. Britain, for instance, has given rather more than most countries. It has, to date, given £14,750,000. For comparative purposes, B1~itain’s share of thc nonreccverabla development costs of the Anglo-French Concorde project is already in excess of £275,000,000, and on present estimates will reach £440,000,¤00. The implication is that the British government values a supersonic transport more than thirty times as.. (shrink)

This article reconsiders the early hominid ‘‘lithic niche’’ by examining the social implications of stone artifact making. I reject the idea that making tools for use is an adequate explanation of the elaborate artifact forms of the Lower Palaeolithic, or a sufficient cause for long-term trends in hominid technology. I then advance an alternative mechanism founded on the claim that competency in making stone artifacts requires extended learning, and that excellence in artifact making is attained only by highly skilled individuals (...) who have been taught and practiced for extensive periods. Consequently both competency and expertise in knapping comes at a high learning cost for both the individual learner and the social group to which they belong. Those high intrinsic costs of learning created contexts in which groups selected cost-reducing forms of social learning and teaching, and in which specialization could develop. Artifacts and their manufacturing processes probably acquired functions as social signals—as honest signals of valuable capacities. The magnification of these signals, through competition between knappers and through inspiring later craftspeople, may account for a substantial amount of the accumulated elaboration visible in the archaeological record. Consequently lithic artifacts operated as material symbols from an early time in hominid evolution. (shrink)

This study presents a substantial and often radical reinterpretation of some of the central themes of Locke's thought. Professor Alexander concentrates on the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and aims to restore that to its proper historical context. In Part I he gives a clear exposition of some of the scientific theories of Robert Boyle, which, he argues, heavily influenced Locke in employing similar concepts and terminology. Against this background, he goes on in Part II to provide an account of Locke's (...) views on the external world and our knowledge of it. He shows those views to be more consistent and plausible than is generally allowed, demonstrating how they make sense and enable scientific explanations of nature. In examining the views of Locke and Boyle together, the book throws light both on the development of philosophy and the beginnings of modern science, and in particular it makes a considerable and original contribution to our understanding of Locke's philosophy. (shrink)

Singer and Dawson point out that two arguments against abortion, that the embryo is entitled to protection because from fertilization it is (1) a human being or (2) a potential human being, are also used by opponents of embryo experimentation. They focus on the second argument, evaluating the notion of potentiality as it applies to gametes, to the unimplanted embryo, to the implanted developing embryo, and to the embryo created by in vitro fertilization (IVF). They argue that there is a (...) crucial distinction between natural reproduction, in which all that is needed for the embryo to have a prospect of reaching its potential is for those involved to refrain from stopping it, and IVF, in which the embryo cannot develop into a person without a deliberate human act. Reproductive techniques necessitate our rethinking of established views about potentiality, and how it should be applied to the embryo in a laboratory. (KIE abstract). (shrink)

We clarify Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics by demonstrating the central role played by his thesis that quantum theory is a rational generalization of classical mechanics. This thesis is essential for an adequate understanding of his insistence on the indispensability of classical concepts, his account of how the quantum formalism gets its meaning, and his belief that hidden variable interpretations are impossible.

: Our paper discusses the epistemic attitudes of particle physicists on the discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider. It is based on questionnaires and interviews made shortly before and shortly after the discovery in 2012. We show, to begin with, that the discovery of a Standard Model Higgs boson was less expected than is sometimes assumed. Once the new particle was shown to have properties consistent with SM expectations – albeit with significant experimental uncertainties –, there (...) was a broad agreement that ‘a’ Higgs boson had been found. Physicists adopted a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, they treated the particle as a SM Higgs boson and tried to establish its properties with higher precision; on the other hand, they searched for any hints of physics beyond the SM. This motivates our first philosophical thesis: the Higgs discovery, being of fundamental importance and establishing a new kind of particle, represented a crucial experiment if one interprets this notion in an appropriate sense. By embedding the LHC into the tradition of previous precision experiments and the experimental strategies thus established, underdetermination and confirmational holism are kept at bay. Second, our case study suggests that criteria of theory preference should be understood as epistemic and pragmatic values that have to be weighed in factual research practice. The Higgs discovery led to a shift from pragmatic to epistemic values as regards the mechanisms of electroweak symmetry breaking. Complex criteria, such as naturalness, combine epistemic and pragmatic different values, but are coherently applied by the community. (shrink)

The graphs present the data in a fashion that will be clear to any audience, and the text is straightforward and persuasive. This book carries the study of historical dynamics to a whole new level.

It is argued that the usual proposals for dealing with mass-Quantification--All x is f--Are inadequate with the predicate is complex or when multiple quantification is considered. Mass-Quantification is seen as a generalisation of ordinary (thing) quantification in that the specialising assumption that the domain of quantification is atomic is not made. It is suggested that the semantic values of predicates are complete ideals of the boolean algebra consisting of the quantity which is the domain of quantification and all its sub-Quantities, (...) While logical connectives are represented by operations on complete ideals. (shrink)

There has been a groundswell of interest in the account of modality that Kant sets forth in his pre-Critical Only Possible Argument. Andrew Chignell's reconstruction of Kant's theistic argument in terms of what he calls has a prima facie advantage in that it appears to be able to block the plurality objection (namely, that even if every modal fact presupposes some ground, this does not entail that all modal facts share the same ground). I argue that it is both textually (...) and philosophically problematic to interpret Kant's argument in terms of real harmony. Then, I set forth an alternative response to the plurality objection which does not require the adoption of the problematic notion of real harmony. Instead, I argue that the objection can be overcome by observing that the argument seeks to ground modal facts as a totality and that, according to Kant, such relations can be accounted for only by their schematization in a single intellect. (shrink)

Our notion of normativity appears to combine, in a way difficult to understand but seemingly familiar from experience, elements of force and freedom. On the one hand, a normative claim is thought to have a kind of compelling authority; on the other hand, if our respecting it is to be an appropriate species of respect, it must not be coerced, automatic, or trivially guaranteed by definition. Both Hume and Kant, I argue, looked to aesthetic experience as a convincing example exhibiting (...) this marriage of force and freedom, as well as showing how our judgment can come to be properly attuned to the features that constitute value. This image of attunement carries over into their respective accounts of moral judgment. The seemingly radical difference between their moral theories may be traceable not to a different conception of normativity, but to a difference in their empirical psychological theories – a difference we can readily spot in their accounts of aesthetics. (shrink)

Shows that the dialogue in Plato's Phaedo is primarily devoted to presenting Socrates' final defense of the philosophical life against the theoretical and political challenge of religion.

According to the growing block ontology of time, there (tenselessly and unrestrictedly) exist past and present objects and events, but no future objects or events. The growing block is made attractive not just because of the attractiveness of its ontological basis for past-tensed truths, the past’s fixity, and future’s openness, but by underlying principles about the right way to fill in this sort of ontology. I shall argue that given these underlying views about the connection between truth and ontology, growing (...) blockers incur an ontological commitment to an infinite number of temporal dimensions (“hypertime”). This commitment to hypertime generates a vicious explanatory regress. It also undermines the idea that the reality of the past is sufficient to explain why truths about the past are fixed. Both of these implications are highly unattractive; growing blockers would do well to clarify what other motivations they can offer for their view and how they can avoid these consequences. (shrink)

Mulder and colleagues [Mulder, T., Hochstenbach, J., Dijkstra, P. U., Geertzen, J. H. B. . Born to adapt, but not in your dreams. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1266–1271.] report that a majority of amputees continue to experience a normally-limbed body during their night dreams. They interprete this observation as a failure of the body schema to adapt to the new body shape. The present note does not question this interpretation, but points to the already existing literature on the phenomenology of (...) the phantom limb in dreams. A summary of published investigations is complemented by a note on phantom phenomena in the dreams of paraplegic patients and persons born without a limb. Integration of the available data allows the recommendation for prospective studies to consider dream content in more detail. For instance, “adaptation” to the loss of a limb can also manifest itself by seeing oneself surrounded by amputees. Such projective types of anosognosia in nocturnal dreams should also be experimentally induced in normally-limbed individuals, and some relevant techniques are mentioned. (shrink)

This paper suggests that Bacon offers an Augustinian (rather than a purely Stoic) model of the “culture of the mind.” He applies this conception to natural philosophy in an original way, and his novel application is informed by two related theological concerns. First, the Fall narrative provides a connection between the cultivation of the mind and the cultivation of the earth, both of which are seen as restorative of an original condition. Second, the fruit of the cultivation of the mind (...) is the virtue of charity, which is understood not only as curing the mind of the individual, but as contributing to human welfare and ameliorating some of the material losses that resulted from the Fall. (shrink)

This paper provides a philosophical evaluation of the concept of handedness prevalent but largely unspoken in the scientific literature. This literature defines handedness as the preference or ability to use one hand rather than the other across a range of common activities. Using the philosophical discipline of phenomenology, I articulate and critique this conceptualization of handedness. Phenomenology shows defining a concept of handedness by focusing on hand use leads to a right hand biased concept. I argue further that a phenomenological (...) model based in spatial orientation rather than hand use provides a more inclusive concept of handedness. (shrink)

We conceive of the natural world as populated by relatively persistent material things standing in spatio-temporal relations to each other. They come into existence, exist for a time, and then pass away. We locate them relative to landmarks and to other material things in the landscape which they, and we, inhabit. We characterize them as things of a certain kind, and identify and re-identify them accordingly. The expressions we typically use to do so are, in the technical terminology derived from (...) Aristotle, names of substances.1 The term ‘substance’ has two distinct, but importantly linked, meanings. In the Aristotelian sense, a substance (more accurately, ‘a primary substance’) is a concrete individual thing of a given kind, such as a particular human being (Socrates), a given tree (such as Gautama’s Bo-tree) or a certain stone (the Kohinoor). The general kind (the ‘secondary substance’ in Aristotle’s terminology) to which the individual substance belongs is specified by a substance-name (‘human being’, ‘pipal tree’, ‘diamond’). Individual substances are the basic objects of reference and subjects of predication in our conceptual scheme. They are things of one kind or another (specified by a substance-name, as when we say that Socrates is a man). They are qualified by numerous properties, specified by non-substantial predicates (for example, is in the agora, is snub-nosed, or is a philosopher), but they are not themselves predicable of things – Socrates cannot be said to qualify anything or to be true of anything (as opposed to being like Socrates, which is a relational property some rare people may have) . Nor can the proper name ‘Socrates’ be said to be true of anything, by contrast with the identifying phrase ‘is Socrates’, which is true of the teacher of Plato, and tells us who he is. Characterizing an individual as a thing of a given kind by using such a (secondary) substance-name answers the question of what the thing is. Grasp of the substance name implies knowledge of what being a such-and-such consists in, in so far as that is logically (or, in the extended sense of the term, grammatically) determined.. (shrink)

This article looks at the late John Paul II's allocution on artificial nutrition and hydration (ANH) and the implications his statement will have on the ordinary-extraordinary care distinction. The purpose of this article is threefold: first, to examine the medical condition of a persistent vegetative state (PVS); second, to examine and analyze the Catholic Church's tradition on the ordinary-extraordinary means distinction; and third, to analyze the ethics behind the pope's recent allocution in regards to PVS patients as a matter of (...) conscience. Rather than providing clarification, I argue that the papal allocution has raised many difficult questions. People in situations where decisions must be made about withdrawal or continued ANH are in need of guidance. Moreover, additional analysis is needed to determine whether the papal allocution is in conflict with the traditional Catholic medical ethics understanding of the ordinary-extraordinary care distinction. (shrink)

Paulo Freire's concept of conscientisation has been the subject of considerable debate since the early 1970s. The interpretation of conscientisation as a process of ‘consciousness raising’, whereby individuals move through a sequence of distinct stages, is widespread. This article critiques the ‘stages’ model and advances an alternative perspective on conscientisation. Rejecting an individualist view of critical consciousness, the author concentrates on the link between conscientisation and praxis, and reassesses Freire's ideal in light of the postmodernist notion of multiple subjectivities.

This article replies to the main objections raised by the commentators on Carruthers . It discusses the question of what evidence is relevant to the assessment of dispositional higher-order thought theory; it explains how the actual properties of phenomenal consciousness can be dispositionally constituted; it discusses the case of pains and other bodily sensations in non-human animals and young children; it sketches the case for preferring higher-order to first-order theories of phenomenal consciousness; and it replies to some miscellaneous points and (...) objections. (shrink)

ABSTRACT When patients refuse to receive medical treatment, the consequences of honouring their decisions can be tragic. This is no less true of patients who autonomously decide to refuse treatment. I distinguish three possible implications of these autonomous decisions. According to the Permissibility Claim, such a decision implies that it is permissible for the patient who has made the autonomous decision to forego medical treatment. According to the Anti‐Paternalism Claim, it follows that health‐care professionals are not morally permitted to treat (...) that patient. According to the Binding Claim it follows that these decisions are binding on health‐care professionals. My focus is the last claim. After arguing that it is importantly different from each of the first two claims, I give two arguments to show that it is false. One argument against the Binding Claim draws a comparison with cases in which patients autonomously choose perilous positive treatments. The other argument appeals to considered judgments about cases in which disincentives are used to deter patients from refusing sound treatments. (shrink)

"These essays are the work of a genial, literate mind exploring a wide range of issues mainly centered on the philosophy of science and epistemology, but including considerations of literature, language, and social practice. Caws's work, in general, represents an independent and alternative current in the philosophy of science, one which is informed by a broader conception of scientific thought and activity than are the usual approaches of either the traditional logical-empiricists or the more recent post-positivists. And he has a (...) knack for deflating the latest fashionable claims early in the game, even before fashion has set in."--Marx Wartofsky, Editor, "The Philosophical Forum". (shrink)

In the first part, the author characterizes the fundamental contents (principles) of the constitutional state. In the second part, he describes the necessary reforms both at the level of the national constitutional state and at the global and humanity level. In the third part, he examines the methods and procedures of reform in the constitutional state, analysing: a) constitutional formation or complete revision; b) constitutional amendments or partial revision; c) parliamentary constitutional legislation; d) constitutional interpretation; e) government and non‐governmental “outlook” (...) commissions. (shrink)

Information about the prehistoric past is available only in the material remains. To be meaningful, these remains must be interpreted under the influence of a theory of some general or specific aspect of the past. For this reason, prehistoric archaeology clearly shows the reciprocity between theory and evidence and the tension between having to impose information on the evidence in order to discover information in the evidence. We use a specific case in the archaeology of Minoan Crete, a case that (...) uses Central Place Theory as a guide to understanding the evidence, to demonstrate a coherence model of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

James Cornman has recently offered a definition for ‘observation term’ which he takes to meet most, if not all, of the standard objections to such definitions. He also employs this definition against certain materialists, but in what follows I wish only to address myself to the proposed definition. I shall argue that he has failed to show any logical difference between “observation terms,” as he defines them, and terms which are not so classified. I shall show that his definition is (...) too restrictive. (shrink)