This book offers a philosophical reflection on the nature of language by reading some exemplary works of literature. Drawing on the thought of philosophers—especially Plato, Kant, Hegel, Emerson, Benjamin, Adorno, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, the author argues that language is the bearer of a utopian or messianic promise of happiness, and that by redeeming the revelatory power of words, the two writers in this study are contributing to the redemption of the promise of happiness in a world of reconciled antagonisms and (...) contradictions. (shrink)

This intellectually discomfiting, disturbingly provocative, yet still thoroughly scholarly Handbook reproduces the intellectual ferment that accompanied the Russian Revolution including the wholly polarising effect at that time of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy does not settle for one safe interpretation of the thought of this world-historic figure but rather revels in a clash of viewpoints. Most interestingly it presents a contrast between the Western editors who emphasise pure democracy and Marxian humanism with many of (...) the contributing scholars who take a more sanguine view of the Leninist political project. Perhaps reflecting the current Western political crisis, some of the volume’s other European and North American scholars more closely align with their colleagues from the Global South. Key Features: · Places particular emphasis on the key elements of Lenin’s thought – the dictatorship of the proletariat, the nature of the dialectic and the New Economic Policy · Additional comprehensive coverage includes the theory of the party, Bolshevism, imperialism, and the class struggle in the countryside · Examines the relation of Lenin’s thought to the ideas of his most influential contemporaries as well as the most eminent thinker to interpret Lenin since his death – György Lukács This Handbook is essential reading for scholars, researchers and advanced students in political philosophy, political theory, the history of political ideas, economics, international relations and world history. It is also ideal for the general reader who wishes to understand some of the most powerful ideas that have shaped the modern world and that may yet shake the world again. (shrink)

Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. This doctrine is rooted in Aristotle's conception of the soul, and has antecedents in Hobbes's conception of the mind as a “calculating machine”, but it has become fully articulated (and popularly endorsed) only (...) in the last third of the 20th century. Though the term ‘functionalism’ is used to designate a variety of positions in a variety of other disciplines, including psychology, sociology, economics, and architecture, this entry focuses exclusively on functionalism as a philosophical thesis about the nature of mental states. (shrink)

Defenders of pragmatic theories of knowledge (such as contextualism and sensitive invariantism) argue that these theories, unlike those that invoke a single standard for knowledge, comport with the intuitively compelling thesis that knowledge is the norm of assertion and practical reason. In this paper, I dispute this thesis, and argue that, therefore, the prospects for both “high standard” approach, and contend that if one abandons the thesis that knowledge is the norm of assertion and practical reason, the most serious arguments (...) against it lose force. (shrink)

All epistemic agents physically consist of parts that must somehow comprise an integrated cognitive self. Biological individuals consist of subunits (organs, cells, molecular networks) that are themselves complex and competent in their own context. How do coherent biological Individuals result from the activity of smaller sub-agents? To understand the evolution and function of metazoan bodies and minds, it is essential to conceptually explore the origin of multicellularity and the scaling of the basal cognition of individual cells into a coherent larger (...) organism. In this paper I synthesize ideas in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental physiology toward a hypothesis about the origin of Individuality: “Scale-Free Cognition”. I propose a fundamental definition of an Individual based on the ability to pursue goals at an appropriate level of scale and organization, and suggest a formalism for defining and comparing the cognitive capacities of highly diverse types of agents. Any Self is demarcated by a computational surface – the spatio-temporal boundary of events that it can measure, model, and try to affect. This surface sets a functional boundary - a cognitive “light cone” which defines the scale and limits of its cognition. I hypothesize that higher-level goal-directed activity and agency, resulting in larger cognitive boundaries, evolve from the primal homeostatic drive of living things to reduce stress – the difference between current conditions and life-optimal conditions. The mechanisms of developmental bioelectricity - the ability of all cells to form electrical networks that process information - suggests a plausible set of gradual evolutionary steps that naturally lead from physiological homeostasis in single cells to memory, prediction, and ultimately complex cognitive agents, via scale-up of the drive of infotaxis. Recent data on the molecular mechanisms of pre-neural bioelectricity suggest a model of how increasingly sophisticated cognitive functions emerge smoothly from cell-cell communication used to guide embryogenesis and regeneration. This set of hypotheses provides a novel perspective on numerous phenomena, such as cancer, and makes several unique, testable predictions for interdisciplinary research that have implications not only for evolutionary developmental biology but also for biomedicine and perhaps artificial intelligence and exobiology. (shrink)

This collection of original essays by preeminent interpreters of continental philosophy explores the question of whether Western thought and culture have been dominated by a vision-centered paradigm of knowledge, ethics, and power. It focuses on the character of vision in modern philosophy and on arguments for and against the view that contemporary life and thought are distinctively "ocularcentric." The authors examine these ideas in the context of the history of philosophy and consider the character of visual discourse in the writings (...) of Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Benjamin, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Wittgenstein, and Habermas. With essays on television, the visual arts, and feminism, the book will interest readers in cultural studies, gender studies, and art history as well as philosophers. (shrink)

Reliabilism holds that knowledge is true belief reliably caused. Reliabilists should say something about individuating processes; critics deny that the right degree of generality can be specified without arbitrariness. It is argued that this criticism applies as well to processes mentioned in scientific explanations. The gratuitous puzzles created thereby show that the “generality problem” is illusory.

We investigate synonymy in the strong sense of content identity. This notion is central in the philosophy of language and in applications of logic. We motivate, uniformly axiomatize, and characterize several “benchmark” notions of synonymy in the messy class of all possible notions of synonymy. This class is divided by two intuitive principles that are governed by a no-go result. We use the notion of a scenario to get a logic of synonymy which is the canonical representative of one division. (...) In the other division, the so-called conceptivist logics, we find, e.g., the well-known system of analytic containment. We axiomatize four logics of synonymy extending AC, relate them semantically and proof-theoretically to SF, and characterize them in terms of weak/strong subject matter preservation and weak/strong logical equivalence. This yields ways out of the no-go result and novel arguments—independent of a particular semantic framework—for each notion of synonymy discussed. This points to pluralism about meaning and a certain non-compositionality of truth in logic programs and neural networks. And it unveils an impossibility for synonymy: if it is to preserve subject matter, then either conjunction and disjunction lose an essential property or a very weak absorption law is violated. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally held that claims about necessities and possibilities are to be evaluated by consulting our philosophical intuitions; that is, those peculiarly compelling deliverances about possibilities that arise from a serious and reflective attempt to conceive of counterexamples to these claims. But many contemporary philosophers, particularly naturalists, argue that intuitions of this sort are unreliable, citing examples of once-intuitive, but now abandoned, philosophical theses, as well as recent psychological studies that seem to establish the general fallibility of intuition.In the (...) first two sections of this paper, I evaluate these arguments, and also the counter-arguments of contemporary defenders of tradition. In the next two sections, I sketch an alternative account of the role of philosophical intuitions that incorporates elements of traditionalism and naturalism - and defend it against other such views. In the final section, however, I discuss intuitions about conscious experience, and acknowledge that my view may not extend comfortably to this case. This may seem unfortunate, since so much contemporary discussion of the epistemology of modality seems motivated by worries about the mind-body problem, and informed by the position one wishes to endorse. But, as I argue, if conscious experience is indeed an exception to the view I suggest in this paper, it is an exception that proves - and can illuminate - the rule. (shrink)

A growing body of literature has revealed ordinary causal judgement to be sensitive to normative factors, such that a norm-violating agent is regarded more causal than their non-norm-violating counterpart. In this paper, we explore two competing explanations for this phenomenon: the Responsibility View and the Bias View. The Bias View, but not the Responsibility View, predicts features peripheral to the agent’s responsibility to impact causal attributions. In a series of three preregistered experiments (N = 1162), we present new evidence that (...) the Norm Effect arises from such peripheral features, namely from nonpertinent or entirely silly norm violations. Furthermore, we show that this effect cannot be explained by recourse to the agent’s foreknowledge or desire of the outcome, nor by its foreseeability: the Norm Effect arises even when participants judge the norm-violating agent’s doing as equally foreseeable. This, we argue, provides evidence in favour of the Bias View. (shrink)

This paper explores how phenomenological notions of rhythm might accommodate a richer description of preverbal infant-caregiver dialogue. Developmental psychologists have theorized a crucial link between rhythm and intercorporeality in the emergence of intersubjectivity and self. Drawing on the descriptions of rhythm in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Erwin Straus, Henri Maldiney and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, the paper emphasizes the role of art and aesthetic processes proposing that they not only be considered as metaphorical or representational aspects of rhythm but as primary (...) resources that can enrich and deepen our understanding of self-emergence and intercorporeality in preverbal infant-caregiver dialogue. (shrink)

Defends the ancient thesis that man is a piece of matter, that all his states are physical states, and all his properties physical properties. This is done in a metaphysical framework which accommodates talk of the identity and diversity of such 'virtual entites' as states and properties without being committed to their actual existence.

Evolution exploits the physics of non‐neural bioelectricity to implement anatomical homeostasis: a process in which embryonic patterning, remodeling, and regeneration achieve invariant anatomical outcomes despite external interventions. Linear “developmental pathways” are often inadequate explanations for dynamic large‐scale pattern regulation, even when they accurately capture relationships between molecular components. Biophysical and computational aspects of collective cell activity toward a target morphology reveal interesting aspects of causation in biology. This is critical not only for unraveling evolutionary and developmental events, but also for (...) the design of effective strategies for biomedical intervention. Bioelectrical controls of growth and form, including stochastic behavior in such circuits, highlight the need for the formulation of nuanced views of pathways, drivers of system‐level outcomes, and modularity, borrowing from concepts in related disciplines such as cybernetics, control theory, computational neuroscience, and information theory. This approach has numerous practical implications for basic research and for applications in regenerative medicine and synthetic bioengineering. (shrink)

Molyneux's Question, that is, “Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere... and the blind man made to see: Quaere, whether by his sight, before he touched them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the globe, which the cube”, was discussed by many theorists in the 17th and 18th centuries, and has recently been addressed by contemporary philosophers interested in the nature, and identity conditions, of (...) perceptual concepts. My main concern in this paper is to argue – against Evans, Campbell, and a number of other contemporary philosophers – that a test of the sort Molyneux envisioned, at least if carefully designed and administered, can indeed be a crucial experiment for the claim that we deploy the same perceptual concepts when identifying shapes by sight and by touch. I will explore some implications of this argument for a theory of recognitional concepts. And I’ll try to trace out some unhappy consequences of various alternative views. (shrink)

Heidegger’s key word Ereignis is frequently translated as “event,” “event of being,” or “event of appropriation.” No ordinary event in the realm of beings, it is an event in which the meaning of being is recognized in difference from beings. In the history of philosophy, this insight into being set in motion the inception of a philosophical discourse within which we are still thinking. Inspired and guided by his philosophy of history, Heidegger hoped our own reflections on being could likewise (...) appropriate and set in motion preparations for another inception, another experience and understanding of what it means for something to be. Whereas, for the early Greek philosophers, their insight was an experience of awe and wonder, and perhaps also dread, for us of today that insight can set in motion a more “inward” turn, a process that puts in question who we are as human beings and who we want to become, and stirs us to acknowledge our responsibility for being in response to a time when being is under assault. (shrink)

From the standpoint of disability advocacy, further exploration of the concept of well-being stands to be availing. The notion that “welfarism” about disability, which Julian Savulescu and Guy Kahane debuted, qualifies as helpful is encouraged by their claim that welfarism shares important commitments with that advocacy. As becomes clear when they apply their welfarist frame to procreative decisions, endorsing welfarism would, in fact, sharply undermine it. Savulescu and Kahane's Principle of Procreative Beneficence—which reflects transhumanism, or advocacy of radical bioenhancement—morally requires (...) parents to choose the child who will, in all probability, have “the best life.” Assuming the emergence of potent biotechnologies, procreative decision-making would be highly standardized, for prospective parents would be morally obliged to maximize select capacities, including intelligence, self-control, and hedonic set-point, in their children. Welfarism, applied to reproduction, is staunchly objectivist about what course is incumbent on decision-makers, giving no credence to first-personal values, aspirations, and experiences. Though this dismissal of individual perspectives applies to everyone, its implications for disability advocacy are especially severe. With that advocacy in view, greater attention to “well-being” should, therefore, be severed from the welfarism of Savulescu and Kahane. (shrink)

In a footnote to his ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’, Thomas Nagel sketches a promising account of phenomenal concepts that purports to explain why mind-body identity statements, even if necessary, will always seem contingent. Christopher Hill and Brian McLaughlin have recently developed this sketch into a more robust theory. In Nagel's more recent work, however, he suggests that the only adequate theory of phenomenal concepts is one that makes the relation between phenomenal and physical states intelligible, or (...) ‘transparent’. Developing such a theory, however, appears to be no easy task. In this paper I argue that the Nagel-Hill-McLaughlin proposal is preferable – and that a serious problem with it, noticed by Stephen Yablo, can be avoided by revising the proposal according to some further suggestions made by Nagel himself. (shrink)

Examples cited by Feldman, Lehrer and others of true beliefs that are justified, but not by false lemmas, turn out under scrutiny to involve false lemmas after all. In each case there is an EG inference whose conclusion is unwarranted unless its base instance is false. A shift to non-deductive justification does not avert the difficulty. The relation of this result to non-inferential Gettier cases is suggested.

Extant research has shown that ordinary causal judgments are sensitive to normative factors. For instance, agents who violate a norm are standardly deemed more causal than norm-conforming agents in identical situations. In this paper, we explore two competing explanations for the Norm Effect: the Responsibility View and the Bias View. According to the former, the Norm Effect arises because ordinary causal judgment is intimately intertwined with moral responsibility. According to the alternative view, the Norm Effect is the result of a (...) blame-driven bias. In a series of five preregistered experiments (N = 2688), we present evidence that predominantly favours the Bias View. In particular, and against predictions made by the Responsibility View, we show that participants deem agents who violate nonpertinent or silly norms – norms that do not relate to the outcome at hand – as more causal, and that this effect cannot be explained in terms of plausible mediators such as the agent’s foreknowledge and desire, or the foreseeability of harm. We close with a discussion regarding the implications of these findings, in as regards the just assessment of proximate cause in the law. (shrink)

First published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Significant progress in the molecular investigation of endogenous bioelectric signals during pattern formation in growing tissues has been enabled by recently developed techniques. Ion flows and voltage gradients produced by ion channels and pumps are key regulators of cell proliferation, migration, and differentiation. Now, instructive roles for bioelectrical gradients in embryogenesis, regeneration, and neoplasm are being revealed through the use of fluorescent voltage reporters and functional experiments using well‐characterized channel mutants. Transmembrane voltage gradients (Vmem) determine anatomical polarity and function as (...) master regulators during appendage regeneration and embryonic left‐right patterning. A state‐of‐the‐art recent study reveals that they can also serve as prepatterns for gene expression domains during craniofacial patterning. Continued development of novel tools and better ways to think about physical controls of cell‐cell interactions will lead to mastery of the morphogenetic information stored in physiological networks. This will enable fundamental advances in basic understanding of growth and form, as well as transformative biomedical applications in regenerative medicine. (shrink)

This paper examines the adequacy of an evolutionary-oriented notion of rationality—ecological rationality—that has recently been proposed in economics. Ecological rationality is concerned with what it is rational to do, and in this sense is a version of what philosophers call ‘practical rationality’. Indeed, the question of the adequacy of ecological rationality as it is understood in the paper, is the question of whether ecological rationality is a genuine notion of practical rationality. The paper first explicates and motivates the notion of (...) ecological rationality by (a) explicating the notion of practical rationality, (b) grounding ecological rationality in an evolutionary approach to the emotions which is mainly illustrated by the example of fear, and (c) outlining the reasons adduced in economics for generalizing ecological rationality beyond the emotions. The paper then argues that (d) the raison d’être of practical rationality is first and foremost a specific role it plays in the explanation of behavior, or in telling why it has occurred. Finally, based on (a)–(d), the paper argues that (e) ecological rationality lacks a constitutive feature of practical rationality—namely, normativity—which is related to the latter’s basic explanatory role, and thus cannot be considered a genuine notion of practical rationality. While the paper focuses on the economic version of ecological rationality, its conclusions apply just as well to other, related, versions of the ecological notion that have been proposed in biology and evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

This paper challenges some leading views about the conditions under which the ascription of beliefs and desires can make sense of, or provide reasons for, a creature's behavior. I argue that it is unnecessary for behavior to proceed from beliefs and desires according to the principles of logic and decision theory, or even from principles that generally get things right. I also deny that it is necessary for behavior to proceed from principles that, though perhaps subrational, are similar to those (...) that we ourselves use. I then propose some conditions that are considerably weaker, and argue that they fulfill the descriptive and explanatory requirements of intentional ascription. (shrink)

In recent years, functionalism has emerged as the most appealing candidate for a materialistic theory of mind. Its central thesis - that types of mental states can be defined in terms of their causal and counterfactual relations to the sensory stimulations, other internal states, and behavior of the entities that have them - offers hope for a reasonable materialism: it promises type-identity conditions for beliefs, sensations, and emotions that are not irreducibly mental, yet would permit entities that are physically quite (...) different to be in mental states of the same type. (shrink)

Birch, Ginsburg, and Jablonka lay out a very convincing case for an important transition marker: unlimited associative learning. Especially welcome are the empirical predictions. I focus here not on the question of how to infer phenomenal consciousness from this behavioral metric, but on possible novel applications of this useful and fundamental framework. Specifically, I highlight two aspects of biology that are often not considered in philosophy of mind approaches that focus on natural species and evolutionary time scales. These are the (...) ability of minds and bodies to change drastically on the time scale of an individual experiencing subject, and bioengineering of novel living forms with no evolutionary history at the organism level. Both of these aspects provide interesting new contexts within which to explore UAL and its implications. (shrink)

Philosophers have articulated six notions of human freedom. Four are metaphysical. According to one, a man acts freely when he is doing what he wants to ; according to the second, he acts freely when he is not being compelled by outside forces ; according to the third, he acts freely when the prior state of the universe was not a sufficient cause of what he is doing; according to the fourth, he acts freely when he, not any preceding event, (...) is the cause of what he is doing. The third and fourth theories may be called “indeterministic freedom” and “the agency theory,” named only to be rejected. I reject indeterminism out of agreement with a long tradition which holds that there is no reason to think that human actions are ever undetermined, and an undetermined human action would not be “free” in any sense in which we desire our actions to be free and believe that they are in fact free. To appreciate, reflect that agents should control and be accountable for “free” actions. Now, we control an event by assembling or obstructing its sufficient conditions; merefore, an event without sufficient conditions, a random event which just happens, would lie beyond human control and, hence, the sphere of human freedom. Similarly, a man is no more responsible for what happens independently of his choices – and an event without sufficient conditions cannot have a choice as a sufficient condition – than he is responsible for the behavior of a roulette wheel. (shrink)

Putnam argues that, by ‘reinterpretation’, the Axiom of Constructibility can be saved from empirical refutation. This paper contends that this argument fails, a failure which leaves Putnam's sweeping appeal to the Lowenheim –Skolem Theorem inadequately motivated.

Contemporary egalitarian liberals—unlike their classical counterparts—have lived through many contentious events where the right to freedom of expression has been tested to its limits—the Skokie, Illinois, skinhead marches, hate speech incidents on college campuses, Internet pornography and hate speech sites, Holocaust deniers, and cross-burners, to name just a few. Despite this contemporary tumult, freedom of expression has been nearly unanimously affirmed in both the U.S. jurisprudence and philosophical discourse. In what follows, I will examine Ronald Dworkin's influential contemporary justification for (...) freedom of expression, which claims that a thoroughgoing right to freedom of expression is justified by the fact that it guarantees and preserves liberalism's commitment to equality by offering everyone an opportunity to speak, whereas any other policy, such as state regulation, would fail to offer this equal opportunity. This justification has been challenged by feminists and critical race theorists, who find the cases of pornography and hate speech to be sufficient threats to the freedom of expression and equality of their targets—women and minorities—to warrant limiting freedom of expression in these cases. I will argue that if Dworkin is to take equality as seriously as he claims to, then, by his own lights, he must back away from an unrestricted freedom of expression, in light of these distinctly contemporary challenges of the harms of systemic racism and sexism, which underlie hate speech and pornography. (shrink)

A paedophile is a person with a sexual attraction to children; some paedophiles commit child sex abuse offences. For such acts, they hold moral and legal responsibility, which presupposes that paedophiles are moral agents who can distinguish right from wrong and are capable of self-control. Like any other moral agents, paedophiles have moral duties. Some moral duties are universal, e.g., the duty not to steal. Whether there are any specific moral duties related to paedophilia is the topic of this paper. (...) I argue that the moral duty not to commit child sex abuse is universal, and the duty to reduce the individual risk of child sex abuse is specific to paedophiles. I further argue that any society has a moral duty to help paedophiles reduce the risk. Both duties provide grounds for moral judgement. Paedophiles should be judged not for their sexual interest but for their efforts to avoid child sex abuse. If a paedophile has an opportunity to reduce the risk of child sex abuse, he is obliged to do so. Unfortunately, societies rarely provide such opportunities and hence fail in their moral duty to paedophiles and children. (shrink)

In Metaphilosophy and Free Will, Richard Double seeks to establish two theses: Disputes over free will are in principle unsolvable, since they stem from incommensurable metaphilosophical views and principles. Given a metaphilosophy which takes philosophy to be continuous with science, free will is not an objective feature of reality. Double defines free choices as "choices that, unless some excusing condition obtains, are sufficient to qualify their agents as morally responsible for the actions those choices produce and as warranting reactive attitudes". (...) This definition, he claims, has the advantage of being neutral between competing theories of what a free choice is. At the same time it is particularly relevant to his defense of thesis. (shrink)

The invariant left–right asymmetry of animal body plans raises fascinating questions in cell, developmental, evolutionary, and neuro‐biology. While intermediate mechanisms (e.g., asymmetric gene expression) have been well‐characterized, very early steps remain elusive. Recent studies suggested a candidate for the origins of asymmetry: rotary movement of extracellular morphogens by cilia during gastrulation. This model is intellectually satisfying, because it bootstraps asymmetry from the intrinsic biochemical chirality of cilia. However, conceptual and practical problems remain with this hypothesis, and the genetic data is (...) consistent with a different mechanism. Based on wide‐ranging data on ion fluxes and motor protein action in a number of species, a model is proposed whereby laterality is generated much earlier, by asymmetric transport of ions, which results in pH/voltage gradients across the midline. These asymmetries are in turn generated by a new candidate for “step 1”: asymmetric localization of electrogenic proteins by cytoplasmic motors. BioEssays 25:1002–1010, 2003. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)