Jim Mackenzie; Evers & Walker and Forms of Knowledge, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 199–209, https://doi.org/10.

The fine arts are considered as one of several pathways toward insight, knowledge, and understanding. My reflections on this are deliberately not based on aesthetics or on philosophy of art. Speculations on fine art observe two characteristics of specific epistemic processes: first, a tacit knowledge that is not enunciated by ordinary language and, second, a present and effective logic, which has a different pattern from the logic of scientific knowledge. The latter leads to change because it is built upon accumulated (...) knowledge, whereas in the arts, change leads to knowledge as creative processes guide us toward what we do not know, and this challenges what we do know. (shrink)

s Jewish identity contributed to his philosophical outlook. His life in a Hungarian-acculturated, nonobservant Jewish family in the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; his experience as a Jew emigrating from Hitler’s Germany; and his thoughts about Zionism informed his theory of knowledge. During the late 1930s and 1940s, he worked to reconcile his Jewish identity with his commitments to Christianity, and this tension contributed to his thinking about the nature of scientific discovery. The malapropism baptized Jew characterizes the scientist (...) on the verge of discovery, one who occupies a twilight world between adherence and apostasy with regard to the scientific community. Key Words: Jewish identity • Hungarian Jews • Karl Popper • Zionism • scientific discovery. (shrink)

A book in which analytic philosophers examine the portrayal of sex in art and the possible artistic value of pornography proves a disappointment. Although a transcendental objection to pornographic art is rebutted, the papers employ barren philosophical methods that divert energy away from significant problems and into scholastic quibbles.

Popper claims that error indicates what to avoid and there is no recipe for how to proceed. Most rationalist philosophers ignore his arguments and still try to justify their views instead of trying to improve upon them by criticizing them and conjecturing alternatives. In public discourse barren forms of justification are widespread. More and better critical institutions are required, and these require political compromise on shared aims.

Chagnon narrates the ups and downs of his career, how he managed to document the basic ethnography of the Yanomamö of Amazonia, and the loss of scientific compass in American anthropology that brought a good deal of personal villification and the end of his research. The reviewer endorses the view that organized American anthropology is in an intellectually sorry state but argues that Chagnon’s anthropology of anthropology is lacking.

Anthropological discussions were important for Michael Polanyi in the middle phase of his intellectual career, in which he articulated in some detail his understanding of science, culture and society. This middle period commenced with his 1946 Riddell Memorial Lectures at Durham University in early 1946, published as Science, Faith and Society later that year, and extended through the publication of Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy in 1958, based on Polanyi’s 1951 and 1952 Gifford Lectures. The Riddell Lectures gave Polanyi’s (...) most robust working out of his constructive theory of science to date, although some of the ideas developed in Science, Faith and... (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to address an interpretive difficulty that surrounds Hegel's position in the history of jurisprudence. After a brief overview of Hegel's project, I outline the first two sections of the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right in order to support my argument that Hegel advocates a natural law theory of legal validity. I then show that confusions regarding Hegel's place in the history of jurisprudence arise from his view that the ethical evaluation of laws is limited (...) (with some exceptions) to procedural laws that govern the enactment and recognition of laws in the administration of justice. I end by providing Hegel's distinctive argument for legal publicity, which he takes to be essential for the enactment and recognition of valid law. (shrink)

Among the reasons for what might be called the ‘utopian crisis’ in post-modern culture, where the very idea of a utopia is the subject of suspicion and where its claim to perfection is held to blame for every fanatical ideology, may well be found the close, perhaps excessively close link that the utopian idea has always maintained with metaphysics. I am referring here to the notion of metaphysics as elaborated by Heidegger. Many defenders of metaphysics still refuse Heidegger's critique, but (...) it remains nevertheless the case that the definition of metaphysics as disregarding being-itself (das Sein) in favour of process-of-being (das Seiende), or of an objective ground of being that reason could grasp and to which it should adhere when interacting with knowledge and praxis, constitutes at least a generally accepted point of departure for discussion. (shrink)

Abstract In The Crisis of Global Capitalism, George Soros claims that the international financial economy is inherently unstable, and that while economists have failed to recognize this because of their commitment to static equilibrium theory, politicians have failed to stabilize the global economy because of their commitment to an unquestioned faith in the complete efficiency of laissez faire. While Soros is right to argue that market participants? expectations about the future can cause instability, he is wrong to maintain that this (...) has gone unrecognized by economists, and his notion that we live in a world of economic laissez faire is equally mistaken. Indeed, his own analysis of the Asian financial crisis points to the ?moral hazard? created by expectations of government intervention, rather than to laissez faire, as the culprit. (shrink)

Justification is a basic component of reasoning because it provides us with the warrant which should ground the acceptability of the whole argument. Indeed, justifying an argument consists in providing some principle which is seen as reasonable. In t his perspective, the set of possible justifications may be regarded as the set of those commonplaces that are admitted by a human community and are grounded on the values that are commonly endorsed by the community. I will try to show how (...) the lack of dis cussion about those values that are regarded as obvious may lead to paradoxical conclusions. (shrink)

F. A. Hayek took two trips to Chile, the first in 1977, the second in 1981. The visits were controversial. On the first trip he met with General Augusto Pinochet, who had led a coup that overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973. During his 1981 visit, Hayek gave interviews that were published in the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio and in which he discussed authoritarian regimes and the problem of unlimited democracy. After each trip, he complained that the western press had painted (...) an unfair picture of the economic situation under the Pinochet regime. Drawing on archival material, interviews, and past research, we provide a full account of this controversial episode in Hayek’s life. (shrink)

Karl Popper’s world 3 theory proposes that the products of the human mind can be considered a third world, partially autonomous of the mental and physical worlds, and real, because it can produce effects on both. When he first introduced the idea in 1960, he took even his close colleagues and students by surprise. Yet tracing the development of his idea shows a great deal in Popper’s previous work and thought led up to what seemed his startlingly new proposal. And (...) far from being the philosophy of his dotage, as some sneered, his world 3 proposal, once fully shaped, became a keystone of his thought. (shrink)

In order to understand consciousness one would benefit from developing a more eclectic intellectual style. Consciousness is, as proposed by almost everyone except the stubborn reductionists, a truly mysterious concept. Its study and dissection merits a multidisciplinary approach. Waving this multidisciplinary flag has positively enlarged the discussion and neurologists, psychiatrists, mathematicians, and so on, have moved to the philosophy of mind arena, first with caution and now with a more powerful voice. Identifying what we mean by consciousness is a first (...) step even when we want to deny its existence. The link between consciousness and some other mental activity is a logical next step and there is abundant literature doing this, but not all of them differentiate among associated yet different phenomena. (shrink)

Dainton and Robinson’s Companion traces lines of descent of analytic philosophy from ancestors. They characterize analytic philosophy as a movement, a tradition, a style, and a commitment to the va...

A sequel to Shapin’s earlier work, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation again solves the problem of induction by observing that researchers are decent. Shapin dismisses most of the literature on both the philosophy of science and (more so) on the sociology of science as ideologically biased and as irrelevant. Approaches to the book as light reading and as serious scholarly reading are considered before a critical summary is offered as a conclusion.

This Companion centers on the fictitious social contract that can be used to justify liberalism. As justification, the theory of the contract either fully justifies a regime as liberal or it fully condemns it as illiberal. This conflicts with the common recognition that liberalism is a matter of degree. John Rawls is taken as the leading light; yet at best the Companion manages to picture him as well-intended but hopelessly confusing.

Gregory Landini offers a new and an illuminating reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea about his own innovation: it is the invention of a notation that removes the mystery from all theorems of logic and of mathematics as it renders their proofs part of their wordings. This makes all theorems in principle as boring as “all four-legged animals are animals.” This idea is Wittgenstein’s doctrine of showing. It is worthless; yet, as Landini shows, every time Wittgenstein offered an elaboration on it, (...) Russell checked it carefully and found it of no value. This, let me add, shows that Russell was in error in suggesting that intellectually there is no “advantage of theft over honest toil”: at times one may pay back and with high interest. Other cases may be due to misjudgment rather than to sloth. (shrink)

Stephen Turner defends the sociopolitical role that experts—mainly but not only of the scientific kind—play in modern democratic society and explores means for increasing the rationality of their employment. Laudable though this is, at times Turner goes into more detail than democratic principles require; in his enthusiasm for rationality, he aims at levels of adequacy that are not always within the grasp of democracy.

This Companion to the philosophy of science reflects fairly well the gloomy state of affairs in this subfield at its best—concerns, problems, prejudices, and all. The field is still stuck with the problem of justification of science, refusing to admit that there is neither need nor possibility to justify science and forbid dissent from it.