In this paper I explore the relationship between the idea of possible worlds and the notion of the beauty of God. I argue that there is a clear contradiction between the idea that God is utterly and completely beautiful on the one hand and the notion that He contains within himself all possible worlds on the other. Since some of the possible worlds residing in the mind of the deity are ugly, their presence seems to compromise God's complete and utter (...) beauty. (shrink)

In this article I reply to Jon Robson's objections to my argument that God does not contain any possible worlds. I had argued that ugly possible worlds clearly compromise God's beauty. Robson argues that I failed to show that possible worlds can be subject to aesthetic evaluation, and that even if they were it could be the case that ugliness might contribute to God's overall beauty. In reply I try to show that possible worlds are aesthetically evaluable by (...) arguing that possible worlds are maximally rich representations of possible events. I further argue that nothing in God's being can be aesthetically non-evaluable since God must be maximal beauty – a beauteous maximality which needs no ugliness. Finally I show in what sense Christ's heavenly scars can be beautiful. (shrink)

My concern is to overturn the Leibnizean model of God's creation of the world which proposes that God selected a possible world out of a whole host of other alternative ones. This is the familiar possible worlds model of creation. I argue that this understanding of creation does not take seriously the idea of ex nihilo and that, rather than considering determinate possible worlds, we should understand possibility as indeterminate. I then develop this argument and explores how it impacts on (...) the idea of providence, and the problem of evil. I then explore the notion of creativity. Only a God who can make something utterly novel is a God who is making something different from Himself and which consequently has no divine precedent. A God who uses possible worlds makes nothing new. -/- . (shrink)

This book is a new interpretation of Schelling's path-breaking 1809 treatise on freedom, the last major work published during his lifetime. The treatise is at the heart of the current Schelling renaissance—indeed, Heidegger calls it "one of the most profound works of German, thus of Western, philosophy." It is also one of the most demanding and complex texts in German Idealism. By tracing the problem of ground through Schelling's treatise, this book provides a unified reading of the text, while unlocking (...) the meaning of its most challenging passages through clear, detailed analysis. This analysis shows how Schelling's implicit distinction between senses of ground is the key to his project of constructing a system that can satisfy reason while accommodating objects that seem to defy rational explanation—including evil, the origins of nature, and absolute freedom. This allows Schelling to unite reason and mystery, providing a rich model for philosophizing about freedom and evil today. (shrink)

John White (2016) defends the UK private school system from the accusation that it allows an unfair form of ‘queue jumping’ in university admissions. He offers two responses to this accusation, one based on considerations of harm, and one based on meritocratic distribution of university places. We will argue that neither response succeeds: the queue-jumping argument remains a powerful case against the private school system in the UK. We begin by briefly outlining the queue-jumping argument (§1), before evaluating White’s no-harm (...) (§2) and meritocracy (§3) arguments. (shrink)

As engineering applications require management of ever larger volumes of data, ontologies offer the potential to capture, manage, and augment data with the capability for automated reasoning and semantic querying. Unfortunately, considerable barriers hinder wider deployment of ontologies in engineering. Key among these is lack of a shared top-level ontology to unify and organise disparate aspects of the field and coordinate co-development of orthogonal ontologies. As a result, many engineering ontologies are limited to their scope, and functionally difficult to extend (...) or interoperate with other engineering ontologies. This paper demonstrates how the use of a top-level ontology, specifically the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), greatly facilitates interoperability of multiple engineering-related ontologies. We constructed a system of formal linked ontologies by re-engineering legacy ontologies to be conformant with BFO and developing new BFO-conformant ontologies to capture knowledge in the engineering design, enterprise, human factors, manufacturing, and application domain of additive manufacturing. The resulting Integrated Framework for Additively Manufactured Products (IFAMP), including the body knowledge instantiated on its basis, serve as the basis for a proposed Design with Additive Manufacturing Method (DWAM), which we believe can support the design of innovative products with semantically enhanced ideation tools and enhanced access to application domain knowledge. The method and its facilitation through the ontological framework are demonstrated using a case study in medicine. (shrink)

Hartry Field has argued that mathematical realism is epistemologically problematic, because the realist is unable to explain the supposed reliability of our mathematical beliefs. In some of his discussions of this point, Field backs up his argument by saying that our purely mathematical beliefs do not ‘counterfactually depend on the facts’. I argue that counterfactual dependence is irrelevant in this context; it does nothing to bolster Field's argument.

Much of the literature from political psychology has focused on the negative traits that are positively associated with affective polarization—e.g., animus, arrogance, distrust, hostility, and outrage. Not as much attention has been focused on the positive traits that might be negatively associated with polarization. For instance, given that people who are intellectually humble display greater openness and less hostility towards conflicting viewpoints (Krumrei-Mancuso & Rouse, 2016; Hopkin et al., 2014; Porter & Schumann, 2018), one might reasonably expect them to be (...) less polarized. -/- We ran two studies designed to explore the relationship between various forms of humility and polarization. Our chief finding is that people who value humility are prone to what we are calling epistemic polarization—that is, judging the epistemic traits of contrapartisans negatively—which in turn plays a role in polarization more generally. Not only are contrapartisans deemed to have the wrong moral and political beliefs, they are also viewed as less humble and more arrogant, close-minded, and irrational. This makes matters even worse when it comes to the growing partisan divide. In light of our findings, we believe that the novel concept of epistemic polarization that we introduce is a promising target for further investigation. (shrink)

The success of the early music movement has long raised questions about performing historical works: Should musicians perform on period instruments and try to reconstruct the original style? If a historically “authentic” performance is impossible or undesirable, what should be the goal of the early music movement? I turn to Gadamer to answer these questions by constructing the outlines of a hermeneutics of early music performance. In the first half of the paper, I examine Gadamer’s critique of historical reconstruction and (...) argue that this critique sheds light on mistaken tendencies and misunderstandings within the early music movement, but it does not discredit the movement as such. In the second half of the paper, I attempt to show how Gadamer’s dialogical account of historical consciousness provides a framework for understanding what historically informed performance is seeking to accomplish, as well as its advantage over a Nietzschean approach. (shrink)

In the Freedom Essay, Schelling provides four different accounts of the copula, two of which are largely implicit. In this paper, I focus on the first of these accounts, which I call the "mediated account." I argue that this explanation of the copula articulates a fundamental ontological structure in Schelling's philosophy. In the first half of the paper, I analyze the structural features of the account, drawing on Schelling's more extensive treatment in the Ages of the World. In the second (...) half of the paper, I argue that Schelling's fundamental distinction between that-which-exists and the ground of existence exhibits the same structure as the mediated account of the copula. This has implications for understanding the enigmatic relationship of these two principles to the Ungrund. I conclude by briefly suggesting other applications of this fundamental structure in Schelling's philosophy. (shrink)

Review article on Philipp Höfele's book "Wollen und Lassen: Zur Ausdifferenzierung, Kritik und Rezeption des Willensparadigmas in der Philosophie Schellings" (Freiburg: Alber, 2019). The book demonstrates why Schelling is not an uncritical predecessor of Nietzsche and the will to power, as Heidegger alleges. Instead, Schelling displays an ambivalent attitude toward willing—affirming it in some forms, critiquing or rejecting it in others. Above all, Schelling’s thought on the will has many layers of complexity: it includes not only a variety of forms (...) of willing, but also “fringe phenomena” like non-willing or Gelassenheit that are ordinarily placed in opposition to will. Moreover, Schelling’s philosophy of will is distinctive in not conceiving willing and letting-be as either-or alternatives, as Heidegger tends to do. Especially in the late lectures, Schelling brings them together, showing how non-voluntary phenomena like Gelassenheit make an authentic willing possible. (shrink)

In this essay, I give an analysis of the account of non-being in the Weltalter, focusing on the ways in which this account reflects Schelling’s new ontology of revelation. I begin by discussing the connection between non-being and the fundamental distinction between the principles in God. I then turn to the relationship of non-being to being in the Weltalter and show how a new meaning of being allows Schelling to distinguish non-being from nothing. The new meaning of being also makes (...) possible a distinction between essential non-being and de facto non-being; this distinction allows for the temporal sequence of revelation and the possibility of evil. I conclude by showing the implications of Schelling’s theory of non-being for his understanding of creation. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate the relationship between the serious and the playful elements in Socrates’ character as these unfold within the context of Xenophon’s Symposium. For the Greeks, the concept of value is attached to the meaning of seriousness, and this accounts for the natural preference for the serious over the playful. Despite the potential rivalry of the playful and philosophy, Socrates mixes the playful with the serious in such a way as to conceal their boundary. This mixing serves (...) the purpose of education, by both attracting us to Socrates and placing us at a distance from the intended meaning of his words. (shrink)

Review article on Alexander Schnell’s book “Hinaus: Entwürfe zu einer phänomenologischen Metaphysik und Anthropologie” (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2011). According to Schnell, an exclusively descriptive phenomenology is not enough; phenomenology must also be constructive. He thus outlines an ambitious project for constructive phenomenology that promises (1) to provide an ultimate justification for knowledge and (2) to ground a phenomenological metaphysics and anthropology, each of which is centered on the “image” (Bild). Insofar as Schnell fills in the details of this outline, (...) his analysis is careful, provocative, and filled with insight. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

Exploring online criticisms of the ‘take the knee’ protest during ‘Euro 2020’, this article examines how alt- and far-right conspiracies were both constructed and communicated via the social media platform, Twitter. By providing a novel exploration of alt-right conspiracies during an international football tournament, a qualitative thematic analysis of 1,388 original tweets relating to Euro 2020 was undertaken. The findings reveal how, in criticisms levelled at both ‘wokeism’ and the Black Lives Matter movement, antiwhite criticisms of the ‘take the knee’ (...) protest were embroiled in alt-right conspiracies that exposed an assumed Cultural Marxist, ‘woke agenda’ in the tournament’s organization and mainstream media coverage. In conclusion, it is argued that conspiratorial discourses, associated with the alt-right, provided a framework through which the protest could be understood. This emphasises how the significance of conspiracy functions to promote the wider dissemination of alt-right ideology across popular cultural contexts, such as sport. (shrink)

This excellent book focuses on a decisive moment in Schelling's philosophical development: his 1801 dispute with Eschenmayer shortly before publishing Presentation of My System, the inaugural text of his identity philosophy. Carl August Eschenmayer was a German physician whose Kant-inspired writings in the philosophy of nature greatly influenced Schelling, especially with respect to the doctrine of the potencies. As Berger and Whistler demonstrate, the 1801 controversy has significant implications for understanding the trajectory of German Idealism and its debates on methodology, (...) the meaning of identity, and the place of nature in philosophy. (shrink)

This book aims to present a richer alternative to the popular conception of freedom as the power to choose by giving an account of freedom in Schiller, Schelling, and Hegel. Despite my points of criticism (especially with regard to moral responsibility and the freedom to do evil), the contributions of the book are significant. By posing and developing the question of the relationship between freedom and actuality, Schindler introduces a problem that any complete account of freedom must address. At the (...) same time, Schindler provides us with a useful framework for relating Schelling and Hegel on freedom. Finally, the book gives an overview of the potential richness that a fuller conception of freedom provides. (shrink)

This collection is the first volume published by Cambridge University Press devoted exclusively to Schelling scholarship. It contains eleven essays on diverse topics in Schelling’s philosophy, covering the entirety of his philosophical development, but mostly focusing on writings up to 1815. A number of the contributors are well-established scholars best known for their work on other thinkers in German Idealism. The volume thus offers readings of Schelling that are especially sensitive to his relationship to other figures in classical German philosophy. (...) Perhaps the richest contribution in the volume is Manfred Frank’s essay on Schelling’s theory of identity, which covers the theory’s historical sources, its application to the mind-body problem, and Schelling’s disagreement with Hegel. In any case, the wide historical range of these essays and the diversity of their topics offer an excellent overview of Schelling’s philosophical development. (shrink)

The translational research community, in general, and the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) community, in particular, share the vision of repurposing EHRs for research that will improve the quality of clinical practice. Many members of these communities are also aware that electronic health records (EHRs) suffer limitations of data becoming poorly structured, biased, and unusable out of original context. This creates obstacles to the continuity of care, utility, quality improvement, and translational research. Analogous limitations to sharing objective data in (...) other areas of the natural sciences have been successfully overcome by developing and using common ontologies. This White Paper presents the authors’ rationale for the use of ontologies with computable semantics for the improvement of clinical data quality and EHR usability formulated for researchers with a stake in clinical and translational science and who are advocates for the use of information technology in medicine but at the same time are concerned by current major shortfalls. This White Paper outlines pitfalls, opportunities, and solutions and recommends increased investment in research and development of ontologies with computable semantics for a new generation of EHRs. (shrink)

Objectives. The purpose of this study was to conduct the first randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the effectiveness of a second-generation mindfulness-based intervention (SG-MBI) for treating fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS). Compared to first generation mindfulness-based interventions, SG-MBIs are more acknowledging of the spiritual aspect of mindfulness. Design. A RCT employing intent-to-treat analysis. Methods. Adults with FMS received an 8-week SG-MBI known as meditation awareness training (MAT; n = 74) or an active control intervention known as cognitive behaviour theory for groups (...) (n = 74). Assessments were performed at pre-, post-, and 6-month follow-up phases. Results. Meditation awareness training participants demonstrated significant and sustained improvements over control group participants in FMS symptomatology, pain perception, sleep quality, psychological distress, non-attachment (to self, symptoms, and environment), and civic engagement. A mediation analysis found that (1) civic engagement partially mediated treatment effects for all outcome variables, (2) non-attachment partially mediated treatment effects for psychological distress and sleep quality, and (3) non-attachment almost fully mediated treatment effects for FMS symptomatology and pain perception. Average daily time spent in meditation was found to be a significant predictor of changes in all outcome variables. Conclusions. Meditation awareness training may be a suitable treatment for adults with FMS and appears to ameliorate FMS symptomatology and pain perception by reducing attachment to self. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 28, Issue 2, pp 132 - 148 A striking feature of Thomas Hobbes’s account of political obligation is his discussion of the Fool, who thinks it reasonable to adopt a policy of selective, self-interested covenant breaking. Surprisingly, scholars have paid little attention to the potential of a psychological defense of Hobbes’s controversial claim that the Fool behaves irrationally. In this paper, I first describe Hobbes’s account of the Fool and argue that the kind of Fool most (...) worth considering is the covert, long-term Fool. Then I advance and critically assess two psychological arguments according to which the Fool’s policy of self-interested covenant breaking is prudentially irrational. The first argument holds that, taken together, the deep guilt from early-stage covenant breaking, the cumulative guilt from continued covenant breaking, and the high statistical risk of detection during high-volume covenant breaking render the Fool’s policy irrational. The second argument holds that the Fool’s policy is irrational because it puts him at risk of adopting a psychologically intolerable view of his fellow covenanters and, specifically, the extent to which they can be trusted. (shrink)

Philosophers have tended to construe friendship as an intimate relationship involving mutual love, and have focused their discussions on this ‘true’ form of friendship. However, everyone recognizes that we use the word ‘friend’ and its cognates to refer, non-ironically, to those with whom we share various relationships that are not terribly intimate or which do not involve mutual love. I argue that there exists no general reason to restrict our philosophical focus to ‘true’ friendships, and allege that we can gain (...) important insights if we broaden our perspective to include lesser friends. I contend that friendships, in the broad sense (encompassing both ‘true’ and lesser forms), are necessarily relationships that are the product of significant collaborative norm manipulation. And I argue that understanding friendship in this way helps explain important features, including the difference between friendships and familiar relations, the non-fungibility of friends, and why friendships are often in flux. (shrink)

Some objects we value because they afford a felt connection with people, events, or places connected with their past. Visiting Canterbury cathedral, you encounter the place where, in 1170, Archbishop Thomas Becket was murdered by four knights of Henry II. Knowing that you are standing in the very place where Becket’s blood was spilled gives the past event a sense of tangible reality. One feels ‘in touch with’ the past; history seems to ‘come alive’. In this paper, I propose (...) an explanation for the phenomenology of such experiences in terms of an imaginative activity that represents what an object is historically connected with as part of the object in the present. One imagines of the site of Becket’s murder Becket being murdered. According to my account, objects that embody their histories are representations in Kendall Walton’s sense: they have the function of serving as props in games of make-believe. (shrink)

This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes—from global tourism to undocumented labor—have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time. Rather than viewing migration as the exception to (...) the rule of political fixity and citizenship, Thomas Nail reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant in the first place. Applying his "kinopolitics" to several major historical conditions and figures of migration, he provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary migration. (shrink)

Moral and political forms of constructivism accord to people strong, “constitutive” forms of discursive standing and so build on, or express, a commitment to discursive respect. The paper explores dimensions of discursive respect, i.e., depth, scope, and purchase; it addresses tenuous interdependencies between them; on this basis, it identifies limitations of the idea of discursive respect and of constructivism. The task of locating discursive respect in the normative space defined by its three dimensions is partly, and importantly, an ethical task (...) that is beyond constructivism. Interdependencies between these dimensions call into question the possibility of a plausible and coherent form of discursive respect that is deep, inclusive in scope, and rich in purchase. This does not mean that we should reject discursive respect, or constructivism, for that matter. But it suggests that the task of reconciling the dimensions of discursive respect may not allow for widely shareable results. This task needs to be addressed on non-constructivist grounds. Accordingly, we have reasons to concede that constitutive forms of discursive standing are less fundamental in the order of justification than weaker, “derivative” forms, and this is so especially if we take constitutive standing to mark an important good. (shrink)

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to present a topological method for constructing discretizations (tessellations) of conceptual spaces. The method works for a class of topological spaces that the Russian mathematician Pavel Alexandroff defined more than 80 years ago. Alexandroff spaces, as they are called today, have many interesting properties that distinguish them from other topological spaces. In particular, they exhibit a 1-1 correspondence between their specialization orders and their topological structures. Recently, a special type of Alexandroff spaces was (...) used by Ian Rumfitt to elucidate the logic of vague concepts in a new way. According to his approach, conceptual spaces such as the color spectrum give rise to classical systems of concepts that have the structure of atomic Boolean algebras. More precisely, concepts are represented as regular open regions of an underlying conceptual space endowed with a topological structure. Something is subsumed under a concept iff it is represented by an element of the conceptual space that is maximally close to the prototypical element p that defines that concept. This topological representation of concepts comes along with a representation of the familiar logical connectives of Aristotelian syllogistics in terms of natural settheoretical operations that characterize regular open interpretations of classical Boolean propositional logic. In the last 20 years, conceptual spaces have become a popular tool of dealing with a variety of problems in the fields of cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics and philosophy, mainly due to the work of Peter Gärdenfors and his collaborators. By using prototypes and metrics of similarity spaces, one obtains geometrical discretizations of conceptual spaces by so-called Voronoi tessellations. These tessellations are extensionally equivalent to topological tessellations that can be constructed for Alexandroff spaces. Thereby, Rumfitt’s and Gärdenfors’s constructions turn out to be special cases of an approach that works for a more general class of spaces, namely, for weakly scattered Alexandroff spaces. This class of spaces provides a convenient framework for conceptual spaces as used in epistemology and related disciplines in general. Alexandroff spaces are useful for elucidating problems related to the logic of vague concepts, in particular they offer a solution of the Sorites paradox (Rumfitt). Further, they provide a semantics for the logic of clearness (Bobzien) that overcomes certain problems of the concept of higher2 order vagueness. Moreover, these spaces help find a natural place for classical syllogistics in the framework of conceptual spaces. The crucial role of order theory for Alexandroff spaces can be used to refine the all-or-nothing distinction between prototypical and nonprototypical stimuli in favor of a more fine-grained gradual distinction between more-orless prototypical elements of conceptual spaces. The greater conceptual flexibility of the topological approach helps avoid some inherent inadequacies of the geometrical approach, for instance, the so-called “thickness problem” (Douven et al.) and problems of selecting a unique metric for similarity spaces. Finally, it is shown that only the Alexandroff account can deal with an issue that is gaining more and more importance for the theory of conceptual spaces, namely, the role that digital conceptual spaces play in the area of artificial intelligence, computer science and related disciplines. Keywords: Conceptual Spaces, Polar Spaces, Alexandroff Spaces, Prototypes, Topological Tessellations, Voronoi Tessellations, Digital Topology. (shrink)

Abstract: We propose a view of vagueness as a semantic property of names and predicates. All entities are crisp, on this semantic view, but there are, for each vague name, multiple portions of reality that are equally good candidates for being its referent, and, for each vague predicate, multiple classes of objects that are equally good candidates for being its extension. We provide a new formulation of these ideas in terms of a theory of granular partitions. We show that this (...) theory provides a general framework within which we can understand the relation between vague terms and concepts and the corresponding crisp portions of reality. We also sketch how it might be possible to formulate within this framework a theory of vagueness which dispenses with the notion of truth-value gaps and other artifacts of more familiar approaches. Central to our approach is the idea that judgments about reality involve in every case (1) a separation of reality into foreground and background of attention and (2) the feature of granularity. On this basis we attempt to show that even vague judgments made in naturally occurring contexts are not marked by truth-value indeterminacy. We distinguish, in addition to crisp granular partitions, also vague partitions, and reference partitions, and we explain the role of the latter in the context of judgments that involve vagueness. We conclude by showing how reference partitions provide an effective means by which judging subjects are able to temper the vagueness of their judgments by means of approximations. (shrink)

In 2016, this Journal published an article by Rob Lawlor1 on what we might call the acceptance-refusal asymmetry in competence requirements. This is the view that there can be cases in which a patient is sufficiently competent to accept a treatment ( viz., to give consent to it), but not sufficiently competent to refuse it ( viz., to withhold consent to it). Though the main purpose of Lawlor’s paper was to distinguish this asymmetry from various other asymmetries with which it (...) has sometimes been confused,1 Lawlor also presented a brief case in favour of it. Developing an earlier argument of Ian Wilks’,2 3 Lawlor argued that, when the risks associated with refusing a treatment are graver than those associated with accepting it, a higher level of competence may be required to refuse a treatment than to accept it. This claim could have important implications for the law, since determinations of competence often play a central role in determining the lawfulness of refusing or imposing a treatment (eg, in England and Wales under the Mental Capacity Act 2005). Indeed, the acceptance-refusal asymmetry in competence requirements, or something close to it, has played an important role in court judgments.2 However, Lawlor himself suggests that his conclusion will have practical implications only in a narrow range of cases.3 In this issue, Pickering, Giles Newton-Howes and Simon Walker (henceforth ‘the authors’) respond to Lawlor’s piece.4 They deny that competence requirements should depend on the level of risk associated with a decision, and thus that there is any basis for the acceptance-refusal asymmetry in competence requirements. Part of the authors’ argument involves contesting the way in which Lawlor uses cases to support his view. In one case cited by Lawlor—and drawn from Wilks—we are invited to consider a whether …. (shrink)

The idea that Derrida kept silent on Marx before the publication of Spectres de Marx, in 1993, has become a commonplace in Derrida studies and in the history of Marxism and French 20th century political thought. This idea has often been accompanied by a certain representation of the relationship between deconstruction and dialectical materialism, and fed the legend of deconstruction’s «apoliticism» – at least before what some have called Derrida’s «ethicopolitical turn», usually dated in the early 1990s. Against this narrative, (...) this essay analyzes Derrida’s notorious «silence on Marx» before Specters of Marx from the perspective of the archives. Archival research transforms the narrative: Derrida’s «silence on Marx» was only «relative». Beyond the scene of publications, archives reveal another scene: multiple engagements with Marx and Marxist thought, marked and remarked in many archival documents – more particularly in a series of early seminar notes from the 1960s and 1970s. How does this archival scene transform our interpretation of Derrida’s «silence»? (shrink)

(1) In the first part of this paper, I review Chomsky's meandering journey from the formalism/mentalism of Syntactic Structures, through several methodological positions, to the minimalist theory of his latest work. Infected with mentalism from first to last, each and every position vitiates Chomsky's repeated claims that his theories will provide useful guidance to later theories in such fields as cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. With the guidance of his insights, he claims, psychologists and neuroscientists will be able to avoid (...) costly dead-end lines of research. -/- (2) This never happened. As I have shown, this never could have happened. (See Johnston, 2018). What has happened, instead, is that current neurolinguistic research (with the arguable exception of the now-dated Lemma Model of Willem Levelt) proceeds without reference to Chomsky. It also wholeheartedly rejects the mentalism of the associated Language of Thought theory of Jerry Fodor. (See Johnston, 2018). -/- (3) I make this argument in the first part of this paper. I would also like to point out that most of my argument was developed in 1972, when I was a graduate student. I know of no other sustained criticisms of Chomsky at that time, and certainly none along the lines I had developed back then. -/- (4) In the second part of this paper, I present my own account of the methodology of science. When I was a graduate student, philosophy of science was dominated by an attempt to describe a methodology common to all the specific sciences, i.e. Hempel’s deductive-nomological model. These days, Hempel’s emphasis on the methodological unity of science has been rejected by such “dis-unity” philosophers of science as Ian Hacking, Patrick Suppes and Nancy Cartwright (see Cat, 2021). -/- (5) I view this change as the swing of a pendulum or, to change the metaphor, a journey from one end point of a continuum to another. As the level of abstraction at which one tries to describe scientific method is raised, the descriptions become increasingly general. Whether or not unity-of-science theories become so general as to be vacuous, is ultimately a subjective judgment. And so I expect that philosophers will eventually become tired of increasingly specific “close to the workbench” descriptions of how scientists work, and begin to turn back to methodological “big pictures”, finding in them powerful abstractions rather than empty irrelevancies. -/- (6) In the second part of this paper, I present my own account of the methodology of science, which I would situate somewhere between the “unity” and “dis-unity” accounts. However, I am not a scientist. My own views about scientific method have three origins: -/- (6a) my work as a graduate student from 1966 until I passed my comprehensive exams in 1973 (at a different university); -/- (6b) reading every issue of Scientific American from 1972 until nearly 2000, (at which point I continued to read it only sporadically, since I concluded that, around that time, it had evolved from a serious science magazine to a popular science magazine); and -/- (6c) my three-year immersion in the cognitive neuroscience of language after I retired, based on repeated study of and note-taking for (Banesh & Compton, 2018), (Kemmerer, 2015), several other books and, finally, numerous articles not hidden behind a paywall. -/- So, as always with my writings: caveat emptor. (shrink)

I provide in this paper an examination of the influence of Immanuel Kant on the internal realist Hilary Putnam. I begin by discussing Putnam’s transition from external, or metaphysical, realism to internal realism, and argue in favor of the view that Kant is best understood as an internal realist. Where Putnam is concerned, I am interested here only in his versions of external and internal realism and not with his more recent views. Having laid out a case for internal realism, (...) I go on to discuss and defend Putnam’s interpretation of Kant’s views on the nature of truth, arguing that although Kant accepts correspondence as a nominal definition of truth, he should not be understood as endorsing the metaphysical realist conception of truth. I conclude by arguing against those, including Ian Hacking and Allen Wood, who believe that the internal realist Putnam misinterpreted Kant on the nature of truth. This criticism rests on a misunderstanding of what Kant must have meant by ‘correspondence.’ Kant does not offer a theory of truth, but had he done so, his theory would be compatible with the internal realist Putnam’s. The view that their views on the nature of truth are incompatible is founded largely on misunderstanding of Kant, Putnam or both. (shrink)

This article pursues the exploration of how contemporary works of deconstruction can challenge preconceptions of the body and embodiments and interrogate their limits, particularly in relation to intertwined foldings of desire, gender, race and sexuality. Through readings of Jacques Derrida and Sarah Kofman, the authors show that deconstruction allows for an understanding of the body or bodies that goes beyond the present body — indexed as human, male, white, able, living body — thus opening up towards the thinking of bodies (...) and corporealities exceeding the limitations of Christian transsubstantiation and of the Eucharist. The deconstructive body is not one of communion; it is one of (self-)interruption, différance and non-presence. It is the other's body — or the body as otherly. The authors then analyse the ethical-political implications of this thinking of another body, one inassimilable by Western metaphysics, and marked by incalculable sexual differences, animality, undecidable life-death, machinicity, monstrosity, and so on. (shrink)

Response to commentary. We are grateful to Crockett and Craigie for their interesting remarks on our paper. We accept Crockett’s claim that there is a need for caution in drawing inferences about patient groups from work on healthy volunteers in the laboratory. However, we believe that the evidence we cited established a strong presumption that many of the patients who are routinely taking a medication, including many people properly prescribed the medication for a medical condition, have morally significant aspects of (...) their cognition and behavior modified in a way that is unintended and may sometimes be unwelcome. Crockett notes that in some cases the effects of long-term drug use may differ, sometimes markedly, from the effects of short-term use. However, if acute use of a drug affects a neural system involved in mediating moral cognition or behavior, this nevertheless provides some evidence that chronic use of the drug may affect that same system and thus have morally significant effects. It is also plausible, in some cases, that an acute moral effect would give rise to a chronic moral effect via cognitive mechanisms. ... (shrink)

What is paradoxical about the Socratic paradoxes is that they are not paradoxical at all. Socrates famously argued that knowledge is sufficient for virtue and that no one errs willingly. Both doctrines are discussed in the Protagoras between Socrates and the Abderian sophist, however the argumentative line that Socrates chooses to follow in order to refute ‘the many’ has raised a serious degree of controversy among scholars. Is Socrates upholding the hedonistic view? Or, is he only trying to show the (...) bankruptcy of the explanation of akrasia as ‘being overcome by pleasure’ which ‘the many’ advocate? Socrates intends to do the latter, showing that this hedonistic explanation of akrasia leads to absurdity. Plato’s and Socrates’ identification of goodness with pleasure would mark a sudden and unexplained departure from their moral theories, and would render the Socratic denial of akrasia an argument with limited range –only for those assuming hedonism. If we are correct to hold that Socrates does not intend to identify the good with the pleasant, then we are immediately put against a new and much more difficult challenge; that is, to suggest how the Socratic denial of akrasia could regain its catholic plausibility against the commonsensical stance to akrasia, namely that people act against their best judgment due to their impotence to resist to motivational forces such as pleasure, pain, fear, passion and love. Socrates does not offer any other explicit account –apart from the hedonistic one- of how his doctrine could be catholically defended; hence the task of decoding the Socratic line of thought is far from an easy one. The key move in order to decode the puzzling Socratic doctrine is to understand how Socrates treats the notion of ‘knowledge’. For Socrates, moral knowledge is distinguished from mere belief; in this sense, only knowledge has the commanding power which enables one to sustain his best evaluative judgment against other motivational forces and only knowledge is sufficient for the virtuous conduct. By contrast, as mere belief is susceptible to other motivational forces like pleasure, pain, fear, etc. its possessor will, in turn, be susceptible to the revision of his intentions which derive from his best value judgment. In the Protagoras, Socrates implies that intentions grounded on belief can be ‘dragged around’ by desire; and according to my view in this paper, this Socratic stance allows a non-epistemic interpretation of his thesis. According to the traditional epistemic interpretation of the Socratic denial of akrasia, one’s wrongdoing is always a miscalculation that takes place on his practical syllogism. However, my understanding of the Socratic denial of akrasia allows cases of one even going against his best judgment, when his judgment is based on belief. In that sense, a judgment grounded on belief has insufficient power to guarantee that the chosen action will follow, whereas only judgments grounded on knowledge have a commanding and lordly power. For Socrates, everyone always goes for the good but only those with knowledge can infallibly discover and act on the good. Those with mere belief can only reach an apparent good, which may be good or bad. The motivation for the good is not unshakeable for those with mere belief since the grounding of their belief is scarcely strong enough to hold on the correct intention. Socrates therefore holds that the grounding of knowledge influences the motivational state of the moral agent. Thereupon, my interpretation differs from others in suggesting that for Socrates not all the cases of akrasia are cognitive mistakes in their judgment. Rather I hold, in opposition to the received stance on akrasia, that Socrates allows that one could act against his best judgment, when the latter is grounded on mere belief. (shrink)

The idea that human beings are intellectually self-governing plays two roles in free-speech theory. First, this idea is frequently called upon as part of the justification for free speech. Second, it plays a role in guiding the translation of free-speech principles into legal policy by underwriting the ascriptive framework through which responsibility for certain kinds of speech harms can be ascribed. After mapping out these relations, I ask what becomes of them once we acknowledge certain very general and profound limitations (...) in people's capacity for intellectual self-governance. I argue that acknowledging these limitations drastically undermines the putative justifications for free speech of the type that I identify in the first part of the paper. I then show how we can reformulate an account of intellectual and doxastic responsibility on which we may still be held responsible for what we think or believe even though we lack agent-causal capacities in our thinking and believing. Then, in light of this ascriptive account of intellectual responsibility, I show how the key ideahave minds of their owncan (and should) still play a significant role in guiding the legislative outworkings of free speech. (shrink)

Mathematical formalism is the the view that numbers are "signs" and that arithmetic is like a game played with such signs. Frege's colleague Thomae defended formalism using an analogy with chess, and Frege's critique of this analogy has had a major influence on discussions in analytic philosophy about signs, rules, meaning, and mathematics. Here I offer a new interpretation of formalism as defended by Thomae and his predecessors, paying close attention to the mathematical details and historical context. I argue that (...) for Thomae, the formal standpoint is an _algebraic perspective_ on a domain of objects, and a "sign" is not a linguistic expression or mark, but a representation of an object within that perspective. Thomae exploits a shift into this perspective to give a purely algebraic construction of the real numbers from the rational numbers. I suggest that Thomae's chess analogy is intended to provide a model for such shifts in perspective. (shrink)

The paper leans on a movie cult from the 1960s, Blow-Up (1966) by Michelangelo Antonioni, of which a famous sequence is often mentioned, the one in which the protagonist, the photographer Thomas (considered here as a "conceptual character"), repeatedly enlarged the photographs he made in a park, in order to find an answer to the mystery surrounding the murder of a man: magnification which leads, on the one hand, to a gradual loss of definition of images, with the grain (...) of the picture becoming more and more evident, but also, on the other, in the emergence, from the very material of the print, of a fundamental detail that will help solve the mystery. What interests is the link between indicative referentiality and evidence documentary, between degrees of definition and authentication powers. The paper also analyzes the links that intertwine, in the film, between the photographs of Thomas (by Don McCullin) and paintings painted by another character of the movie, Bill (directed by Ian Stephenson), but also, outside the film, with all a series of examples from artistic production and visual culture of the time: very low definition images of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas (the famous Zapruder Film), the portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald directed by Sigmar Polke by simulating the halftone technique, the war photographs of Don McCullin and David Bailey's Fashion Photographs, Random Earths Studies by Mark Boyle and Joan Hills, Materialologies and Texturologies by Jean Dubuffet, as well as Zen for Film by Nam June Paik. Fimiani's text addresses also two contemporary installations which have tried to return to the issues from the photographic sequence of Antonioni's film: Blow-Up Blow-Up (2010) by Joan Fontcuberta and Portrait Landscape (from the Object Classifier series) (2015) by John Houck, an installation in which photograms of Blow-Up are analyzed through facial recognition software. (shrink)

I offer an account of the virtue of intellectual humility, construed as a pair of dispositions enabling proper management of one's intellectual confidence. I then show its integral role in a range of familiar educational practices and concerns, and finally describe how certain entrenched educational attitudes and conceptions marginalise or militate against the cultivation and exercise of this virtue.

In his book The Things We Mean, Stephen Schiffer advances a subtle defence of what he calls the ‘face-value’ analysis of attributions of belief and reports of speech. Under this analysis, ‘Harold believes that there is life on Venus’ expresses a relation between Harold and a certain abstract object, the proposition that there is life on Venus. The present essay first proposes an improvement to Schiffer’s ‘pleonastic’ theory of propositions. It then challenges the face-value analysis. There will be such things (...) as propositions only if they possess conditions of identity and distinctness. By analyzing Frege’s theory of propositions (Gedanken), I argue that such conditions may be found for the special case of beliefs and sayings advanced as premises and conclusions of deductive arguments. These conditions, however, are not applicable to most ordinary beliefs and sayings. Ordinary attributions and reports, then, do not place thinkers and speakers in relations to propositions. A bonus is exposure of the fallacy in the Putnam-Taschek objection to Frege’s theory of sense and reference. (shrink)

Although critics often argue that the new atheists are arrogant, dogmatic, closed-minded and so on, there is currently no philosophical analysis of this complaint - which I will call 'the vice charge' - and no assessment of whether it is merely a rhetorical aside or a substantive objection in its own right. This Chapter therefore uses the resources of virtue epistemology to articulate this ' vice charge' and to argue that critics are right to imply that new atheism is intrinsically (...) epistemically vicious, and it ends with some remarks about the rationality of allowing such intrinsically vicious doctrines to feature within public debate about important matters concerning science, religion, and politics. (shrink)

It is very well known that from the late-1960s onwards Feyerabend began to radically challenge some deeply-held ideas about the history and methodology of the sciences. It is equally well known that, from around the same period, he also began to radically challenge wider claims about the value and place of the sciences within modern societies, for instance by calling for the separation of science and the state and by questioning the idea that the sciences served to liberate and ameliorate (...) human societies. But what is less known is how, if at all, these two sets of challenges were connected, and why Feyerabend felt it important to raise them at all. In this chapter, my aim is to explore these issues by considering why Feyerabend used radical strategies to challenge the authority of science, and what purpose, if any, they were supposed to serve. Why, for instance, did Feyerabend defend alternative medicine, psychical abilities, astrology, magic and witchcraft and why did he argue that ‘Western science’ is complicit in environmental destruction, intellectual imperialism, social oppression, and spiritual destitution. Located in their historical and political context, such defences and arguments seem peculiar, not least because science was recognised not only as a central site of the intellectual and ideological competition between the West and the Soviet Union, but also because Western victory in that site was considered inevitable. What, then, did Feyerabend think he was trying to achieve by raising radical challenges to a central component of the cultural and intellectual prestige of the Western world grounded in appeals to practices and traditions which most would regard as eccentric at best and absurd at worst? My suggestion is that Feyerabend was making a subtler point than one might suppose. For the purpose of these radical challenges was to determine if the members of Western societies would in fact honour the epistemic standards – of tolerance, critical enquiry – which were identified as being characteristic of science and definitive of the social and political values of Western liberal democracy. I suggest that Feyerabend was trying to demonstrate that scientists were, too often, guilty of the same intolerant and dogmatic attitudes which were, according to prevailing propaganda, the property of illiberal totalitarian societies. Science does not reflect the superior epistemic and political values of Western societies but are, in fact, reflective of the same vices ascribed to the Soviet Union. If that is the case, then the sciences are not symbols of our epistemic and political values, but quite the reverse, hence Feyerabend’s talk of the ‘dogmatic’, ‘totalitarian’, ‘ratiofascist’ nature of modern science. But there is a positive upshot to Feyerabend’s challenge. For even if the sciences do not yet reflect the epistemic and political values of liberal democratic Western societies, they might yet be reformed so that they are. And there is a parallel between Feyerabend’s strategy and that of many of the other radicals of the time – student activists, environmentalists, and pacifists – namely to test the commitment to tolerance and deliberative debate of the establishment by asking it to seriously engage with ideas and convictions opposed to its own. For both science and society can become ‘tyrannical’ through the same means: by exempting themselves from critical scrutiny, by promoting self-serving ‘myths’ about themselves, and by derogating and excluding alternatives, including the ‘outsider’ perspectives they offer. The chapter concludes by suggesting that Feyerabend is distinctive in virtue of his willingness to offer radical criticisms of the authority of science such that it can fulfil its legitimate ideological role – namely, of symbolising and instantiating our core epistemic and political values – such that we can offer a sincere and meaningful answer to Feyerabend’s question ‘what’s so great about science?’. (shrink)

Quietist Moral Realists accept that there are moral facts and properties, while aiming to avoid many of the explanatory burdens thought to fall on traditional moral realists. This chapter examines the forms that Quietist Moral Realism has taken and the challenges it has faced, in order to better assess its prospects. The best hope, this chapter argues, lies in a pragmatist approach that distinguishes the different functions of diverse areas of discourse. This paves the way for a form of Quietism (...) that does not simply remain quiet about the explanatory demands of metaethics, but rather is able to diagnose where they go wrong. By combining a neopragmatic analysis of the discourse with an easy approach to ontology, , we can develop a form of Quietist Moral Realism that is far stronger than critics of quietism have appreciated. (shrink)

This article deals with the feeling of strangeness in the human being. When it comes to being human, it is traditionally understood as beings containing reasons and emotions. Thus, to better understand the feeling of the foreigner, its context is analyzed on the perspective of humean moral sentimentalism and on the intertwining, proposed by Husserl, between the intellectual and affective spheres. From these philosophers one can see the convergence between the intellectual and affective spheres, as well as between reason and (...) emotion. Therefore, contemporary emotional theories bring an explanatory gain for understanding the feeling of the foreigner in the face of new environments and cultures, as both cognitive and non-cognitive elements are perceived. Therefore, Goldie and Husserl contribute to the analysis of the foreigner's feeling of strangeness in its various peculiarities. (shrink)

We are subject with consciousness. For this we have to have self-consciousness so that consciousness can exist. In this way, there is the possibility of self-knowledge of one's own mental states. Thus, the article aims at investigating the possibility of self-knowledge of one's own mental states, their applicability and consequences in relation to Kantian moral theory. Therefore, it reflects on how self-knowledge of one's own mental states and the characteristics of Kantian moral theory occur. Finally, there is the possibility of (...) moral responsibility for one's own mental states related to Kantian morality and the method of self-knowledge of the very action of the moral agent. (shrink)

This article is about self-knowledge on one's own mental states. Considering human as rational beings, this study aims to problematize the position of subject in process of self-knowledge, as well as to realize the state of knowledge about self-knowledge. In this way, Richard Moran constitutes the method of transparency about the knowledge of one's own mental states. Such a method receives some criticism from the philosopher Quassim Cassam and the philosopher Brie-Gertler. In the same extent, both authors problematize some characteristics (...) of self-knowledge, in which criticism reaches some points studied by Brazilian philosophers, namely Paulo Farias, Waldomiro Silva Filho and André Abath. The latter two authors are based on Moran's methodology and thus constitute his reflections on conditions of daily life as well as the incomplete understanding of human beings. (shrink)

Some philosophers writing on the possibility of faultless disagreement have argued that the only way to account for the intuition that there could be disagreements which are faultless in every sense is to accept a relativistic semantics. In this article we demonstrate that this view is mistaken by constructing an absolutist semantics for a particular domain – aesthetic discourse – which allows for the possibility of genuinely faultless disagreements. We argue that this position is an improvement over previous absolutist responses (...) to the relativist's challenge and that it presents an independently plausible account of the semantics of aesthetic discourse. (shrink)

There has been an explosion of interest in the metaphysics of fundamentality in recent decades. The consensus view, called metaphysical foundationalism, maintains that there is something absolutely fundamental in reality upon which everything else depends. However, a number of thinkers have chal- lenged the arguments in favor of foundationalism and have proposed competing non-foundationalist ontologies. This paper provides a systematic and critical introduction to metaphysical foundationalism in the current literature and argues that its relation to ontological dependence and substance should (...) be qualified in important ways. (shrink)

We argue that the interaction of biased media coverage and widespread employment of the recognition heuristic can produce epistemic injustices. First, we explain the recognition heuristic as studied by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, highlighting how some of its components are largely external to, and outside the control of, the cognitive agent. We then connect the recognition heuristic with recent work on the hypotheses of embedded, extended, and scaffolded cognition, arguing that the recognition heuristic is best understood as an instance of (...) scaffolded cognition. In section three, we consider the double-edged sword of cognitive scaffolding. On the one hand, scaffolds can reduce the internal processing demands on cognitive agents while increasing their access to information. On the other hand, the use of scaffolding leaves cognitive agents increasingly vulnerable to forming false beliefs or failing to form beliefs at all about particular topics. With respect to the recognition heuristic, agents rely on third parties (such as the media) to report not just what’s true but also what’s important or valuable. This makes cognitive agents relying on these third parties vulnerable to two erroneous influences: 1) because they don’t recognize something, it isn’t important or valuable, and 2) because they do recognize something, it is important or valuable. Call the latter the Kardashian Inference and the former the Darfur Inference. In section four, we use Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice to characterize the nature and harm of these false inferences, with special emphasis on the Darfur Inference. In section five, we use data-mining and an empirical study to show how Gigerenzer’s population estimation task is liable to produce Darfur Inferences. We conclude with some speculative remarks on more important Darfur Inferences, and how to avoid them by scaffolding better. One primary way to accomplish this it to shift the burden of embodying the virtue of epistemic justice from the hearer or consumer of media to the media themselves. (shrink)

During multiple testing, researchers often adjust their alpha level to control the familywise error rate for a statistical inference about a joint union alternative hypothesis (e.g., “H1,1 or H1,2”). However, in some cases, they do not make this inference. Instead, they make separate inferences about each of the individual hypotheses that comprise the joint hypothesis (e.g., H1,1 and H1,2). For example, a researcher might use a Bonferroni correction to adjust their alpha level from the conventional level of 0.050 to 0.025 (...) when testing H1,1 and H1,2, find a significant result for H1,1 (p < 0.025) and not for H1,2 (p > .0.025), and so claim support for H1,1 and not for H1,2. However, these separate individual inferences do not require an alpha adjustment. Only a statistical inference about the union alternative hypothesis “H1,1 or H1,2” requires an alpha adjustment because it is based on “at least one” significant result among the two tests, and so it refers to the familywise error rate. Hence, an inconsistent correction occurs when a researcher corrects their alpha level during multiple testing but does not make an inference about a union alternative hypothesis. In the present article, I discuss this inconsistent correction problem, including its reduction in statistical power for tests of individual hypotheses and its potential causes vis-à-vis error rate confusions and the alpha adjustment ritual. I also provide three illustrations of inconsistent corrections from recent psychology studies. I conclude that inconsistent corrections represent a symptom of statisticism, and I call for a more nuanced inference-based approach to multiple testing corrections. (shrink)