One of the most remarkable recent findings in developmental biology has been the colinear and homologous relationships shared between the Drosophila HOM‐C and vertebrate Hox homeobox gene complexes. These relationships pose the question of the functional significance of colinearity and its molecular basis. While there was much initial resistance to the validity of this comparison, it now appears the Hox/HOM homology reflects a broad degree of evolutionary conservation which has reawakened interest in comparative embryology and evolution.The evolutionary conservation of protein (...) motifs in many gene families (including those for growth factors, secreted and membrane bound signalling factors, adhesion molecules, cytoplasmic receptor kinases, nuclear receptors and transcription factors) has lead to speculation on the extent to which these homology relationships represent common developmental processes and underlying molecular mechanisms. Structural identities in a protein may indicate the biochemical/molecular function that a protein plays in cellular and developmental processes, without reflecting a conserved role in a cascade of developmental events. However, the analysis of genes encoding transcription factors has provided evidence suggesting that there are gene complexes in arthropods and vertebrates which are true homologues and which may share common roles in the specification of regional identity along embryonic A‐P axis. These genes comprise the Box/HOM‐C homeotic complexes. This review will detail some of the evidence for this proposed relationship and will speculate on the functional implications. (shrink)

Hindbrain development is orchestrated by a vertebrate gene regulatory network that generates segmental patterning along the anterior–posterior axis via Hox genes. Here, we review analyses of vertebrate and invertebrate chordate models that inform upon the evolutionary origin and diversification of this network. Evidence from the sea lamprey reveals that the hindbrain regulatory network generates rhombomeric compartments with segmental Hox expression and an underlying Hox code. We infer that this basal feature was present in ancestral vertebrates and, as an evolutionarily constrained (...) developmental state, is fundamentally important for patterning of the vertebrate hindbrain across diverse lineages. Despite the common ground plan, vertebrates exhibit neuroanatomical diversity in lineage‐specific patterns, with different vertebrates revealing variations of Hox expression in the hindbrain that could underlie this diversification. Invertebrate chordates lack hindbrain segmentation but exhibit some conserved aspects of this network, with retinoic acid signaling playing a role in establishing nested domains of Hox expression. (shrink)

Alfred A. Robb. THEOREM 54 If P1 and P2 be a pair of parallel inertia planes while an inertia plane Q1 has parallel general lines a and b in common with P1 and P2 respectively and if Q2 be an inertia plane parallel to Q1 through some ...

This paper is an articulation and defense of a trope-bundle theory of material objects. After some background remarks about objects and tropes, I start the main defense in Section III by answering a charge frequently made against the bundle theory, namely that it commits a conceptual error by saying that properties are parts of objects. I argue that there’s a general and intuitive sense of “part” in which properties are in fact parts of objects. This leads to the question of (...) qualitative unity: in virtue of what are certain properties unified as parts of an object? In Section IV I defend an account of unity for complex material objects. It turns on the thesis that the properties of such objects are structural properties. After addressing some objections, I turn in Section V to the question of unity for simple material objects. Here a different and more radical account is needed, for simples, since they do not have structural properties, are not subsumed by the account of Section IV. I defend the view that a simple object just is a simple property, so that identity delivers the desired unity. (shrink)

This is an account of Sceptical investigation as it is presented by Sextus Empiricus. I focus attention on the motivation behind the Sceptic’s investigation, the goal of that investigation, and on the development Sextus describes from proto-Sceptical to Sceptical investigator. I suggest that recent accounts of the Sceptic’s investigative practice do not make sufficient sense of the fact that the Sceptic finds a relief from disturbance by way of suspending judgement, nor of the apparent continuity between proto-Sceptical and Sceptical investigation. (...) I offer an alternative account which turns on the suggestion that the Sceptic accepts that justification is the norm of belief. (shrink)

In this chapter I consider three different positions on the a priori/a posteriori distinction that have been attributed to Hegel, specifically in the context of the epistemology of the metaphysical claims he defends in his Realphilosophie. I outline and briefly provide evidence for a reading of Hegel that understands him to retain the distinction in question, but to hold that the metaphysical claims he defends in the context of his philosophy of nature and his philosophy of spirit typically involve elements (...) of both a priori and a posteriori knowledge. I then defend this interpretation against two competitors. The first of these also takes Hegel to retain the distinction, but holds that the conclusions of his Realphilosophie, like those of his logic, are principally to be understood as known a priori. The second takes Hegel to abandon the a priori/a posteriori distinction altogether. I argue that these alternatives are less compelling. (shrink)

In this chapter, Robb Dunphy is concerned with the nature of G.E. Schulze's scepticism as he presents it in his 1792 work Aenesidemus, and with its relation to the metaphysical projects of Kant, Reinhold, and later German Idealists. After introducing Schulze's text, Dunphy turns to a recent interpretation offered by Jessica Berry, who claims that the extent to which Schulze endorsed a genuinely Pyrrhonian Scepticism has gone unacknowledged, both by his idealist contemporaries and by the majority of the secondary (...) literature on the period. Berry suggests that this unacknowledged Pyrrhonism in Aenesidemus provides the resources for a more radical criticism of the German Idealists' scientific, systematic metaphysical ambitions, to which they remain fundamentally vulnerable. Despite agreeing that an exploration of Schulze's debt to Pyrrhonism represents a valuable addition to our understanding of his scepticism, in the latter parts of the chapter Dunphy suggests that the Berry's attribution of a Pyrrhonian Scepticism to Schulze should to some extent be rejected, and that such a scepticism is perhaps not quite as problematic for the projects of Kant and the German Idealists as she suggests. (shrink)

In this article I develop an interpretation of the opening passages of Hegel's essay ‘With what must the beginning of science be made?’ I suggest firstly that Hegel is engaging there with a distinctive problem, the overcoming of which he understands to be necessary in order to guarantee the scientific character of the derivation of the fundamental categories of thought which he undertakes in the Science of Logic. I refer to this as ‘the problem of beginning’. I proceed to clarify (...) the nature of the problem, which I understand to be motivated by a concern to avoid arbitrariness, and then to detail the nature of Hegel's proposed solution, which turns on understanding how the concept of ‘pure being’, understood in a specific sense to be both mediated and immediate, avoids the concerns about arbitrariness which accompany attempts to begin merely with something mediated, or merely with something immediate. On this basis, I offer a number of criticisms of alternative approaches to the beginning of Hegel's Logic. (shrink)

Hegel opens the first book of his Science of Logic with the statement of a problem: “The beginning of philosophy must be either something mediated or something immediate, and it is easy to show that it can be neither the one nor the other, so either way of beginning finds its rebuttal.” Despite its significant placement, exactly what Hegel means in his expression of this problem and exactly what his solution to it is, remain unclear. -/- In this book, (...) class='Hi'>Robb Dunphy provides a detailed engagement with Hegel’s “problem of beginning”, locating it within Hegel’s account of significant approaches to the topic of beginning in the history of Western philosophy, as well as making an extended case for the influence of Pyrrhonian Scepticism on the beginning of Hegel’s Logic. Dunphy’s discussion of the various putative solutions that Hegel might be thought to put forward contributes to debates concerning Hegel’s views on the methodology of logic, the relation between his Logic and his Phenomenology of Spirit, and differences between his Encyclopaedia presentation of logic and that of his greater Science of Logic. -/- Hegel and the Problem of Beginning also functions as a critical commentary on Hegel’s essay, “With what must the beginning of the science be made?” which should be of interest to both researchers and students working on the opening of Hegel’s Logic. (shrink)

Winfield’s explication of Hegel’s theory of mind, especially Hegel’s theory of intelligence, is, he suggests, important for solving three problems that continue to haunt contemporary work in the philosophy of mind and epistemology: 1) A problem concerning the acquisition of language and its place in an account of consciousness, 2) A problem concerning the objectivity of representations, and 3) A problem concerning the grounds of knowing. I think Winfield is correct in identifying all three problems as having their source in (...) Kantian philosophy. I examine these three problems more carefully through a critical lens aimed at recent work by John McDowell and Robert Brandom. Both philosophers claim certain Hegelian influences. I argue that, in crucial ways, both Brandom and McDowell have each inherited the problems Hegel sought to solve and that are so clearly articulated in Winfield’s essay. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 1, Page 21-24, March 2012.

This paper argues firstly that the argument of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is necessary for the justification of the beginning of his logical project, and secondly that Hegel's attempt to secure the beginning of his Science of Logic by relying upon the argument of the Phenomenology fails. I argue firstly that the position taken up at the beginning of Hegel's Logic is constructed in such a fashion that it relies upon the argument of the Phenomenology to justify it. I then (...) offer some support for the view of the relationship between the two texts defended by Maker in order to see how the two might be thought to be compatible. Finally, in the longest part of the paper, I offer a number of reasons for thinking that attempts to render the two compatible in this fashion fail. I therefore conclude that, as it stands, the beginning of Hegel's Logic is not secured against objection in the way that Hegel wants it to be. (shrink)

Worries about mental causation are prominent in contemporary discussions of the mind and human agency. Originally, the problem of mental causation was that of understanding how a mental substance (thought to be immaterial) could interact with a material substance, a body. Most philosophers nowadays repudiate immaterial minds, but the problem of mental causation has not gone away. Instead, focus has shifted to mental properties. How could mental properties be causally relevant to bodily behavior? How could something mental qua mental cause (...) what it does? After looking at the traditional Problem of Interaction, we survey various versions of the property-based problem and look at proposed solutions to them. (shrink)

This essay is concerned with a passage from §24 of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, in which Hegel characterises the concepts or ‘thoughts’ developed in the discipline of metaphysics by saying that they ‘used to count as expressing the essentialities of things’. I begin by drawing attention to Hegel’s use of the past tense in this passage and suggest that it looks problematic for conceptual realist interpreters of Hegel’s idealism, who want, roughly, to attribute to him the view that thoughts or ‘thought-determinations’ express (...) the essentialities of things. I then develop this challenge with help from Robert Pippin, who takes Hegel, in this passage, to be rejecting the metaphysical projects of pre-Kantian European rationalism. If Pippin is right, then in this passage Hegel is in fact distancing himself from the view that conceptual realist accounts attribute to him. In the final part of the article, I re-examine some of Hegel’s remarks concerning the history of European metaphysics and offer an alternative, better explanation of Hegel’s use of the past tense in the passage in question, one which neutralises the objection to conceptual realist accounts of Hegel’s idealism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Thales of Miletus: The Beginnings of Western Science and PhilosophyKevin RobbPatricia F. O’Grady. Thales of Miletus: The Beginnings of Western Science and Philosophy. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2002. Pp xxii + 310. Paper, $84.95.This book has a consistent thesis: Thales of Miletus was the first Western scientist and philosopher not just for what he began, but for what he himself said (or, as O'Grady believes, wrote). On this view, (...) Thales made significant contributions to metaphysics ("He asked the question: 'What is real?' no less than Plato and Aristotle did," 249), cosmology (on the earth and earthquakes, 87 ff.), astronomy (notably the eclipse, 126 ff.), mathematics (Proclus attributes Euclidean theorems to Thales, 191 ff.), psychology (on psyche) and theology (on "full of the gods," 108 ff.). O'Grady's thesis is that we know enough about Thales' thoughts in these areas (each a treacherous minefield of scholarly dispute, as O'Grady admits) that, after a clarified understanding of "Scientificity and Rationality" (her awkward title for Chapter 11), we can confidently conclude that philosophy and science were well begun by Thales. "I believe I have drawn a clear and detailed picture of a brilliant, veracious, and courageously speculative Greek. I see him as a questioner of almost everything, an investigator of nature...Thales is not the mere shadowy figure of Guthrie's perception. He is a man of substance, a man of distinction and of lasting importance" (251).O'Grady had early noted that W. K. C. Guthrie considered Thales a shadowy figure historically, made all the more so, Guthrie believed, because the legend kept expanding. For example, a sixth-century Thales as the seeker after the material archê, and so the first important physikos, is unknown before fourth-century Aristotle's Metaphysics Alpha, and by the time Euclidean theorems are attributed to Thales the tendency to foist imposing discoveries on famous persons was prevalent.This raises the major issue concerning O'Grady's exhaustively researched book. To what extent can the doxographic sources (the "A" sections of Diels's 1903Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker), be used to interpret the Presocratics, especially if the original wording from a thinker perished (any "B" section quotations). It is clear that in the fourth century nothing in writing from Thales survived for the Lyceum to read and catalogue although its scholars clearly sought it; the repeated legetai ("it is said") of Aristotle in Metaphysics Alpha and elsewhere is decisive. It is his standard way of indicating that no written work on the matter survives to be consulted, but stories or oral accounts do.O'Grady's thesis requires that the "A" section material be exploited fully, especially to present Thales as a philosopher (29-70). Many historians will be unwilling to take the entire journey with her. Some (Harold Cherniss) would balk at the first step. The demand for confirming ipsissima verba (or "B" quotations) to reconstruct the thought of any Presocratic with real confidence (as once proposed by G. S. Kirk) threatens to exclude Thales from histories of philosophy, an unsatisfactory result. Even so, Harold Cherniss proposed that drastic solution in 1935 in his magisterial Aristotle's Criticism of Presocratric Philosophy. Presocratic philosophy, he argued, should begin with Anaximander (375).The heart of Cherniss's numbingly exhaustive argument (400 + pages) was that Aristotle's purpose in surveying his predecessors's views was never historical, but dialectical. His intent was to argue for a fourfold causality (on the grounds only four archai had been turned up by all his predecessors, starting with Thales' material cause), and to fit those predecessors's views into a theory of natural causality as he had finally formulated it in his sophisticated, [End Page 107] largely technical vocabulary. Aristotle's "historical" notices on which all later accounts must depend were, thus, never history; the problem and the solution, along with their language, were Aristotle's alone. If Theophrastus paraphrased what he found in Aristotle (McDiarmid), and if the post-Aristotelian doxographic notices were largely dependent on Theophrastus (so already Diels in 1879, in Doxographi Graeci), then any attempt to extract a philosophical Thales from the later doxographic sources (or Aristotle) is methodologically doomed from... (shrink)

Is simulation some new kind of science? We argue that instead simulation fits smoothly into existing scientific practice, but does so in several importantly different ways. Simulations in general, and computer simulations in particular, ought to be understood as techniques which, like many scientific techniques, can be employed in the service of various and diverse epistemic goals. We focus our attentions on the way in which simulations can function as (i) explanatory and (ii) predictive tools. We argue that a wide (...) variety of simulations, both computational and physical, are best conceived in terms of a set of common features: initial or input conditions, a mechanism or set of rules, and a set of results or output conditions. Studying simulations in these terms yields a new understanding of their character as well as a body of normative recommendations for the care and feeding of scientific simulations. (shrink)

In this article I consider Sextus’ account of the Five Modes and of the Two Modes in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism. I suggest that from these we can derive the basic form of a number of different problems which I refer to as “Agrippan problems,” where this category includes both the epistemic regress problem and the problem of the criterion. Finally, I suggest that there is a distinctive Agrippan problem present at the beginning of Hegel’s Science of Logic.

This article is concerned with some of the criteria which Hegel believes apply to a scientific treatment of logic. I briefly address criteria which I take Hegel to inherit from German rationalism before focusing on two fairly idiosyncratic criteria: the requirement that a science of logic exhibit a circular structure and that it begin with the concept of pure being. I offer an explanation of these criteria which understands them as motivated by anti-sceptical concerns, before arguing that Hegel’s mature treatment (...) of the latter criterion is problematically ambiguous. (shrink)

In any event, I realize fully that the parole, the speech, the "word" of a writer such as myself, has something strange and even contradictory about it, even within its own creator. At the moment when I write, let us say, La Jalousie or Glissements progressifs du plaisir, what I propose is improbable and consequently unacceptable; that is, my parole as a writer or as a cinéaste in my novels or in my films is abrupt, inexplicable, nonrecuperable for any correctly (...) organized discourse. Nevertheless, you have noticed that I speak with the same clarity as any professor, and this constitutes an extremely interesting contradiction because it goes to the very heart of the debate; order and disorder never cease to interact, to contaminate each other, to practice a sort of mutual recuperation. If, having written a novel of disorder, I don't find someone—for example, Bruce Morrissette, about La Jalousie—to prove that it has order, I'll do it myself. The principle of order is so crucial that I wish to prove that the disorder which I've created I can myself transform into order. But, as soon as I have shown that it has its order, from that moment on I've destroyed the interest of my work. I have brought about within an organized discourse, organized according to the normal logic of Cartesianism, the recuperation of something which was in fact a machine of war against order. I often run into people who say to me after a film, "Ah, it's a pity that you didn't come to explain all of that before the film. We didn't understand a thing, and it is such a fine thing that you have explained it." And I reply, "Yes, but don't trust that too much," because what I've said is not at all the film. It is even almost the opposite; it is the way in which I show myself that there is in what I created a part which is in spite of everything, explainable by established order, and a part increasingly large, because order progresses. Alain Robbe-Grillet, novelist, film maker, and essayist, is the author of Les Gommes , Le Voyeur , La Jalousie , Dans le labyrinthe , La Maison de rendez-vous , Projet pour une révolution à New York , and Topologie d'une cité fantôme . His films include: L'Année dernière à Marienbad , L'Immortelle , Trans-Europ-Express , L'Homme qui ment , L'Eden et après , Glissements progressifs du plaisir , and Le Jeu avec le feu . He has presented his views on contemporary fiction in Pour un Nouveau Roman. Bruce Morrissette, author of books on Alain Robbe-Grillet and Sunny Distinguished Service Professor in the department of Romance languages and literature at the University of Chicago, has translated "Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction." He is the author of "Post-Modern Generative Fiction: Novel and Film". (shrink)

In this article, evidence is briefly presented for three facts that together point to something puzzling. (1) That major continental philosophers of the nineteenth century tended to engage in some detail, as part of a broader preoccupation with ancient Greek thought, with Pyrrhonian scepticism. (2) That major continental philosophers of the twentieth century tended to engage in some depth with their nineteenth-century forebears and maintained their tendency to engage significantly with ancient Greek thought. (3) That twentieth-century continental philosophers demonstrate little (...) to no interest in Pyrrhonian scepticism. This raises the question: why does engagement with Pyrrhonism disappear from continental philosophy? The article discusses two hypotheses that might explain this disappearance. (shrink)

This book examines the progress of literacy in ancient Greece from its origins with the introduction of the alphabet in the eighth century to the fourth century, when the major cultural institutions of Athens became totally dependent on alphabetic literacy. Professor Robb introduces much new evidence and re-evaluates older evidence to demonstrate that early Greek literacy can only be understood in terms of the rich oral culture that immediately preceded it, one that was dominated by the oral performance of (...) epical verse, or "Homer". The eventual dependence of Athenian democratic institutions, notably law and higher education, on the technology of writing contributed to the "miracle" of Greece. (shrink)

Recent discussions of mental causation have focused on three principles: (1) Mental properties are (sometimes) causally relevant to physical effects; (2) mental properties are not physical properties; (3) every physical event has in its causal history only physical events and physical properties. Since these principles seem to be inconsistent, solutions have focused on rejecting one or more of them. But I argue that, in spite of appearances, (1)–(3) are not inconsistent. The reason is that 'properties' is used in different senses (...) in the principles. In (1) and (3), 'properties' should be read as 'tropes' (properties here are particulars), while in (2) 'properties' should read as 'types' (properties here are universals or classes). Although mental types are distinct from physical types, every mental trope is a physical trope. This allows mental properties to be causally relevant to physical effects without violating the closed character of the physical world. (shrink)

This article is an investigation of the nature of suspension of judgement as it is conceived by Sextus Empiricus. I carry out this investigation by examining what I take to be Sextus’ most pertinent remarks on the topic and by considering them in the context of contemporary philosophical work on the nature of suspension. Against the more frequently encountered idea that Sextus is operating with a privative conception of suspension, I argue that Sextus instead has a metacognitive account of suspension, (...) whereby suspending constitutively involves acknowledging that one is not in a position to tell whether or not p. (shrink)

A revelatory alternative to the standard economic models of human behavior that proposes an exciting new way to understand decision-making "Willful is a breakthrough in economics. Richard Robb's tremendously insightful book shows how much of our behavior is not explained by existing theories of human action and explains in sparkling prose why understanding decisions made seemingly without reason presents a fuller picture of our world."--Edmund S. Phelps, Nobel Laureate in Economics Why do we do the things we do? The (...) classical view of economics is that we are rational individuals, making decisions with the intention of maximizing our preferences. Behaviorists, on the other hand, see us as relying on mental shortcuts and conforming to preexisting biases. Richard Robb argues that neither explanation accounts for those things that we do for their own sake, and without understanding these sorts of actions, our picture of decision-making is at best incomplete. Robb explains how these choices made seemingly without reason belong to a realm of behavior he identifies as "for-itself." A provocative combination of philosophy and economics that offers a key to many of our quixotic choices, this groundbreaking volume provides a new way to understand everything from investing to how hard we work to how we manage daily interactions. (shrink)

A commonly raised criticism against celebrity culture is that it celebrates people who become famous without any connection to their skills, talents or achievements. A culture in which people become famous simply for being famous is criticized for being shallow and inauthentic. In this paper we offer a defence of celebrity by arguing against this criticism. We begin by outlining what we call the Talent Argument: celebrity is a negative cultural phenomenon because it creates and sustains fame without any connection (...) to the accomplishments that arise from an expression of talent or skill. By appealing to the metaphysics of talent and skill, we argue against the Talent Argument and propose that being a celebrity requires the skills that are necessary to acquire and maintain one’s status as a celebrity. A celebrity is more likely to be talented and successful in their expression of these skills, and even celebrities who are ‘famous for being famous’ will often display talents and skills that give rise to their fame. This means that those who critique celebrity culture should not do so by appealing to the Talent Argument. We show how our account of celebrity, talent and skill works to reject both the strong version of the Talent Argument, as well as a weaker and more plausible version of the argument we call the Valuable Talents argument. We conclude by noting that our analysis has demonstrated the need to explore more closely the kinds of skills that are necessary to cultivate celebrity status. This allows for a more nuanced understanding of what a celebrity is, and the values that are attached to celebrity culture. (shrink)

Talents often play a significant role in our personal and social lives. For example, our talents may shape the choices we make and the goods that we value, making them central to the creation of a meaningful life. Differences in the level of talents also affect how social institutions are structured, and how social goods and resources are distributed. Despite their normative importance, it is surprising that talents have not yet received substantial philosophical analysis in their own right. As a (...) result, the current literature is rife with conceptual ambiguity: a talent is referred to as all of a skill, potential, ability, capacity, endowment, and a natural gift. In response to this confusion, in this paper I develop an account of what a talent is, based on the debate concerning the metaphysics of ability and dispositions. I argue for a position that I call ‘talent dispositionalism’: S has a talent for skill A in circumstances C iff S has the general disposition to excellently develop and maintain A when, in circumstances C, she tries to excellently develop and maintain A. On this account, a talent is not the skill itself, but a general iterated ability for the excellent development and up-keep of a particular skill, constituted by an agent’s dispositional properties. I defend the account against four objections usually levelled against traditional dispositionalist theories of ability, and highlight some ways the account may influence debates in other areas of philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Even though The Medium Place is overshadowed by the dramatic events that unfold in the fake Good Place neighborhood, it is more significant to The Good Place. The Medium Place is described as an individually tailored “eternal mediocrity,” a place of neutrality and compromise. One of the most prominent contemporary cultural theorists, Homi K. Bhabha, calls this space of becoming, where contradictions and differences are explored rather than resolved, a “Third Space”. Bhabha claims that despite its importance, being “in‐between” is (...) usually “unrepresentable,” and Roland Barthes too refers to his idea of the “third possibility” as having “no place” of its own. But the writers of The Good Place have proved them wrong—they have found a way to represent this middle “in‐between” space it as a geographical neighborhood. The morality of The Medium Place is the most human and realistic of all The Good Place neighborhoods. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose that Derrida’s writing on the impossibility of justice has the potential for fruitful dialogue with Ruth Chang’s contemporary account of practical rationality. For Derrida, making a just decision must always come with a moment of undecidability, a “leap” into the unknown with an experience of doubt and anxiety that continues to “haunt” the decision-maker. By contrast, in her work on rationality, Chang proposes that hard decisions are difficult to make because the alternatives are “on a (...) par,” such that there are no rational differences between the alternatives that would contribute to choosing one over the other. Hard decisions are made by expressing one’s own rational agency, generating will-based reasons to commit to or “drift” into one of the alternatives. Derrida writes of anxiety, doubt, and impossibility, yet Chang writes of commitment, agency, and rationality. Despite these differences, there are important comparisons and connections between the two accounts that are worth exploring. I suggest that the moment of the decision which Derrida describes as heterogeneous to knowledge can be understood as a moment of parity in which there is a lack of given reasons, as explained by Chang. Chang’s account of rational agency provides an interpretation of how decision-making is possible despite the undecidability as described by Derrida. This notion of commitment and agency as explained by Chang is not incompatible with Derrida’s insistence that the responsible decision is haunted by anxiety and doubt. Instead, I suggest that Derrida’s writing highlights uncertainty as central to understanding the nature of hard choices and how to navigate the demands of justice. (shrink)

This is about a proposed solution to the exclusion problem, one I've defended elsewhere. Details aside, it's just the identity theory : mental properties face no threat of exclusion from, or preemption by, physical properties, because every mental property is a physical property. Here I elaborate on this solution and defend it from some objections. One of my goals is to place it in the context of a more general ontology of properties, in particular, a trope ontology.