Collingwood's... descendants... will be engaged in conceptual analysis not unlike other modern forms of conceptual analysis but not so isolated, in principle and in practice, from the panorama of the human past, from the rich diversity of contemporary cultures, and from the perplexities of individual experience in art, religion, the privacies of thought, and the publicity of action. They will search out the a priori elements in experience and the empirical genesis of thought. They may try, although they will surely (...) fail, to make the scope of philosophy as wide as life itself, and this attempt would at least be not unwelcome in a time when some of the descendants of Socrates try, although they too will fail, to make the scope of philosophy as narrow as an academic department. Louis O. Mink. (shrink)

Chapter INTRODUCTION i. The Problem Why suppose that sense perception is, by and large, an accurate source of information about the physical environment? ...

Divine Nature and Human Language is a collection of twelve essays in philosophical theology by William P. Alston, one of the leading figures in the current renaissance in the philosophy of religion. Using the equipment of contemporary analytical philosophy, Alston explores, partly refashions, and defends a largely traditional conception of God and His work in the world a conception that finds its origins in medieval philosophical theology. These essays fall into two groups: those concerned with theological language and those (...) that deal with the nature, status, and activity of God. In Part 1, Alston develops a conceptual scheme for discussing the topic of theological language. He also argues that there is a core of literal talk about God and even a core of predicates univocally applicable to God and creatures. Furthermore, he shows that God can be referred to directly as well as descriptively. In Parts II and III, the author sketches out a middle way between a classical conception of God exemplified by Aquinas and the more recent “process” or “panentheist” conception exemplified by Hartshorne. Alston argues that such a God can act so as to have real effects in the world and can enter into genuine dialogue and otherwise interact with human beings. In addition, he defends the idea that God provides a foundation for morality. The first collection of Alston's ground breaking work in the philosophy of religion, Divine Nature and Human Language will be welcomed by scholars and students of the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, theology, and religious studies. (shrink)

Functionalists in philosophy of mind traditionally raise two major arguments against the type identity theory: (1) psychological states are _multiply realizable_ so that there are no one-to-one mappings of psychological states onto neural states and (2) the most that evidence could ever establish is the _correlation_ of psychological and neural states, not their identity. We defend a variant on the traditional type identity theory which we call _heuristic identity theory_ (HIT) against both of these objections. Drawing its inspiration from scientific (...) practice, heuristic identity theory construes identity claims as hypotheses that guide subsequent inquiry, not as conclusions of the research. (shrink)

1. A Historical Look at Unity 2. Field Guide to Modern Concepts of Reduction and Unity 3. Kitcher's Revisionist Account of Unification 4. Critics of Unity 5. Integration Instead of Unity 6. Reduction via Mechanisms 7. Case Studies in Reduction and Unification across the Disciplines.

" In a book that seeks to shift the ground of debate within theory of knowledge, William P. Alston finds that the century-lo.

In this clear and provocative account of the epistemology of religious experience, William P. Alston argues that the perception of God—his term for direct experiential awareness of God—makes a major contribution to the grounds of religious belief. Surveying the variety of reported direct experiences of God, Alston demonstrates that a person can be justified in holding certain beliefs about God on the basis of mystical experience.

1. The Naturalistic Turn in Philosophy of Science 2. The Framework of Mechanistic Explanation: Parts, Operations, and Organization 3. Representing and Reasoning About Mechanisms 4. Mental Mechanisms: Mechanisms that Process Information 5. Discovering Mental Mechanisms 6 . Summary.

This paper distinguishes and interrelates a number of respects in which persons have been thought to be in a specially favorable epistemic position vis-A-Vis their own mental states. The most important distinction is a six-Fold one between infallibility, Omniscience, Indubitability, Incorrigibility, Truth-Sufficiency, And self-Warrant. Each of these varieties can then be sub-Divided as the kind of modality, If any, Involved. It is also argued that discussions of self-Knowledge have been hampered by a failure to recognize these distinctions.

Beliefs are freely attributed to God nowadays in Anglo–American philosophical theology. This practice undoubtedly reflects the twentieth–century popularity of the view that knowledge consists of true justified belief . The connection is frequently made explicit. If knowledge is true justified belief then whatever God knows He believes. It would seem that much recent talk of divine beliefs stems from Nelson Pike's widely discussed article, ‘Divine Omniscience and Voluntary Action’. In this essay Pike develops a version of the classic argument for (...) the incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and free will in terms of divine forebelief. He introduces this shift by premising that ‘ A knows X ’ entails ‘A believes X ’. As a result of all this, philosophers have increasingly been using the concept of belief in defining ‘omniscience’. (shrink)

This paper defends the view that a belief to the effect that the believer is currently in some conscious state is "self-Warranted," in the sense that what warrants it is simply its being a belief of that sort. This position is compared with other views as to the epistemic status of such beliefs--That they are warranted by their truth and that they are warranted by an immediate awareness of their object. In the course of the discussion, Various modes of immediate (...) justification and various types of "epistemic immunities" are distinguished. It is contended that principles of justification are to be evaluated in terms of whether the beliefs they approve are likely to be correct. (shrink)

P. T. Geach, notoriously, holds the Relative Identity Thesis, according to which a meaningful judgment of identity is always, implicitly or explicitly, relative to some general term. ‘The same’ is a fragmentary expression, and has no significance unless we say or mean ‘the same X’, where ‘X’ represents a general term (what Frege calls a Begriffswort or Begriffsausdruck). (P. T. Geach, Mental Acts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 69. I maintain that it makes no sense to judge whether (...) things are ‘the same’, or remain ‘the same’, unless we add or understand some general term - ‘the same F’. (P. T. Geach, Reference and Generality, third Edition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 63f. I am arguing for the thesis that identity is relative. When one says ‘x is identical with y’, this, I hold, is an incomplete expression; it is short for ‘x is the same A as y’, where ‘A’ represents some count noun understood from the context of utterance - or else, it is just a vague expression of a half-formed thought. (P. T. Geach, ‘Identity,’ Review of Metaphysics 21 (1967-8), p. 3.) One of the ways Geach seeks to support this is by tying it to the well nigh universally admired Fregean thesis about cardinality. (shrink)

Neuroscience and cognitive science seek to explain behavioral regularities in terms of underlying mechanisms. An important element of a mechanistic explanation is a characterization of the operations of the parts of the mechanism. The challenge in characterizing such operations is illustrated by an example from the history of physiological chemistry in which some investigators tried to characterize the internal operations in the same terms as the overall physiological system while others appealed to elemental chemistry. In order for biochemistry to become (...) successful, researchers had to identify a new level of operations involving operations over molecular groups. Existing attempts at mechanistic explanation of behavior are in a situation comparable to earlier approaches to physiological chemistry, drawing their inspiration either from overall psychology activities or from low-level neural processes. Successful mechanistic explanations of behavior require the discovery of the appropriate component operations. Such discovery is a daunting challenge but one on which success will be beneficial to both behavioral scientists and cognitive and neuroscientists. (shrink)

Since the publication of Gilbert Ryle's book, The Concept of Mind, the distinction between dispositions and occurrences has loomed large in the philosophy of mind. In that enormously influential book Ryle set out to show that much of what passes as mental is best construed as dispositional in character rather than, as traditionally supposed, being made up of private “ghostly” occurrences, ‘happenings, or “episodes.” Many philosophers, including some of Ryle's ablest critics, have accepted the terms of Ryle's contentions. They have (...) either agreed, with respect to certain kinds of mental states, that they are not occurrent because dispositional, or have undertaken to vindicate their occurrent status by showing Ryle's dispositional account to be inadequate. Thus U. T. Place in his essay, “The Concept of Heed,” while agreeing with Ryle's dispositional account of belief; memory, intention, and desire, rejects a similar account of heeding, attention, and consciousness, and defends the traditional account according to which they are construed as distinctive sorts of internal activity. And Terence Penelhum, in “The Logic of Pleasure,” defends an “episode-view” of pleasure as against Ryle's dispositional account. (shrink)