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Sensations and brain processes

Philosophical Review 68 (April):141-56 (1959)

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  1. Mental Causation.Rodolfo Giorgi & Andrea Lavazza - 2018 - Aphex 17.
    This article aims to provide a brief overview of mental causation problem and its current proposed solutions. Indeed, mental causation turns out as one of the most difficult philosophical conundrums in contemporary philosophy of mind. In the first two sections, we offer an outline of the problem and the philosophical debate about it, and show that mental causation problem is pivotal within the contemporary philosophy of mind. In the third section, we focus on the most popular models of mental causation, (...)
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  • Grounding, Conceivability, and the Mind-Body Problem.David Elohim - 2018 - Synthese 195 (2):919-926.
    This paper challenges the soundness of the two-dimensional conceivability argument against the derivation of phenomenal truths from physical truths in light of a hyperintensional, ground-theoretic regimentation of the ontology of consciousness. The regimentation demonstrates how ontological dependencies between truths about consciousness and about physics cannot be witnessed by epistemic constraints, when the latter are recorded by the conceivability—i.e., the epistemic possibility—thereof. Generalizations and other aspects of the philosophical significance of the hyperintensional regimentation are further examined.
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  • Functionalism and the Problem of Occurrent States.Gary Bartlett - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (270):1-20.
    In 1956 U. T. Place proposed that consciousness is a brain process. More attention should be paid to his word ‘process’. There is near-universal agreement that experiences are processive—as witnessed in the platitude that experiences are occurrent states. The abandonment of talk of brain processes has benefited functionalism, because a functional state, as it is usually conceived, cannot be a process. This point is dimly recognized in a well-known but little-discussed argument that conscious experiences cannot be functional states because the (...)
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  • Reduction redux.Lawrence Shapiro - 2018 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 68:10-19.
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  • Physicalism as a Research Programme.Duško Prelević - 2018 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 95 (1):15-33.
    _ Source: _Page Count 19 It is argued in this paper that physicalism is best understood as a research programme, rather than a thesis or an attitude, as some philosophers argue. Given that research programmes connect past, present and future philosophical or scientific activities, physicalists need not decide between current and future physical theories, as it has been required by Hempel’s Dilemma. The author contrasts this proposal with other solutions to Hempel’s Dilemma proposed by currentists, futurists, and those philosophers who (...)
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  • Pain (Oxford Bibliographies Online).David Bain - 2015 - Oxford Bibliographies Online.
    Philosophers think of pain less and less as a paradigmatic instance of mentality, for which they seek a general account, and increasingly as a rich and fruitful topic in its own right. Pain raises specific questions: about mentality and consciousness certainly, but also about embodiment, affect, motivation, and value, to name but a few. The growth of philosophical interest in pain has gone hand-in-hand with the growth of pain science, which burgeoned in the 1960s. This is no accident: developments in (...)
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  • Token physicalism and functional individuation.James DiFrisco - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (3):309-329.
    Token physicalism is often viewed as a modest and unproblematic physicalist commitment, as contrasted with type physicalism. This paper argues that the prevalence of functional individuation in biology creates serious problems for token physicalism, because the latter requires that biological entities can be individuated physically and without reference to biological functioning. After characterizing the main philosophical roles for token physicalism, I describe the distinctive uses of functional individuation in models of biological processes. I then introduce some requirements on token identity (...)
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  • Free Will and Epistemology: a Defence of the Transcendental Argument for Freedom.Robert Lockie - 2018 - London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
    This is a work concerned with justification and freedom and the relationship between these. Its summational aim is to defend a transcendental argument for free will – that we could not be epistemically justified in undermining a strong notion of free will, as a strong notion of free will would be required for any such process of undermining to be itself epistemically justified. The book advances two transcendental arguments – for a deontically internalist conception of epistemic justification and the aforementioned (...)
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  • Where neuroscience and education meet: Can emergentism successfully occupy the middle ground between mind and body?John Clark - 2018 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 50 (4):404-416.
    Increasingly, connections are being made between neuroscience and education. At their interface is the attempt to ‘bridge the gap between conscious minds and living brains’. All too often, the two sides pursue a reductionist strategy of excluding the other. A middle way, promoted by Sankey in the context of values education, is emergentism: our conscious mental states are the product of brain processes but are not reducible to them. This paper outlines Sankey’s emergentist position and raises two objections: What are (...)
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  • What is Wrong with Self-Grounding?David Mark Kovacs - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (6):1157-1180.
    Many philosophers embrace grounding, supposedly a central notion of metaphysics. Grounding is widely assumed to be irreflexive, but recently a number of authors have questioned this assumption: according to them, it is at least possible that some facts ground themselves. The primary purpose of this paper is to problematize the notion of self-grounding through the theoretical roles usually assigned to grounding. The literature typically characterizes grounding as at least playing two central theoretical roles: a structuring role and an explanatory role. (...)
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  • Temperature, Color and the Brain: An Externalist Reply to the Knowledge Argument.Paul Skokowski - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (2):287-299.
    It is argued that the knowledge argument fails against externalist theories of mind. Enclosing Mary and cutting her off from some properties denies part of the physical world to Mary, which has the consequence of denying her certain kinds of physical knowledge. The externalist formulation of experience is shown to differ in vehicle, content, and causal role from the internalist version addressed by the knowledge argument, and is supported by results from neuroscience. This means that though the knowledge argument has (...)
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  • HIT and brain reward function: a case of mistaken identity (theory).Cory Wright, Matteo Colombo & Alexander Beard - 2017 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 64:28–40.
    This paper employs a case study from the history of neuroscience—brain reward function—to scrutinize the inductive argument for the so-called ‘Heuristic Identity Theory’ (HIT). The case fails to support HIT, illustrating why other case studies previously thought to provide empirical support for HIT also fold under scrutiny. After distinguishing two different ways of understanding the types of identity claims presupposed by HIT and considering other conceptual problems, we conclude that HIT is not an alternative to the traditional identity theory so (...)
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  • Idealism and the Mind-Body Problem.David Chalmers - 2019 - In William Seager (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Panpsychism. Routledge. pp. 353-373.
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  • Introduction: The Character of Physicalism.Andreas Elpidorou - 2018 - Topoi 37 (3):435-455.
    The aim of this editorial introduction is twofold. First, Sects. 1–8 offer a critical introduction to the metaphysical character of physicalism. In those sections, I present and evaluate different ways in which proponents of physicalism have made explicit the metaphysical dependence that is said to hold between the non-physical and the physical. Some of these accounts are found to be problematic; others are shown to be somewhat more promising. In the end, some important lessons are drawn and different options for (...)
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  • Mind–brain identity and evidential insulation.Jakob Hohwy - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 153 (3):377-395.
    Is it rational to believe that the mind is identical to the brain? Identity theorists say it is (or looks like it will be, once all the neuroscientific evidence is in), and they base this claim on a general epistemic route to belief in identity. I re-develop this general route and defend it against some objections. Then I discuss how rational belief in mind–brain identity, obtained via this route, can be threatened by an appropriately adjusted version of the anti-physicalist knowledge (...)
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  • The Philosophy of Phenomenal Consciousness.Zoe Drayson - 2015 - In Drayson Zoe (ed.), The Constitution of Phenomenal Consciousness. pp. 273-292.
    A primer on the philosophical issues relating to phenomenal consciousness, part of a collection of new papers by scientists and philosophers on the constitution of consciousness.
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  • Behaviorism at fifty.B. F. Skinner - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (4):615.
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  • Inconceivable physicalism.Jonathon VandenHombergh - 2017 - Analysis 77 (1):116-125.
    Using his two-dimensional semantics, I demonstrate that David Chalmers’s 2010 ‘two-dimensional argument against materialism’ is sound only if a wide swath of reductive physicalist theses – crucially, those involving identity and other intrinsic reductive relations – are inconceivable. 2DA therefore begs the question against its opponents and undermines its argumentative relevance. Comparisons are drawn to similar arguments in Marton and Sturgeon; the present account differs in its formal and philosophical simplicity, as well as its specific application to reductivist doctrines beyond (...)
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  • Rodgers on calls for observable verbs.Jim Mackenzie - 2018 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 50 (1):18-27.
    This paper takes up Shannon Rodgers’ 2016 critique of curriculum writers’ call for observable verbs, pp. 563–578), and argues that a more effective line of critique should focus not on metaphorical thinking, but on the notion of observation itself, by way of Nietzsche on metaphor, the history of astronomy, the non-existence of dragons and dissuading indigenous people from voting.
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  • Rethinking the problem of cognition.Mikio Akagi - 2018 - Synthese 195 (8):3547-3570.
    The present century has seen renewed interest in characterizing cognition, the object of inquiry of the cognitive sciences. In this paper, I describe the problem of cognition—the absence of a positive characterization of cognition despite a felt need for one. It is widely recognized that the problem is motivated by decades of controversy among cognitive scientists over foundational questions, such as whether non-neural parts of the body or environment can realize cognitive processes, or whether plants and microbes have cognitive processes. (...)
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  • Abductive two-dimensionalism: a new route to the a priori identification of necessary truths.Biggs Stephen & Wilson Jessica - 2020 - Synthese 197 (1):59-93.
    Epistemic two-dimensional semantics, advocated by Chalmers and Jackson, among others, aims to restore the link between necessity and a priority seemingly broken by Kripke, by showing how armchair access to semantic intensions provides a basis for knowledge of necessary a posteriori truths. The most compelling objections to E2D are that, for one or other reason, the requisite intensions are not accessible from the armchair. As we substantiate here, existing versions of E2D are indeed subject to such access-based objections. But, we (...)
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  • No help on the hard problem.Derek Nelson Ball - unknown
    The hard problem of consciousness is to explain why certain physical states are conscious: why do they feel the way they do, rather than some other way or no way at all? Arthur Reber claims to solve the hard problem. But he does not: even if we grant that amoebae are conscious, we can ask why such organisms feel the way they do, and Reber’s theory provides no answer. Still, Reber’s theory may be methodologically useful: we do not yet have (...)
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  • Mental Causation and Mental Properties.Michael Esfeld - 2005 - Dialectica 59 (1):5-18.
    The aim of this paper is to defend the causal homogeneity of functional, mental properties against Kim's attack. It is argued that token identity is sufficient for mental causation, that token identity implies a sort of functional reduction, but that nonetheless functional, mental properties can be causally homogeneous despite being multiply realizable: multiple composition is sufficient for multiple realizability, but multiple composition does not prevent the realizers from having their pertinent effects in common. Thus, the causal exclusion problem provides no (...)
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  • Der evolutionäre Naturalismus in der Ethik.Marie I. Kaiser - 2010 - In Jochen Oehler (ed.), Der Mensch - Evolution, Natur und Kultur: Beiträge zu unserem heutigen Menschenbild. Springer. pp. 261-283.
    Charles Darwin hat eindrucksvoll gezeigt, dass der Mensch ebenso wie alle anderen Lebewesen ein Produkt der biologischen Evolution ist. Die sich an Darwin anschließende Forschung hat außerdem plausibel gemacht, dass sich nicht nur viele der körperlichen Merkmale des Menschen, sondern auch (zumindest einige) seiner Verhaltensdispositionen in adaptiven Selektionsprozessen herausgebildet haben. Die Vorstellung, dass auch die menschliche Moralität evolutionär bedingt ist, scheint daher auf den ersten Blick ganz überzeugend. Schließlich hat die Evolutionstheorie in den vergangenen Jahrzehnten in vielen Bereichen (auch außerhalb (...)
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  • Free Will and the Burden of Proof.William G. Lycan - 2003 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 53:107-122.
    Here are some things that are widely believed about free will and determinism. Free will is prima facie incompatible with determinism. The incompatibility is logical or at least conceptual or a priori. A compatibilist needs to explain how free will can co-exist with determinism, paradigmatically by offering an analysis of ‘free’ action that is demonstrably compatible with determinism. Free will is not impugned by quantum indeterminism, at least not in the same decisive way that it is impugned by determinism. To (...)
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  • The ontological status of secondary qualities.A. Olding - 1968 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 46:52.
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  • Journal of Philosophical Investigations.M. Asgahri - 2015 - Journal of Philosophical Investigations 9 (17):1-227.
    open journal of Philosophical Investigations (PI) is an international journal dedicated to the latest advancements in philosophy. The goal of this journal is to provide a platform for academicians all over the world to promote, share, and discuss various new issues and developments in different areas of philosophy. -/- All manuscripts to be prepared in English or Persian and are subject to a rigorous and fair peer-review process. Generally, accepted papers will appear online. The journal publishes papers including the following (...)
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  • What does It Mean to be a Mechanism? Stephen Morse, Non-reductivism, and Mental Causation.Katrina L. Sifferd - 2017 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 11 (1):143-159.
    Stephen Morse seems to have adopted a controversial position regarding the mindbody relationship: John Searle’s non-reductivism, which claims that conscious mental states are causal yet not reducible to their underlying brain states. Searle’s position has been roundly criticized, with some arguing the theory taken as a whole is incoherent. In this paper I review these criticisms and add my own, concluding that Searle’s position is indeed contradictory, both internally and with regard to Morse's other views. Thus I argue that Morse (...)
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  • Ontological Parsimony, Erosion, and Conservatism.Thomas Metcalf - 2016 - Metaphilosophy 47 (4-5):700-718.
    This article presents a novel argument against a common principle of parsimony in philosophy. First, it identifies a widely employed principle of positive ontological parsimony, according to which we should, ceteris paribus, prefer smaller ontologies to larger ontologies. Next, it shows how this principle is used as part of a strategy by which to argue for antirealist positions in many subfields of philosophy: the ockhamistic antirealist strategy. Third, it argues that this principle commits its adherents to an implausible epistemological thesis—the (...)
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  • Religion and scientism: a shared cognitive conundrum.Matthew Burch - 2016 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 80 (3):225-241.
    This article challenges the claim that the rise of naturalism is devastating to religious belief. This claim hinges on an extreme interpretation of naturalism called scientism, the metaphysical view that science offers an exhaustive account of the real. For those committed to scientism, religious discourse is epistemically illegitimate, because it refers to matters that transcend—and so cannot be verified by—scientific inquiry. This article reconstructs arguments from the phenomenological tradition that seem to undercut this critique, viz., arguments that scientism itself cannot (...)
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  • Das Observações Filosóficas à Unidade da Ciência.David Gerald Stern - 2009 - Dois Pontos 6 (1).
    No verão de 1932, Wittgenstein alegou que o artigo recentemente publicado porCarnap “Linguagem Física como Linguagem Universal da Ciência” fez uso extensivo e semmenções das idéias do próprio Wittgenstein. Em uma carta a Schlick, ele se queixou que“em breve estaria em uma situação na qual seu próprio trabalho seria considerado meramentecomo uma versão requentada ou plágio do de Carnap”. Neste artigo, examino arelação entre o artigo de Carnap, posteriormente reimpresso como A Unidade da Ciência, eo tratamento dispensado por Wittgenstein, nos (...)
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  • Replacing Functional Reduction with Mechanistic Explanation.Markus I. Eronen - 2011 - Philosophia Naturalis 48 (1):125-153.
    Recently the functional model of reduction has become something like the standard model of reduction in philosophy of mind. In this paper, I argue that the functional model fails as an account of reduction due to problems related to three key concepts: functionalization, realization and causation. I further argue that if we try to revise the model in order to make it more coherent and scientifically plausible, the result is merely a simplified version of what in philosophy of science is (...)
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  • Understanding the Heart-Mind Within the Heart-Mind of the Nèiyè.Steven Geisz - 2016 - Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 15 (3):393-412.
    The Nèiyè 內業 talks of “a heart-mind within a heart-mind” that is somehow connected to or prior to language. In the context of the overall advice on looking “inward” or “internally” as part of the meditation and mysticism practice that the Nèiyè introduces, this talk of a heart-mind within a heart-mind arguably invites comparisons with a Cartesian “inner theater” conception of mentality. In this paper, I examine the “inner” talk of the Nèiyè in order to tease out its identifiable commitments (...)
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  • The Numerous Forms of Occam’s Razor and their Effect on Philosophy of Mind.Mikayla L. O'Neal - unknown
    In the first chapter of this paper I focus on the general overview of Occam's Razor, and develop several interpretations and adaptations of Occam's Razor as a principle of simplicity. In the second chapter I apply these different interpretations in the Physicalism/Dualism debate, and critically assess the validity of these implementations of Occam's Razor in philosophy of mind. In the final chapter I give an overview of my discussion thus far, and make assertions about what my paper means for the (...)
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  • Functionally extended cognition.Miljana Milojevic - 2013 - Prolegomena 12 (2):315-336.
    The hypothesis of the Extended Cognition (ExCog), formulated by Clark and Chalmers (1998), aims to be a bold and new hypothesis about realisers of cognitive processes. It claims that sometimes cognitive processes extend above the limits of the skin and skull and include chunks of the environment as their partial realisers. One of the most pursuasive arguments in support of this assertion is the famous “parity argument” which calls upon functional similarities between extended cognitive processes and relevant internal processes. This (...)
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  • Interactionism Revived?Frank Jackson - 1980 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 10 (3):316-323.
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  • Pain eliminativism: scientific and traditional.Jennifer Corns - 2016 - Synthese 193 (9).
    Traditional eliminativism is the view that a term should be eliminated from everyday speech due to failures of reference. Following Edouard Machery, we may distinguish this traditional eliminativism about a kind and its term from a scientific eliminativism according to which a term should be eliminated from scientific discourse due to a lack of referential utility. The distinction matters if any terms are rightly retained for daily life despite being rightly eliminated from scientific inquiry. In this article, I argue that (...)
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  • Wittgenstein versus Carnap on physicalism: a reassessment.David Stern - unknown
    The "standard account" of Wittgenstein’s relations with the Vienna Circle is that the early Wittgenstein was a principal source and inspiration for the Circle’s positivistic and scientific philosophy, while the later Wittgenstein was deeply opposed to the logical empiricist project of articulating a "scientific conception of the world." However, this telegraphic summary is at best only half-true and at worst deeply misleading. For it prevents us appreciating the fluidity and protean character of their philosophical dialogue. In retrospectively attributing clear-cut positions (...)
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  • Sartre.Robert Hopkins - 2016 - In Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Imagination. New York: Routledge. pp. 82-93.
    In The Imaginary Sartre offers a systematic, insightful and heterodox account of imagining in many forms. Beginning with four ‘characteristics’ he takes to capture the phenomenology of imagining, he draws on considerations both philosophical and psychological to describe the deeper nature of the state that has those features. The result is a view that remains the most potent challenge to the Humean orthodoxy that to this day dominates both philosophical and psychological thinking on the topic.
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  • CHAPTER 1. Mental Causation and Consciousness: Our Two Mind-Body Problems.Jaegwon Kim - 2005 - In Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. Princeton University Press. pp. 7-31.
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  • Realization and Causal Powers.Umut Baysan - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Glasgow
    In this thesis, I argue that physicalism should be understood to be the view that mental properties are realized by physical properties. In doing this, I explore what the realization relation might be. Since realization is the relation that should help us formulate physicalism, I suggest that the theoretical role of realization consists in explaining some of the things that physicalists wish to explain. These are: How are mental properties metaphysically necessitated by physical properties? How are mental properties causally efficacious? (...)
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  • Erratum to: Four Neglected Prescriptions of Hartian Legal Philosophy.Kevin Toh - 2015 - Law and Philosophy 34 (3):333-368.
    This paper seeks to uncover and rationally reconstruct four theoretical prescriptions that H. L. A. Hart urged philosophers to observe and follow when investigating and theorizing about the nature of law. The four prescriptions may appear meager and insignificant when each is seen in isolation, but together as an inter-connected set they have substantial implications. In effect, they constitute a central part of Hart’s campaign to put philosophical investigations about the nature of law onto a path to a genuine research (...)
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  • Of brains and planets: on a causal criterion for mind-brain identities.Vera Hoffmann-Kolss - 2016 - Synthese 193 (4):1177-1189.
    Whether mental properties are identical with neural properties is one of the central questions of contemporary philosophy of mind. Many philosophers agree that even if mental properties are identical with neural properties, the mind-brain identity thesis cannot be established on empirical grounds, but only be vindicated by theoretical philosophical considerations. In his paper ‘When Is a Brain Like the Planet?’, Clark Glymour proposes a causal criterion for local property identifications and claims that this criterion can be used to empirically establish (...)
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  • A Defense of Materialism Against Attacks Based on Qualia.Jeffrey Charles Beall - 1998 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst
    Qualia--the "what it's like features" of minds--pose a great challenge to a materialist view of the world. The two strongest and most popular objections to materialism based on qualia are the Zombie Argument and the Knowledge Argument. The current dissertation defends materialism against these two popular arguments. ;I argue that if zombie worlds exist, then qualia cause no physical events--they're epiphenomenal$\sb{\rm p},$ or epiphenomenal with respect to the physical domain of our world. I argue, however, that there is good reason (...)
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  • Locke on Primary and Secondary Qualities.Marcia Ann McKelligan - 1979 - Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst
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  • Descartes, La Mettrie, Language, And Machines.Keith Gunderson - 1964 - Philosophy 39 (149):193-222.
    IN L'Homme machine La Mettrie at one point discusses the possibility of teaching an ape to speak, and later he suggests that just as the inventor Vaucanson had made a mechanical flute player and a mechanical duck, it might be possible some day for ‘another Prometheus’ to make a mechanical man which could talk.
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  • Projectivism psychologized: the philosophy and psychology of disgust.Daniel R. Kelly - unknown
    This dissertation explores issues in the philosophy of psychology and metaphysics through the lens of the emotion of disgust, and its corresponding property, disgustingness. The first chapter organizes an extremely large body of data about disgust, imposes two constraints any theory must meet, and offers a cognitive model of the mechanisms underlying the emotion. The second chapter explores the evolution of disgust, and argues for the Entanglement thesis: this uniquely human emotion was formed when two formerly distinct mechanisms, one dedicated (...)
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  • Four Neglected Prescriptions of Hartian Legal Philosophy.Kevin Toh - 2014 - Law and Philosophy 33 (6):689-724.
    This paper seeks to uncover and rationally reconstruct four theoretical prescriptions that H. L. A. Hart urged philosophers to observe and follow when investigating and theorizing about the nature of law. The four prescriptions may appear meager and insignificant when each is seen in isolation, but together as an inter-connected set they have substantial implications. In effect, they constitute a central part of Hart's campaign to put philosophical investigations about the nature of law onto a path to a genuine research (...)
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  • A methodologically naturalist defense of ethical non-naturalism.Abraham Graber - unknown
    The aim of this dissertation is to show that, if one is committed to the scientific worldview, one is thereby committed to ethical non-naturalism. In the first chapter I offer the reader an outline of the three primary domains of ethical inquiry: normative ethics, applied ethics, and meta-ethics. I commit myself to a meta-ethical thesis--ethical non-naturalism--and contrast ethical non-naturalism with its competitors. In the second chapter I offer a cursory defense of the moral realist's semantic thesis. I offer reason to (...)
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  • Kim on Reductive Explanation.Neil Campbell - 2015 - Acta Analytica 30 (2):149-156.
    In the light of what appear to be clear counterexamples, I argue that Jaegwon Kim’s comparative evaluation of functional reduction and reduction via necessary identities is problematic. I trace the problem to two sources: a misplaced metaphysical assumption about the explanatory role of identities and an excessively strong and narrow criterion for successful reductive explanation. Appreciating where Kim’s critique runs astray enhances our understanding of the role of necessary identities in reductive explanation.
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