Epistemology is in the business of formulating norms of acceptable belief. We typically arrive at beliefs through inference. So epistemology is concerned with our inferential practices. Making inferences is something individuals do. If I believe the premises of an argument and you know how to infer something from those premises, it doesn't follow that you will draw the inference, unless you believe the premises. It appears, then, that all the important epistemic work goes on in individual agents. When we build (...) an automobile together, we build it just once, but when we draw the same conclusion, each of us draws it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:381 IMPRESSIONS, IDEAS, AND FICTIONS I. Introduction Under the heading of "fiction," Selby-Bigge's index to Hume's Treatise of Human Nature lists no fewer than seventeen distinct fictions. There is the fiction of perfect equality, of continued and distinct existence, of substance and matter, of substantial forms, accidents, faculties and occult qualities, the fiction of personal identity, and many others. The notion of a fiction is central in Hume's philosophy. (...) As the title of this paper suggests, I believe that fictions are so important that what is commonly called Hume's theory of impressions and ideas ought to be called the theory of impressions, ideas, and fictions. Although fictions are at the heart of a number of Treatise passages, they have 2 generally received very little sustained treatment. This paper is a start at filling a gap in Hume interpretation. I hope to lay the groundwork for a complete study of Hume's fictions. There are some obvious questions to be addressed in such a study: Is there just one type of fiction or are there many? Is there an essential feature or set of features shared by all fictions? Is the characterization of a view as involving a fiction always a criticism of that view? If fictions are in some sense false or wrong, what do they contrast with? What notions are true or correct? Does Hume's account of fictions mesh with an account of truth? If there is no account of truth, how can there be an account of fictions? These questions, by no means the only ones which can be raised, are related. They can be seen as hovering around the issue of whether Hume's notion 382 of a fiction is an ontological notion. Is calling something a fiction denying the existence of that thing? Does believing in fictions (e.g., believing that there are persons) amount to holding a false belief that something exists when in fact it does not? Should we read Hume as claiming, for example, that there are no substances because he calls substance a fiction? Answering 'yes' to these questions has obvious implications for the questions raised in the last paragraph. I believe that while the deflationist reading is not completely wrong, it is wrong enough to account for much confusion in Hume interpretation. Many readers of the Treatise think, for example, that in calling the self a fiction Hume is denying the existence of persons. This makes it completely mysterious why Hume talks about persons throughout the Treatise in a common-sense way, as if they do exist. Though I cannot investigate all the consequences of my interpretation of Hume's fictions for the numerous issues which involve fictions in the Treatise, it is my hope that clarifying Hume's notion of fiction will help shed light on those other notions, such as personal identity, which Hume calls fictions. I will offer an interpretation which attempts to locate some general features of fictions in the Treatise passages where Hume invokes them. Although there are different fictions, Hume has a core notion of fiction which is fundamentally epistemological rather than ontological. There will be space in this paper to look at only a few fictions, those which occur in or before "Of scepticism with regard to the senses." I believe, however, that the interpretation can be generalized. Finally, I will suggest how my interpretation provides answers to the above questions. 383 II. Fiction and Imagination It is tempting to think of Hume's notion of a fiction as an ontological notion because in contemporary usage, the notion of a fiction is ontologically loaded. Fictions are things we construct in our heads; they are the result of concatenating ideas in the imagination. Golden mountains and the Wicked Witch of the East are fictitious; they don't represent anything which exists. If Hume is using this notion of fiction, then he must be doing deflationary ontology. On this view, to call something a fiction is to demote it to the status of something thought up in one's imagination; it is to accord it the rank of something whose existence is not to be accepted. There is some support... (shrink)

For my part, my only hope is, that I may contribute a little to the advancement of knowledge, by giving in some particulars a different turn to the speculations of philosophers, and pointing out to them more distinctly those subjects, where alone they can expect assurance and conviction.

The standard interpretation of Hume on testimony takes him to be a reductionist; justification of beliefs from testimony ultimately depends on one's own first-person experience. Yet Hume's main discussions of testimony in the Treatise and first Enquiry suggest a social account. Hume appeals to shared experience and develops norms of belief from testimony that are not reductionist. It is argued that the reductionist interpretation rests on an overly narrow view of Hume's theory of ideas. By attending to such mechanisms of (...) the imagination as abstraction and fictions, it is shown that Hume's theory of ideas does not forestall a non-reductionist social epistemology. (shrink)

The test Turing proposed for machine intelligence is usually understood to be a test of whether a computer can fool a human into thinking that the computer is a human. This standard interpretation is rejected in favor of a test based on the Imitation Game introduced by Turing at the beginning of "Computing Machinery and Intelligence.".

The early sections of Book I, Part III of A Treatise of Human Nature are widely studied, and with good reason.(2) They contain Hume's skeptical arguments about what we now call inductive inference or what Hume called reasoning from experience. Very little attention, however, has been paid to Hume's extensive treatment of the social context of belief formation and correction which dominates sections iv-xiii of Part III. When these sections are noticed at all, they are seen as, at best, embellishments (...) and digressions, at worst, as unfortunate muddles. Purified of sections iv-xiii, Part III is simpler (and shorter) than the actual Part III; its arguments are well understood and their influence on Kant and the subsequent history of philosophy is well documented.(3) I will purposefully dirty the waters by attempting to account for the rich examples and the explicit treatment of the social component of belief in these neglected sections. While there are excellent reasons for stressing the importance of Hume's skeptical arguments, the text shows that Hume's had a second major concern, namely to account for the formation and regulation of beliefs as they typically arise in social contexts. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Critiques of Hume's Account Memory, Belief, and Causal Inference The Creation and Discovery of Personal Identity Memory and Imagination in Other Hume Texts References Further Reading.

This _Guide_ provides students with the scholarly and interpretive tools they need to understand Hume’s _A Treatise of Human Nature _and its influence on modern philosophy. A student guide to Hume’s _A Treatise of Human Nature_. Focuses on recent developments in Hume scholarship. Covers topics such as the formulation, reception and scope of the _Treatise_, imagination and memory, the passions, moral sentiments, and the role of sympathy. All the chapters are newly written by Hume scholars. Each chapter guides the reader (...) through a portion of the _Treatise,_ explaining the central arguments and key contemporary interpretations of those arguments. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind by Timothy M. CostelloeSaul TraigerTimothy M. Costelloe. The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Pp. xv + 312. Hardback. ISBN: 9781474436397. $107.00.If anything about Hume’s philosophy can be characterized as widely accepted, it is that the imagination is front and center in Hume’s account of the mind. The aim of (...) Timothy Costelloe’s book is to fully develop the observation, that the imagination, as Hume understands it, is “the canvas of the mind.” Costelloe amply demonstrates that the imagination is a broad canvas, ranging from Hume’s epistemology and metaphysics, to his aesthetics, moral and political philosophy, history, philosophy of religion, and his general conception of philosophy itself. Seven substantial chapters cover these areas, and show how Hume takes the imagination to play a pivotal role in each.One of the many strengths of this book is that Costelloe responsibly mines the secondary literature, carefully explaining the interpretations he seconds and those he finds wanting. The attention to the relevant secondary literature is apparent from the start, where Costelloe laments the surprising dearth of book-length treatments of Hume on the imagination, but helpfully highlights both the lesser known Hume-centric monographs on the imagination by Furlong and Wilbanks, as well as more widely read interpretations.The introductory chapter makes important distinctions and introduces some main concepts. Hume differentiates the imagination’s “combinatory power” from its “creative power.” While the uninhibited ability to concatenate ideas might also be seen as a creative act, Costelloe sees the creative power where the imagination [End Page 173] “generates a class of ideas—‘fictions’ of a certain sort—independent of experience and according to its own inner logic” (21). This characterization makes sense when viewing the imagination’s function as directed towards a goal, such as achieving coherence or creating an aesthetically pleasing effect. Costelloe suggests that achieving an aesthetically pleasing effect is an element in any exercise of the imagination’s creative power. The imagination creates easy transitions among ideas where there were none, where doing so is pleasurable, or aided by the passions.Costelloe introduces his account of Hume’s fictions as errors of the imagination whereby ideas are formed in a manner different from the standard derivation from antecedent impressions. He insists, helpfully, that fictions are not illusions, but rather errors of a different kind. Though both involve error, fictions, unlike illusions, are not described in terms of jest or irony (30).Though he acknowledges that Hume does not describe any fictions as “artificial,” Costelloe finds it helpful to draw a distinction between natural and artificial fictions. Natural fictions are generated without reflection. Artificial fictions, such as those created by poets and philosophers, issue from “the voluntary act of imagination” (31). Costelloe holds that artificial fictions “are rarely taken to refer to objects with real existence and that any professed belief is really a matter of people being persuaded of something and taking the ideas in question as having real referents, thus only lending themselves to their existence for one reason or another” (31). This is a bit unclear. Certainly, poetic fictions are voluntary creations not intended to refer to real objects. But substance, and the double existence of ideas and external objects, as philosophical fictions, surely both involve belief and the corresponding existential commitments on the part of the philosophers who are committed to them. It is also difficult to see the purported contrast between belief and taking ideas to have real referents.Chapter 2, on metaphysics, is the longest chapter in the book, and it addresses the fictions of the imagination in Hume’s account of space and time, continued and distinct existence, liberty and necessity, and personal identity. Costelloe is sensitive to the worry that classifying Hume’s subject in Book 1 of the Treatise as metaphysics may appear to be slighting the central epistemological concerns and failing to appreciate Hume’s nascent cognitive psychology. Such worries fall away as Costelloe explores the roles that the imagination plays in the formation of our conception of duration without change, and the identity... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:166, FLAGE ON HUME'S ACCOUNT OF MEMORY In the Treatise Hume writes that an impression which "has been present with the mind" may "make its appearance there as an idea," and that it can appear either through the faculty of memory or the faculty of the imagination. Memory and imagination each produces its own species of idea. In "Hume on Memory and 2 Causation" Daniel Flage addresses Hume's carving (...) out of these two species. Flage's main purpose is to show that Hume has a criterion for distinguishing memory ideas from others. I will argue that Flage has not located necessary and sufficient conditions for memory in Hume's discussion of memory. I will show that if Hume intended to provide a criterion at all, it is not the criterion Flage attributes to him, and that the criterion Flage has formulated is not an improvement over what appears to be Hume's criterion. Before looking at the details of Flage's interpretation I want to mention briefly an underlying assumption of the paper. The assumption is that Hume believes that there must be a clear distinction between memories and other perceptions. The assumption is supported by the fact that Hume speaks of the species of memory. However, there is textual evidence against this assumption. In the Treatise Hume emphasizes the ways in which memories are like other perceptions. For example, Hume calls memories impressions, while in distinguishing impressions from ideas he introduces 3 memories as paradigm examples of ideas. The reason Hume calls memories impressions, I believe, is that for the purpose of inference, he takes memories to be equivalent to impressions of sense. Since Hume is willing to put memories in two seemingly incompatible categories, perhaps his primary concern is with the role they play in belief; we make causal inferences 167. from memory and sense, not from the imagination. That Hume's primary concern is with inference, and not with memory per se, is supported by the fact that both Treatise sections devoted to memory are followed by 4 sections which deal with causal inference. Hume thinks that we cannot always distinguish memories from other perceptions "in their operation." It is not clear that he thinks that there must be a sharp distinction at all, since the traditional epistemological purpose for such a distinction, to partition the veridical from the non-veridical, is not obviously Hume's purpose. However, Flage claims that there is a clear criterion of memory in the Treatise. Let's take a look at what he has found. Flage maintains that Hume has both a phenomenal criterion based on vivacity which allows us in a rough and ready way to distinguish memories from imaginings "in their operation," and a formal criterion which "provides one with insight into the complex structure of an idea of memory." (p. 169) The phenomenal criterion does not distinguish memory ideas from others, since, as Hume himself allows, non-memories (e.g. beliefs, delusions, even ideas of the imagination) can have the same vivacity as memories. (Cf. T86) The marking off of memory as a distinct species is accomplished, on Flage's view, by the formal criterion. Hume writes "The chief exercise of the memory is not to preserve the simple ideas, but their order and position." (T9) This is what Flage calls Hume's formal criterion, and Flage takes it as both necessary and sufficient for being a memory idea. Flage takes memory ideas to be what he calls relative ideas, ideas which pick out or refer to a unique item. A memory idea, on this view, is a complex idea which uniquely picks out the antecedent complex 168, impression which resembles and is the cause of the idea. Flage writes: The formal criterion is basically a causal thesis: if a particular positive idea (mental image) is a genuine idea of the memory, then at some point in the past there was a complex impression that was the cause (or the original cause) of and exactly (or closely) resembles that positive idea as an idea. (p. 172) In this formulation the criterion is a necessary condition of memory. In a subsequent formulation Flage claims its sufficiency as... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME ON FINDING AN IMPRESSION OF THE SELF 47 1 1. Introduction Descartes held that reflection on "the commonest matters", for example our recognition of a piece of wax, reveals our more fundamental awareness of ourselves. And further, if the [notion or] perception of the wax has seemed to me clearer and more distinct, not only after the sight or the touch, but also after many other causes have (...) rendered it quite manifest to me, with how much more [evidence] and distinctness must it be said that I now know myself, since all the reasons which contribute to the knowledge of wax, or any other body whatever, are yet better proofs of the nature of my mind!2 Even if I only seem to see a piece of wax, when I have no eyes to see and there is no wax before me, I still know something. I know myself. When I judge that the wax is soft I am aware of myself as so judging. When I judge that the wax is hard, I am aware that I_ judge it so. I cannot have knowledge of external bodies without having certain knowledge of myself, because even my mere beliefs reveal my self-knowledge. Descartes exploited the insight that he is more intimately conscious of his own mind than anything else to establish that he is "a mind or a soul... a thing which thinks".3 Philosophers who did not share Descartes' rationalism still held the view that we are intimately conscious of ourselves, and that our awareness of other things enhances our self-awareness, and is epistemically dependent on it. Butler claimed that our awareness of ourselves was beyond doubt, since to doubt that awareness presupposes that we already have it. Whenever we "turn our thoughts upon ourselves" we have 48 "certain conviction, which necessarily and every moment, rises within us" of our personal identity. In A Treatise of Human Nature Hume argues against both the intelligibility of the notion of immaterial substance, and the claim that we have simple awareness of our selves independently of our awareness of other objects. when Hume turns his attention squarely to the topic of personal identity in the Treatise, he has already dismissed the rationalist notion of immaterial substance or soul. He attacks the view which tempted rationalists and empiricists alike, that our awareness of ourselves is distinct from our feeling and thinking, but is often enhanced by such experience. Hume's argument has been and continues to be influential. Recent Wittgenstein interpretation suggests that the Tractatus discussion of the unencounterability of the self in experience is directly borrowed from Hume.5 Chisholm's views concerning self-awareness are motivated in part by problems he locates in Hume's negative argument. Chisholm argues that the report that he finds no impression of self commits Hume to the existence of a subject of experience.6 Most recently, Nozick suggests that Hume did not consider the possibility that our awareness of ourselves might be isolated by employing •7 special techniques, such as yoga or meditation. In this paper I will focus on the passage in the Treatise where Hume reports his failure to find an impression of the self and presents this as an argument against the theory of self-awareness which many philosophers found irresistible. Although Hume's argument has been influential and is often discussed in contemporary literature, the Treatise passage in which it occurs appears confused. The confusion is cleared up only when it is seen that Hume really presents two 49 different arguments against the view that we are intimately conscious of ourselves. Finally I suggest how Hume's actual arguments pave the way for his positive views. 2. The Difficulty Hume's discussion of personal identity in the Treatise begins with his consideration of the view of "some philosophers, who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our SELF."8 After characterizing the view, Hume rejects it, having found that we have no idea of self "after the manner it is here explain'd". The unnamed philosophers, as Hume understands them, take the idea of the self to be a simple idea. For Hume, a... (shrink)

The Hans Reichenbach Collection, part of the Archives of Twentieth Century Philosophy of Science, is located at the University of Pittsburgh. In the past few years work on the recently acquired Hans Reichenbach Collection has resulted in a useful research source. A great deal of organizational work on the collection has now been completed, and the correspondence is open to study by interested scholars. What follows is an overview of the correspondence catalogued in the collection. All of the information recorded (...) here has been found in the many thousand letters to and from Reichenbach which make up only a portion of the collection. The purpose of this essay is both to acquaint the philosophical public with the wealth of material in this research source and to argue for the importance of this material for the history of recent philosophy. (shrink)

The Hans Reichenbach Collection is part of the Archives of Twentieth Century Philosophy of Science, which also houses the Rudolf Carnap and Frank Ramsey Collections. The Archives of Twentieth Century Philosophy of Science is located in the Special Collections Department of the University of Pittsburgh's Hillman Library. In the past few years work on the recently acquired Hans Reichenbach Collection has resulted in a useful research source. Although the collection contains many notes, manuscripts, and recordings, efforts at organizing the collection (...) have centered on the wealth of correspondence contained in the collection. A great deal of this organizational work has now been completed, and this part of the collection is open to study by interested scholars. (shrink)

Impressed by Isaac Newton's success at explaining the apparently diverse and chaotic physical world with a few universal principles, David Hume (1711-1776), while still in his teens, proposed that the same might be done for the realm of the mind. Through observation and experimentation, Hume hoped to uncover the mind's "secret springs and principles." Hume's proposal for a science of the mind was published as..

Essay, Ii8) Although theorizing about ideas figures prominently in philosophy before him, Locke introduced what became known as the "New Way of Ideas," by considering all metaphysical and epistemological questions through an examination of the nature and origin of the mind's content. Although sometimes disagreeing with him on important details, other empiricists of the modern era follow Locke by first theorizing about the origin of ideas, and second by classifying ideas into types, based on origin and characteristics discovered by mental (...) inspection. The shared features of the empiricist notion of ideas is that ideas are not innate, and that they are the result of sensation and reflection. (See INNATENESS). (shrink)

IDEAS. LOCKE used the term "to stand for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding when a Man thinks." (Essay , Ii8) Although theorizing about ideas figures prominently in philosophy before him, Locke introduced what became known as the "New Way of Ideas," by considering all metaphysical and epistemological questions through an examination of the nature and origin of the mind's content. Although sometimes disagreeing with him on important details, other empiricists of the modern era follow Locke by first theorizing (...) about the origin of ideas, and second by classifying ideas into types, based on origin and characteristics discovered by mental inspection. The shared features of the empiricist notion of ideas is that ideas are not innate, and that they are the result of sensation and reflection. (See INNATENESS). (shrink)

Solipsism, Individualism and Cognitive Science [1] "Artificial Intelligence cannot ignore philosophy" - John McCarthy I shall challenge the claim that Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence, or GOFAI is solipsistic while more recent neural or "brain-style" approaches to AI are not. After distinguishing GOFAI from connectionism, I will first show that GOFAI is not committed to solipsism but rather to what is more properly called individualism.

This paper examines the four counterexamples offered by Lehrer and Richard in 'Remembering Without Knowing'. The analysis which Lehrer and Richard's purported counterexamples attempt to discredit is that remembering p requires knowing that p and believing that p. The counterexamples are considered individually and all are rejected as counterexamples to knowing as a necessary condition of remembering.

The aim of Fred Wilson’s detailed treatment of Hume’s theory of causal inference is to show that although Hume posed a skeptical challenge concerning the justification of beliefs through causal inference, Hume also presents a solution to that challenge, a solution that includes a justification of causal inference. Wilson’s Hume is not a skeptic, but rather a vindicator of the norms of scientific inquiry. This study is wide-ranging, both in terms of the texts Wilson interprets and the connections he draws (...) to the views of other philosophers, both modern and contemporary. (shrink)

Michael Kremer defines fixed-point logics of truth based on Saul Kripke’s fixed point semantics for languages expressing their own truth concepts. Kremer axiomatizes the strong Kleene fixed-point logic of truth and the weak Kleene fixed-point logic of truth, but leaves the axiomatizability question open for the supervaluation fixed-point logic of truth and its variants. We show that the principal supervaluation fixed point logic of truth, when thought of as consequence relation, is highly complex: it is not even analytic. We (...) also consider variants, engendered by a stronger notion of ‘fixed point’, and by variant supervaluation schemes. A ‘logic’ is often thought of, not as a consequence relation, but as a set of sentences – the sentences true on each interpretation. We axiomatize the supervaluation fixed-point logics so conceived. (shrink)

It may be that all that matters for the modalities, possibility and necessity, is the object named by the proper name, not which proper name names it. An influential defender of this view is Saul Kripke. Kripke’s defense is criticized in the paper.

Best Book of June 2015 (The Christian Science Monitor) Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J.R.R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades, they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met every week in Lewis's Oxford rooms and in nearby pubs. They discussed literature, religion, and ideas; read aloud from works in progress; took philosophical (...) rambles in woods and fields; gave one another companionship and criticism; and, in the process, rewrote the cultural history of modern times. In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings' lives and works. The result is an extraordinary account of the ideas, affections and vexations that drove the group's most significant members. C. S. Lewis accepts Jesus Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, maps the medieval and Renaissance mind, becomes a world-famous evangelist and moral satirist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises. J.R.R. Tolkien transmutes an invented mythology into gripping story in The Lord of the Rings, while conducting groundbreaking Old English scholarship and elucidating, for family and friends, the Catholic teachings at the heart of his vision. Owen Barfield, a philosopher for whom language is the key to all mysteries, becomes Lewis's favorite sparring partner, and, for a time, Saul Bellow's chosen guru. And Charles Williams, poet, author of "supernatural shockers," and strange acolyte of romantic love, turns his everyday life into a mystical pageant. Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized reality, wartime writers who believed in hope, Christians with cosmic reach, the Inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the twentieth century's darkest years-and did so in dazzling style. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:173. PERCHANCE TO DREAM: A REPLY TO TRAIGER1 In "Hume on Memory and Causation" I argued that Hume took ideas of the memory to be relative ideas corresponding to definite descriptions of the general form "the complex impression that is the (original) cause of a particular positive idea m and which exactly (or closely) resembles m, " where 'm' is a variable ranging over positive ideas (mental images). My (...) argument was based primarily upon what I called Hume's formal criterion, i.e., Hume's contention that, unlike the imagination, memory preserves "the same order and form with the original impressions" (T9), it preserves "the original order and position of its ideas" (T85). Saul Traiger has recently taken exception to my interpretation of Hume, suggesting that my interpretation suffers from at least four defects. First, Traiger maintains that there is evidence that Hume took some ideas of the memory to be simple, while my account requires that they are all complex. Secondly, he maintains that my interpretation will not allow Hume to remember dreams or the contents of his imaginings, and Traiger contends that this provides at least prima facie evidence against my interpretation. Thirdly, he maintains that my account of the formal criterion is not sufficient to distinguish ideas of the memory from ideas of the imagination. Finally, he raises several questions regarding the temporal reference of ideas of the memory. I do not believe that any of Traiger's points require a significant modification of my account. I shall begin by discussing his third and fourth points and then focus 2 on his first and second points. 1. Memories and fictions. Traiger suggests that if my account of the formal criterion is correct, the formal criterion is not sufficient to distinguish 174, ideas of the memory from ideas of the imagination, "because there are complex ideas which are caused by resembling complex impressions but which are not memories" (FHAM, p. 170). He illustrates this by appealing to a writer of fiction who might appeal to some of his memories in constructing his fictitious world. Why, then, would not the resulting ideas of fiction count as ideas of the memory, since they meet both the causal conditions and the order and position requirements? The answer is that in the case of an idea of fiction one does not conceive of one's positive idea as a representative of some other perception. It is only because one conceives of the positive idea of which one is aware in memory as a representative of some other particular perception or perceptions that questions of form and order come into play. 2. Temporal reference. At several places in his paper, Traiger raises questions concerning the temporal reference of ideas of the memory. He suggests, first, that Hume's concern with "order" was with temporal order, rather than the order and arrangement of simple ideas in the complex positive component of an idea of the memory (FHAM, p. 168), and, secondly, that "when we remember, we place an impression in its temporal context, its place among a temporal sequence of perceptions" and this "temporal reference is generally not secured by the causal and resemblance relations an idea bears to an antecedent impression" (FHAM, p. 171). Regarding the first of these claims, it is clear that an idea of the memory can be "true" only if it represents a past impression or event, and since Hume construed representation in terms of resemblance (T233), this indicates that at least part of his concern with "order" must be with the arrangement of simple ideas in the complex positive component of an idea of the memory. Were it not for 175. such a correspondence between the "order" of simple ideas in the positive component of one's relative idea of the memory and the "order" of the simple impressions in the original impression, one's idea of the memory could not represent the original impression. Resemblance, however, plays no role in determining what the temporal position of the original impression was, and this brings us to Traiger's second point. Since Hume's account of time would seem to require that one locate a past impression within a series... (shrink)

Persons and passions : an introduction / Christopher Williams What are the passions doing in the Meditations? / Lisa Shapiro Love in the ruins : passion in Descartes’ Meditations / William Beardsley The passionate intellect : reading the opposition of reason and emotions in Descartes / Amy Schmitter Material falsity and the arguments for God’s existence in Descartes’ Meditations / Cecilia Wee Reason unhinged : passion and precipice from Montaigne to Hume / Saul Traiger Reflection and ideas in (...) Hume’s account of the passions / Lilli Alanen Sympathy and the unity of Hume’s idea of self / Donald Ainslie Hume’s voyage / Janet Broughton Artifice, desire, and their relationship : Hume against Aristotle / Alasdair MacIntyre Hume and morality’s "useful purpose" / David Gauthier Reflection and well-being / Robert Shaver Friendship and the law of reason : Baier and Kant on love and principles / Sergio Tenenbaum Cruelty, respect, and unsentimental love / Michele Moody-Adams Trust as an affective attitude / Karen Jones Trusting "first" and "second" selves : Aristotelian reflections on Virginia Woolf and Annette Baier / Jennifer Whiting. (shrink)

The new editorial team, Ann Levey, Karl Schafer and Amy Schmitter, are very pleased to present this special double-issue of Hume Studies. It contains a wide variety of articles on subjects old and new, as well as an assortment of book reviews, commissioned by the new book review editor, David Landy of San Francisco State University. We are grateful to the many people who have helped us get this volume and our tenure as editors underway, including the preceding editors-in-chief, Angela (...) Coventry and Peter Kail, and preceding book review editor, Annemarie Butler, as well as the previous editors-in-chief Corliss Swain and Saul Traiger, who offered invaluable advice about procedures, practices, and technological issues.... (shrink)

In Naming and Necessity' Saul A. Kripke gives two types of examples of contingent truths knowable a priori. So he disagrees with the first leg of the thesis. As we will see later, his examples depend on the direct designation theory of names. While there have been attempts to provide examples of the contingent a priori that do not depend on that theory, most of those examples should be viewed as expansions, or modifications, of Kripke's examples. Philip Kitcher, (...) for example, gives an interesting example that has nothing to do with theories of names, but is produced using the indexical 'actual'.2 His example, however, is a variation of Kripke's Neptune Type example.' In what follows I will focus on Kripke's two types of examples and modifications of them. I will argue that although both types of example fail, it is possible to modify his Standard Metre example in such a way that we have an example of the contingent a priori. (shrink)

The rule-following debate, in its concern with the metaphysics and epistemology of linguistic meaning and mental content, goes to the heart of the most fundamental questions of contemporary philosophy of mind and language. This volume gathers together the most important contributions to the topic, including papers by Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Graeme Forbes, Warren Goldfarb, Paul Horwich, John McDowell, Colin McGinn, Ruth Millikan, Philip Pettit, George Wilson, and José Zalabardo. This debate has centred on Saul Kripke's reading of (...) the rule-following sections in Wittgenstein and his consequent posing of a "sceptical paradox" that threatens our every day notions of linguistic meaning and mental content. These essays are attempts to respond to this challenge and represent some of the most important work in contemporary theory of meaning. They examine the notion of meaning; whether it is possible to find a suitable meaning-constituting fact from our previous behaviour or mental histories; objections to, and defenses of, dispositional accounts of meaning; the plausibility of non-factualism about meaning; our attempts to develop non-reductionist accounts of meaning; and the sources of the normativity which attaches to meaning, such as the linguistic practice of the community or the dispositions of the individual. With an introductory essay and a comprehensive guide to further reading the book is an excellent resource for courses in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, Wittgenstein, and metaphysics, as well as for all philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists with interests in these areas. Contributors include Simon Blackburn, Paul Boghossian, Graeme Forbes, Warren Goldfarb, Paul Horwich, John McDowell, Colin McGinn, Alexander Miller, Ruth Garrett Millikan, Philip Pettit, George. M. Wilson, Crispin Wright, and José L. Zalabardo. (shrink)

After a brief summary of the 17 essays in Sally Haslanger’s (2012) collection, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, I raise questions in two areas, the defense of constructionism and the definition of gender and race in terms of social oppression. I cite Robin Andreasen’s and Philip Kitcher’s essays arguing (in different ways) that races are both biologically real and socially constructed, and also Joshua Glasgow’s claim that constructionist arguments ultimately fail. I then cite Jennifer Saul’s critique (...) that “oppression” definitions of gender and race run into problematic counterexamples, and add some other points arising from the different histories of gender and racial categories and realities. As someone sympathetic to constructionism myself, my aim is not a critique of Haslanger but rather an inquiry as to how she thinks (we) constructionists should answer such challenges. (shrink)

Many philosophers are again examining the traditional topic of a priori knowledge, or knowledge that does not depend on sensory experience. This volume collects the most important recent essays on the subject by well-known thinkers such as A.J. Ayer, W.V. Quine, Barry Stroud, C.I. Lewis, Hilary Putnam, Roderick M. Chisholm, Saul A. Kripke, Albert Casullo, R.G. Swinburne, and Philip Kitcher. Including an introduction by the editor and an extensive bibliography, this book provides philosophers and students with an in-depth (...) look at contemporary investigations into the nature of a priori knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Talmud Meets Church HistoryDaniel Boyarin (bio)Virginia Burrus. Chastity as Autonomy: Women in the Stories of the Apocryphal Acts. New York: Edwin Mellen, 1987.———. ‘“Equipped for Victory’: Ambrose and the Gendering of Orthodoxy.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 4.4 (1996): 461–75.———. The Making Of A Heretic: Gender, Authority, And The Priscillianist Controversy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.———. “Reading Agnes: The Rhetoric of Gender in Ambrose and Prudentius.” Journal (...) of Early Christian Studies 3.1 (1995): 25–46.———. “Word and Flesh: The Bodies and Sexuality of Ascetic Women in Christian Antiquity.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 10.1 (1994): 27–51.[1] Prologue: Morningside Heights, 1941—A Talmudist Meets a Church HistorianIn 1944, my teacher Saul Lieberman published a classic essay in which he treated talmudic martyrology in the context of patristic literature. 1 The article had been written under the inspiration of his meeting and friendship with Henri Gregoire, the great Belgian church historian, then a refugee from the Nazis in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in New York, where Lieberman, the great Lithuanian talmudist, had also found refuge and where the two met. Nearly a half-century later, this student of Lieberman’s met another church historian, Virginia Burrus, in Morningside Heights under happier circumstances, when both of us were participants at a conference on asceticism at Union Theological Seminary, and a similar intellectual interaction began. This paper represents some of the first fruits of that second encounter and aspires to modestly continue the enterprise begun by the first.[2] Intertextuality and InterdisciplinarityAveril Cameron has recently written:The myth of early Christianity as the resort of the poor and underprivileged is precisely that, and a very convenient one it has been. It is a myth that rests, moreover, on the fallacy of an original Christianity uncontaminated by external influences; but its holders then have to explain how this “new” faith could make [End Page 52] the leap to center stage. Thus, we have been told, “the naiveté of the early Christian speech came in the course of time to wed itself to the cultures of the world.” But while much of current New Testament scholarship is directed at the internal (that is, theological) articulation of the texts, there is also a perceptible trend towards a mode of interpretation that balances the external and internal factors operative in the literary texts. It is thus less a question of the degree of “influence” of Greco-Roman or Jewish literary or philosophical elements on early Christian writing than of their integral relationship.[37–38]Judaism also (and Jewish scholarship) has had a stake in inscribing itself as pure and uncontaminated, for reasons that Philip Alexander has articulated: “The attempt to [lay down a norm for Judaism in the first century] barely conceals apologetic motives—in the case of Christianity a desire to prove that Christianity transcended or transformed Judaism, in the case of Jews a desire to suggest that Christianity was an alien form of Judaism which deviated from the true path” [3]. Indeed, the very distinctness of Judaism has been articulated by Jews as precisely its distance from a “syncretistic” Christianity whose defining feature is that it is somehow a composite of Judaism and Hellenism. 2In this essay, in conversation with some of the work of Burrus, I wish to begin to suggest a few of the ways that study of the Talmud can be further enriched through the engagement of talmudic scholars with the recent sophisticated (and especially gender-oriented) work being done on early Christianity. Indeed, I will be hinting (and in future work explicitly arguing) that we have to begin seriously thinking about Judaeo-Christianity as a single cultural system: contentious, dialectical, polemical, and sometimes friendly, but—I hasten to add—not moralistic in the homogenized “family values” sense implied by the modern usage of this term. I put forth here, as a case in point, that the richest contexts for understanding the sets of cultural tensions that gave rise to a particular talmudic text are to be uncovered in contemporary patristic literature. From the point of view of a New Historicist approach to talmudic literature, this suggests that the... (shrink)

Gornick on V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth and the intimate relationship between emotional damage and great literature.

Several years before the recent French-American diplomatic squabble, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, arguably America’s two greatest novelists, wrote major works of a markedly anti-French tenor. Indeed, both Ravelstein and The Human Stain, with their disparate griefs against the French, share a remarkably similar plot: against a back-drop of Gallic treachery, a courageously conservative academic, condemned to death by his sexual excesses, asks, before dying, a novelist friend to write the story of his life. Framed by a consideration (...) of an idiosyncratic work of American sculpture that appears to depict the sexual servicing of Abraham Lincoln and an evocation of the career of William Bullitt, Freud’s collaborator on a study of Woodrow Wilson and America’s ambassador to Paris during the fall of France, this essay offers a reading of both novels and raises the question of American sanctimony and the price France may be expected to pay for it. (shrink)

How Galileo created the problem of consciousness -- Is there a ghost in the machine? -- Can physical science explain consciousness? -- How to solve the problem of consciousness -- Consciousness and the meaning of life.

In recent years a growing number of philosophers in the analytic tradition have focused their attention on the significance of human sociality. An older point of departure of analysis, which actually precedes this current tide of accounts of sociality, has revolved around the debate between “holism” and “individualism” in the philosophy of the human or social sciences and social theory. The more recent point of departure for various accounts of sociality has centered on the nature of conventions, social groups, shared (...) intentions, or collective intentionality. Putting aside the disagreements among these accounts, they all take for granted an antecedently intelligible notion of individual agency as explanatorily primitive and seek to explain the possibility of plural or collective agency in terms of the former. By contrast, other philosophers who have worked at the intersection of analytic and "continental" philosophy have emphasized the primacy of practice as the proper starting point for philosophical reflections on the nature of human sociality. In the analytic tradition this emphasis is typically framed in terms of the possibility of rule-following, a topic put on the philosophical agenda by the later Wittgenstein. Peter Winch’s and Saul Kripke’s influential but controversial readings of Wittgenstein explicitly thematize the issue of rule-following, readings which have in turn generated critical reflection in various disciplines for which this issue is relevant. -/- I begin by briefly explicating the positions of Pettit and Brandom on the issue of rule-following (putting aside any specific differences between them for the moment). Next I connect Pettit’s and Brandom’s views on rule-following, and more generally on normativity and its necessarily social basis, with the views of Theodore Schatzki and Joseph Rouse, whose conceptions of the significance of practice and its inherent sociality are indebted as much to the early Heidegger as well as the later Wittgenstein. I suggest that Pettit’s and Brandom’s views of the necessarily social nature of rule-following (i.e., practice) ought to acknowledge and integrate the shared insight of Schatzki and Rouse that practices are not only modes of activity, but constitute more basically the concrete setting or world within which practices qua modes of activity are intelligible (verständlich) at all. I conclude the paper by suggesting how an integrated account of the significance of the necessarily social nature of practice undermines the assumptions of those philosophers who seek to analyze human sociality solely on the basis of modes of interactions among individual agents. (shrink)

There are almost as many versions of realism as there are antirealists, each ready to supply a preferred characterization before undertaking demolition. Even in the case of scientific realism, my topic here, I recognize two major antirealist themes.

Academic misconduct is a threat to the validity and reliability of online examinations, and media reports suggest that misconduct spiked dramatically in higher education during the emergency shift to online exams caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This study reviewed survey research to determine how common it is for university students to admit cheating in online exams, and how and why they do it. We also assessed whether these self-reports of cheating increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, along with an evaluation of (...) the quality of the research evidence which addressed these questions. 25 samples were identified from 19 Studies, including 4672 participants, going back to 2012. Online exam cheating was self-reported by a substantial minority (44.7%) of students in total. Pre-COVID this was 29.9%, but during COVID cheating jumped to 54.7%, although these samples were more heterogenous. Individual cheating was more common than group cheating, and the most common reason students reported for cheating was simply that there was an opportunity to do so. Remote proctoring appeared to reduce the occurrence of cheating, although data were limited. However there were a number of methodological features which reduce confidence in the accuracy of all these findings. Most samples were collected using designs which makes it likely that online exam cheating is under-reported, for example using convenience sampling, a modest sample size and insufficient information to calculate response rate. No studies considered whether samples were representative of their population. Future approaches to online exams should consider how the basic validity of examinations can be maintained, considering the substantial numbers of students who appear to be willing to admit engaging in misconduct. Future research on academic misconduct would benefit from using large representative samples, guaranteeing participants anonymity. (shrink)