In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:John Edward MacKinnon BORIS PASTERNAK'S CONCEPTION OF REALISM To desire truth is to desire direct contact with a piece of reality. To desire contact with a piece of reality is to love. —Simone Weil, The Needfor Roots According to czeslaw milosz, Boris Pasternak "did not pluck fruits from the tree of reason, the tree of life was enough for him. Confronted by argument, he replied with his sacred dance." (...) Pasternak's poetry, he concludes, is "antispeculative, anti-intellectual," and though he was compelled to make certain concessions in the course of writing Doctor Zhivago, speculative thought nonetheless remained for him a perennial and decided "adversary." ' However, the familiar and conveniently stark distinction between lyricist and thinker upon which such judgments depend is in fact both naive and tiresome since, plainly, creativity and reflection need in no way necessarily subvert one another. Accordingly, while it is indeed likely that the most valued feature of Pasternak's poetry and best prose is its detailed recording ofthe world's incessant change, of the magic and movement of weather and gardens, seasons and landscapes, Milosz is far from just in so readily and categorically dismissing any attribution of poetic thought to Pasternak. For as much as the whole of his poetry amounts to a celebration of life's small wonders, unrivaled in their greatness, there remains at bottom the inspiration of the thinker, of one who has seen and felt, but who at the same time has had to compile and consider in an attempt to make sense of the whole. As if in open challenge to Milosz, CM. Bowra notes that Pasternak's poetic sensibility is "both physical and intellectual." The mental states described in his poems, Bowra writes, "begin with sensations of the eye and ear but contain something else in their mental appreciation of the 211 212Philosophy and Literature situation," namely, his "gift for grasping abstract problems." 2 If Milosz remains unconvinced, and if Wladimir Weidle dismisses Pasternak's poetic thought as "puny and piteous," still more poets and critics have shared Bowra's view.3 Henry Gifford refers to Pasternak's "philosophical habit of mind," Ronald Hingley to the "pyrotechnics" ofhis "darting intellect," and Yury Lotman to his personal and "thoroughly professional philosophical culture." 4 In her review ofPasternak's My Sister, Life, meanwhile, Marina Tsvetaeva observes that "thought is what works in him, burrows in subterranean passages...." 5 And though Nadezhda Mandelstamclaims that the word of all poets "flows from a general, integrated view of the world," she acknowledges too that poets "vary in the range and depth of their understanding" and proceeds to cite Pasternak as her one example of a poet with a particularly unified worldview.6 If we were to agree with Francis Sparshott that "the fiercest hatreds spring from the closest relationships," we could assume in turn that the fundamental antagonism customarily alleged to obtain between the creative and critical faculties in fact indicates only some common, if confused, origin or inspiration.7 In creating, after all, it is predictable rather than idiosyncratic that the artist will be led to investigate the roots ofart within himself, tiiat he will be tempted by the urge to define, to entertain, that is, some rudimentary theory. And indeed, in Pasternak 's case, it is not simply a matter of his poetry and prose having been informed by certain tacit, if stray, aesthetic conceptions, but rather of his having supplemented his intensely thoughtful artwith aconcurrently developed theory. In this article, I want specifically to consider Pasternak's conception of realism, that standard of achievement which, according to his theory, constitutes the touchstone of all great art. In order more firmly to ground this notoriously vague and unwieldy notion, I will appeal not only to complementary theoretical conceptions of Pasternak's, but also to those central ideas advanced by Iris Murdoch in The Sovereignty of Good. My intention will be to locate Pasternak's brand of realism within what I take to be an identifiable tradition, or at least a conspicuous and pervasive theoretical tendency, according to which the most crucial criterion of artistic realism is judged to be not any properly physical aspect ofthe completed work, and certainly... (shrink)

This is the first publication of these ideas in book form. 'It is a rare treat--important, original philosophy that is also a pleasure to read.

With incisiveness and lucid style, Dworkin has written a masterful explanation of how the Anglo-American legal system works and on what principles it is grounded. Law’s Empire is a full-length presentation of his theory of law that will be studied and debated for years to come.

Baedeker -- Independence. Truth in morals -- External skepticism -- Morals and causes -- Internal skepticism -- Interpretation. Moral responsibility -- Interpretation in general -- Conceptual interpretation -- Ethics. Dignity -- Free will and responsibility -- Morality. From dignity to morality -- Aid -- Harm -- Obligations -- Politics. Political rights and concepts -- Equality -- Liberty -- Democracy -- Law -- Epilogue. Dignity indivisible.

Most recent philosophical thought about the scientific representation of the world has focused on dyadic relationships between language-like entities and the world, particularly the semantic relationships of reference and truth. Drawing inspiration from diverse sources, I argue that we should focus on the pragmatic activity of representing, so that the basic representational relationship has the form: Scientists use models to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes. Leaving aside the terms "law" and "theory," I distinguish principles, specific conditions, models, (...) hypotheses, and generalizations. I argue that scientists use designated similarities between models and aspects of the world to form both hypotheses and generalizations. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Written by the world's best-known political and legal theorist, Freedom's Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution is a collection of essays that discuss almost all of the great constitutional issues of the last two decades, including abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, homosexuality, pornography, and free speech. Professor Dworkin offers a consistently liberal view of the Constitution and argues that fidelity to it and to law demands that judges make moral judgments. He proposes that we all interpret the abstract language (...) of the Constitution by reference to moral principles about political decency and justice. His `moral reading therefore brings political morality into the heart of constitutional law. The various chapters of this book were originally published separately and are now drawn together to provide the reader with a rich, full-length treatment of Dworkin's general theory of law. (shrink)

'Principles Of Mental Imagery' offers a broad, balanced, and up-to-date introduction to the major findings of this research and identifies five general principles that can account for most of them. It considers the development of experimental techniques that have solved many of the challenging methodological problems inherent in imagery research and includes recent experimental findings not covered in other imagery books..

In arguing a "role for history," Kuhn was proposing a naturalized philosophy of science. That, I argue, is the only viable approach to the philosophy of science. I begin by exhibiting the main general objections to a naturalistic approach. These objections, I suggest, are equally powerful against nonnaturalistic accounts. I review the failure of two nonnaturalistic approaches, methodological foundationism (Carnap, Reichenbach, and Popper) and metamethodology (Lakatos and Laudan). The correct response, I suggest, is to adopt an "evolutionary perspective." This perspective (...) is defended against one recent critic (Putnam). To argue the plausibility of a naturalistic approach, I next sketch a naturalistic account of theories and of theory choice. This account is then illustrated by the recent revolution in geology. In conclusion I return to Kuhn's question about the role of history in developing a naturalistic theory of science. (shrink)

There is no best scientific model of anything; there are only models more or less good for different purposes. Thus, there is no general answer to the question of whether one should model biological behavior using computer simulations or robots. It all depends on what one wants to learn. This is not a question about models, but about scientific goals.

Experiments are presented showing that visual search for Mueller-Lyer (ML) stimuli is based on complete configurations, rather than component segments. Segments easily detected in isolation were difficult to detect when embedded in a configuration, indicating preemption by low-level groups. This preemption—which caused stimulus components to become inaccessible to rapid search—was an all-or-nothing effect, and so could serve as a powerful test of grouping. It is shown that these effects are unlikely to be due to blurring by simple spatial filters at (...) early visual levels. It is proposed instead that they are due to more sophisticated processes that rapidly bind contour fragments into spatially-extended assemblies. These results support the view that rapid visual search cannot access the primitives formed at the earliest stages of visual processing; rather, it can access only higher-level, more ecologically-relevant structures. (shrink)

This paper explores a new reason for preferring a model-theoretic approach to understanding the nature of scientific theories. Identifying the models in philosophers' model-theoretic accounts of theories with the concepts in cognitive scientists' accounts of categorization suggests a structure to families of models far richer than has commonly been assumed. Using classical mechanics as an example, it is argued that families of models may be "mapped" as an array with "horizontal" graded structures, multiply hierarchical "vertical" structures, and local "radial" structures. (...) These structures promise important implications for how scientific theories are learned and used in actual scientific practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT As bioethics emerged in the 1960s and 1970s and began to have enormous impacts on the practice of medicine and research – fuelled, by broad socio‐political changes that gave rise to the struggle of women, African Americans, gay men and lesbians, and the antiauthoritarian impulse that characterised the New Left in democratic capitalist societies – little attention was given to the question of the ethics of public health. This was all the more striking since the core values and practices (...) of public health, often entailing the subordination of the individual for the common good, seemed opposed to the ideological impulses of bioethics. Of what relevance is autonomy‐focused bioethics for public health, with its mix of justifications including those that are either implicitly or explicitly paternalistic or that seek to impose strictures on individuals and communities in the name of collective welfare? To examine the deep divide between the central commitments of bioethics and the values that animate the practice of public health, we focus on a series of controversies implicating the concepts of privacy, liberty, and paternalism. Recognising the role of moral values in decision‐making was a signal contribution of bioethics in its formative period. Over the past three decades a broad array of perspectives emerged under the rubric of bioethics but individualism remains central. As we commence the process of shaping an ethics of public health, it is clear that bioethics is the wrong place to start when thinking about the balances required in defence of the public's health. (shrink)

Business schools have a responsibility to incorporate applied business ethics courses as part of their undergraduate and MBA curriculum. The purpose of this article is to take a background and historical look at reasons for the new emphasis on ethical coursework in business schools. The article suggests a prescription for undergraduate and graduate education in applied business ethics and explores in detail the need to increase applied business ethics courses in business schools to enhance the ethical development of students.

In «Naturalized Epistemology and the Law of Evidence Revisited», the original target article for the various refutations that I comment on here, I revisited through a slightly different lens the subject of the article that I coauthored with Brian Leiter close to twenty years ago. That article has prompted four responses from Professors Pardo, Spellman, Muffato, and Enoch. Professors Pardo and Spellman basically accept the implications of the original article and offer useful but friendly amendments. Prof. Muffato apparently does not (...) want to dispute over my ground and so changes the subject, and in doing so offers a number of interesting points. Only the fourth, Prof. Enoch, has the same doubts about the utility of my original article as I do of the genre that gave rise to it. I can thus be quite brief in discussing professors Pardo, Spellman, and Muffato, but it will take bit more effort to lay out the limits of Prof. Enoch’s analysis. (shrink)

We revisit Naturalized Epistemology and the Law of Evidence, published twenty years ago. The evolution of the relative plausibility theory of juridical proof is offered as evidence of the advantage of a naturalized approach to the study of the field and law evidence. Various alternative explanations of aspects of juridical proof from other disciplines are examined and their shortcomings described. These competing explanations are similar in their reductive, a priori approaches that are at odds with an empirically oriented naturalized approach. (...) The shortcomings of the various a priori approaches are driven by their common methodological commitments to employing weird hypotheticals to engage in intuition mining about the American legal systems that in turn ignore important aspects of the actual legal systems and consistently make impossible epistemological demands. As a result, both their descriptions of and prescriptions for American legal systems are implausible, unlike the relative plausibility theory. (shrink)

Religious atheism? -- The universe -- Religious freedom -- Death and immortality.

In Epistemic Cultures (1999), Karin Knorr Cetina argues that different scientific fields exhibit different epistemic cultures. She claims that in high energy physics (HEP) individual persons are displaced as epistemic subjects in favor of experiments themselves. In molecular biology (MB), by contrast, individual persons remain the primary epistemic subjects. Using Ed Hutchins' (1995) account of navigation aboard a traditional US Navy ship as a prototype, I argue that both HEP and MB exhibit forms of distributed cognition. That is, in both (...) fields cognition is distributed across individual persons and complex artifacts. The cognitive system producing the knowledge is heterogeneous. Nevertheless, in both fields we can reserve epistemic agency for the human components of these systems. We do not need to postulate new distributed cognitive agents, let alone ones exhibiting new forms of consciousness. (shrink)

Several years ago I prepared a point-by-point response to this postscript as a working paper for the NYU Colloquium in Legal, Moral and Political Philosophy. I have not yet published that paper, but I understand that copies of it are in circulation. I do not intend to recapitulate the arguments of that working paper, but instead to concentrate on one aspect of Hart's Postscript, which is his defence of Archimedean jurisprudence. I shall have something to say about his own legal (...) philosophy, which was a form of legal positivism. But I shall mainly be concerned about the method that he said generated his legal positivism. (shrink)

The use of idealizations and approximations in scientific explanations poses a problem for traditional philosophical theories of confirmation since, strictly speaking, these sorts of statements are false. Furthermore, in several central cases in the history of science, theoretical predictions seen as confirmatory are not, in any usual sense, even approximately true. As a means of eliminating the puzzling nature of these cases, two theses are proposed. First, explanations consist of idealized deductive-nomological sketches plus what are called modal auxiliaries, i.e., arguments (...) showing that if the idealizations used in the initial conditions are improved, then there will be an improvement in the prediction. Second, a theory is confirmed if it can be shown that its idealized sketches can be improved; similarly, a theory is disconfirmed if its idealized sketches cannot be improved. Several examples are given to illustrate both confirmation and disconfirmation achieved by means of the modal auxiliary. These cases are compared with Scriven's bridge example. (shrink)

Bad Faith and Sincerity: Does Sartre's Analysis Rest on a Mistake? In this opening chapter, I intend to deal with an issue that vexed my earliest ...

The importance of institutionalizing ethics within an organization cannot be underestimated.

In this paper, we sketch the development of two important themes of modern set theory, both of which can be regarded as growing out of work of Kurt Gödel. We begin with a review of some basic concepts and conventions of set theory.§0. The ordinal numbers were Georg Cantor's deepest contribution to mathematics. After the natural numbers 0, 1, …, n, … comes the first infinite ordinal number ω, followed by ω + 1, ω + 2, …, ω + ω, (...) … and so forth. ω is the first limit ordinal as it is neither 0 nor a successor ordinal. We follow the von Neumann convention, according to which each ordinal number α is identified with the set {ν ∣ ν α} of its predecessors. The ∈ relation on ordinals thus coincides with <. We have 0 = ∅ and α + 1 = α ∪ {α}. According to the usual set-theoretic conventions, ω is identified with the first infinite cardinal ℵ0, similarly for the first uncountable ordinal number ω1 and the first uncountable cardinal number ℵ1, etc. We thus arrive at the following picture:The von Neumann hierarchy divides the class V of all sets into a hierarchy of sets Vα indexed by the ordinal numbers. The recursive definition reads: ;Vλ = ∪v<λVv for limit ordinals λ. We can represent this hierarchy by the following picture. (shrink)

This article addresses the implications of rapid and uncertain ecological change, and global climate change in particular, for reserve oriented and restoration oriented ecosystem management. I argue for the following conclusions: (1) rapid and uncertain ecological change undermines traditional justifications for reserve oriented and restoration oriented ecosystem management strategies; (2) it requires rethinking ecosystem management goals, not just developing novel strategies (such as assisted colonization) to accomplish traditional goals; (3) species preservation ought to be deemphasized as an ecosystem management goal; (...) (4) reserve oriented ecosystem management remains well justified, but the goals for it must be revised. (shrink)

Husserl has finally begun to be recognized as the precursor of current interest in intentionality — the first to have a general theory of the role of mental representations in the philosophy of language and mind. As the first thinker to put directedness of mental representations at the center of his philosophy, he is also beginning to emerge as the father of current research in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence.

(2005). Intuitus and Ratio in Spinoza's Ethical Thought. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 73-90. doi: 10.1080/0960878042000317591.

Synthetic biology makes use of genetic and other materials derived from modern biological life forms to design and construct novel synthetic organisms. Artificial organisms are not constructed from parts of existing biological organisms, but from non-biological materials. Artificial and synthetic organisms are artefactual organisms. Here we are concerned with the non-instrumental value of such organisms. More specifically, we are concerned with the extent to which artefactual organisms have natural value, inherent worth and intrinsic value. Our conclusions are largely supportive of (...) the value of artefactual organisms. However, they do not constitute a comprehensive ethical evaluation of them. (shrink)

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

I begin by arguing that a consistent general naturalism must be understood in terms of methodological maxims rather than metaphysical doctrines. Some specific maxims are proposed. I then defend a generalized naturalism from the common objection that it is incapable of accounting for the normative aspects of human life, including those of scientific practice itself. Evolutionary naturalism, however, is criticized as being incapable of providing a sufficient explanation of categorical moral norms. Turning to the epistemological norms of science itself, particularly (...) those governing the empirical testing of specific models, I argue that these should be regarded as conditional rather than categorical and that, as such, can be given a naturalistic justification. The justification, however, is more cognitive than evolutionary. The historical development of science is found to be a better place for applying evolutionary ideas. After briefly considering the possibility of a naturalistic understanding of mathematics and logic, I turn to the problem of reconciling scientific realism with an evolutionary picture of scientific development. The solution, I suggest, is to understand scientific knowledge as being “perspectival” rather than absolutely objective. I first argue that scientific observation, whether by humans or instruments, is perspectival. This argument is extended to scientific theorizing which is regarded not as the formulation of universal laws of nature but as the construction of principles to be used in the construction of models to be applied to specific natural systems. The application of models, however, is argued to be not merely opportunistic but constrained by the methodological presumption that we live in a world with a definite causal structure even though we can understand it only from various perspectives. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 465-477.

The consensus among legal philosophers is probably that rule-based legal expert systems leave much to be desired as aids in legal decision-making. Why? What can we do about it? A bureaucrat administering some set of complex rules will ascertain the facts and apply the rules to them in order to discover their consequences for the case in hand. This process of deductive reasoning is characteristically bureaucratic.

While ethicists have directed much attention to controversial biomedical issues--including euthanasia, abortion, and genetic engineering--they have largely ignored the less obvious, but more pervasive, everyday ethical problems faced by family physicians. Ethical Issues in Family Medicine addresses these problems, offering an ethics that reflects the distinctive features of family practice, and helping family physicians to appreciate the extent to which ethical issues influence their practice.

Talk of a “genetic program” has become almost as common in cell and evolutionary biology as talk of “genetic information”. But what is a genetic program? I understand the claim that an organism’s genome contains a program to mean that its genes not only carry information about which proteins to make, but also about the conditions in which to make them. I argue that the program description, while accurate in some respects, is ultimately misleading and should be abandoned. After that, (...) I sketch an alternative framework which is better suited to capturing the full informational nature of genes. This framework is centered on the notion of a signaling game, as originally developed by David Lewis, but expanded upon considerably by Brian Skyrms in more recent years. On the view I develop, genes turn out to be the producers and consumers of regulatory or developmental information, rather than entities encoding such information. This finding has consequences that link up with a broader debate in the philosophy of biology concerning inheritance systems. I take this to be one form of theoretical payoff that results from applying the signaling games framework to genes. (shrink)