In Howard Kahane's current reply to my previous discussion of Goodman's elimination rules, he suggests both that the notion of conflict required by the first elimination rule cannot be made clear, and that both proposed revisions of the second elimination rule are too strong [4]. These seem to me to be the points which require settlement, and I would like to discuss them in this paper.

Scholars of classical philosophy have long disputed whether Aristotle was a dialectical thinker. Most agree that Aristotle contrasts dialectical reasoning with demonstrative reasoning, where the former reasons from generally accepted opinions and the latter reasons from the true and primary. Starting with a grasp on truth, demonstration never relinquishes it. Starting with opinion, how could dialectical reasoning ever reach truth, much less the truth about first principles? Is dialectic then an exercise that reiterates the prejudices of one's times and at (...) best allows one to persuade others by appealing to these prejudices, or is it the royal road to first principles and philosophical wisdom? In From Puzzles to Principles? May Sim gathers experts to argue both these positions and offer a variety of interpretive possibilities. The contributors' thoughtful reflections on the nature and limits of dialectic should play a crucial role in Aristotelian scholarship. (shrink)

We estimate that 208,000 deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices have been implanted to address neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders worldwide. DBS Think Tank presenters pooled data and determined that DBS expanded in its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 providing a space where clinicians, engineers, researchers from industry and academia discuss current and emerging DBS technologies and logistical and ethical issues facing the field. (...) The emphasis is on cutting edge research and collaboration aimed to advance the DBS field. The Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank was held virtually on September 1 and 2, 2020 (Zoom Video Communications) due to restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting focused on advances in: (1) optogenetics as a tool for comprehending neurobiology of diseases and on optogenetically-inspired DBS, (2) cutting edge of emerging DBS technologies, (3) ethical issues affecting DBS research and access to care, (4) neuromodulatory approaches for depression, (5) advancing novel hardware, software and imaging methodologies, (6) use of neurophysiological signals in adaptive neurostimulation, and (7) use of more advanced technologies to improve DBS clinical outcomes. There were 178 attendees who participated in a DBS Think Tank survey, which revealed the expansion of DBS into several indications such as obesity, post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction and Alzheimer’s disease. This proceedings summarizes the advances discussed at the Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank. (shrink)

This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind. In pursuing the first aim, we expect our main audience to be clinicians and linguists interested in pragmatics. It is when we turn to methodological issues that we hope to pique the interest of philosophers. (...) Still, the methodological issue becomes pressing precisely because of the empirical finding—thus the first part is important for the philosophical readers as well. The game plan is as follows. Given our intended dual audience, we begin with background on autism and pragmatics. Some of this material will be familiar to some of our readership, but few will know all of it. (Those who do are invited to skip these sections.) We then present some results from our pilot study on a corpus of speech by people with ASD. The heart of our finding is that certain speakers with ASD, who have severe trouble with familiar pragmatic phenomena such as metaphor and conversational implicature, exhibit surprising abilities with respect to what is often called “pragmatic determinants of what is said.” We turn next to a possible implication of this finding: It seems to suggest that hitherto seemingly promising evidence from ASD about the semantics/pragmatics boundary is.. (shrink)

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

Social and regional inequality remained of secondary importance in the 2017 House of Representatives election, especially in comparison to national security and constitutional reform. Still, the election victory of the coalition between the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Kōmeitō was also due to its ability to shape the debate concerning Japan’s political-economic model of growth and inequality. Abenomics and regional revitalization were the dominating policies, which opposition parties criticized without having a real counter-model. A more detailed analysis shows, however, that (...) Abenomics has not yet fulfilled its promise of shared growth, and that the governing coalition’s discursive control over the political-economic agenda has significantly weakened. This creates opportunities for opposition parties in the future. (shrink)

The weeks-long rioting and the destruction of property were more than just a hyper reaction to apparent racial discrimination in 2020. We might interpret this anti-social and criminal behavior as having its origin with an envy and resentment over things material. We were warned about this misuse of our freedom more than forty years ago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Finding our way back from a materialist-saturated vision of the good life depends on taking up a Christian humanism which was championed by (...) Pope Saint John Paul II. We see that Christian humanism expressed vividly in family life. (shrink)

In anthropology, archaeology and popular culture, Shamanism may be one of the most used, abused and misunderstood terms, to date. Researchers are increasingly recognizing the socio‐political roles of altered states of consciousness and shamanism in past and present societies, yet the rise of Neo‐shamanism and its implications for academics and their subjects of study are consistently neglected. Moreover, many academics marginalize "neo‐shamans," and neo‐shamanic interaction with anthropology, archaeology and indigenous peoples is often regarded as neocolonialism. To complicate the matter, indigenous (...) peoples express multivocal opinions of neo‐shamanism, from blatant condemnation to active encouragement. I first trace the roots of neo‐shamanism in order to compare neo‐shamanic and academic approaches. Criticisms of neo‐shamanism as expressed by academic and native critics are presented, and I suggest these conflicting views are potentially reconcilable. Essentially, post‐processualist praxis should be implemented via programs of research and communication. (shrink)

John Henry Newman wrote the “Theses de Fide” in Rome as a seminary student in 1846/1847, and the text represents a key point in the development of his thought. Newman wrote the “Theses” in an attempt to grapple with scholastic categories on faith, a question that had occupied him in the Anglican Church for years. Although the “Theses” were not published in Newman’s life, he returned to these reflections often over the course of his Roman Catholic career. This edition and (...) partial translation of the “Theses de Fide” is to aid general readers in understanding this moment in Newman’s life, and to assist specialists in approaching the manuscript record of the “Theses” themselves. (shrink)

Along with national data, this book uses two detailed questionnaires which were administered to older Americans in Allegany County, New York in 1983 and 1987 as the basis for exploring the public lives of rural older Americans. The authors discuss the factors that shape the political views and behavior of the rural elderly, consulting social, economic, health and nutritional variables.

Robert Fogelin here collects fifteen of his essays, organized around the theme of interpreting philosophical texts. The essays place particular emphasis on understanding the argumentative or dialectical role that passages play in the specific context in which they occur. The somewhat surprising result of taking this principle seriously is that certain traditional, well-worked texts are given a radical re-interpretation. Throughout the essays reprinted here, Fogelin argues that, when carefully read, the philosophical position under consideration has more merit than commonly (...) believed. Included are essays dealing with texts from the works of Plato, Aquinas, Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Price, Hamilton, and Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Postural instability in Parkinson’s disease (PD) is characterized by impaired postural responses to transient perturbations, increased postural sway in stance and difficulty transitioning between tasks. In addition, some studies suggest that loss of dopamine in the basal ganglia due to PD results in difficulty using proprioceptive information for motor control. Here, we quantify the ability of subjects with PD and age-matched control subjects to use and re-weight sensory information for postural control during steady-state conditions of continuous rotations of the stance (...) surface or visual surround. We measure the postural sway of subjects in response to a pseudorandom, surface-tilt stimulus with eyes closed, and in response to a pseudorandom, visual-tilt stimulus. We use a feedback control model of the postural control system to interpret our results, focusing on sensory weighting as a function of stimulus amplitude. We find that subjects with PD can re-weight their dependence upon sensory information in response to changes in surface- or visual-stimulus amplitude. Specifically, subjects with PD behaved like age-matched control subjects by decreasing proprioceptive contribution to stance control with increasing surface-tilt amplitude, and decreasing visual contribution with increasing visual-tilt amplitude. However, subjects with PD do not decrease their reliance on proprioception as much as age-matched controls for small increases in surface-stimulus amplitudes. Levodopa medication did not affect sensory re-weighting behaviors for postural control. The impairment in PD subject’s ability to respond differently to small changes in surface rotation amplitudes is consistent with an increased threshold for perceiving proprioceptive signals, which may result from decreased signal-to-noise in the dopaminergic pathways associated with sensory processing and/or sensory integration. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century by Raffaella CribioreRobert J. PenellaRaffaella Cribiore. Libanius the Sophist: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion in the Fourth Century. Townsend Lectures/Cornell University Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013. x + 260 pp. Cloth, $49.95.Raffaella Cribiore has earned her Libanian stripes, especially with her The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch (Princeton 2007). When she (...) was invited to give the Townsend Lectures at Cornell University, of which the book under review is the published version, she decided to use that occasion as an opportunity to settle some Libanian misunderstandings, to insist on certain methodological principles, and to offer solutions to some specific problems. The book touches on a good number of discrete points; it might be described as a Libanian mélange. But, as its title indicates, the agenda revolves around matters of rhetoric and religion.In chapter 1, “Rhetoric and the Distortion of Reality,” the central exhibit is Oration 1, Libanius’ so-called autobiography. Cribiore provides a good discussion of its compositional history—the main section (1–155) written in 374 when Libanius was sixty years old and the rest at various sittings from 380 to 393—and of the main lines of its narrative. Any autobiography is, of course, an interpretive construction, a “distortion of reality,” made at a certain point or points in one’s lifetime. Cribiore explores Libanius’ self-interpretations, most famously the [End Page 537] role he allots to Tychē in his life. She shows how Libanius’ letters, written with immediacy at a particular point in time, can sometimes act as a factual corrective to the autobiography. Cribiore wonders whether one source of Libanius’ self-shaping may have been the holy-man tradition. She is struck by commonalities in Libanius’ autobiography and biographies of Apollonius of Tyana, Pythagoras, and Plotinus, although she does not believe that the Philostratean and Neopla-tonic works in question directly inspired Libanius. On the other hand, she argues that he read Athanasius’ life of the Christian monk Antony, in which he “could find much that could help him shape the narrative of his own life” (74). While I would not deny that Libanius might have read this work, I am not convinced that we need to invoke it to explain similarities of motif (or of counter-motif) found in his autobiography. All the commonalities are better seen, in Mortimer Smith’s words, as arising “from the general religious and intellectual milieu” (63).Chapter 2, “A Rhetor and His Audience: The Role of Invective,” depicts Libanius as a master of the emotions—provoking pity, anger, and shame, and also consoling grief—and of invective and satire. Personal invective had deep roots in the classical past; and classical models of invective, especially Demosthenes and Aeschines, were still inspiring emulation in Libanius’ day. Libanius could control the size of his listening or reading audience and suppress proper names or resort to allusion in attacking contemporary figures in his orations, but Cribiore rejects Paul Petit’s view that Libanius kept his most abusive orations “hidden in his file drawers,” intended “only for himself or for an audience of two or three friends” (86–87). They were far more publicly intended than that. The publicity of invective, though, raises a problem: the same Libanius who condemns certain public figures in the orations is very polite to them in the letters. (Cribiore is particularly interested in the case of Proclus, comes Orientis in 383–84.) Does this not make Libanius a hypocrite who can turn easily from invective to flattery? Cribiore tries to mitigate bald inconsistency by observing that traditional invective would have been taken cum grano salis, whereas a friendly and restrained tone would have been expected in letters. Fair enough. But such an observation, based on conventions of genre and the expectations of the audiences, tells us very little about the writer’s actual state of mind and behavior in any particular case. Cribiore’s insistence here on the publicity (more or less) of orations is one side of a coin that first appears in chapter 1, although it is not put to much... (shrink)

Assuming that the reader accepts, albeit provisionally, that James's "will" to believe, early and late, implies that his ethics is traversed by a deontological streak, and by a "faith" which implies epistemic form on the relevant facts (both interpretations the writer argued for in two previous essays), a final feature of his position entitles one to interpret his "will" to believe as, not merely a willingness or readiness, but as a controlling resolve, in the strong sense, to interpret the facts (...) in a manner appropriate to our living in the "strenuous mood," a mood which is congruent to our universe viewed as "moral." Consider, as a crucial instance, the will to believe which undergirds the "keeping" of a friendship. (shrink)

THERE is no trap that is easier to stumble into than that of trying to show whether one philosopher did or did not answer the problem of another philosopher. The trap consists in the tendency to think that both philosophers handled the problem in precisely the same way, even though they represent two quite different traditions. This is especially true of thinkers like David Hume and Charles Sanders Peirce. John Smith has shown quite convincingly that we cannot understand the American (...) pragmatists by limiting discussion to the epistemological questions of the British empiricist tradition stemming from Hume, Mill, and Russell. And A. J. Ayer can be faulted for attempting to do just that. However, it is possible for one to treat of Peirce's answer to Hume on necessary connection without falling into the trap. First of all, both philosophers raised the same kind of question. It is clear that Peirce had Hume specifically in mind when on many an occasion he attacked nominalism and defended real connections. But they differed in that Peirce defended his position from a broader perspective enabling him to arrive at a more satisfactory conclusion. To establish this thesis, it will be necessary to focus on several aspects of their thought that bear upon the topic under discussion. Undoubtedly the task of selection and interpretation of details has many a trap of its own, but it is hoped that the more obvious ones can be avoided. (shrink)

Jung & Haier (J&H) have done an admirable job of solving the wrong problem. Their article does not show because intelligence resides not in the brain but, rather, in the interaction of brain and environment. I describe four reasons why the article does not adequately localize intelligence in the brain.

138 titles across a wide range of scholarly publications illustrate the conceptual affinities that connect the palaetiological sciences of biological systematics, historical linguistics, and stemmatics. These three fields all have as their central objective the reconstruction of evolutionary "trees of history" that depict phylogenetic patterns of descent with modification among species, languages, and manuscripts. All three fields flourished in the nineteenth century, underwent parallel periods of quiescence in the early twentieth century, and in recent decades have seen widespread parallel revivals. (...) "Tree thinking" (O'Hara, 1988) is now standard within evolutionary biology, and the unity of what William Whewell called palaetiology is being once again appreciated by scholars and scientists in many fields. (shrink)

A HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY examines the nature of philosophical enterprise and philosophy's role in Western culture. Jones and Fogelin weave key passages from classic philosophy works into their comments and criticisms, giving A HISTORY OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY the combined advantages of a source book and textbook. The text concentrates on major figures in each historical period, combining exposition with direct quotations from the philosophers themselves. The text places philosophers in appropriate cultural context and shows how their theories reflect the (...) concerns of their times. (shrink)

William James' lecture on "The Will to Believe" has kindled spirited controversy. In this reappraisal of that controversy, Father O'Connell contributes some : that James' argument should be viewed against his indebtedness to Pascal and Renouvier; that it works primarily to validate our "over-beliefs" ; and most surprising perhaps, that James envisages our "passional nature" as intervening, not after, but before and throughout, our intellectual weighing of the evidence for belief. --From publisher's description.

Quite early in the construction of his theory, Darwin realized that he had to explain the distinctive features of the human animal to forestall the return of the Creator. For most British intellectuals, what distinguished man from animals was not reason, an operation in which faint sensory images followed the rules of association, but moral judgment. Thus, shortly after he first formulated the principle of natural selection in the fall of 1838, Darwin began a decades-long struggle to bring human moral (...) judgment under his advancing theory. The fruition of that work came in Descent of Man, where two long chapters are devoted to an evolutionary understanding of moral behavior in man and its antecedents in animals. Since that time, numerous efforts have been made by biologists, psychologists, and philosophers to fol-. (shrink)

Definite descriptions (e.g. 'The king of France in 1997', 'The teacher of Aristotle') do not stand for particulars. Or so I will assume. The semantic alternative has seemed to be that descriptions only have meaning within sentences: i.e., that their semantic contribution is given syncategorimatically. This doesn't seem right, however, because descriptions can be used and understood outside the context of any sentence. Nor is this use simply a matter of "ellipsis." Since descriptions do not denote particulars, but seem to (...) have a meaning in isolation, I propose that they be assigned generalized quantifiers as denotations — i.e. a kind of function, from sets/properties to propositions. I then defend the pragmatic plausibility of this proposal, using Relevance Theory. Specifically, I argue that, even taken as standing for generalized quantifiers, descriptions could still be used and understood in interpersonal communication. (shrink)