Fodor & Pylyshyn (1981) criticize J. J. Gibson's ecological account of perception for failing to address what I call the 'correlation problem' in visual perception. That is, they charge that Gibson cannot explain how perceivers learn to correlate detectable properties of the light with perceptible properties of the environment. Furthermore, they identify the correlation problem as a crucial issue for any theory of visual perception, what I call a 'primary problem'—i.e. a problem which plays a definitive role in establishing the (...) concerns of a particular scientific research program. If they are correct, Gibson's failure to resolve this problem would cast considerable doubt upon his ecological approach to perception. In response, I argue that both Fodor & Pylyshyn's problem itself and their proposed inferential solution embody a significant mistake which needs to be eliminated from our thinking about visual perception. As part of my response, I also suggest a Gibsonian alternative to Fodor & Pylyshyn's primary problem formulation. (shrink)

Argues i) that part of what it is to understand what is being asked, when we ask whether something is good, is being able to distinguish stopping points in a series of "Why?" questions, and ii) that this ability explains how we can reason from observable facts to conclusions about value.

Imagine a human society, perhaps in pre-history, in which people were generally of a psychological kind with us, had the use of natural language to communicate with one another, but did not have any properly moral concepts in which to exhort one another to meet certain standards and to lodge related claims and complaints. According to The Birth of Ethics, the members of that society would have faced a set of pressures, and made a series of adjustments in response, sufficient (...) to put them within reach of ethical concepts. Without any planning, they would have more or less inevitably evolved a way of using such concepts to articulate desirable patterns of behavior and to hold themselves and one another responsible to those standards. Sooner or later, they would have entered ethical space. While this central claim is developed as a thesis in conjectural history or genealogy, the aim of the exercise is philosophical. Assuming that it explains the emergence of concepts and practices that are more or less equivalent to ours, the story offers us an account of the nature and role of morality. It directs us to the function that ethics plays in human life and alerts us to the character in virtue of which it can serve that function. The emerging view of morality has implications for the standard range of questions in meta-ethics and moral psychology, and enables us to understand why there are divisions in normative ethics like that between consequentialist and Kantian approaches. (shrink)

Few musical works loom as large in Western culture as Richard Wagner's four-part Ring of the Nibelung. In Finding an Ending, two eminent philosophers, Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, offer an illuminating look at this greatest of Wagner's achievements, focusing on its far-reaching and subtle exploration of problems of meanings and endings in this life and world. Kitcher and Schacht plunge the reader into the heart of Wagner's Ring, drawing out the philosophical and human significance of the text and (...) the music. They show how different forms of love, freedom, heroism, authority, and judgment are explored and tested as it unfolds. As they journey across its sweeping musical-dramatic landscape, Kitcher and Schacht lead us to the central concern of the Ring--the problem of endowing life with genuine significance that can be enhanced rather than negated by its ending, if the right sort of ending can be found. The drama originates in Wotan's quest for a transformation of the primordial state of things into a world in which life can be lived more meaningfully. The authors trace the evolution of Wotan's efforts, the intricate problems he confronts, and his failures and defeats. But while the problem Wotan poses for himself proves to be insoluble as he conceives of it, they suggest that his very efforts and failures set the stage for the transformation of his problem, and for the only sort of resolution of it that may be humanly possible--to which it is not Siegfried but rather Brünnhilde who shows the way. The Ring's ending, with its passing of the gods above and destruction of the world below, might seem to be devastating; but Kitcher and Schacht see a kind of meaning in and through the ending revealed to us that is profoundly affirmative, and that has perhaps never been so powerfully and so beautifully expressed. (shrink)

A minimum voting age is defended as the most effective and least disrespectful means of ensuring all members of an electorate are sufficiently competent to vote. Whilst it may be reasonable to require competency from voters, a minimum voting age should be rejected because its view of competence is unreasonably controversial, it is incapable of defining a clear threshold of sufficiency and an alternative test is available which treats children more respectfully. This alternative is a procedural test for minimum electoral (...) competence. A procedural test for minimum electoral competence also succeeds in fulfilling adults’ duties to promote children’s rational and moral engagement with democracy. A minimum voting age should therefore be rejected, all things considered. A procedural test for minimum literacy and independent voting is the most justified means to ensure competency from voters and to promote the democratic agency of children. (shrink)

We introduce and study a natural class of fields in which certain first-order definable sets are existentially definable, and characterise this class by a number of equivalent conditions. We show that global fields belong to this class, and in particular obtain a number of new existential predicates over global fields.

Intermediate Quantitifiers presents and analyzes the logical and linguistic features of intermediate quantifiers, in a fashion typical of traditional logic. Intermediate quantifiers express logical quantities which fall between Aristotle's two quantities of categorical propositions - the universal and the particular. This book is the first to use traditional methods to integrate the logic and semantics of intermediate quantifiers with the two traditional quantities. Few, many and most express the most commonly referred to intermediate quantities, yet in this book Peterson argues (...) that an infinite number of additional quantities can be understood through a deeper examination of the logical nature of all intermediate quantifiers. Drawing on the work of Robert Carnes and taking a critical look at James McCawley's grammatical analysis, Peterson concludes that a new approach to foundations of mathematics based on the syllogistic logic of quantifiers is possible.Offering invaluable insights for those studying across areas of logic, linguistics, and the philosophy or semantics of natural language, this book presents the completion of an explanation for extending traditional syllogistic logic to handle intermediate quantifiers. (shrink)

Philip H Walkling; The Idea of a Multicultural Curriculum [1], Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 87–95, https://doi.org.

Heuristics are necessary but far from sufficient explanations for moral judgment. This commentary stresses: (a) the need to complement cold, cognitive-economizing functionalist accounts with hot, value-expressive, social-identity-affirming accounts; and (b) the importance of conducting reflective-equilibrium thought and laboratory experiments that explore the permeability of the boundaries people place on the “thinkable.”.

Patient and family demands for the initiation or continuation of life-sustaining medically non-beneficial treatments continues to be a major issue. This is especially relevant in intensive care units, but is also a challenge in other settings, most notably with cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Differences of opinion between physicians and patients/families about what are appropriate interventions in specific clinical situations are often fraught with highly strained emotions, and perhaps none more so when the family bases their desires on religious belief. In this essay, (...) I discuss non-beneficial treatments in light of these sorts of disputes, when there is a clash between the nominally secular world of fact- and evidence-based medicine and the faith-based world of hope for a miraculous cure. I ask the question whether religious belief can justify providing treatment that has either no or a vanishly small chance of restoring meaningful function. I conclude that non-beneficial therapy by its very definition cannot be helpful, and indeed is often harmful, to patients and hence cannot be justified no matter what the source or kind of reasons used to support its use. Therefore, doctors may legitimately refuse to provide such treatments, so long as they do so for acceptable clinical reasons. They must also offer alternatives, including second opinions, as well the option of transferring the care of the patient to a more accommodating physician or institution. (shrink)

I compare recent work in the sociology of scientific knowledge with other types of sociological research. On this basis I urge a revival of the sociology of science, offer a tentative agenda, and attempt to show how the questions I raise might be addressed.

Following in general a history of religions analysis, the paper argues that myth lays a basis for morality in that it sets forth a picture of “how things really are” (the is), to which humans seek to conform their actions (morality, the ought). A parallel argument locates the capacity for morality and values orientation in the process of evolution itself. A hypothesis is formulated concerning the function of myth in the emergence of Homo sapiens, namely, to motivate the action required (...) if creatures so culturally formed as humans were to survive. The Christian love command (understood as altruism) is interpreted as an example of the general hypothesis. (shrink)

People can look at non-conforming behaviour in two ways: either the person is acting immorally or the moral theory that condemns the behaviour is mistaken. To choose the former is to reflect a confidence in the existing moral theory, while choosing the latter is evidence that moral theory for that particular behaviour is wrong. This point says a lot about the link between the descriptive and evaluative enterprises of law. The development of basic moral principles, which draws from moral intuition, (...) is a similar process when it comes to developing social practices, which in turn draw from human behaviour. Legal positivism has contributed much to clarifying the kind of social facts that characterize legal systems, specifically the kind of normative claims that legal systems typically make. Legal positivism provides much of the descriptive front. This chapter is motivated by an interest in reconciling the normative claims of law with the claims that moral philosophers believe can be justified. (shrink)

Open theism represents an important mediating position between more traditional or evangelical theology and process thought. But open theists have in general failed to engage panentheism. The increasingly significant role of panentheism not only in process thought but now across the theological spectrum—including among evangelical thinkers—suggests a new mediating position, open panentheism. Its panentheistic themes allow this new constructive theology to draw more deeply from process sources than most open theists do. At the same time, along with more traditional theologies, (...) it affirms a free creation by God ex nihilo, and hence the free self-limitation (kenosis) of God in the creative act. (shrink)

This article investigates the status of Norbert Elias’s conception of the sociology of knowledge as the means to provide a new epistemological security for sociology. The author of the article argues that this translates into an effective critique of the underlaboring model of the relationship between philosophy and the social sciences, which is consistent with Elias’s attempt to consolidate his own sociological theory. Nevertheless, the author argues that Elias’s sociology of knowledge runs into problems in its attempt to evade the (...) problem of relativism in explanation, and in its conception of human agency. (shrink)

Metaphysics, as I understand it, is the attempt to construct theories which give correct accounts in general terms of pervasive structural features of reality. Though not precise and not intended as an explicit definition, this characterization is comprehensive enough to include both descriptive and revisionary varieties of metaphysical theory. The enterprise of descriptive metaphysics, Strawson tells us, consists in describing “the actual structure of our thought about the world.” Presumably a philosopher would favor this approach to metaphysics if he or (...) she believed either that the actual structure of our thought about the world provides, at least for the most part, an accurate portrait of the world’s structure or that the actual structure of our thought at any time provides privileged access, or perhaps our only access, at that time to the structure of the world. Revisionary metaphysics, by contrast, is concerned to produce a structure of thought about the world better than the one we actually have. Obviously a philosopher would adopt this approach if he or she believed that the actual structure of our thought about the world provides, in at least some important respects, an inaccurate portrait of the world’s structure and stands in need of revision in the interests of correctness. And clearly a philosopher might hold that the actual structure of our thought is quite accurate in some respects and need only be described to yield correct theory and yet is thoroughly inaccurate in others and requires substantial revision if correct theory is to be the outcome. Philosophers may, as I suppose most of them do, practice by turns descriptive and revisionary kinds of metaphysics. No global commitment to one approach or the other is required; the choice between approaches can be allowed to rest on the exigencies of local problems. (shrink)

Ces contributions tentent de dégager les enjeux littéraires, philosophiques, politiques et psychologiques des "Dialogues", oeuvre méconnue de Rousseau, afin de cerner sa signification dans le parcours de l'écrivain.

This article offers a vision for work at the intersection of science and religion over the coming seven years. Because predictions are inherently risky and are more often than not false, the text first offers an assessment of the current state of the science-religion discussion and a quick survey of the last 50 years of work in this field. The implications of the six features of this vision for the future of the field are then presented in some detail. Rather (...) than bemoaning the current diversity of approaches and conclusions as a negative result, I endorse it as a healthy sign—if acknowledged honestly and managed well. (shrink)

Any discussion of the possibility of ‘science and religion’ as a distinct field of study represented a clear step forward from the dominant prejudice of an earlier age. By contrast, it seems hard to deny that a new area of study has emerged, one devoted to the study of the complex and multifaceted relationships between science and religion. The text in this book testifies to the existence of a distinct field of inquiry. One can hope that carefully studying how differently (...) the various religions conceive their relationship with the sciences will help to overcome the tendency, until recently dominant in Western scholarship, to equate ‘religion and science’ with ‘Christianity and science’. (shrink)

Shehtman introduced bimodal logics of the products of Kripke frames, thereby introducing frame products of unimodal logics. Van Benthem, Bezhanishvili, ten Cate and Sarenac generalize this idea to the bimodal logics of the products of topological spaces, thereby introducing topological products of unimodal logics. In particular, they show that the topological product of S4 and S4 is S4 ⊕ S4, i.e., the fusion of S4 and S4: this logic is strictly weaker than the frame product S4 × S4. Indeed, van (...) Benthem et al show that S4 ⊕ S4 is the bimodal logic of the particular product space Q × Q, leaving open the question of whether S4 ⊕ S4 is also complete for the product space R × R. We answer this question in the negative. (shrink)

This article examines Hegel's treatment of Antigone and of women in the Phenomenology of Spirit. I differ from many other scholars in arguing that Antigone ought to be understood as like the Hegelian slave—both were dominated and oppressed, but, through that very domination and oppression, they subverted the master and ultimately made as significant a contribution to culture as he did. Antigone represents a form of individualism which, unlike liberal individualism, is compatible with the Sittlichkeit that Hegel wants to achieve (...) for the modern world. Despite the fact that many of Hegel's views on women are not acceptable, he nevertheless has some things to say that can be of value for feminists. Certainly, his views are not as objectionable as the ones he seems to hold in the Philosophy of Right, and the latter should not be projected back into the Phenomenology. (shrink)

This paper suggests the utility of studying unconscious cognition from a selectionist perspective, specifically as outlined by theory and research in the field of behavior analysis. Currently, issues surrounding the complexity of the unconscious cognitive behaviors, the number of variables involved, and the multidirectional influences of these variables, are of utmost concern to theories of mind and behavior. Unanswered questions about these factors leave us without the ability to predict outcomes in an individual case or adequately manipulate variables in order (...) to alter outcomes. Multiple examples of current work by behavior analysts are suggested as potentially fruitful ways of addressing some of these concerns. (shrink)