First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

How does microbiota research impact our understanding of biological individuality? We summarize the interdisciplinary summer school on "Microbiota, Symbiosis and Individuality: Conceptual and Philosophical Issues" (July 2019), which was supported by a European Research Council starting grant project "Immunity, DEvelopment, and the Microbiota" (IDEM). The summer school centered around interdisciplinary group work on four facets of microbiota research: holobionts, individuality, causation, and human health. The conceptual discussion of cutting-edge empirical research provided new insights into microbiota and highlights the value of (...) incorporating into meetings experts from other disciplines, such as philosophy and history of science. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to provide a comment on Simone Weil’s brief but seminal essay ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.’ It complements an earlier one on Weil’s Lectures on Philosophy. The essay was sent via a letter to her friend and mentor, the Catholic priest, and Dominican friar, Father Joseph-Marie Perrin O.P. It set out her belief that school studies should provide the individual pupil or student with (...) an education in the value and acquisition of attention. This, Weil believed, would be of fundamental value when reaching out to God through prayer. Such a capacity for attention would also enhance the student’s general academic and social learning providing a basis for authentic dialogue with others, and not only teachers and schoolfellows. The article introduces her as a religious philosopher, explains the origins of the essay, and Weil’s friendship with Father Perrin, who was her Christian religious mentor, examines the text itself, considers some critical commentaries, and assesses its relevance to the philosophy and practice of education today. (shrink)

Denying Divinity: Apophasis in the Patristic Christian and Soto Zen Buddhist Traditions. Janet P. Williams. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000. 249 pp. £40. ISBN 0 19 826999 4.

This book is one of the series entitled "Rare Masterpieces of Philosophy and Science" and it is entitled to both distinctions. The papers collected here are virtually unobtainable except in the most complete libraries; and de Morgan's work is clearly that of a master-between Boole and Frege, he is the leading figure in formal logic. The papers found herein include the series of six on the syllogism published between 1846 and 1868, together with three shorter notes concerning logical phraseology, (...) a syllabus for a system of logic, and an encyclopaedia article whose topic is logic. The editor has added a useful introduction which, among other important services, allows us to see de Morgan, not, as we today see him, as a founder of symbolic logic, but as a rival of William Hamilton, engaged in controversy much of his life.—P. J. M. (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.

From the author of the New York Times bestselling novels The Shack, Cross Roads, and Eve comes a compelling, conversational exploration of the wrong-headed ideas we sometimes have and share about God. Now available in Spanish.

Justification, or at least ‘justification’, bulks large in recent epistemology. The view that knowledge consists of true-justified-belief has been prominent in this century, and the justification of belief has attracted considerable attention in its own right. But it is usually not at all clear just what an epistemologist means by ‘justified’, just what concept the term is used to express. An enormous amount of energy has gone into the attempt to specify conditions under which beliefs of one or another sort (...) are justified; but relatively little has been done to explain what it is for a belief to be justified, what that is for which conditions are being sought. The most common procedure has been to proceed on the basis of a number of obvious cases of justified belief, without pausing to determine what property it is of which these cases are instances. Now even if there were some single determinate concept that all these theoriests have implicitly in mind, this procedure would be less than wholly satisfactory. For in the absence of an explicit account of the concept being applied, we lack the most fundamental basis for deciding between supposed intuitions and for evaluating proposed conditions of justification. And in any event, as philosophers we do not seek merely to speak the truth, but also to gain an explicit, reflective understanding of the matters with which we deal. We want to know not only when our beliefs are justified, but also what it is to enjoy that status. True, not every fundamental concept can be explicated, but we shall find that much can be done with this one. (shrink)

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.

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.

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)