In this book William G. Lycan offers an epistemology of philosophy itself, a partial method for philosophical inquiry. The epistemology features three ultimate sources of justified philosophical belief. First, common sense, in a carefully restricted sense of the term-the sorts of contingentpropositions Moore defended against idealists and skeptics. Second, the deliverances of well confirmed science. Third and more fundamentally, intuitions about cases in a carefully specified sense of that term. The first half of On Evidence in Philosophy expounds a (...) version of Moore's method and applies it to each of several issues. This version is shown to resist all the standard objections to Moore; most of them do not even apply. It is argued, in Chapters 5 and 6, that philosophical method is far lesspowerful than most have taken it to be. In particular, deductive argument can accomplish very little, and hardly ever is an opposing position refuted except by common sense or by science. The final two chapters defend the evidential status of intuitions and the Goodmanian method of reflectiveequilibrium; it is argued that philosophy always and everywhere depends on them. The method is then set within a more general explanatory-coherentist epistemology, which is shown to resist standard forms of skepticism.In sum, William G. Lycan advocates a picture of philosophy as a very wide explanatory reflective equilibrium incorporating common sense, science, and our firmest intuitions on any topic-and nothing more, not ever. (shrink)

This dissertation is an effort to describe the effects of Postmodern thought in a variety of narrative forms, including novels, film, and computer games. Using Brian McHale's description of the focal point of Modernist narratives as being epistemological and Postmodernist narratives as being concerned primarily with ontological issues, I trace the possible meaning of the changing understanding of these concepts in the twentieth century. In addition, I interrogate the ramifications of the Postmodern resolution to the crisis of epistemology presented through (...) the work of Modernist writers to test whether or not the Postmodern idea of "claiming worlds" is, indeed, a reasonable or viable resolution to this crisis. ;It is my contention that a changing sense of the relationship between the definitions of epistemology and ontology in traditional literary narrative has been affected by and has affected the narratives of less traditionally "literary" media. In order to show that this change has occurred, I use a number of texts to serve as examples, first, of the conception of epistemology as presented in Modernist works like James Joyce's "The Dead" and Edith Wharton's A Son At the Front and then of the conception of ontology as presented in Postmodernist work like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. I then examine more popular narrative forms to examine how Postmodernism's focus on what I term an "epistemologically derived ontology" has crept into the general culture. My specific examples in these cases are Norman Spinrad's cyberpunk novel Little Heroes , the film The Matrix, and a number of video games, particularly online games. ;My final conclusions are exemplified by the film Memento, which contains many of the Postmodern tenets I propose are typical of mainstream Postmodern works and which also serves as a basis for revealing some of my ethical concerns about the ramifications of this shift in understanding of the aforementioned philosophical categories. (shrink)

I have very little disagreement with Carruthers' article, for our views are very similar. I think he is terminologically a bit hard on Michael Tye. I think that in invoking Swampman he is in danger of conflating teleological theories of representation with etiological theories of teleology. In response to his criticism of my own higher-order experience view, I argue that there is good reason to believe that we human beings sport as great a degree of computational complexity as is (...) needed for HOEs. If other animals do not exhibit a comparable degree, we should deny that they have "phenomenal-consciousness" in the strong sense of that term. (shrink)

The semantic paradoxes arise when the range of the quantifiers in the object language is too generous in certain ways. But it is not really clear how unfair to Urdu or to Hindi it would be to view the range of their quantifiers as insufficient to yield an explicit definition of ‗true-in-Urdu‘ or ‗true-in- Hindi‘. Or, to put the matter in another, if not more serious, way, there may in the nature of the case always be something we grasp in (...) understanding the language of another (the concept of truth) that we cannot communicate to him. In any case, most of the problems of general philosophical interest arise within a fragment of the relevant natural language that may be conceived as containing very little set theory. Of course these comments do not meet the claim that natural languages are universal. But it seems to me this claim, now that we know such universality leads to paradox, is suspect. –―Truth and Meaning‖. (shrink)

Objectives - To explore the wvay ethical principles develop during a medical education course for three groups of medical students - in their first year, at the beginning of their penultimate (fifth) year and towards the end of their final (sixth) year. Design - Survey questionnaire administered to medical students in their first, fifth and final (sixth) year. Setting - A large medical school in Queensland, Australia. Survey sample - Approximately half the students in each of three years (first, fifth (...) and sixth) provided data on a voluntary basis, a total of 385 students. Results - At the point of entry, minor differences were found between medical students and first year law and psychology students. More striking were differences between male and female medical students, suggesting early socialization had a substantial impact here. Conclusions - Results indicate that substantial changes in attitude have developed by the beginning of fifth year with little change thereafter. Gender difference persisted. Some difference in ethical attitudes were found when groups of different ethnic backgrounds were compared. The impact of a move to a graduate medical course, which gives high priority to ethics within a professional development domain, can now be evaluated. (shrink)

Frege begins his exposition of the symbol system employed in his Begriffsschrift by introducing the sign ⟝, whereby, he says, “[a] judgment is always to be expressed”.[The judgment sign] stands to the left of the sign or complex of signs in which the content of the judgment is given. If we omit the little stroke at the left of the horizontal stroke, then the judgment is to be transformed into a mere complex of ideas; the author is not expressing (...) his recognition or nonrecognition of the truth of this. (shrink)

Information can be public among a group. Whether or not information is public matters, for example, for accounts of interdependent rational choice, of communication, and of joint intention. A standard analysis of public information identifies it with (some variant of) common belief. The latter notion is stipulatively defined as an infinite conjunction: for p to be commonly believed is for it to believed by all members of a group, for all members to believe that all members believe it, and so (...) forth. This analysis is often presupposed without much argument in philosophy. Theoretical entrenchment or intuitions about cases might give some traction on the question, but give little insight about why the identification holds, if it does. The strategy of this paper is to characterize a practical-normative role for information being public, and show that the only things that play that role are (variants of) common belief as stipulatively characterized. In more detail: a functional role for “taking a proposition for granted” in non-isolated decision making is characterized. I then present some minimal conditions under which such an attitude is correctly held. The key assumption links this attitude to beliefs about what is public. From minimal a priori principles, we can argue that a proposition being public among a group entails common commitment to believe among that group. Later sections explore partial converses to this result, the factivity of publicity and publicity from the perspective of outsiders to the group, and objections to the aprioricity of the result deriving from a posteriori existential presuppositions. (shrink)

Supervaluationism is often described as the most popular semantic treatment of indeterminacy. There’s little consensus, however, about how to fill out the bare-bones idea to include a characterization of logical consequence. The paper explores one methodology for choosing between the logics: pick a logic thatnorms beliefas classical consequence is standardly thought to do. The main focus of the paper considers a variant of standard supervaluational, on which we can characterizedegrees of determinacy. It applies the methodology above to focus ondegree (...) logic. This is developed first in a basic, single-premise case; and then extended to the multipremise case, and to allowdegreesof consequence. The metatheoretic properties of degree logic are set out. On the positive side, the logic is supraclassical—all classical valid sequents are degree logic valid. Strikingly, metarules such as cut and conjunction introduction fail. (shrink)

IntroductionThe pelvic floor muscles are active during motor tasks that increase intra-abdominal pressure, but little is known about how the PFM respond to dynamic activities, such as gait. The purpose of this study was to characterize and compare PFM activity during walking and jogging in continent adults across the entire gait cycle.Methods17 able-bodied individuals with no history of incontinence participated in this study. We recorded electromyography from the abdominal muscles, gluteus maximus, and PFM while participants performed attempted maximum voluntary (...) contractions of all muscles and completed 60–70 strides in four gait conditions: slow walk ; regular walk ; transition walk ; jog. We quantified activity throughout the whole gait cycle and during periods of bursting for each participant, and analyzed the timing of PFM bursting periods to explore when the PFM were most active in the gait cycle. We also conducted a phase metric analysis on the PFM and GM burst timings. We performed a Spearman's rank-order correlation to examine the effect of speed on %aMVCGC, %aMVCBR, and phase metric score, and used the Wilcoxon Signed-Rank test to evaluate the effect of gait modality, matched for speed, on these variables.ResultsThe PFM were active throughout the gait cycle, with bursts typically occurring during single-leg support. The PFM and GM were in phase for 44–69% of the gait cycle, depending on condition. There was a positive correlation between gait speed and both %aMVCGC and %aMVCBR. Phase metric scores were significantly higher during jogging than transition walking, but there was no difference between gait modality on %aMVCGC or %aMVCBR. Where possible we disaggregated data by sex, although were unable to make statistical comparisons due to low sample sizes.ConclusionThe PFM are active during walking and jogging, with greater activity at faster speeds and with bursts in activity around single-leg support. The PFM and GM co-activate during gait, but are not completely in phase with each other. (shrink)

In a recent essay review of William R. Newman, Atoms and Alchemy (2006), Ursula Klein defends her position that philosophically informed corpuscularian theories of matter contributed little to the growing knowledge of "reversible reactions" and robust chemical species in the early modern period. Newman responds here by providing further evidence that an experimental, scholastic tradition of alchemy extending well into the Middle Ages had already argued extensively for the persistence of ingredients during processes of "mixture" (e.g. chemical reactions), (...) and that this corpuscular alchemical tradition bore important fruit in the work of early modern chymists such as Daniel Sennert and Robert Boyle. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 124.1 (2003) 153-156 [Access article in PDF] Gesine Manuwald, ed. Der Satiriker Lucilius und seine Zeit. Zetemata 110. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001. 206 pp. Paper, fi49.90. In mid-February 2001 at the University of Freiburg, a symposium was held under the aegis of Professor Eckard Lefèvre on the theme "Lucilius, Identity, and Alterity." Moving with lightning speed, Gesine Manuwald edited fifteen of the papers given (...) there and had them ready in June so that Beck could publish them in record time. This is the swiftest production of the doings of such a symposium that I have come across. If only there had been some really new things to say about Lucilius, it would make this monograph invaluable. Unfortunately, no new fragments have appeared, and the identity of Lucilius remains shrouded in mystery for lack of new historical evidence. As for alterity, most of the participants in the project did not feel comfortable with addressing that aspect of Lucilius, probably again for lack of useful data on the satirist and his period.Nine of the fifteen papers come from the hands of students and faculty at the University of Freiburg. In addition, there are contributions from Johannes Christes of Berlin, C. J. Classen of Göttingen, Ursula Gärtner of Leipzig, Severin Kostner of Erlangen, Werner Krenkel of Rostock, and Eckart Olshausen of Stuttgart. All of the titles try to link Lucilius with a genre like epic, with a specific poet like Callimachus or Aristophanes, or with a cultural or historical phenomenon like the city of Rome or the times in which the poet lived. One essay alone addresses a specific satire, predictably the Trip to Sicily in Book 3, which provides enough surviving lines to allow a discussion of fifteen pages.Several of the essays illustrate the difficulty of putting a confident hand on the "identity" of Lucilius. Even the famous disclaimer of ambition to become a [End Page 153] publican in the new province of Asia, though firmly linked to Lucilius' name in its text, does not necessarily justify the conclusion that the poet is expressing personal pride as Manuwald claims. A pose is certainly struck, but what exactly is Lucilius proud of, and what does he propose instead? The statement could be the opening to his artistic creed as satirist, but it has other possibilities, e.g., the choice of an Epicurean existence or an attack on equestrian operators, and we need to advance every inference very tentatively. It is indeed quite possible that the lines came from a fictional dramatic situation.The first paper, by Ulrike Auhagen, deals with Lucilius and comedy, an important and difficult topic. In his early poems of the first edition, Lucilius wrote a number of scenes in comic meters. Before he completed that edition, he seems to have decided permanently against those meters, senarius and septenarius, and he confined himself to hexameters in Book 30, the last book of that edition. Did he also abandon the way he used the comic meters? That is, in his early satirical experiments, did he produce little comic vignettes on fictional situations, familiar in Plautus and Terence, or did he use comedy to make satiric commentary on the Rome of his day? If the former, which I had hoped Auhagen would consider, then we can infer the variety of the satura that the poet was exploring. If the latter, then Lucilius is already from his earliest works the hard-hitting moralist that Auhagen imagines, ready to turn any meter and any situation into an arena for his polemics. I would plead for more openness to alterity.Various papers deal with Lucilius' interest in other genres or writers. Thus, Andreas Bagordo downplays the connection with Callimachus, which Puelma Piwonka daringly argued. Bernhard Zimmermann considers Horace's apparent belief that Lucilius depended greatly on Aristophanes, and he puts it rightly into perspective. Manuwald shows how little the satirist admired the Greek and Roman tragedians, but she could have spent more time on the programmatic relevance of his disapproval: he was, after all, staking... (shrink)

Central to R. G. Collingwood's philosophy of history, and among the most controvrsial of his doctrines, is the contention that historical understanding requires a re-anactment of past experience or a re-thinking of past thought. Some critics have found this contention in it-self incoherent or otherwise unsatisfactory, even as applied to what Collingwood apparently regarded as paradigm cases of historical thinking: for example, accounting for Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in terms of his political ambitions. Others, while accepting the applicability of (...) notions like re-enactment and re-thinking to such cases, have nevertheless rejected them as a basis for a general theory of historical understanding on the ground that their range of application is too narrow to encompass anything like the normal concerns of historians. In particular, these notions have been held to throw little light on what historians have had to say about largescale social events, conditions and processes. (shrink)

Despite a profound concern for the epistemological, ontological and ethical conditions for being-at-home-in-the-world, G.W.F. Hegel published very little on a particularly serious threat to being-at-home: mental illness and disorder. The chief exception is found in Hegel'sEncyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences(1830). In this work, Hegel briefly provides an ontology of madness (Verrücktheit), wherein madness consists in the inward collapsing of subjectivity and objectivity into the individual's unconscious and primordial feeling soul. While there has been an increasing number of studies on (...) Hegel's conception of madness, I propose that there is another overlooked way to understand madness in Hegel's system: as social pathology. I argue in this article that Hegel offers a compelling social account of madness in thePhenomenology of Spirit(1807), which arises at the elevated, self-reflective and community level of spirit. This sociality of madness, as I call it, occurs when spirit is unable to reconcile two contradictory yet equally essential aspects of its reality, resulting in spirit's structural homelessness. I argue that by examining this overlooked sociality of madness, we may read Hegel's political-philosophical project in a new light: on the one hand, the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) presented in thePhilosophy of Right(1821) becomes understood as a political therapeutic. On the other hand, if the ethical life fails to live up to the demand of being an adequate spiritual therapeutic, then the traditional reading of thePhilosophy of Rightas a reconciliatory hermeneutic becomes problematized, opening up new avenues for the proliferation of social pathology. (shrink)

A great deal of research has demonstrated that learning is influenced by the learner’s prior background knowledge (e.g. Murphy, 2002; Keil, 1990), but little is known about the processes by which prior knowledge is deployed. We explore the role of explanation in deploying prior knowledge by examining the joint effects of eliciting explanations and providing prior knowledge in a task where each should aid learning. Three hypotheses are considered: that explanation and prior knowledge have independent and additive effects on (...) learning, that their joint effects on learning are subadditive, and that their effects are superadditive. A category learning experiment finds evidence for a superadditive effect: explaining drives the discovery of regularities, while prior knowledge constrains which regularities learners discover. This is consistent with an account of explanation’s effects on learning proposed in Williams & Lombrozo (in press). (shrink)

Introduction: -/- It is likely that Boethius (480-524ce) inaugurates, in Latin Christian theology, the consideration of personhood as such. In the Treatise Against Eutyches and Nestorius Boethius gives a well-known definition of personhood according to genus and difference(s): a person is an individual substance of a rational nature. Personhood is predicated only of individual rational substances. This chapter situates Boethius in relation to significant Christian theologians before and after him, and the way in which his definition of personhood is a (...) particular answer to the question, “Jesus has two natures, a divine nature and a human nature, but is one what?” Among Greek (and Syriac) speaking theologians, the typical answer is that Jesus is one ‘hypostasis’. Among Latin speaking theologians, the typical answer is that Jesus is one ‘persona’. It is Boethius’s definition of ‘persona’ that inaugurates personhood as such in Latin speaking theology. Although the Greek and Syriac theologians that I survey come close to a concept of personhood as a distinct category, they do not have such a concept and did not need it for their theological purposes. I show that Rusticus the Deacon is an early witness to this Latin theological invention, and also show that for later Latin theologians, the rationality condition for personhood does very little metaphysical work for their Trinitarian theology or Christology. -/- Further, this chapter surveys Patristic and Medieval Christian theologians’ answers to the question, “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are one God, but each is one what?” The same replies as above are typically given by Christian theologians. These two theological questions frame the discussion about personhood (and ‘hypostasis’) and put a boundary around what a satisfying account of personhood (and ‘hypostasis’) would be. -/- In contemporary philosophy, there is a lot of attention paid to the rationality condition for personhood. But if we look at the text in which Boethius defines a person, we do not find any precise criteria for it. In other texts, he says that a rational being is one compatible with (capable of) thought and free choice of the will. What we find is that detailed discussion of personhood shows up in theological questions about the Trinity and Incarnation, but not in e.g., applied ethics. The intrusion of personhood into contemporary applied ethics with a focus on detailed and disputed criteria for rationality as a condition for personhood seems to be a modern development. From a Patristic and Medieval Christian theology point of view, trying to find just the right detailed criteria for rationality in order to define personhood is a wild goose chase. This chapter makes clear another contribution that Christian theology had for personhood. Given the theological issues at play in developing a notion of personhood, Christian theologians came to posit that e.g., an individual human is a person contingently (i.e. not essentially), but God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are each a person essentially. The contingency for created persons is not based on whether e.g., an individual human has conscious acts (as might be the case for John Locke) but on the possibility of a divine person’s assuming e.g., an individual human nature. -/- This sampling of Christian intellectual history spans over one thousand years. I make no claim of being exhaustive. The chapter consists of six sections, where each section covers significant historical conversation partners who together represent the sorts of things that Patristic and Medieval Christian theologians where concerned with in theorizing about ‘persona’ or ‘hypostasis’. -/- 1. Origen of Alexandria and the Cappadocians: Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa 2. Miaphysites: Severus of Antioch, John Philoponus, and Peter of Callinicum 3. Boethius and Rusticus the Deacon: Rationality, Subsistence, and the Invention of Personhood 4. Neo-Chalcedonians (II): Leontius of Byzantium 5. Scholastic Neo-Chalcedonians (I): Gilbert of Poitiers, Richard of St. Victor, William of Auxerre, Alexander of Hales, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and William of Ware 6. Scholastic Neo-Chalcedonians (II): Henry of Ghent, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham . (shrink)

Claudius Marius Victor , a rhetor of Marseilles , composed in the first half of the fifth century a metrical paraphrase of Genesis from the creation of the world up to the destruction of Sodom. The work, which amounts to something over 2,000 lines and is supposedly unfinished, is entitled Alethia, seasoned with occasional discussion of philosophic or other matter, and written with the expressed hope of improving the minds of the young. The text depends on a single ninth-century Paris (...) manuscript , which contains errors that are numerous but in general rudimentary and susceptible of convincing emendation. The first serious edition—for the edition of J. de Gagny , though it offered many useful emendations, was too full of licentious alterations, excisions, and additions, to rank as such—was that of G. Morel . The next editor, G. Fabricius , in spite of his awareness of Morel's edition, did little more than reproduce the depraved text of Gagny. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary KnowledgeWilliam FleschMeaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge, by G. L. Hagberg; xi & 178 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, $27.50.The idea of studying Henry James and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein together is attractive, although there is very little stylistic similarity between them. Wittgenstein writes like a novelist, James like a philosopher. Wittgenstein is intensely interested (...) in the real language of real people; most of James’s dialogues bristle with a peculiarly Jamesian stiltedness. But both writers focus on the exquisite, extensive subtleties of language and of linguistic interaction, subtleties that tend to make uselessly crude such notional entities as facts, meanings, or ideas, and so of an epistemology based on such entities. The extremely fine grain of James’s analyses of his characters and of their analyses of each other already commits him philosophically to agreeing with Wittgenstein’s central insight that “to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life”: to James’s characters life consists in interpretation of each other’s language. Those characters have the deepest lives who come to the greatest subtlety in their investigations of what determines the deeply overdetermined linguistic moves made by other minds.Hagberg’s book is disappointing, however. The exposition of Wittgenstein is unexceptionable but hardly novel, and as for James, Hagberg has confined himself to four stories, considerable to be sure, but hardly the novels. Hagberg gives creditable readings of these stories, especially “The Lesson of the Master” and “The Figure in the Carpet.” But he treats James’s stories more as demonstrations of his philosophical point—that there is an analogy between language games and works of art, also an analogy between our attitude towards a person and our attitude towards a work of art—than as works of art themselves. This would be fine if he didn’t keep asserting that they are examples of what they address: perhaps they are, but Hagberg makes them out primarily as didactic. Thus in “Figure” he finds a clear and direct argument that one ought not look for some propositional content as the point or secret of a work of art and thus a fortiori of a story like the one under consideration. [End Page 373] Hagberg is right, of course, but he reduces the story to a moral in just the way he claims it warns us to avoid.In his treatment of “Lesson,” he writes with real insight about the ambiguities of the master’s motivation in that story, and argues convincingly that the motivation may be opaque to the master himself, but then retreats from the insight thus won by treating ambiguity itself rather literal-mindedly, as a sort of resultant of several unambiguous vectors. Although the comparison of ambiguity to seeing aspects is fascinating, Hagberg’s analysis would be inevitably enriched by treating The Golden Bowl, where Adam Verver remains essentially ambiguous. Hagberg’s readings falter because his sense of language-games is too flat: he doesn’t take into account (although he claims to) their genuine variety. For Hagberg, unlike for Wittgenstein, games always have well-defined moves, and so ambiguity becomes a move. But what if it’s ambiguous whether it’s a move or not?Perhaps Hagberg’s account of “The Tree of Knowledge” is least in the spirit of Wittgenstein. In Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein writes, “I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking” (Part II, section xi). But Hagberg, in a taxonomy of kinds of knowing, takes it for granted that I can know what I am thinking (pp. 153, 169): again, this is a way of reducing ambiguity to a question of the intent of a “move,” and not grappling with its fundamental elusiveness.Meaning and Interpretation is a learned and helpfully provocative book, often written with great verve, but its value is more in the questions that it broaches than in the answers it offers. Raising questions is the proper Wittgensteinian and Jamesian activity: the book demonstrates by its own examples that offering definite answers may neutralize the power of the questions.William FleschBrandeis UniversityCopyright... (shrink)

It may seem odd to review a New York social club's yearbook, with its list of members’ addresses and series of committee reports. But such books sometimes contain material of more general interest. The latest one from the Century Association, for example, devotes 250 of its 685 pages to “Century Memorials”—that is, biographical sketches of recently deceased members, written by other members. Among the well-known figures taken up in these eighty-three sketches are the artists Richard Anuszkiewicz and Robert Motherwell; the (...) architects Henry N. Cobb and Charles A. Platt; the newspaper editors Harold Evans and Whitelaw Reid; the historians Henry F. Graff and William McFeely; the translator and literary scholar Donald Keene; the collector of literary and musical manuscripts Frederick Koch; the popular writer on Russian history Robert K. Massie; the clergyman James Parks Morton; the financier Felix G. Rohatyn; the lawyers Whitney North Seymour Jr. and Isaac N. Phelps Stokes; the literary editor Elisabeth Sifton; the university president Michael Sovern; the museum director Evan H. Turner; and the broadcast journalist Sander Vanocur. The sketches are generally well written and often richly evocative: the writers include Louis Begley, Kenneth T. Jackson, D. T. Max, and Honor Moore.The long shelf of Century volumes like this one clearly constitutes a valuable contribution to prosopographical literature. And the Century is not the only institution with such a tradition (other examples are the British Academy and the American Philosophical Society); but their publications are a frequently overlooked source, one not always available in research libraries. Unfortunately, it is also a source that seems to be diminishing: the American Antiquarian Society and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation are examples of organizations, each with a history of providing biographical information, that are no longer doing so. Of course, the great previous runs of the former's Proceedings and the latter's Reports remain (one hopes) on the shelves for those who know to look for them. A step in the opposite direction has recently been taken by the Grolier Club, which has not had such a tradition (except for two biographical volumes in 1959 and 2000): its Gazette now includes a section of memorials in each issue. This is a welcome move, but one has to regret that so little scholarly use is made of this whole body of biographical detail and reminiscence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Pragmatist Philosophy of History by Marnie BinderPiers H. G. StephensA Pragmatist Philosophy of History Marnie Binder. Lexington Books, 2023.Looking at current scholarship and opinion in American philosophy, one can easily conclude that there has been much more work done on studying the history of pragmatist philosophy than there has been on what pragmatist philosophy can give to the study of history. Ever since the resurrection of interest (...) in pragmatism in the late twentieth century, we have seen a range of publications offering new interpretations for the ideas of the classical pragmatists, as well as important new applications for philosophical pragmatism and the moving to center stage of historically sidelined individuals and groups. What we have seen relatively little of, however, aside from a 2016 symposium in the European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, is sustained engagement with the question of what a classically pragmatist approach to historical inquiry might contribute, entail, or imply. It is this important niche in the ecosystem of American philosophy that Marnie Binder's A Pragmatist Philosophy of History seeks to partially fill in.Binder, who is perhaps best known for her past writings on José Ortega y Gasset, is at pains from the start to indicate both the humility and the utility of her project. As befits the tradition, there are no grandiose philosophical pretensions here, with the "goal in presenting a pragmatist philosophy of [End Page 112] history" merely being "to add another apparatus to the toolkits of the philosopher and the historian," an extra perspective that is "meant to complement other methodologies" (xi; emphasis in original), as she explains in her introduction. At the same time, pragmatism can offer something distinctive, firstly through asking the pragmatic question of what difference is meant by the accepting of particular presumed facts as being true, and secondly, being able to better understand why certain historical details have relevance, value, and meaning for us as a result of answering the first question. A pragmatist philosophy of history is helpful then, Binder maintains, as it "is in a unique position to bridge the speculative analytic divide" (xiii), and her approach to doing this is to draw upon the resources found in the works of a succession of the familiar classical pragmatists, building toward a synthesis and a cashing out of insights in her concluding reflections.Structurally the work consists of an explanatory introduction followed by six chapters, each dedicated to a particular pragmatist and their insights, leading finally to an extended concluding section drawing the component parts together and answering possible objections to the project. Pragmatism, as Binder recognizes, is seldom thought of as a historically orientated philosophy, but she argues that for each of these thinkers—William James, John Dewey, F. C. S. Schiller, Charles Sanders Peirce, George Herbert Mead, and Jane Addams—there is at least the germ of a philosophy of history that can be unearthed and developed, eventually helping to inform understanding of what is needed to bring a pragmatist ethics into practical reality, the last of which is manifested primarily by Addams. Thus, the treatment of William James in chapter 1 homes in on James's psychological insights into the way that experienced reality forms a temporal continuum; our consciousness necessarily selects from the experiences of the past, ascribing interpretations and assuming levels of facticity and relevance, since no individual can know all the facts or select among them with perfect impartiality. The continuum will be one that speaks to the inquirer's concerns with accuracy, practicality, meaningfulness, and coherence, as all knowledge comes about through temporal processes, and since past events are continuously added to and can be continuously reinterpreted, it can have no real or ultimate beginning or end. Accordingly, for a Jamesian pragmatist account, the "continuum of history is the way in which we construct a meaning for history of the connected past experiences with the present and in view of the future—this is what we call 'history'" (7; emphasis in original), and Binder draws upon José Medina's recent work to further illuminate how such history can and will be continuously critically reconstructed. In addition, she observes, such reconstruction [End Page... (shrink)

In just thirteen brief, accessible chapters, this engaging little book takes "absolute beginners" from the most basic questions about the language (e.g., what does a classical Chinese character look like?) to reading and understanding selections from classical Chinese philosophical texts and Tang dynasty poetry._ " An outstanding introduction to reading classical Chinese_. Van Norden does a wonderful job of clearly explaining the basics of classical Chinese, and he carefully takes the reader through beautifully chosen examples from the textual tradition. (...) An invaluable work." —Michael Puett, Harvard University. (shrink)

The relationship of consciousness to brain, which Schopenhauer grandly referred to as the "world knot," remains an unsolved problem within both philosophy and science. The central focus in what follows is the relevance of science---from psychoanalysis to neurophysiology and quantum physics-to the mind-brain puzzle. Many would argue that we have advanced little since the age of the Greek philosophers, and that the extraordinary accumulation of neuroscientific knowledge in this century has helped not at all. Increas- ingly, philosophers and scientists (...) have tended to go their separate ways in considering the issues, since they tend to differ in the questions that they ask, the data and ideas which are provided for consideration, their methods for answering these questions, and criteria for judging the acceptability of an answer. But it is our conviction that philosophers and scientists can usefully interchange, at least to the extent that they provide co~straints upon each other’s preferred strategies, and it may prove possible for more substantive progress to be made. Philosophers have said some rather naive things by ignoring the extraordinary advances in the neurosciences in the twentieth century. The skull is not filled with green cheese! On the other hand, the arrogance of many scientists toward philosophy and their faith in the scientific method is equally naive. Scientists clearly have much to learn from philosophy as an intellectual discipline. Manifestations of Mind: Some Conceptual and Empirical Issues Walter B. Weimer Pages 5-31 The Mysterious “Split‘: A Clinical Inquiry into Problems of Consciousness and Brain Peter H. Knapp Pages 37-69 Mind, Brain, and the Symbolic Consciousness Irwin Savodnik Pages 73-98 Brain and Free Will John C. Eccles Pages 101-121 An Old Ghost in a New Body C. Wade Savage Pages 125-153 How Dogmatic Can Materialism Be? John C. Eccles Pages 155-160 Mental Phenomena as Causal Determinants in Brain Function R. W. Sperry Pages 163-177 Consciousness as an Emergent Causal Agent in the Context of Control System Theory E. M. Dewan Pages 181-198 Reductionism, Levels of Organization, and the Mind-Body Problem William C. Wimsatt Pages 205-267 Mind, Structure, and Contradiction Gordon G. Globus Pages 271-293 Problems Concerning the Structure of Consciousness Karl H. Pribram Pages 297-313 The Role of Scientific Results in Theories of Mind and Brain: A Conversation among Philosophers and Scientists E. M. Dewan, John C. Eccles, Gordon G. Globus, Keith Gunderson, Peter H. Knapp, Grover Maxwell et al. Pages 317-328 Scientific Results and the Mind-Brain Issue: Some Afterthoughts Grover Maxwell Pages 329-358. (shrink)

While there has been significant discussion in the health sciences and ethics literatures about problems associated with publication practices (e.g., ghost- and gift-authorship, conflicts of interest), there has been relatively little practical guidance developed to help researchers determine how they should fairly allocate credit for multi-authored publications. Fair allocation of credit requires that participating authors be acknowledged for their contribution and responsibilities, but it is not obvious what contributions should warrant authorship, nor who should be responsible for the quality (...) and content of the scientific research findings presented in a publication. In this paper, we review arguments presented in the ethics and health science literatures, and the policies or guidelines proposed by learned societies and journals, in order to explore the link between author contribution and responsibility in multi-author multidisciplinary health science publications. We then critically examine the various procedures used in the field to help researchers fairly allocate authorship. (shrink)

Huw Price’s subject naturalism has emerged as a leading pragmatist position within recent debates surrounding philosophical naturalism. Unlike orthodox views which tend to be guided by metaphysical questions about the “place” of, for instance, the mind, meaning, and morality within the natural world, subject naturalism focuses philosophical attention on language-users and the functions that certain concepts play within discursive practices. This paper considers two objections to subject naturalism and argues that they can be overcome by looking to the methodological insights (...) of philosophical genealogy. Although Price occasionally characterizes his project as a kind of genealogy, he offers little explanation of what such a methodological orientation is supposed to involve. I suggest that subject naturalists ought to remedy this theoretical lacuna by looking to the work of Bernard Williams. On the one hand, doing so can serve a diagnostic function: Williams’ conception of genealogy affords a perspective from which subject naturalism’s explanatory inadequacies are more clearly understood. On the other hand, Williams’ elaborated conception of genealogy represents a path by which the subject naturalist can overcome the shortcomings discussed in this paper. (shrink)

This article addresses three topics. It describes Chartisms creation of a ‘peoples history’ as an alternative to middle-class history, whether Whig or Tory. It locates the sources, most of which have not been noticed before, for the Chartist narrative of the English Reformation. William Cobbetts reinterpretation of the English Reformation is well known as a source for the working-class narrative; William Howitts much less familiar but more important source, antedating Cobbetts History of the Protestant Reformation in England, is (...) used for the first time. The article reconstructs that narrative using printed and manuscript lectures and published interpretations dating from the first discussions of the Peoples Charter in 1836 to the last Chartist Convention in 1858. The manuscript lectures of Thomas Cooper are an essential but little-used source. The article contributes to historical understanding of the intellectual life of the English working class. (shrink)

The beginning of the seventy-sixth poem of Catullus appears to cause some modern readers considerable dismay. One may instance the reactions of R. O. A. M. Lyne: ‘Our first reaction to the beginning of this poem may be one of incredulity’ ; ‘The effect of such language is to imply an outrageous and implausible self-righteousness’ ; of K. Quinn: ‘a self-righteousness that makes us feel a little uncomfortable’ ; or of G. Williams: ‘this is sheer melodrama, a deft and (...) surprising reversal of “count your blessings”’; and, further down, on ‘si vitam puriter egi’: ‘This could be simply priggish or outrageous or both, but he does not mean it as a general statement’. (shrink)

In 1958, economist A. W. Phillips published an article describing what he observed to be the inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment; subsequently, the "Phillips curve" became a central concept in macroeconomic analysis and policymaking. But today's Phillips curve is not the same as the original one from fifty years ago; the economy, our understanding of price setting behavior, the determinants of inflation, and the role of monetary policy have evolved significantly since then. In this book, some of the top (...) economists working today reexamine the theoretical and empirical validity of the Phillips curve in its more recent specifications. The contributors consider such questions as what economists have learned about price and wage setting and inflation expectations that would improve the way we use and formulate the Phillips curve, what the Phillips curve approach can teach us about inflation dynamics, and how these lessons can be applied to improving the conduct of monetary policy. ContributorsLawrence Ball, Ben Bernanke, Oliver Blanchard, V. V. Chari, William T. Dickens, Stanley Fischer, Jeff Fuhrer, Jordi Gali, Michael T. Kiley, Robert G. King, Donald L. Kohn, Yolanda K. Kodrzycki, Jane Sneddon Little, Bartisz Mackowiak, N. Gregory Mankiw, Virgiliu Midrigan, Giovanni P. Olivei, Athanasios Orphanides, Adrian R. Pagan, Christopher A. Pissarides, Lucrezia Reichlin, Paul A. Samuelson, Christopher A. Sims, Frank R. Smets, Robert M. Solow, Jürgen Stark, James H. Stock, Lars E. O. Svensson, John B. Taylor, Mark W. Watson. (shrink)

This is the first of three instalments which attempt to present a summary and critique of the life-work of William Burroughs Steele. Steele was an American business man who, subsequent to retiring after the First World War, spent his life working on a comprehensive study of mankind and its aspirations and follies, producing a gargantuan treatise called The Anatomy of Frustration-a treatise previously not published in its entirety. Here, Mr. Wells explains that he himself has decided to publish an (...) account of Steele's little-known treatise "in general terms and for the general public." Contents include: "Part I. What All Men Seek," "Part II. Toward the Next Beginning," and "Part III. Why We Are Frustrated." Herbert George Wells (1866 - 1946) was a prolific English writer who wrote in a variety of genres, including the novel, politics, history, and social commentary. Today, he is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to the science fiction genre thanks to such novels as "The Time Machine" (1895), "The Invisible Man" (1897), and "The War of the Worlds" (1898). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this book now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author. First published in "Harper's Magazine," April-June 1936. (shrink)

Cybersecurity research often describes people as understanding internet security in terms of metaphorical mental models (e.g., disease risk, physical security risk, or criminal behavior risk). However, little research has directly evaluated if this is an accurate or productive framework. To assess this question, two experiments asked participants to respond to a statistical reasoning task framed in one of four different contexts (cybersecurity, plus the above alternative models). Each context was also presented using either percentages or natural frequencies, and these (...) tasks were followed by a behavioral likelihood rating. As in previous research, consistent use of natural frequencies promoted correct Bayesian reasoning. There was little indication, however, that any of the alternative mental models generated consistently better understanding or reasoning over the actual cybersecurity context. There was some evidence that different models had some effects on patterns of responses, including the behavioral likelihood ratings, but these effects were small, as compared to the effect of the numerical format manipulation. This points to a need to improve the content of actual internet security warnings, rather than working to change the models users have of warnings. (shrink)

JOHN CORCORAN AND WILIAM FRANK. Surprises in logic. Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. 19 253. Some people, not just beginning students, are at first surprised to learn that the proposition “If zero is odd, then zero is not odd” is not self-contradictory. Some people are surprised to find out that there are logically equivalent false universal propositions that have no counterexamples in common, i. e., that no counterexample for one is a counterexample for the other. Some people would be surprised to (...) find out that in normal first-order logic existential import is quite common: some universals “Everything that is S is P” —actually quite a few—imply their corresponding existentials “Something that is S is P”. Anyway, perhaps contrary to its title, this paper is not a cataloging of surprises in logic but rather about the mistakes that did or might have or might still lead people to think that there are no surprises in logic. The paper cataloging of surprises in logic is on our “to-do” list. -/- ► JOHN CORCORAN AND WILIAM FRANK, Surprises in logic. Philosophy, University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY 14260-4150, USA E-mail: [email protected] There are many surprises in logic. Peirce gave us a few. Russell gave Frege one. Löwenheim gave Zermelo one. Gödel gave some to Hilbert. Tarski gave us several. When we get a surprise, we are often delighted, puzzled, or skeptical. Sometimes we feel or say “Nice!”, “Wow, I didn’t know that!”, “Is that so?”, or the like. Every surprise belongs to someone. There are no disembodied surprises. Saying there are surprises in logic means that logicians experience surprises doing logic—not that among logical propositions some are intrinsically or objectively “surprising”. The expression “That isn’t surprising” often denigrates logical results. Logicians often aim for surprises. In fact, [1] argues that logic’s potential for surprises helps motivate its study and, indeed, helps justify logic’s existence as a discipline. Besides big surprises that change logicians’ perspectives, the logician’s daily life brings little surprises, e.g. that Gödel’s induction axiom alone implies Robinson’s axiom. Sometimes wild guesses succeed. Sometimes promising ideas fail. Perhaps one of the least surprising things about logic is that it is full of surprises. Against the above is Wittgenstein’s surprising conclusion : “Hence there can never be surprises in logic”. This paper unearths basic mistakes in [2] that might help to explain how Wittgenstein arrived at his false conclusion and why he never caught it. The mistakes include: unawareness that surprise is personal, confusing logicians having certainty with propositions having logical necessity, confusing definitions with criteria, and thinking that facts demonstrate truths. People demonstrate truths using their deductive know-how and their knowledge of facts: facts per se are epistemically inert. [1] JOHN CORCORAN, Hidden consequence and hidden independence. This Bulletin, vol.16, p. 443. [2] LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Kegan Paul, London, 1921. -/-. (shrink)

Several variants of Lewis's Best System Account of Lawhood have been proposed that avoid its commitment to perfectly natural properties. There has been little discussion of the relative merits of these proposals, and little discussion of how one might extend this strategy to provide natural property-free variants of Lewis's other accounts, such as his accounts of duplication, intrinsicality, causation, counterfactuals, and reference. We undertake these projects in this paper. We begin by providing a framework for classifying and assessing (...) the variants of the Best System Account. We then evaluate these proposals, and identify the most promising candidates. We go on to develop a proposal for systematically modifying Lewis's other accounts so that they, too, avoid commitment to perfectly natural properties. We conclude by briefly considering a different route one might take to developing natural property-free versions of Lewis's other accounts, drawing on recent work by Williams. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001) 275-291 [Access article in PDF] The Conceptual Unity of Aristotle's Rhetoric 1 - [PDF] Alan G. Gross and Marcelo Dascal The standard view--that the Rhetoric lacks conceptual unity--has strong and prestigious support, stretching over most of the century. To David Ross in 1923 the unity of the Rhetoric was practical, not theoretical; to misunderstand this fact was to see this work, mistakenly, as "a (...) curious jumble of literary criticism with second-rate logic, ethics, and politics, and jurisprudence, mixed with the cunning of one who knows well how the weaknesses of the human heart are to be played upon" (285). So unaltered has been this view over the years that, in 1995, Jonathan Barnes could turn Ross's metaphor into an argument concerning the Rhetoric's lack of intellectual focus: it presents, not one art, but fragments of three arts, and of three arts that exist quite independently of rhetoric. The sections on logic have the closest connections with dialectic and in part overlap with what Aristotle says in the Topics; the sections on the emotions are linked to the ethical and psychological writings; Book III... shares its subject matter with the Poetics. Rhetoric... is a magpie, thieving a piece of one art and a piece of another, and then botching a nest of its own. (Companion 263-64) To Ross and Barnes, while logos, êthos, and pathos are essential to rhetorical invention, and style and arrangement are essential to rhetorical performance, they have nothing conceptually in common. Insofar as disciplinary identity depends on such conceptual unity, rhetorical studies lack such identity.William Grimaldi offers an alternate view; beneath Ross's jumble, he sees as the work's fundamental unifying principle, the enthymeme, which serves both as a form of argument and as a source for arguments about fact, character, and emotion. On this view, the factual content of a rhetorical argument is structured logically, a structure that is then molded linguistically [End Page 275] by means of êthos and pathos to suit the requirements of the particular case: "The content of... statements, the manner in which propositions will be expressed, the language, and images in casting the statements will be determined by the topical examination of the ethos and pathos of [a] particular speaker-auditor's situation" (Commentary I, 335n). Grimaldi convinced no one that this was the case; as Jakob Wisse has pointed out, Grimaldi's interpretation takes unacceptable hermeneutic liberties (27-28); nothing in the Rhetoric supports his view of the enthymeme as the central organizing principle of the work.Although we agree that Grimaldi was mistaken, we would like to argue that he was correct in seeing inferential processes as the key to the Rhetoric's conceptual unity. We would like to claim, however, that, contrary to Grimaldi's view, each of the three pisteis is inference-based, as is the canon of style. Moreover, the canon of arrangement, while not inference-based for Aristotle, plays a vital role in strengthening the patterns of inference that speakers prefer; in addition, it can be inference-based, as Perleman and Olbrechts-Tyteca have shown. So much conceptual unity seems to us consistent with Aristotle's definition of rhetoric; if such unity exists, it would mean that Aristotle was correct in calling rhetoric a tekhnê, which was, like dialectic or medicine, a unified body of knowledge (1.1.2-1354a1-14)We are not going to argue that the text as we have it is conceptually unified; obviously, no text that contains inconsistent views and serious ambiguities can be unified and there is little doubt that the Rhetoric contains such inconsistencies and ambiguities. With the aid of current scholarship, however, we intend to construct from the text a consistent theory of persuasion with inference as its base. In our construction, we will add nothing to Aristotle. But we will omit some passages--especially, a crucial one in which he seems clearly to spurn emotional and ethical means of persuasion (1.1.3-1354a16-45). We will also prefer some interpretations--especially an... (shrink)

William G. Lycan; XII*—Two—No, Three—Concepts of Possible Worlds, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 91, Issue 1, 1 June 1991, Pages 215–228, https.

Toward theory a homuncular of believing For years and years, philosophers took thoughts and beliefs to be modifications of incorporeal Cartesian egos. ...

Lycan not only uses the numerous arguments against materialism, and functionalist theories of mind in particular, to gain a more detailed positive view of the ..

In this book, William Lycan reviews the diverse philosophical views on consciousness--including those of Kripke, Block, Campbell, Sellars, and Casteneda--and ..

‘[I]ntrospection’ is just a convenient word to describe our way of knowing what is going on in our own mind, and anyone convinced that we know—at least sometimes—what is going on in our own mind and therefore, that we have a mind and, therefore, that we are not zombies, must believe that introspection is the answer we are looking for. I, too, believe in introspection.

This book reveals a stunning thread of scientific data that points the way to the natural anabolic state a biochemical condition wherein body fat is metabolized, muscle tissue is built, strength and speed are increased, mental acuity is enhanced, and the mind and body perform at top efficiency. This inspirational book is a must-read for athletes and coaches in every sport, students and teachers at every level, people of faith, people seeking faith, and anyone competing for success. Readers will learn (...) how one simple thought altered the blood chemistry of students taking the GRE and raised test scores and how that same thought increased athletic performance in multiple sports. Readers will also come to understand why honesty, gratitude, humility, self-discipline, assertiveness, love, faith, and playing-to-win induce an empowering anabolic blood chemistry. If you read this book, you will meet Jenny (the girl who achieved a seemingly impossible goal), Susie (the most aggressive infielder I ve ever seen), Hank (the shortstop who experienced his worst nightmare), John Doe (the guy who experienced all five types of stress before leaving his driveway), Attila the Hun (an example of humility), and several more unforgettable characters. If you read this book, I promise you that, by the time you finish the third chapter, you will fervently wish you'd read it earlier in your life. (shrink)

Since Twin Earth was discovered by American philosophical-space explorers in the 1970s, the domain of.

Charles Siewert's _The Significance of Consciousness_ contends that most philosophers and psychologists who have written about "consciousness" have neglected a crucial type or aspect that Siewert calls "phenomenal consciousness" and tries carefully to define. The present article argues that some philosophers, at least, have not neglected phenomenal consciousness and have offered tenable theories of it.

On Evidence in Philosophy sketches an epistemology of philosophy itself, a method for philosophical inquiry. Part 1 defends a version of Moore's method of “common sense,” in which humble, boring everyday facts like “I have hands” and “I had breakfast earlier today” trump the a priori philosophical premises of arguments for various eliminative idealisms and skepticisms. Part 2 exhibits the deeper poverty of philosophical method, arguing that philosophy cannot prove or even refute any interesting thesis. But Part 3 defends intuitions (...) as giving us good prima facie reason to accept the judgments they support, and then develops the method of wide reflective equilibrium in the context of a broader explanatory-coherentist epistemology. (shrink)