My central research focus over the past 30 years has been the articulation of what I call a radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below, written between 2001 and 2022, I treat the varying ways in which radically temporal thinking manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida's deconstructive project and George Kelly's personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of clarifying and (...) further defining the nature of this family of orientations, I have delineated the important ways in which it differs from a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that includes hermeneutic and radical constructivisms, social constructionism, 4EA (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective) cognition, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of corporeal intersubjectivity, autopoietic self-organizing systems theory and American pragmatism. Among the authors whose work I have submitted to critique from the radically temporal perspective are: Francisco Varela (autopoietic self-organizing systems), Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Michel Bitbol, Thomas Fuchs (enactive, embodied ('4EA') cognition), Gilles Deleuze (Deleuzian biopolitics), Ken Gergen and John Shotter ( social constructionism), Kym Maclaren ( critical phenomenology) and Jan Slaby (critical neuroscience). I argue that these authors' accounts of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, attention , reflective and pre-reflective self-consciousness, the basis of mathematical naturalism and sensori-motor models of behavior, and the relation between the body, language and culture remain burdened by traditional presuppositions that the radically temporal philosophies of Heidegger et al put into question. (shrink)

Pragmatism has played only a small role in the half century and more of the science‐and‐religion dialogue, in part because pragmatism was at a low ebb in the 1950s. Even though Jamesean pragmatism in particular is experiencing a resurgence, owing partly to the work of Rorty and Putnam, it remains inconspicuous in the dialogue. Excepting artificial intelligence and artificial life, computer science also has not played a large role in the dialogue. Recent research into the foundations of object‐oriented programming, however, (...) shows this increasingly pervasive practice possesses an implicit pragmatist epistemology. Although science will have to become more computational, it will have to come to terms with both object‐oriented computing and its implicit pragmatism, which in turn supports the conclusion that we have fresh warrant for recasting the science‐and‐religion dialogue in Jamesean pragmatist terms. Some preliminary consequences of such a recasting of the dialogue are explored. (shrink)

Discusses the conditions of possibility for intercultural and comparative philosophy, and for crosscultural communication at large. This innovative book explores the preconditions necessary for intercultural and comparative philosophy. Philosophical practices that involve at least two different traditions with no common heritage and whose languages have very different grammatical structure, such as Indo-Germanic languages and classical Chinese, are a particular focus. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel look at the necessary and not-so-necessary conditions of possibility of interpretation, comparison, and other forms (...) of interaction and how we can speak of similarities and differences in this context. The authors posit that it is necessary to dissolve the question of universalism versus relativism by replacing the ideal language paradigm with a paradigm of family resemblances and that it is not necessary to share a common language to engage in comparison. Numerous case studies are presented, including many comparisons of Western and Chinese concepts. (shrink)

This chapter explores perspectivism in the American Pragmatist tradition. On the one hand, the thematization of perspectivism in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science can benefit from resources in the American Pragmatist philosophical tradition. On the other hand, the Pragmatists have interesting and innovative, pluralistic views that can be illuminated through the lens of perspectivism. I pursue this inquiry primarily through examining relevant sources from the Pragmatist tradition. I will illustrate productive engagements between pragmatism and perspectivism in three areas: in (...) the pragmatists’ fallibilistic theories of inquiry and truth, in their pluralistic metaphysics, and in their views on cultural pluralism. While there are some potential sticking points between pragmatism and perspectivism, particularly around the visual metaphor of perspective, these philosophical approaches nonetheless have much to learn from each other. Perspectivism is in danger of falling between the horns of pernicious relativism and a platitudinous view of the limits of human perception and cognition. The pragmatists accounts of truth and reality open the possibility of a more thoroughgoing perspectivism. I will follow this thread through Charles S. Peirce’s, William James’, and John Dewey’s theories of inquiry and truth, Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics, James’ radical pluralism, Dewey’s cultural naturalism, Richard Rorty’s anti-essentialism, Jane Addams’ standpoint epistemology, W.E.B. Du Bois’ theory of race consciousness, Horace Kallen’s and Alain LeRoy Locke’s cultural pluralism, and Mary Parker Follett’s account of pluralistic integration. (shrink)

I investigate the consequences of Nietzsche's perspectivism for notions of truth and objectivity, and show how the metaphor of visual perspective motivates an epistemology that avoids self-referential difficulties. Perspectivism's claim that every view is only one view, applied to itself, is often supposed to preclude the perspectivist's ability to offer reasons for her epistemology. Nietzsche's arguments for perspectivism depend on “internal reasons”, which have force not only in their own perspective, but also within the standards of alternative perspectives. Internal reasons (...) allow a perspectivist argument against dogmatism without presupposing aperspectival criteria for theory choice. Nietzsche also offers “internal” conceptions of truth and objectivity which reduce them to a matter of meeting our epistemic standards. This view has pluralistic implications, which conflict with common sense, but it is nevertheless consistent and plausible. Nietzsche's position is similar to Putnam's recent internalism, and this is due to their common Kantian heritage. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to cast new light on an important and often overlooked notion of perspectival knowledge arising from Kant. In addition to a traditional notion of perspectival knowledge as "knowledge from a vantage point", a second novel notion — "knowledge towards a vantage point" —is here introduced. The origin and rationale of perspectival knowledge 2 are traced back to Kant's so-called transcendental illusion. The legacy of the Kantian notion of perspectival knowledge 2 for contemporary discussions on (...) disagreement and the role of metaphysics in scientific knowledge is discussed. (shrink)

There is an overt tension between Rorty’s pragmatist critique of philosophy and his apparent epistemological and metaphysical commitments, which it is instructive to examine in order to assess not only Rorty’s overall position, but also renewed contemporary interest in pragmatism and its metaphilosophical implications. After showing why Rorty’s attempts to limit the scope of his critique failed to resolve this tension, I try reading him as a constructive metaphysician who was attempting to balance a causal account of the language / (...) world relation with panrelationism. However, Rorty intended these commitments to be interpreted in light of his pragmatism about vocabularies, and relied upon a ‘social standpoint strategy’ to render his overall position consistent. I conclude that to the extent that this strategy succeeds, it removes almost all of the argumentative force from Rorty’s pragmatism. (shrink)

It is now over 15 years since Hilary Putnam first urged that we take the “narrow path” of internal realism as a way of navigating between “the swamps of metaphysics and the quicksands of cultural relativism and historicism” (1983, p. 226). In the opening lines of the Preface toRealism with a Human Face, a collection of Putnam's recent papers edited by James Conant, Putnam reaffirms his allegiance to this narrow path, unmoved by Realist murmurings from the swamps and laconic Rortian (...) suggestions that only the quicksands are a proper metaphilosophical abode for those willing to confront our lack of epistemological and metaphysical foundations. If there are changes to be discerned in these writings, Putnam avers, they pertain only to the burden allotted to different considerations in the overall economy of his argument: “It might be said that the difference between the present volume and my work prior toThe Many Faces of Realismis a shift in emphasis: a shift from emphasizing model-theoretic arguments against metaphysical realism to emphasizing conceptual relativity” (p. xi). (shrink)

This book is about the idea that some true statements would have been true no matter how the world had turned out, while others could have been false. It develops and defends a version of the idea that we tell the difference between these two types of truths in part by reflecting on the meanings of words. It has often been thought that modal issues—issues about possibility and necessity—are related to issues about meaning. In this book, the author defends the (...) view that the analysis of meaning is not just a preliminary to answering modal questions in philosophy; it is not merely that before we can find out whether something is possible, we need to get clear on what we are talking about. Rather, clarity about meaning often brings with it answers to modal questions. In service of this view, the author analyzes the notion of necessity and develops ideas about linguistic meaning, applying them to several puzzles and problems in philosophy of language. Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophical logic. [See my homepage for a sample chapter.]. (shrink)

Until now, antirealists have offered sketches of a theory of truth, at best. In this paper, we present a probabilist account of antirealist truth in some formal detail, and we assess its ability to deal with the problems that are standardly taken to beset antirealism.

What is W. V. O. Quine’s relationship to classical pragmatism? Although he resists the comparison to William James in particular, commentators have seen an affinity between his “web of belief” model of theory confirmation and James’s claim that our beliefs form a “stock” that faces new experience as a corporate body. I argue that the similarity is only superficial. James thinks our web of beliefs should be responsive not just to perceptual but also to emotional experiences in some cases; Quine (...) denies this. I motivate James’s controversial view by appealing to an episode in the history of medicine when a researcher self-experimented by swallowing a vial of bacteria that at the time had not been studied in much detail. The researcher’s commitment to his own as-yet untested hypothesis was based in part on emotional considerations. Finally, I argue that Quine’s insistence that emotions can never be relevant to adjusting our web of belief reflects a tacit holdover of one of logical positivism’s crucially anti-pragmatist commitments—that philosophy of science should focus exclusively on the context of justification, not the context of discovery. James’s emphasis on discovery as a (perhaps the) crucial locus for epistemological inquiry is characteristic of pragmatism in general. Since Quinean epistemology is always an epistemology of justification, he is not happily viewed as a member of the pragmatist tradition. (shrink)

I begin by contrasting three approaches one can take to the distinction between the essential and accidental properties: an ontological, a deflationary, and a mind‐dependent approach. I then go on to apply that distinction to the necessary a posteriori, and defend the deflationist view. Finally I apply the distinction to modal truth in general and argue that the deflationist position lets us avoid an otherwise pressing problem for the actualist: the problem of accounting for the source of modal truth.

Se sostiene, con Rorty, que la verdad no es ninguna propiedad y, contra Rorty, que esta posición no implica eliminar el concepto de verdad del discurso teórico. Con una estrategia pragmatista, se analizan las prácticas de los hablantes, para mostrar que no se adquieren los mismos compromisos cuando se atribuye verdad y cuando se atribuye justificación. Se evidencia el sentido en que es socialmente útil la distinción filosófica entre verdad y justificación, para finalizar mostrando cómo esa distinción no entraña ninguna (...) metafísica misteriosa. (shrink)

Se sostiene, con Rorty, que la verdad no es ninguna propiedad y, contra Rorty, que esta posición no implica eliminar el concepto de verdad del discurso teórico. Con una estrategia pragmatista, se analizan las prácticas de los hablantes, para mostrar que no se adquieren los mismos compromisos cuando se atribuye verdad y cuando se atribuye justificación. Se evidencia el sentido en que es socialmente útil la distinción filosófica entre verdad y justificación, para finalizar mostrando cómo esa distinción no entraña ninguna (...) metafísica misteriosa. We affirm, with Rorty, that truth is not a property, and, against Rorty, that this position does not imply eliminating the concept of truth from theoretical discourse. The practices of speakers are analyzed using a pragmatist strategy, in order to show that one does not acquire the same commitments when attributing truth or attributing justification. The article discusses the sense in which the philosophical distinction between truth and justification is socially useful and, finally, shows that said distinction does not entail a mysterious metaphysics. (shrink)

Aktivnost integracije i distribucije prožima cjelokupni čovjekov jezik, mišljenje i djelovanje; njegov praktični i teorijski um, uz pomoć malog broja operacija (konjunkcija, negacija, kvantifikacija) koje čine logičke konstante, sabire i razdjeljuje varijabilne elemente jezika, svijeta i mišljenja u beskonačne konačnosti (skupovi, klase, relacije, atributi) u kojima se koreliraju realne stimulacije i virtualne simulacije, čijom se konstrukcijom, rekonstrukcijom i dekonstrukcijom formiraju i transformiraju "dobro uređene formule" jezičko-gramatičkih i mentalno-psiholoških struktura koje se u svijetu saznanja imenuju pojmom svijeta, pojmom jezika, pojmom duha. (...) Svijet pojmova, koji se uzima u kvantificiranoj formi govora / "(x) (Fx) / kao realni ili egzistentni, a u substitutivnoj formi / " { x : Fx}" / kao virtualni ili subzistentni zbog apstraktnosti klasa i relacija, konstruira mrežu multipliciranih logičkih općenitosti, njihovih relacija ili zakonitih sukcesija koje se mogu izraziti, parafrazirati i prevesti iz jedne notacije u drugu salva veritate ed salva congruentia. (shrink)

An influential tradition in moral philosophy attempts to explain an immoral action by reference to the defect in reasoning on the part of an immoral agent. On this view, the requirements of morality are not only sanctioned by the more general requirements of rationality, but the violations of the moral requirements would be indicative of a rational failure. In this article I argue that ascription of irrationality to amoral individuals (e.g., psychopaths) is either empirically false, or else, conceptually problematic. An (...) interpretation of irrationality in its instrumental sense fails to do justice to the results of the research concerning the intelligence of some amoralists, whereas the suggestion that the alleged cognitive deficiency lies at the level of final ends and ultimate values faces serious theoretical difficulties. All attempts to construe the notion of an external reason for action without reference to the agent's actual goals and values bespeak an objectivist's bias, rest on controversial assumptions, and tend to alienate the agent from the proposed set of reasons. The argument is partly based on the analysis of reasoning of Ted Bundy, a notorious serial murderer, who presents a rather sophisticated justification for his criminal behavior. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe paper distinguishes between two different ways of cashing out the general insight that often goes by the name of ‘liberal naturalism’. The objective is to show how these two different argumentative strategies undergird two fundamentally different approaches to the project of elucidating the specificity of mental phenomena. On one approach, the central concern of such a project is the ontological status of subjective conscious phenomena; on the other, the central concern is the irreducibility of parochial capacities in the adoption (...) of intentional stances. I begin by tracing out some of the origins of this important divergence and then focus on the motivations of the latter approach. I show that there is a tension between its motivations and the way that it has been used to rehabilitate idealist themes from the post-Kantian tradition. (shrink)

Phenomenology has recently come under attack from proponents of speculative realism. In this paper, I present and assess the criticism, and argue that it is either superficial and simplistic or lacks novelty.

The analyses of the mind–world relation offered by transcendental idealists such as Husserl have often been dismissed with the argument that they remain committed to an outdated form of internalism. The first move in this paper will be to argue that there is a tight link between Husserl’s transcendental idealism and what has been called phenomenological externalism, and that Husserl’s endorsement of the former commits him to a version of the latter. Secondly, it will be shown that key elements in (...) Husserl’s transcendental idealism, including his rejection of representationalism and metaphysical realism, is shared with a number of prominent contemporary defenders of an externalist view on the mind. Ultimately, however, it will be suggested that the very alternative between internalism and externalism—an alternative based on the division between inner and outer—might be inapplicable when it comes to phenomenological conceptions of the mind–world relation. (shrink)

Externalism is widely endorsed within contemporary philosophy of mind and language. Despite this, it is far from clear how the externalist thesis should be construed and, indeed, why we should accept it. In this entry I distinguish and examine three central types of externalism: what I call foundational externalism, externalist semantics, and psychological externalism. I suggest that the most plausible version of externalism is not in fact a very radical thesis and does not have any terribly interesting implications for philosophy (...) of mind, whereas the more radical and interesting versions of externalism are quite difficult to support. (shrink)

Since Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke's first attacks on traditional, descriptivist theories of natural kind terms, it has become customary to speak of the ‘Putnam-Kripke’ view of meaning and reference. This article argues that this is a mistake, and that Putnam's account of natural kind terms is importantly different from that of Kripke. In particular, Putnam has from the very start been sceptical of Kripke's modal claims, and in later papers he explicitly rejects the proposal that theoretical identity statements are (...) metaphysically necessary (if true). I suggest that this is wholly in line with Putnam's earlier, Quine-inspired writings on general terms, and his preoccupation with the philosophy of science. Moreover, I argue that the picture of general terms that emerges from Putnam's writings is more plausible than that suggested by Kripke. However, contrary to Putnam, I also suggest that Putnam's later views on natural kinds and natural kind terms do not support standard Twin Earth externalism. (shrink)

I argue that Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of the metaphysical subject sheds new light on subjective qualities of experience. In this article I draw first of all on the interpretations provided by Michael Kremer and James Conant. Subsequently, I conclude that “what is it like” means primarily “what is it like to see myself as the metaphysical subject”.

One’s philosophical points of view, which form the bases for assumptions that we bring to management theory and practice matter, and matter deeply, to management thinking and corporate behavior. In this paper I outline three related threads of philosophical conversations and explain how they are important in management theory and practice: the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, deriving from the later writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a social constructionist perspective: a set of theories at least implicitly derived from the linguistic turn in (...) philosophy, and the notion of the impartial spectator. I then use these three theories to analyze the idea of the corporation, corporate cultures and corporate mission statements, stakeholder theories and their differences, and the limitations of the popular notion of “corporate social responsibility.” I conclude that how one frames these management ideas makes a difference, a difference in theory and in practice. (shrink)

The global expansion of free enterprise has been underway for some time, and the challenges for global companies are well‐known. Companies often operate in economically blighted communities and in corrupt environments without a rule of law. At the same time Western‐based global corporations are under increasing public pressure to take on responsibilities to these communities that are often beyond their expertise or economic purview. For example, at the 2008 Davos meetings Bill Gates proposed the idea of “creative capitalism, challenging business (...) to ‘meet the needs of the poor in ways that generate profits’...” In what follows I shall argue that while there have been many successful global ventures, the Gates’ challenge requires academics and managerial leaders to rethink their mind sets and expand their thinking about what we mean by globalization, poverty, and the multiple dimensions of free enterprise. (shrink)

In various essays, Paul Churchland explores the relevance of studies in cognitive science to issues in ethics. What emerges is a kind of ethical naturalism that has two components. The first component is a descriptive‐genealogical one whose purpose is to explain how people come to have their ethical beliefs. The second component is a normative one whose purpose is to explain why some values are better than other values. Given this distinction, the problem of integrating ethics with beliefs about the (...) world is a consequence of the traditional view that it is possible to naturalize descriptive‐genealogical ethics but not normative ethics. With this distinction as background, I critically examine Churchland's exploration of cognitive science's contribution to our understanding of the values and purposes that should direct our lives. The conclusion is twofold. First, using concepts from the American pragmatists, I argue that, pace Churchland, it is possible to bridge the descriptive‐normative gap in order to articulate an ethical naturalism that addresses the so‐called naturalistic fallacy but is not committed to an unpalatable relativism. Second, I argue that the sort of ethical naturalism that emerges has affinities to the postmodern ethics of Jean‐François Lyotard. (shrink)

Pragmatists recommend optimism as a successful strategy, and recent psychological research has confirmed its value. But optimism comes at a price: optimists are less accurate in their assessments and expectations than are pessimists. Thus optimism ‘proves itself to be good in the way of belief’, and by pragmatic standards should count as true; but that makes the accuracy costs of optimism invisible . The problem prevents pragmatists from offering a Darwinian explanation of why pessimism survives, and also blocks any pragmatist (...) account of the well‐documented and highly successful exploratory behavior of many animal species. (shrink)

There is a widespread opinion that the realist idea that whether a proposition is true or false typically depends on how things are independently of ourselves is bound to turn truth, in Davidson's words, into “something to which humans can never legitimately aspire”. This opinion accounts for the ongoing popularity of “epistemic” theories of truth, that is, of those theories that explain what it is for a proposition (or statement, or sentence, or what have you) to be true or false (...) in terms of some epistemic notion, such as provability, justifiability, verifiability, rational acceptability, warranted assertibility, and so forth, in some suitably characterized epistemic situation. My aim in this paper is to show that the widespread opinion is erroneous and that the (legitimate) epistemological preoccupation with the accessibility of truth does not warrant the rejection of the realist intuition that truth is, at least for certain types of propositions, radically nonepistemic. (shrink)

In this paper I put forward some arguments in defence of inclusive legal positivism . The general thesis that I defend is that inclusive positivism represents a more fruitful and interesting research program than that proposed by exclusive positivism . I introduce two arguments connected with legal interpretation in favour of my thesis. However, my opinion is that inclusive positivism does not sufficiently succeed in estranging itself from the more traditional legal positivist conceptions. This is the case, for instance, with (...) regard to the value-freedom principle, which is commonly accepted by inclusive positivist scholars. In contrast with this approach, I try to show, in the concluding section, how a constructivistic version of inclusive positivism could legitimately acknowledge the presence of value-judgments in the cognitive activities of jurists and legal theorists. (shrink)

The autonomy of chemistry and the legitimacy of the philosophy of chemistry are usually discussed in the context of the issue of reduction of chemistry to physics, and defended making use of the failure of reductionistic claims. Until quite recent times a rather widespread viewpoint was, however, that the failure of reductionistic claims concerns actually epistemological aspect of reduction only, but the ontological reduction of chemistry to physics cannot be denied. The new problems of the autonomy of chemistry in the (...) context of reductionism seem to be ontological and metaphysical. In the present paper it is argued that there is no need for some kind of metaphysical-ontological underpinning for rejection of the secondary positions of chemistry and philosophy of chemistry with respect to physics and philosophy of physics. The issue can be elucidated in terms of the philosophy of science accepting practical realism (also known by other names). (shrink)

Recent research on “causal cognition” in adults and infants shows that we can perceive singular causal relations not previously experienced. In particular, infants that are able to perceive causality seem to rely on innate beliefs and principles that allow a priori inference of a connection between cause and effect. Can causal cognition in infants justify the thesis of causal realism? On the one hand, it weakens the central pillar of the Humean arguments: the impossibility of a synthetic a priori causal (...) inference. On the other hand, if perception is the privileged way of justifying the reality of objects of the external world, that is valid in the case of causal relations as well. Moreover, the perception of causal relations, based on innate principles and beliefs, reflects the selective results of the interaction between the real constraints of the physical structure of the world and the evolution of the human mind. (shrink)

This article examines how a class of emerging technologies—specifically, radical cognitive enhancements and artificial intelligence—has the potential to influence the future of philosophy. The article argues that progress in philosophy has been impeded, in part, by two specific constraints imposed on us by the natural architecture of our cognitive systems. Both of these constraints, though, could in principle be overcome by certain cognitive technologies currently being researched and/or developed. It surveys a number of these technologies, and then looks at a (...) particular metaphilosophical stance (called “inflationism”) that advocates amplifying the abilities of philosophers rather than reducing the ambitions of philosophy, given the apparent “teleological gap” between philosophy's ultimate goal (i.e., “the truth”) and the limited capacities of our evolved mental machinery. (shrink)

According to the quantificational Quinean model in meta-ontology, the question of ontology boils down to the question of whether a sortal property is exemplified. I address some complications that arise when we try to build a philosophical reconstruction of the link between individuals and kinds displayed in the exemplification relation from the point of view of conceptualism about kinds and having in mind this stand in ontology. I distinguish two notions of resemblance, object-to- object and object-to- kind, and show the (...) problems with both of them. Finally, I argue for a better awareness of the implicit "bias" involved in the very notion of "resemblance," without indulging in Quine's veto toward this notion. (shrink)

Models are the coin of the realm in current philosophy of science, as they are in science itself, having replaced laws and theories as the primary strategy. Logical Positivism tried to erase the older neo-Kantian distinction between ideal constructions and reality. It returns in the case of models. Nowak’s concept of idealization pro- vided an alternative account of this issue. It construed model application as concretizations of hypotheses which improve by accounting for exceptions. This appears to account for physical law. (...) But it raises the problem of uniqueness: is the result unique, as physical law should be? Neo-Kantianism failed this test. Its solutions were circular justifications for claims of uniqueness. Nowak inherited the problem without resolving it. (shrink)

Philosophers have often noted that science displays an uncommon degree of consensus on beliefs among its practitioners. Yet consensus in the sciences is not a goal in itself. I consider cases of consensus on beliefs as concrete events. Consensus on beliefs is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for presuming that these beliefs constitute knowledge. A concrete consensus on a set of beliefs by a group of people at a given historical period may be explained by different factors according (...) to various hypotheses. A particularly interesting hypothesis from an epistemic perspective is the knowledge hypothesis: shared knowledge explains a consensus on beliefs. If all the alternative hypotheses to the knowledge hypotheses are false or are not as good in explaining a concrete consensus on beliefs, the knowledge hypothesis is the best explanation of the consensus. If the knowledge hypothesis is best, a consensus becomes a plausible, though fallible, indicator of knowledge. I argue that if a consensus on beliefs is uncoerced, uniquely heterogeneous and large, the gap between the likelihood of the consensus given the knowledge hypothesis and its likelihoods given competing hypotheses tends to increase significantly. Consensus is a better indicator of knowledge than "success" or "human flourishing". (shrink)

As a response to what I see as the challenge posed by constructivist and narrative pedagogies, this paper seeks to sympathetically reconstruct Bernard Williams’ Absolute Conception from the scattered texts in which he briefly sketched it While ultimately defending the Absolute Conception or something close enough to it, the paper criticizes and distances itself from some aspects of Williams’ version, notably his conception of philosophy as insurmountably perspectival. Williams’ understanding of perspectival knowledge as contrasted to absolute knowledge is illustrated with (...) the concrete, if fictional case of the Dr Manhattan character from Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009). Adrian Moore’s reading, and Hilary Putnam’s criticisms of Williams’ Absolute Conception are amongst the positions engaged with. (shrink)

This symposium contribution discusses some issues of ontology involved in the metaethics of Hilary Putnam's book Ethics without Ontology.

An autobiographical account is offered of how the medical study of self (immunology) became a chapter in the philosophical study of human agency (from Nietzsche and Thoreau to Freud by way of Wittgenstein). Whether viewed scientifically or philosophically, several themes converge on the intractable instability of any notion of selfhood—epistemological or moral. How this problematic motivated an extended analysis of selfhood refracts the psychology of the author and his pursuit of philosophy as self‐knowledge.

What is the relation between the concept good and more specific or ‘thick’ concepts such as admirable or courageous? I argue that good or more precisely good pro tanto is a general concept, but that the relation between good pro tanto and the more specific concepts is not that of a genus to its species. The relation of an important class of specific evaluative concepts, which I call ‘affective concepts’, to good pro tanto is better understood as one between a (...) determinable and its determinates, whereas concepts such as courageous can be analysed in terms of affective concepts and purely descriptive concepts. (shrink)