The case for massively modular models of mind -- The architecture of animal minds -- Modules of the human mind -- Modularity and flexibility : the first steps -- Creative cognition in a modular mind -- The cognitive basis of science -- Distinctively human practical reason.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:April 3, 2010 (11:17 am) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE2902\russell 29,2 050 red.wpd 188 Reviews 1 A.yW. Brown, The Metaphysical Society (New York: Octagon, 1973), pp. 180–1. THE ETHICS OF BELIEF Sylvia Nickerson History & Philosophy of Science & Technology / U. of Toronto Toronto, on, Canada m5s 1k1 [email protected] Timothy J. Madigan. W.yK. CliVord and “The Ethics of Beliefz”. Newcastle, uk: CambridgeScholars Publishing, 2009. Pp. [x], 202. isbn (...) 1-84718-503-7. £29.99; us$44.99 (hb). The mathematician William Kingdon CliTord (1845–1879) is generally remembered as a potentially great man whose life was cut short before his genius was fully realized. During his lifetime CliTord was well known in London as a public intellectual and noted authority on science. He was also an iconoclast, a leader in the application of Darwinian principles to areas beyond biology, and a proponent of non-Euclidean geometry. Unlike other agnostics, CliTord did not mourn the loss of his religious belief, nor did he worry that a secularized society would bring about general social decay. While other scientiWc naturalists worried that a collapse of religion would destroy morality and lead to social disintegration, CliTord willingly ceded the universal truths religion oTered, embracing the uncertainty that scientiWc knowledge actually entailed. He even dared to call himself an atheist. However, CliTord’s death at age 34 curtailed the trace of his thought. What remains is consigned to his scant private notebooks and collected works. Perhaps it was the brevity of his life that has led to his neglect within the history of science; no comprehensive appraisal of his mathematical work has been written. CliTord’sbest-knownnon-mathematical statementisthat“itiswrongalways, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insuUcient evidence.” This was the statement he defended in his lecture “The Ethics of Beliefz”, which he delivered to London’s Metaphysical Society in 1876. The Metaphysical Society, founded in 1869 to promote discussion between religious believers and scientiWc rationalists, ceased operation in 1880 after members could not Wnd enough common ground to begin debate. The rationalist position CliTord argues in “The Ethics of Beliefz” stands on the far side of the spectrum within this discourse. CliTord’s immoderate stance, along with his use of biblical rhetoric to argue a secularist position, was calculated to provoke conservative intellectuals and institutions.1 When his essay appeared in the January 1877 issue April 3, 2010 (11:17 am) C:\Users\Milt\Desktop\backup copy of Ken's G\WPData\TYPE2902\russell 29,2 050 red.wpd Reviews 189 of Contemporary Review, it proved antagonistic enough that it led in part to the dismissal of James Knowles as editor. Timothy Madigan’s book W.yK. CliVord and “The Ethics of Beliefz”z provides an introduction to and analysis of CliTord’s ethical philosophy. His goal is to outline the historical context from which CliTord’s most famous essay arose, and to analyze the merits and demerits of its argument through the viewpoints of critics and freethinkers from the nineteenth century to the present. Madigan gives a brief history of the Victorian crisis of faith, CliTord’s mathematical work, and the biographical details of his life. He presents the argument CliTord makes within “The Ethics of Beliefz”, and outlines the critical response from his contemporaries, including founding members of the Metaphysical Society William George Ward and Richard H. Hutton, poet Matthew Arnold, physiologist George John Romanes, and American psychologist and philosopher William James. Madigan also discusses the positions argued by other rationalists in the 1870s,1880sandlater(Leslie Stephen, Karl Pearson, FriedrichNietzsche, Charles Peirce and Bertrand Russell) and by modern philosophers who have contributed to the rationalist/religionist debate (C.yS. Lewis, J.yL. Mackie, Michael Martin, Peter van Inwagen, Susan Haack, Anthony Quinton, and Lorraine Code). In Chapter 6 Madigan presents his own defence of CliTord’s ethics of belief. While early sections of the book provide a helpful summary of previously published work, I found Madigan’s discussion of CliTord’s writings on psychology and theory of mind particularly valuable (pp. 58–65). Madigan notes positively that CliTord’s contribution helped steer the early development... (shrink)

In 1936, G. Birkhoff and J. v. Neumann published an article with the title The logic of quantum mechanics'. In this paper, the authors demonstrated that in quantum mechanics the most simple observables which correspond to yes-no propositions about a quantum physical system constitute an algebraic structure, the most important proper ties of which are given by an orthocomplemented and quasimodular lattice Lq. Furthermore, this lattice of quantum mechanical proposi tions has, from a formal point of view, many similarities with (...) a Boolean lattice L8 which is known to be the lattice of classical propositional logic. Therefore, one could conjecture that due to the algebraic structure of quantum mechanical observables a logical calculus Q of quantum mechanical propositions is established, which is slightly different from the calculus L of classical propositional logic but which is applicable to all quantum mechanical propositions. This calculus has sometimes been called 'quan tum logic'. However, the statement that propositions about quantum physical systems are governed by the laws of quantum logic, which differ from ordinary classical logic and which are based on the empirically well-established quantum theory, is exposed to two serious objec tions: Logic is a theory which deals with those relationships between various propositions that are valid independent of the content of the respective propositions. Thus, the validity of logical relationships is not restricted to a special type of proposition, e. g. to propositions about classical physical systems. (shrink)

Ambitiously identifying fresh issues in the study of complex systems, Peter J. Taylor, in a model of interdisciplinary exploration, makes these concerns accessible to scholars in the fields of ecology, environmental science, and science studies. Unruly Complexity explores concepts used to deal with complexity in three realms: ecology and socio-environmental change; the collective constitution of knowledge; and the interpretations of science as they influence subsequent research. For each realm Taylor shows that unruly complexity-situations that lack definite boundaries, where what (...) goes on "outside" continually restructures what is "inside," and where diverse processes come together to produce change-should not be suppressed by partitioning complexity into well-bounded systems that can be studied or managed from an outside vantage point. Using case studies from Australia, North America, and Africa, he encourages readers to be troubled by conventional boundaries-especially between science and the interpretation of science-and to reflect more self-consciously on the conceptual and practical choices researchers make. (shrink)

Provocative essays on real-world ethical questions from the world's most influential philosopher Peter Singer is often described as the world's most influential philosopher. He is also one of its most controversial. The author of important books such as Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, Rethinking Life and Death, and The Life You Can Save, he helped launch the animal rights and effective altruism movements and contributed to the development of bioethics. Now, in Ethics in the Real World, Singer shows that he (...) is also a master at dissecting important current events in a few hundred words. In this book of brief essays, he applies his controversial ways of thinking to issues like climate change, extreme poverty, animals, abortion, euthanasia, human genetic selection, sports doping, the sale of kidneys, the ethics of high-priced art, and ways of increasing happiness. Singer asks whether chimpanzees are people, smoking should be outlawed, or consensual sex between adult siblings should be decriminalized, and he reiterates his case against the idea that all human life is sacred, applying his arguments to some recent cases in the news. In addition, he explores, in an easily accessible form, some of the deepest philosophical questions, such as whether anything really matters and what is the value of the pale blue dot that is our planet. The collection also includes some more personal reflections, like Singer’s thoughts on one of his favorite activities, surfing, and an unusual suggestion for starting a family conversation over a holiday feast. Now with a new afterword by the author, this provocative and original book will challenge—and possibly change—your beliefs about many real-world ethical questions. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century, and his seminal text Being and Time is considered one of the most significant texts in contemporary philosophy. Yet his name has also been mired in controversy because of his affiliations with the Nazi regime, his failure to criticize its genocidal politics and his subsequent silence about the holocaust. Now, according to Heidegger's wishes, and to complete the publication of his multi-volume Complete Works, his highly (...) controversial and secret 'Black Notebooks' have been released to the public. These notebooks reveal the extent to which Heidegger's 'personal Nazism' was neither incidental nor opportunistic, but part of his philosophical ethos. So, why would Heidegger, far from destroying them, allow these notebooks, which contain examples of this extreme thinking, to be published? In this revealing new book, Peter Trawny, editor of Heidegger's complete works in German, confronts these questions and, by way of a compelling study of his theoretical work, shows that Heidegger was committed to a conception of freedom that is only beholden to the judgement of the history of being; that is, that to be free means to be free from the prejudices, norms, or mores of one's time. Whoever thinks the truth of being freely exposes themselves to the danger of epochal errancy. For this reason, Heidegger's decision to publish his notebooks, including their anti-Jewish passages, was an exercise of this anarchical freedom. In the course of a wide-ranging discussion of Heidegger's views on truth, ethics, the truth of being, tragedy and his relationship to other figures such as Nietzsche and Schmitt, Trawny provides a compelling argument for why Heidegger wanted the explosive material in his Black Notebooks to be published, whilst also offering an original and provocative interpretation of Heidegger's work. (shrink)

In this short book Peter Sloterdijk offers a genealogy of the concept of freedom from Ancient Greece to the present day. This genealogy is part of a broader theory of the large political body, according to which Sloterdijk argues that political communities arise in response to a form of anxiety or stress. Through a highly original reading of Rousseaus late Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Sloterdijk shows that, for Rousseau, the modern subject emerges as a subject free of all (...) stress, unburdened by the cares of the world. Most of modern philosophy, and above all German Idealism, is an attempt to reign back Rousseaus useless and anarchical subject and anchor it in the cares of the world, in the task of having to produce both the world and itself. In the light of this highly original account, Sloterdijk develops his own distinctive account of freedom, where freedom is conceptualized as the availability for the improbable. This important text, in which Sloterdijk develops his account of freedom and the modern subject, will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy and the humanities and to anyone interested in contemporary philosophy and critical theory. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of some of the most important philosophical papers by Peter Gärdenfors. Spanning a period of more than 20 years of his research, they cover a wide ground of topics, from early works on decision theory, belief revision and nonmonotonic logic to more recent work on conceptual spaces, inductive reasoning, semantics and the evolutions of thinking. Many of the papers have only been published in places that are difficult to access. The common theme of all (...) the papers is the dynamics of thought. Several of the papers have become minor classics and the volume bears witness of the wide scope of Gärdenfors’ research and of his crisp and often witty style of writing. The volume will be of interest to researchers in philosophy and other cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Peter Achinstein has gathered some prominent philosophers and historians of science for critical and lively discussions of both general questions about the ...

Newton deplored speculation in science, Einstein reveled in it. What exactly are scientific speculations? Are they ever legitimate? Are they subject to constraints? This book defends a pragmatic approach to these issues and applies it to speculations within science and to speculations about science.

A major problem with the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is that Jesus is meant to be both God and man. Richard Swinburne attempts to overcome the problem by having it that in him there are two consciousnesses – the consciousness of being God, and the consciousness of being a man. This position is rejected, on the Aristotelian ground that one consciousness is enough to explain with dignity the mind of Christ.

"Wisdom in the Open Air" traces the Norwegian roots of the strain of thinking called "deep ecology" - the search for the solutions to environmental problems by examining the fundamental tenets of our culture. Although Arne Naess coined the term in the 1970s, the insights of deep ecology actually reflect a whole tradition of thought that can be seen in the history of Norwegian culture, from ancient mountain myths to the radical ecoactivism of today. Beginning with an introduction to Norway's (...) emphasis on nature and the wild, Reed and Rothenberg explore the birth of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s. What follows is a collection of writings by prominent Norwegian thinkers on humanity and nature, most never before published in English. From Peter Wessel Zapffe, a twentieth-century Kierkegaardian figure, the list goes on to include Arne Naess, activist/critic/artist Sigmund Kvaloy, wilderness educator Nils Faarlund, novelist Finn Alnaes, sociologist Johan Galtung, and social reformer Erik Dammann. Their points of view offer thoughts on the significance of modern life and what it means to be human in the face of deteriorating environmental global trends of the 20th century. "Wisdom in the Open Air" asks and answers a fundamental question concerning the ecomovement: what is the role of deep, often abstract, thinking in the attempt to avert a very real ecological crisis? (shrink)

What are the differences between philosophy and science, or between the methods of philosophy and the methods of science? Unlike some philosophers we do not find philosophy and the methods of philosophy to be sui generis. Science, and in particular neuroscience, has much to tell us about the nature of the world and the concepts that we must use to understand and explain it. Yet science cannot function well without reflective analysis of the concepts, methods, and practices that constitute it. (...) For example, experimental methods and their resulting empirical data are essential for understanding the world, yet such data is not a-conceptual. Understanding how and what theoretical assumptions, conceptual assumptions, and practical knowledge guide the use of experimental methods is relevant to understanding the results of that use. In this way, philosophy – whether done by philosophers or scientists – has a role to play in understanding the world. Neuroscience is typically individualistic in focus; nonetheless, the mechanisms of learning and linguistic ability that some neuroscientists study also have a role to play in understanding communication. Philosophy cannot offer adequate understanding, even conceptual clarity, in isolation from empirical investigation. Yet, this does not require that science or scientific concepts will replace or reduce philosophical concepts, let alone those of ordinary language. (shrink)

The place of moral innocence in politics is the central theme of Peter Johnson's subtle and original book.

Peter Alexander; I*—The Presidential Address: Incongruent Counterparts and Absolute Space, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 85, Issue 1, 1 June 1.

Midcentury America was governed from the center, a bipartisan consensus of politicians and public opinion that supported government spending on education, the construction of a vast network of interstate highways, healthcare for senior citizens, and environmental protection. These projects were paid for by a steeply progressive tax code, with a top tax rate at one point during the Republican Eisenhower administration of 91 percent. Today, a similar agenda of government action would be portrayed as dangerously left wing. At the same (...) time, radically anti-government and anti-tax opinions are considered part of the mainstream. In _Take Back the Center_, Peter Wenz makes the case for a sane, reality-based politics that reclaims the center for progressive policies. The key, he argues, is taxing the wealthy at higher rates. The tax rate for the wealthiest Americans has declined from the mid-twentieth-century high of 91 percent to a twenty-first-century low of 36 percent--even as social programs are gutted and the gap betweeen rich and poor widens dramatically. Ever since Ronald Reagan famously declared that government was the problem and not the solution, conservatives have had an all-purpose answer to any question: smaller government and lower taxes. Wenz offers an impassioned counterargument. He explains the justice of raising the top tax rates significantly, making a case for less income inequality, and he offers suggestions for how to spend the increased tax revenues: K-12 education, tuition relief, transportation and energy infrastructure, and universal health care. Armed with Wenz's evidence-driven arguments, progressives can position themselves where they belong: in the mainstream of American politics and at the center of American political conversations, helping their country address a precipitous decline in equality and quality of life. (shrink)

This book is a follow-up to _Inside Schools_. It reviews the position of ethnography in educational research in the light of current issues and of the author's own research over the past ten years. Starting from an analysis of teaching as science and as art, Peter Woods goes on to review the general interactionist framework in which his own work is situated, and how this relates to postmodernist trends in qualitative research. The approach is illustrated through reference to the (...) author's own personal history and research career, and his recent research on creative teaching, critical events, and his teachers reactions to school inspections. How to represent such research is a central feature, and includes a consideration of the tools used in that task and how they relate to the ethnographer's self, whatever forms of representation are selected, however, the audiences' own concerns will guide them in their interpretation of the work. Prominent themes include: * the person of the ethnographer in research * the art of teaching and new ways of representing it, while not forgetting the science of teaching and of research * research for educational use, and the uses of educational research * collaborative work between researchers and teachers The issues covered include such matters as research purposes, research design, research careers, access, data collection, data analysis, truth criteria, the relationship between theory and research methods, writing-up, and dissemination. (shrink)

At once provocative and inspiring_, Against the Flow_ is a work of polemic from an internationally respected writer and thinker on arts education. Peter Abbs argues that contemporary education ignores the aesthetic and ethical as a result of being in thrall to such forces as the market economy and managerial and functional dictates. He identifies the present education system as being inimical to creativity and authentic learning and instead, narrowly focused on the quantitative measuring of results. This absence of (...) a creative and ethical dimension in education has implications for art making in wider society. Art is shown as emerging from, and appealing to, the ironic postmodernist sensibility and mass media-led culture, while being devoid of philosophical significance. This book opens up a fresh and timely debate about the vital power of creativity in modern education. Drawing on examples from modern poetry, literature and visual art, it is an eloquent and passionate argument for the need to develop ethical and aesthetic energies to confront the growing vacuity of contemporary culture. (shrink)

Peter Alexander: It is presumably admitted that laws, whether causal or not, are universal in form; they are appropriately stated in universal categoricals or unrestricted hypotheticals. I assume that this is not at issue in the question set. I take our question to be this: given that causal laws are universal statements, can they be said to be about, to apply to, to hold for, individual things? -/- Peter Downing: Mr. Alexander maintains that there are 'irreducibly singular' causal (...) statements, and that from this it follows that causal laws need not be purely general. The view that there are irreducibly singular causal statements appears to commit Alexander to rejecting two theses: (i) that singular causal statements are analysable into statements containing specific generalizations, [...] (ii) That singular causal statements are analysable into statements containing incompletely specified generalizations [...]. Thesis (i) is, I think, clearly false. [...] Thesis (ii), however, is not easily refuted. (shrink)

Nicknamed the "Eye of Paris" by Henry Miller, Brassaï was one of the great European photographers of the twentieth century. This volume of letters and photographs, many published for the first time, chronicles the fascinating early years of Brassaï's life and artistic development in Paris and Berlin during the 1920s and 1930s. "[Brassaï] is probably the only photographer—at least in France—to have acquired such a vast audience and mastered his material to such a degree that he can express himself with (...) a flexibility and apparent ease that is almost literary in its nature."—Jean Gallien, Photo-Monde "The letters that Brassaï wrote to his parents between 1920 and 1940 chronicle the sometimes painful stages by which this gifted man hauled himself from penury to celebrity."—Peter Hamilton, Times Literary Supplement "In these proud, protective, occasionally conscience-stricken missives, the young man full of eager dreams emerges as one of the century's pioneering photographers, revered for his lushly atmospheric portraits of Paris after dark."—Elle "A fascinating insight into how a bright individual slowly found his calling."—Christine Schwartz Hartley, New York Times Book Review. (shrink)

I survey Brouwer’s weak counterexamples to classical theorems, with a view to discovering what useful mathematical work is done by weak counterexamples; whether they are rigorous mathematical proofs or just plausibility arguments; the role of Brouwer’s notion of the creative subject in them, and whether the creative subject is really necessary for them; what axioms for the creative subject are needed; what relation there is between these arguments and Brouwer’s theory of choice sequences. I refute one of Brouwer’s claims with (...) a weak counterexample of my own. I also examine Brouwer’s 1927 proof of the negative continuity theorem, which appears to be a weak counterexample reliant on both the creative subject and the concept of choice sequence; I argue that it provides a good justification for the weak continuity principle, but it is not a weak counterexample and it does not depend essentially on the creative subject. (shrink)