The twentieth century brought enormous change to subjects such as language, metaphysics, ethics and epistemology. This volume covers the major developments in these areas and more.

The nature of representation is a central topic in philosophy. This is the first book to connect problems with understanding representational artifacts, like pictures, diagrams, and inscriptions, to the philosophies of science, mind, and art. Can images be a source of knowledge? Are images merely conventional signs, like words? What is the relationship between the observer and the observed? In this clear and stimulating introduction to the problem John V. Kulvicki explores these questions and more. He discusses: the nature (...) of pictorial experience and "seeing in" recognition, resemblance, pretense, and structural theories of depiction images as aids to scientific discovery and understanding mental imagery and the nature of perceptual content photographs as visual prostheses. In so doing he assesses central problems in the philosophy of images, such as how objects we make come to represent other things, and how we distinguish kinds of representation - pictures, diagrams, graphs - from one another. Essential reading for students and professional philosophers alike, the book also contains chapter summaries, annotated further reading, and a glossary. (shrink)

In 1924 W. W. Tarn published an article in which he attempted to prove that the mother of Philip V of Macedon was the Epirot princess Phthia. Previously all historians had accepted the statement of Eusebius that Philip was the son of Demetrius II and Chryseis, whom, after the death of her husband, the Macedonians gave in marriage to Antigonus Doson. Despite the cogency of Tarn's arguments, his theory has been rejected by both Beloch and Dinsmoor, who adhere to the (...) traditional view. This problem of the identity of Philip's mother is one of considerable importance, and consequently in this paper I intend to collect the evidence once again and subject it to a careful analysis. The results will be found strongly to corroborate Tarn's contention. (shrink)

While historians of scientific method have recently called attention to the views of many of John Stuart Mill's contemporaries on the relation between probability and inductive inference, little if any note has been taken of Mill's own vigorous attack on the received "Laplacean" interpretation of probability in the first edition of the System of Logic. This paper examines the place of Mill's critique, both in the overall framework of his philosophy, and in the tradition of assessing the so-called "probability (...) of causes". It also offers an account of why, in later editions of the work, Mill appears to adopt a much more sympathetic stance toward the received view. (shrink)

John Kulvicki explores the many ways in which pictures can be meaningful, taking inspiration from the philosophy of language. Pictures are important parts of communicative acts. They express a variety of thoughts, and they are also representations. Kulvicki shows how the meanings of pictures let us put them to a wide range of communicative uses.

Two fundamentally different perspectives on knowledge diffusion dominate debates about academic disciplines. On the one hand, critics of disciplinary research and education have argued that disciplines are isolated silos, within which specialists pursue inward-looking and increasingly narrow research agendas. On the other hand, critics of the silo argument have demonstrated that researchers constantly import and export ideas across disciplinary boundaries. These perspectives have different implications for how knowledge diffuses, how intellectuals gain and lose status within their disciplines, and how intellectual (...) reputations evolve within and across disciplines. We argue that highly general claims about the nature of disciplinary boundaries are counterproductive, and that research on the nature of specific disciplinary boundaries is more useful. To that end, this paper uses a novel publication and citation network dataset and statistical models of citation networks to test hypotheses about the boundaries between philosophy of science and 11 disciplinary clusters. Specifically, we test hypotheses about whether engaging with and being cited by scientific communities outside philosophy of science has an impact on one’s position within philosophy of science. Our results suggest that philosophers of science produce interdisciplinary scholarship, but they tend not to cite work by other philosophers when it is published in journals outside of their discipline. Furthermore, net of other factors, receiving citations from other disciplines has no meaningful impact—positive or negative—on citations within philosophy of science. We conclude by considering this evidence for simultaneous interdisciplinarity and insularity in terms of scientific trading theory and other work on disciplinary boundaries and communication. (shrink)

What makes pictures different from all of the other ways we have of representing things? Why do pictures seem so immediate? What makes a picture realistic or not? Against prevailing wisdom, Kulvicki claims that what makes pictures special is not how we perceive them, but how they relate to one another. This not only provides some new answers to old questions, but it shows that there are many more kinds of pictures out there than many have thought.

ABSTRACT Historians of science, inasmuch as they are concerned with knowledges and practices rather than institutions, have tended of late to focus on case studies of common processes such as experiment and publication. In so doing, they tend to treat science as a single category, with various local instantiations. Or, alternatively, they relate cases to their specific local contexts. In neither approach do the cases or their contexts build easily into broader histories, reconstructing changing knowledge practices across time and space. (...) This essay argues that by systematically deconstructing the practices of science and technology and medicine (STM) into common, recurrent elements, we can gain usefully “configurational” views, not just of particular cases and contexts but of synchronic variety and diachronic changes, both short term and long. To this end, we can begin with the customary actors’ disciplines of early modern knowledge (natural philosophy, natural history, mixed mathematics, and experimental philosophy), which can be understood as elemental “ways of knowing and working,” variously combined and disputed. I argue that these same working knowledges, together with a later mode—synthetic experimentation and systematic invention—may also serve for the analysis of STM from the late eighteenth century to the present. The old divisions continued explicitly and importantly after circa 1800, but they were also “built into” an array of new sciences. This historiographic analysis can help clarify a number of common problems: about the multiplicity of the sciences, the importance of various styles in science, and the relations between science and technology and medicine. It suggests new readings of major changes in STM, including the first and second scientific revolutions and the transformations of biomedicine from the later twentieth century. It offers ways of recasting both microhistories and macrohistories, so reducing the apparent distance between them. And it may thus facilitate both more constructive uses of case studies and more innovative and acceptable longer histories. (shrink)

I can’t help but like a book that calls Wittgenstein the greatest philosopher since Kant and then proceeds to show how On Certainty, a manifestly brilliant but understudied book, sheds light on matters under current debate. It is pleasant to see a highly skilled contemporary put texts from the later philosophy under close scrutiny and mine them for insight, and that outside the bounds of familiar Wittgenstein scholarship.

Saul Kripke, among others, reads Wittgenstein’s private-language argument as an inference from the idea of rule following: The concept of a private language is inconsistent, because using language entails following rules, and following rules entails being a member of a community. Kripke expresses the key exegetical claim underlying that reading as follows.

This book is a philosophical examination of the main stages in our journey from hominid to human. It deals with the nature and origin of language, the self, self-consciousness, and the religious ideal of a return to Eden. It approaches these topics through a philosophical anthropology derived from the later writings of Wittgenstein. The result is an account of our place in nature consistent with both a hard-headed empiricism and a this-worldy but religiously significant mysticism.

This paper seeks to highlight the importance of spatial cognition in Bergson’s Données immédiates by engaging with Robert Watt’s reconstruction of Bergson’s argument that every idea of number involves the idea of space. We focus on the second stage of Watt’s reconstruction, where Bergson argues that only space can provide the distinction required for our counting of otherwise identical items. Watt bases his reconstruction on a premise regarding the possibility that identical objects, in the absence of spatial distinction, might remain (...) identical across different “temporal locations”. Our paper raises the prospect that Bergson is committed to a stronger thesis, namely one implying that identical objects would necessarily remain indistinguishable without the intervention of space. The paper thus concludes by emphasizing the indispensability of space for knowledge according to Bergson. (shrink)

Accountability is a norm basic to several aspects of medical practice. We explore here the benefits of a more explicit focus on the virtue of accountability, which as distinct from the state of being held accountable, entails both welcoming responsibility to others and welcoming input from others. Practicing accountably can limit moral distress caused by institutional pressures on the doctor patient relationship. Fostering a mindset that is welcoming rather than resistant to feedback is critical to enhancing a culture of learning. (...) Analysis of failures of accountable practice offers opportunities for improving the delivery of clinical care. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's later philosophy and the doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism integral to Zen coincide in a fundamental aspect: for Wittgenstein language has, one might say, a mystical base; and this base is exactly the Buddhist ideal of acting with a mind empty of thought. My aim is to establish and explore this phenomenon. The result should be both a deeper understanding of Wittgenstein and the removal of a philosophical objection to Zen that has troubled some people.

This article places Henry Corbin’s concept of creative imagination in conversation with the French phenomenological tradition. Section I explores Corbin’s phenomenological method and his view of the imaginal world, drawn from his interpretations of Suhrawardī and Ibn ‘Arabī. Section II then places this concept in conversation with the early Jean-Paul Sartre’s “annihilative” imagination and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s critique of it. This section argues that Corbin needs a strong distinction like Sartre’s between imagination and perception but also that he could be seen (...) as agreeing partly with Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre. What Corbin ultimately maintains, as the article’s conclusion argues, is that our access to the distinctive imaginal world enables a characteristic duality to arise in all perceptual life, a duality that is required if we are to be able to relate to perception either critically or charitably. (shrink)

In his commentary on Euclid, Proclus develops what he takes to be an important Platonic critique of the epistemology of abstraction. As I argue, his argument closely reflects terminology and concepts from Plato’s Philebus. Both emphasize the priority—in reality and in our awareness—of the precise over the imprecise. Specifically, Proclus’s famous notion of the psychical “projection” of intermediate mathematical entities, while having no technically exact precedent in Plato, finds a conceptual neighbor in the Philebus’s suggestion that philosophical arithmeticians “posit” pure (...) units for counting. Likewise, for both our self-engagement in mathematical thinking serves to clarify the independence of the precise sciences—both in their content and in their practice—from perception. Thus, as I argue, Plato and Proclus, with their different terms and nuances, develop a shared conception scientific inquiry in which an activity of “creative discovery” plays a central role. (shrink)

Christian miller invites further clarification about the relationship between accountability and autonomy. Whereas embracing accountability to others for one’s responsibilities in those relationships emphasizes relationality, autonomy accents the individual’s own capacities to exhibit agency in enacting one’s decisions. Accordingly, we theorize that relational capacities for empathic concern and perspective-taking are especially important in the virtue of accountability. The capacity for self-regulation may serve both one’s autonomous pursuits and accountability for carrying out one’s responsibilities...

ABSTRACT This essay explores ways to “write together” the awkwardly jointed histories of “science” and “medicine”—but it also includes other “arts” (in the old sense) and technologies. It draws especially on the historiography of medicine, but I try to use terms that are applicable across all of science, technology, and medicine (STM). I stress the variety of knowledges and practices in play at any time and the ways in which the ensembles change. I focus on the various relations of “science” (...) and “medicine,” as they were understood for a succession of periods—from mainly agricultural societies, through industrial societies, to our biomedical present—trying to sketch a history that encompasses daily practices and understandings as well as major conceptual and technical innovations. The model is meant to facilitate inquiry across topics and across times, including those to come. (shrink)

A follow up to 'The Easter God'. John V. Taylor sets out God's incarnation in Jesus and his interaction with the world.

Using a multiple-trial stock market decision paradigm, the possibility that counterfactual thinking can be dysfunctional for learning and performance by distorting the processing of outcome information was examined. Correlational (Study 1) and experimental (Study 2) evidence suggested that counterfactuals are associated with a decrease in experiential learning. When counterfactuals were made salient, participants displayed significantly poorer performance compared to their counterparts for whom counterfactuals were relatively less salient. A counterfactual salience ? need for cognition (NFC) interaction qualified these findings. High (...) NFC participants outperformed their counterparts when counterfactuals were not salient. Evidence for a memory-based mechanism was also supported. (shrink)

Health reform debate understandably focuses on large system design. We should not omit attention to the “last mile” problem of physician payment theory. Achieving fundamental goals of integrative, patient-centered primary care depends on thoughtful financial support. This commentary describes the nature and importance of innovative primary care payment programs.

1. The early philosophy--language as picture -- 2. Logic and ontology -- 3. "My world and its value" -- 4. The later philosophy--views and reviews -- 5. Method and essense -- 6. Meaning -- 7. Criteria -- 8. Knowing, naming, certainty, and idealism -- 9. The private language argument -- 10. Logical necessity and rules -- 11. Philosophy of mathematics -- 12. Persons -- 13. Psychology and conceptual relativity -- 14. Aesthetics, ethics, and religion -- 15. Elective affinities.

Language Games 2 This chapter provides some background necessary for subsequent discussions by sketching in the idea of a language game, thereby giving a ...

As John Henry Newman reflected on 'The Idea of a University' more than a century and a half ago, Bradley C. S. Watson brings together some of the nation's most eminent thinkers on higher education to reflect on the nature and purposes of the American university today. Their mordant reflections paint a picture of the American university in crisis. This book is essential reading for thoughtful citizens, scholars, and educational policymakers.

This paper examines the nature of classical correspondence in the case of coherent states at the level of quantum trajectories. We first show that for a harmonic oscillator, the coherent state complex quantum trajectories and the complex classical trajectories are identical to each other. This congruence in the complex plane, not restricted to high quantum numbers alone, illustrates that the harmonic oscillator in a coherent state executes classical motion. The quantum trajectories we consider are those conceived in a modified de (...) Broglie-Bohm scheme. Though quantum trajectory representations are widely discussed in recent years, identical classical and quantum trajectories for coherent states are obtained only in the present approach. We may note that this result for standard harmonic oscillator coherent states is not totally unexpected because of their holomorphic nature. The study is extended to coherent states of a particle in an infinite potential well and that in a symmetric Poschl-Teller potential by solving for the trajectories numerically. For the Gazeau-Klauder coherent state of the infinite potential well, almost identical classical and quantum trajectories are obtained whereas for the Poschl-Teller potential, though classical trajectories are not regained, a periodic motion results as t→∞. Similar features were found for the SUSY quantum mechanics-based coherent states of the Poschl-Teller potential too, but this time the pattern of complex trajectories is quite different from that of the previous case. Thus we find that the method is a potential tool in analyzing the properties of generalized coherent states. (shrink)