Karl Marx claims that alienation inheres in all wage labor. I raise questions about the applicability of this claim to subjects of patriarchy. In the first section, I discuss industrial wage labor and its allure for women who were trying to escape the norms of familial patriarchy. In the second section, I extend this criticism of Marx’s claim by considering the racially enslaved subjects of the Antebellum American South, for whom economicallyrecognized wage labor was still a bloody political battle. Finally, (...) I turn to the identification of working class women and sexuality, in order to show how wage labor offered liberation from narrow bourgeois sexual strictures. I conclude by reassessing the viability of Marx’s critique of alienation, taking into account the standpoints from which wage labor itself was a considerable political achievement. (shrink)

Essay Review of New Waves in the Philosophy of Technology (Olsen/Selinger). Treats issue of difference of technology in Marx and Heidegger at some length.

According to representationalism, the qualitative character of our phenomenal mental states supervenes on the intentional content of such states. Strong representationalism makes a further claim: the qualitative character of our phenomenal mental states _consists in_ the intentional content of such states. Although strong representationalism has greatly increased in popularity over the last decade, I find the view deeply implausible. In what follows, I will attempt to argue against strong representationalism by a two-step argument. First, I suggest that strong representationalism must (...) be _unrestricted_ in order to serve as an adequate theory of qualia, i.e., it must apply to all qualitative mental states. Second, I present considerations to show that an unrestricted form of strong representationalism is problematic. (shrink)

One common response to the knowledge argument is the ability hypothesis. Proponents of the ability hypothesis accept that Mary learns what seeing red is like when she exits her black-and-white room, but they deny that the kind of knowledge she gains is propositional in nature. Rather, she acquires a cluster of abilities that she previously lacked, in particular, the abilities to recognize, remember, and imagine the color red. For proponents of the ability hypothesis, knowing what an experience is like simply (...) consists in the possession of these abilities. Criticisms of the ability hypothesis tend to focus on this last claim. Such critics tend to accept that Mary gains these abilities when she leaves the room, but they deny that such abilities constitute knowledge of what an experience is like. To my mind, however, this critical strategy grants too much. Focusing specifically on imaginative ability, I argue that Mary does not gain this ability when she leaves the room for she already had the ability to imagine red while she was inside it. Moreover, despite what some have thought, the ability hypothesis cannot be easily rescued by recasting it in terms of a more restrictive imaginative ability. My purpose here is not to take sides in the debate about physicalism, i.e., my criticism of the ability hypothesis is not offered in an attempt to defend the anti-physicalist conclusion of the knowledge argument. Rather, my purpose is to redeem the imagination from the misleading picture of it that discussion of the knowledge argument has fostered. (shrink)

Work in philosophy of mind often engages in descriptive phenomenology, i.e., in attempts to characterize the phenomenal character of our experience. Nagel’s famous discussion of what it’s like to be a bat demonstrates the difficulty of this enterprise (1974). But while Nagel located the difficulty in our absence of an objective vocabulary for describing experience, I argue that the problem runs deeper than that: we also lack an adequate subjective vocabulary for describing phenomenology. We struggle to describe our own phenomenal (...) states in terms we ourselves find adequately expressive. This paper aims to flesh out why our phenomenological vocabulary is so impoverished – what I call the impoverishment problem. As I suggest, this problem has both practical and philosophical import. After fleshing out the problem in more detail, I draw some suggestive morals from the discussion in an effort to point the way forward towards a solution. (shrink)

Philosophers in the Western tradition have both theorized about imagination and used imagination in their theorizing about other matters. In this chapter, I first provide a brief overview of philosophical theorizing about imagination with a special focus on its relation to other mental states such as belief and perception. I then turn to a discussion of the methodological role that imagination has played in philosophy. I here focus on the imaginability principle, i.e., the claim that the imaginability of a given (...) scenario entails that such a scenario is in some sense possible. Relying on this kind of principle, philosophers have used imagination to justify theories in domains such as philosophy of mind, metaphysics and ethics. (shrink)

Origin of a dissipative structure in a chemical dynamic system: occurs under the following constraints: 1) Affinity must be high. (The system must be far from equilibrium.); 2) There must be an auto-catalytic process; 3) A process that reduces the concentration of the auto-catalyst must operate; 4) The relevant parameters (rate constants, etc.) must lie in a range corresponding to a limit cycle trajectory. That is, there must be closure of the network of reaction such that a state sufficiently close (...) to the prior condition is achieved at the corresponding part of each oscillation. If these constraints continue to be met interactions of the system with the rest of the world are quite different in the presence of the dissipative structure than they would be in the absence of that self-organized coherence. Closure of a network of relationships which gives rise to a dissipative structure is a 'unit-determining' feature. The effects of the structure as a whole are the resultants of the effects of the components, but the concentrations of the components at any instant are effects of the closure of the limit cycle. This is an influence on components arising from what those components constitute --- downward causation. (shrink)

The theoretical biology movement originating in Britain in the early 1930’s and the biosemiotics movement which took off in Europe in the 1980’s have much in common. They are both committed to replacing the neo-Darwinian synthesis, and they have both invoked theories of signs to this end. Yet, while there has been some mutual appreciation and influence, particularly in the cases of Howard Pattee, René Thom, Kalevi Kull, Anton Markoš and Stuart Kauffman, for the most part, these movements have developed (...) independently of each other. Focussing on morphogenesis understood as vegetative semiosis, in this paper I will argue that the ideas of these movements are commensurate. Furthermore, synthesising them would enable us to see life processes as proto-narratives. Doing so will involve synthesising biohermeneutics, Peircian biosemiotics with Waddington’s theoretical biology and Piagetian genetic structuralism, and this, I claim, would strengthen the challenge of these traditions to mainstream biology. At the same time, this should contribute to overcoming the opposition between the sciences and the humanities, developing a broader tradition of Schellingian thought which involves developing the humanities and then demanding of the physical and biological sciences that they are consistent with and can make intelligible the emergence of humans as conceived by the humanities. (shrink)

This paper recommends that chemistry educators shift to a different ‘idea of nature’, an alternative ‘worldview.’ Much of contemporary science and technology deals in one way or another with dynamic coherences that display novel and important properties. The notion of how the world works that such studies and practices generate (and require) is quite different from the earlier concepts that are now integrated into science education. Eventual success in meeting contemporary technological and social challenges requires general diffusion of an overall (...) outlook that focuses on creative generation of novel and useful coherences, replacing a worldview that concentrates on analysis of pre-existing items to minimum constituents. Such a shift in emphasis would amount to general adoption of a new basic model of how nature functions. Chemistry educators can and should provide leadership for this urgently-needed development. (shrink)

Time’s arrow is necessary for progress from a past that has already happened to a future that is only potential until creatively determined in the present. But time’s arrow is unnecessary in Einstein’s so-called block universe, so there is no creative unfolding in an actual present. How can there be an actual present when there is no universal moment of simultaneity? Events in various places will have different presents according to the position, velocity, and nature of the perceiver. Standing against (...) this view is traditional common sense since we normally experience time’s arrow as reality and the present as our place in the stream of consciousness, but we err to imagine we are living in the actual present. The present of our daily experience is actually a specious present, according to E. Robert Kelly (later popularized by William James), or duration, according to Henri Bergson, an habitus, as elucidated by Kerby (1991), or, simply, the psychological present (Adams, 2010) – all terms indicating that our experienced present so consists of the past overlapping into the future that any potential for acting from the creative moment is crowded out. Yet, for philosophers of process from Herakleitos onward, it is the philosophies of change or process that treat time’s arrow and the creative fire of the actual present as realities. In this essay, I examine the most well known but possibly least understood process cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead to seek out this elusive but actual present. In doing so, I will also ask if process philosophy is itself an example of the creative imagination and if this relates to doing science. I conclude Whitehead's process philosophy falls short of allowing for the actual creative spontaneity of a dynamic (eternal) present. (shrink)

● Sergio Cremaschi, The non-existing Island. The chapter discusses how the cleavage between the Continental and the Anglo-American philosophies originated, the (self-)images of both philosophical worlds, the converging rediscoveries from the Seventies, and recent ecumenic or anti-ecumenic strategies. I argue that pragmatism provides an important counter-instance to the familiar self-images and the fashionable ecumenic or anti-ecumenic strategies. The conclusions are: (i) the only place where Continental philosophy exists (as Euro-Communism one decade ago) is America; (ii) less obviously, also analytic philosophy (...) does not exist, or does no more exist as a current or a paradigm; what does exist is, on the one hand, philosophy of language and, on the other, philosophy of mind, that is, two disciplines; (iii) the dissolution of analytic philosophy as a school has been highly fruitful, precisely in so far as it has left room for disciplines and research programmes; (iv) what is left, of the Anglo-American/Continental cleavage is primarily differences in styles, depending partly on intellectual traditions, partly owing to sociology, history, institutional frameworks; these differences should not be blurred by rash ecumenism; besides, theoretical differences are alive as ever, but within both camps; finally, there is indeed a lag (not a difference) in the appropriation of intellectual techniques by most schools of 'Continental' philosophy, and this should be overcome through appropriation of what the best 'analytic' philosophers have produced. ● Michael Strauss, Language and sense-perception: an aspect of analytic philosophy. To test an assertion about one fact by comparing it with perceived reality seems quite unproblematic. But the very possibility of such a procedure is incompatible with the intellectualistic basis of logical positivism and atomism (as it is for example to be found in Russell's Analysis of Mind). According to the intellectualistic approach pure sensation is meaningless. Sensation receives its meaning and order from the intellect through interpretation, which is performed with the help of linguistic tools, i.e. words and sentences. Before being interpreted, sensation is not a picture or a representation, it is neither true nor false, neither an illusion nor knowledge; it does not tell us anything; it is a lifeless and order-less matter. But how can a thought (or a proposition) be compared with such a lifeless matter? This difficulty confronts the intellectualist, if on the one hand he admits the necessity of comparing thought with sense-perception, and on the other hand presupposes that we possess only intellectual and no immediate perceptual understanding of what we see and hear. In this paper I give a critical exposition of three attempts, made by Russell, Neurath and Wittgenstein, to solve this problem. The first attempt adheres to strict conventionalism, the second tends to naturalism and the third leads to an amended, very moderate version of conventionalism. This amended conventionalism looks at sense impressions as being a peculiar language, which includes primary symbols, i.e. symbols not founded on convention and not being in need of interpretation. ● Ernst Tugendhat, Phenomenology and language analysis. The paper, first published in German in 1970, by which Tugendhat gave a start to the German rediscovery of analytic philosophy. The author stages a confrontation between phenomenology and language analysis. He argues that language analysis does not differ from phenomenology as far as the topics dealt with are concerned; instead, both currents are quite different in method. The author argues that language-analytic philosophy does not simply lay out of the mainstream of transcendental philosophy, but that instead it challenges this tradition on the very level of foundations. The author criticizes the linguistic-analytic approach centred on the subject as well as any object-centred approach, while proposing inter-subjective understanding through language as the new universal framework. This is, when construed in so general terms, the same program of hermeneutics, though in a more basic version. ● Jürgen Habermas, Language game, intention and meaning. On a few suggestions by Sellars and Wittgenstein. The paper, first published in German in 1975, in which Habermas announces his own linguistic turn through a discovery of speech acts. In this essay the author wants to work out a categorical framework for a communicative theory of society; he takes Wittgenstein's concept of language game as a Leitfade and, besides, he takes advantage also of Wilfried Sellars's quasi-transcendental account of the genesis of intentionality. His goal is to single out the problems connected with a theory of consciousness oriented in a logical-linguistic sense. ● Zvie Bar-On, Isomorphism of speech acts and intentional states. This essay presents the problem of the formal relationship between speech acts and intentional states as an essential part of the perennial philosophical question of the relation between language and thought. I attempt to show how this problem had been dealt with by two prominent philosophers of different camps in our century, Edmund Husserl and John Searle. Both of them wrote extensively about the theory of intentionality. I point out an interesting, as it were unintended, continuity of their work on that theory. Searle started where Husserl left off 80 years earlier. Their meeting point could be used as the first clue in our search. They both adopted in effect the same distinction between two basic aspects of the intentional experience: its content or matter, and its quality or mode. Husserl did not yet have the concept of a speech act as contradistinguished from an intentional state. The working hypothesis, however, which he suggested, could be used as a second clue for the further elaboration of the theory. The relationship of the two levels, the mental and the linguistic, which remained for Husserl in the background only, became the cornerstone of Searle' s inquiry. He employed the speech act as the model and analysed the intentional experience by means of the conceptual apparatus of his own theory of speech acts. This procedure enabled him to mark out a number of parallelisms and correlations between the two levels. This procedure explains the phenomenon of the partial isomorphism of speech acts and intentional states. ● Roberta de Monticelli, Ontology. A dialogue among the linguistic philosopher, the naturalist, and the phenomenological philosopher. This paper proposes a comparison between two main ways of conceiving the role and scope of that fundamental part of philosophy (or of "first" philosophy) which is traditionally called "ontology". One way, originated within the analytic tradition, consists of two main streams, namely philosophy of language and (contemporary) philosophy of mind, the former yielding "reduced ontology" and the latter "neo-Aristotelian ontology". The other way of conceiving ontology is exemplified by "phenomenological ontology" (more precisely, the Husserlian, not the Heideggerian version). Ontology as a theory of reference ("reduced" ontology, or ontology as depending on semantics) is presented and justified on the basis of some classical thesis of traditional philosophy of language (from Frege to Quine). "Reduced ontology" is shown to be identifiable with one level of a traditional, Aristotelian ontology, namely the one which corresponds to one of the four "senses of being" listed in Aristotle's Metaphysics: "being" as "being true". This identification is justified on the basis of Franz Brentano's "rules for translation" of the Aristotelian table of judgements in terms of (positive and negative) existential judgments such as are easily translatable into sentences of first order predicate logic. The second part of the paper is concerned with "neo-Aristotelian ontology", i.e. with naturalism and physicalism as the main ontological options underlying most of contemporary discussion in the philosophy of mind. The qualification of such options as "neo-Aristotelian" is justified; the relationships between "neo-Aristotelian ontology" and "reduced ontology" are discussed. In the third part the fundamental tenet of "phenomenological ontology" is identified by the thesis that a logical theory of existence and being does capture a sense of "existing" and "being" which, even though not the basic one, is grounded in the basic one. An attempt is done of further clarifying this "more basic" sense of "being". An argument making use of this supposedly "more basic" sense is advanced in favour of a "phenomenological ontology". ● Kuno Lorenz, Analytic Roots in Dialogic Constructivism. Both in the Vienna Circle ad in Russell's early philosophy the division of knowledge into two kinds (or two levels), perceptual and conceptual, plays a vital role. Constructivism in philosophy, in trying to provide a pragmatic foundation - a knowing-how - to perceptual as well as conceptual competences, discovered that this is dependent on semiotic tools. Therefore, the "principle of method" had to be amended by the "principle of dialogue". Analytic philosophy being an heir of classical empiricism, conceptually grasping the "given", and constructive philosophy being an heir of classical rationalism, perceptually providing the "constructed", merge into dialogical constructivism, a contemporary development of ideas derived especially from the works of Charles S. Peirce (his pragmatic maxim as a means of giving meaning to signs) and of Ludwig Wittgenstein (his language games as tools of comparison for understanding ways of life). 7. Albrecht Wellmer, "Autonomy of meaning" and "principle of charity" from the viewpoint of the pragmatics of language. In this essay I present an interpretation of the principle of the autonomy of meaning and of the principle of charity, the two main principles of Davidson's semantic view of truth, showing how both principles may fit in a perspective dictated by the pragmatics of language. I argue that (I) the principle of the autonomy of meaning may be thoroughly reformulated in terms of the pragmatics of language, (ii) the principle of charity needs a supplement in terms of pragmatics of language in order to become really enlightening as a principle of interpretation. Besides, I argue that: (i) on the one hand, the fundamental thesis of Habermas on the pragmatic theory of meaning ("we understand a speech act when we know what makes it admissible") is correlated with the seemingly intentionalist thesis according to which we understand a speech act when we know what a speaker means; (ii) on the other hand, to say that the meaning competence of a competent speaker is basically a competence about a potential of reasons (or also of possible justifications) which is inherently connected with the meaning of statements, or with their use in utterances. ● Rüdiger Bubner, The convergence of analytic and hermeneutic philosophy This paper argues that the analytic philosophy does not exist, at least as understood by its original programs. Differences in the analytic camp have always been bigger than they were believed to be. Now these differences are coming to the fore thanks to a process of dissolution of dogmatism. Philosophical analysis is led by its own inner logic towards questions that may be fairly qualified as hermeneutic. Recent developments in analytic philosophy, e.g. Davidson, seem to indicate a growing convergence of themes between philosophical analysis and hermeneutics; thus, the familiar opposition of Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophy might soon belong to history. The fact of an ongoing appropriation of analytical techniques by present-day German philosophers may provide a basis for a powerful argument for the unity of philosophizing, beyond its strained images privileging one technique of thinking and rejecting the remainder. Actual philosophical practice should take the dialogue between the two camps more seriously; in fact, the processes described so far are no danger to philosophical work. They may be a danger for parochial approaches to philosophizing; indeed, contrary to what happens in the natural sciences, Thomas Kuhn's "normal science" developing within the framework of one fixed paradigm is not typical for philosophical thinking. And in philosophy innovating revolutions are symptoms more of vitality than of crisis. ● Karl-Otto Apel, The impact of analytic philosophy on my intellectual biography. In my paper I try to reconstruct the history of my Auseinandersetzung mit - as I called it - "language-analytical" philosophy (including even Peircean semiotics) since the late Fifties. The heuristics of my study was predetermined by two main motives of my beginnings: the hermeneutic turn of phenomenology and the transformation of "transcendental philosophy" in the light of the "language a priori". Thus, I took issue with the early and the later Wittgenstein, logical positivism, and post-Wittgensteinian and post-empiricist philosophy of science (i.e. G.H. von Wright and the renewal of the "explanation vs understanding controversy" as well as the debate between Th. Kuhn and Popper/Lakatos); besides, with speech act theory and the debate about "transcendental arguments" since Strawson. The "pragmatic turn", started already by C.L. Morris and the later Carnap, led me to study also the relationship between Wittgensteinian "use" theory of meaning and of truth. This resulted on my side in something like a program of "transcendental semiotics", i.e. "transcendental pragmatics" and "transcendental hermeneutics". ● Ben-Ami Scharfstein, A doubt on both their houses: the blindness to non-western philosophies. The burden of my criticism is that contemporary European philosophers of all kinds have continued to think as if there were no true philosophy but that of the West. For the most part, the existentialists have been oblivious of their Eastern congeners; the hermeneuticians have yet to stretch their horizons beyond the most familiar ones; and the analysts remain unaware of the analyses and linguistic sensitivities of the ancient non-European philosophers. Briefly, ignorance still blinds almost all contemporary Western philosophers to the rich, variegated philosophical traditions outside of their familiar orbit. Both Continental and Anglo-Americans have lost the breadth of view that once characterized such thinkers as Herder and the Humboldts. The blindness that has resulted is not simply that of individual Western philosophers but of our whole, still parochial philosophical culture. (shrink)

1.Summary The key terms. 1. Key term: ‘Sunyata’. Nagarjuna is known in the history of Buddhism mainly by his keyword ‘sunyata’. This word is translated into English by the word ‘emptiness’. The translation and the traditional interpretations create the impression that Nagarjuna declares the objects as empty or illusionary or not real or not existing. What is the assertion and concrete statement made by this interpretation? That nothing can be found, that there is nothing, that nothing exists? Was Nagarjuna denying (...) the external world? Did he wish to refute that which evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things that somehow arise? My first point is the refutation of this traditional translation and interpretation. 2. Key terms: ‘Dependence’ or ‘relational view’. My second point consists in a transcription of the keyword of ‘sunyata’ by the word ‘dependence’. This is something that Nagarjuna himself has done. Now Nagarjuna’s central view can be named ‘dependence of things’. Nagarjuna is not looking for a material or immaterial object which can be declared as a fundamental reality of this world. His fundamental reality is not an object. It is a relation between objects. This is a relational view of reality. This is the heart of Nagarjuna’s ideas. In the 19th century a more or less unknown Italian philosopher, Vincenzo Goberti, spoke about relations as the mean and as bonds between things. Later, in quantum physics and in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead we are talking about interactions and entanglements. These ideas of relatedness or connections or entanglements in Eastern and Western modes of thought are the main idea of this essay. Not all entanglements are known. Just two examples: the nature of quantum entanglements is not known. Quantum entanglements should be faster than light. That's why Albert Einstein had some doubts. A second example: the completely unknown connections between the mind and the brain. Other examples are mysterious like the connections between birds in a flock. Some are a little known like gravitational forces. 3. Key terms: ‘Arm in arm’. But Nagarjuna did not stop there. He was not content to repeat this discovery of relational reality. He went on one step further indicating that what is happening between two things. He gave indications to the space between two things. He realized that not the behaviour of bodies, but the behaviour of something between them may be essential for understanding the reality. This open space is not at all empty. It is full of energy. The open space is the middle between things. Things are going arm in arm. The middle might be considered as a force that bounds men to the world and it might be seen as well as a force of liberation. It might be seen as a bondage to the infinite space. 4. Key term: Philosophy. Nagarjuna, we are told, was a Buddhist philosopher. This statement is not wrong when we take the notion ‘philosophy’ in a deep sense as a love to wisdom, not as wisdom itself. Philosophy is a way to wisdom. Where this way has an end wisdom begins and philosophy is no more necessary. A.N. Whitehead gives philosophy the commission of descriptive generalization. We do not need necessarily a philosophical building of universal dimensions. Some steps of descriptive generalization might be enough in order to see and understand reality. There is another criterion of Nagarjuna’s philosophy. Not his keywords ‘sunyata’ and ‘pratityasamutpada’ but his 25 philosophical examples are the heart of his philosophy. His examples are images. They do not speak to rational and conceptual understanding. They speak to our eyes. Images, metaphors, allegories or symbolic examples have a freshness which rational ideas do not possess. Buddhist dharma and philosophy is a philosophy of allegories. This kind of philosophy is not completely new and unknown to European philosophy. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave it is already a little known. (Plato 424 – 348 Befor Current Era) The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has underlined the importance of metaphors in European philosophy. 5. Key terms: Quantum Physics. Why quantum physics? European modes of thought had no idea of the space between two this. They were bound to the ideas of substance or subject, two main metaphysical traditions of European philosophical history, two main principles. These substances and these subjects are two immaterial bodies which were considered by traditional European metaphysics as lying, as a sort of core, inside the objects or underlying the empirical reality of our world. The first European scientist who saw with his inner eye the forces between two things had been Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Faraday was an English scientist who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism. Later physicists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and others followed his view in modern physics. This is a fifth point of my work. I compare Nagarjuna with European scientific modes of thought for a better understanding of Asia. I do not compare Nagarjuna with European philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein. The principles and metaphysical foundations of physical sciences are more representative for European modes of thought than the ideas of Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein and they are more precise. And slowly we are beginning to understand these principles. Let me take as an example the interpretation of quantum entanglement by the British mathematician Roger Penrose. Penrose discusses in the year of 2000 the experiences of quantum entanglement where light is separated over a distance of 100 kilometers and still remains connected in an unknown way. These are well known experiments in the last 30 years. Very strange for European modes of thought. The light should be either separated or connected. That is the expectation most European modes of thought tell us. Aristotle had been the first. Aristotle (384 - 322 Before Current Era) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He told us the following principle as a metaphysical foundation: Either a situation exists or not. There is not a third possibility. Now listen to Roger Penrose: “Quantum entanglement is a very strange type of thing. It is somewhere between objects being separate and being in communication with each other” (Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, Cambridge University Press. 2000 page 66). This sentence of Roger Penrose is a first step of a philosophical generalization in a Whiteheadian sense. 6. Key terms: ‘The metaphysical foundations of modern science’ had been examined particularly by three European and American philosophers: E. A. Burtt, A.N. Whitehead and Hans-Georg Gadamer, by Gadamer eminently in his late writings on Heraclitus and Parmenides. I try to follow the approaches of these philosophers of relational views and of anti-substantialism. By ‘metaphysical foundations’ Edwin Arthur Burtt does not understand transcendental ideas but simply the principles that are underlying sciences. -/- 7. Key terms: ‘Complementarity’, ‘interactions’, ‘entanglements’. Since 1927 quantum physics has three key terms which give an indication to the fundamental physical reality: Complementarity, interactions and entanglement. These three notions are akin to Nagarjuna’s relational view of reality. They are akin and they are very precise, so that Buddhism might learn something from these descriptions and quantum physicists might learn from Nagarjuna’s examples and views of reality. They might learn to do a first step in a philosophical generalisation of quantum physical experiments. All of us we might learn how objects are entangled or going arm in arm. [The end of the summary.] -/- « Wenn du gerade das, wodurch auch immer du gefesselt bist, erkennst, wirst du zur Freiheit gelangen. Wenn du diesen speziellen Pfad verwirklichst, gelangst du in einem Leben zur Buddhaschaft. Deswegen verhält es sich folgendermaßen : Wenn plötzlich die Geistesregung « Begierde » enststeht, dann betrachte, ohne ihr zu folgen, direkt ihre Essenz und verweile in dieser Betrachtung, ohne Ablenkungen zuzulassen. Auf diese Weise reinigt Begierde sich selbst, ohne aufgegeben zu werden, da sie ohne Grundlage und Ursprung entsteht. Das wird « Befreiung in sich selbst », « unterscheidende ursprüngliche Weisheit » oder Buddha Amitabha » genannt ». Jigden Sumgön, Licht, das die Dunkelheit durchbricht, Otter Verlag, München 2006, Seite 47, 48 . (shrink)

The book focuses on the thinking of the philosopher of Jewish origins, Hans Jonas (1903-1993), and precisely on his “philosophical biology”. The overall thesis is that this topic, which occupies the second stage of his thinking, is coherent with the previous phase (which focused on ancient Gnosticism), as well as with the following (which was dedicated to the ethics of responsibility). The main evidence supporting this thesis is the key notion of “ontological revolution”, the development of which I try to (...) analyse in Jonas’ published and unpublished writings. This is the first innovative feature of the research. The second is my attempt to compare Jonas’ ideas of life and organism with the reflections of thinkers such as Aristotle, Spinoza, and Whitehead. (shrink)

The concepts of particular and universal have grown so familiar that their significance has become difficult to discern, like coins that have been passed back and forth too many times, worn smooth so their values can no longer be read. On the Genealogy of Universals seeks to overcome our sense of over-familiarity with these concepts by providing a case study of their evolution during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, a study that shows how the history of these (...) concepts is bound up with the origins and development of analytic philosophy itself. Understanding how these concepts were taken up, transfigured, and given up by the early analytic philosophers, enables us to recover and reanimate the debate amongst them that otherwise remains Delphic. This book begins from the early, originating texts of analytic philosophy that have hitherto baffled commentators, including Moore's early papers, and engages afresh with the neglected contributions of philosophical figures that historians of analytic philosophy have mostly since forgotten, including Stout and Whitehead. This sheds new light upon the relationships of Moore to Russell, Russell to Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein to Ramsey. (shrink)

Amie Thomasson’s work provides numerous ways to rethink and improve our approach to metaphysics. This chapter is my attempt to begin to sketch why I still think the easy approach leaves room for substantive metaphysical work, and why I do not think that metaphysics need rely on any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge. After distinguishing two possible forms of deflationism, I argue that the easy ontologist needs to accept (implicitly or explicitly) that there are worldly constraints on what sorts of entities could (...) exist, and could co-exist. I argue this leaves room for a substantive role for metaphysics if (following the work of E.J. Lowe) we take metaphysics to be concerned with the possible ways that reality could be. I explain how this conception does not need to appeal to any ‘epistemically metaphysical’ knowledge, and need only make use of conceptual and/or empirical means to arrive at views on what could exist (and co-exist). Thus, the answer I propose to the question posed in the title, at least in my view, is no-one. Or, at least, no-one should be afraid of conceptual analysis. Not even metaphysicians. (shrink)

A logic is called higher order if it allows for quantification over higher order objects, such as functions of individuals, relations between individuals, functions of functions, relations between functions, etc. Higher order logic began with Frege, was formalized in Russell [46] and Whitehead and Russell [52] early in the previous century, and received its canonical formulation in Church [14].1 While classical type theory has since long been overshadowed by set theory as a foundation of mathematics, recent decades have shown (...) remarkable comebacks in the fields of mechanized reasoning (see, e.g., Benzm¨. (shrink)

Nosso trabalho pretende traçar um percurso teórico sobre a referência de objetos fictícios. Para tanto, apresentamos o tratamento de Frege, Russell e Meinong com o intuito de fornecer o pano de fundo clássico sobre o qual nosso tema se encontra. Tentamos mostrar a insuficiência desse quadro clássico de teses tendo em vista suas soluções para a referência de objetos fictícios e o resultado esperado por nós. Por isso, sugerimos a linha argumentativa delineada por Kripke a partir de Naming and Necessity, (...) passando por Vacuous Names and Fictional Entities até Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures, como uma alternativa para o estudo desses objetos. Não obstante, a despeito de sua faceta inovadora, tornou-se evidente o caráter incompleto das teses lançadas por Kripke. Todavia, a importância do arranjo kripkeano é claramente percebida a partir do estudo de perspectivas artefactuais da ficção que se baseiam em muitas das teses apresentadas. Nesse sentido, utilizamos a obra Fiction and Metaphysics da filósofa norte-americana Amie Thomasson com o intuito de mostrar os resultados dessa perspectiva para o problema da referência de objetos fictícios. Após analisarmos o aparato artefactual que a autora apresenta na obra, consideramos que a teoria thomasiana oferece as soluções que melhor se conectam com as nossas práticas linguísticas sobre objetos fictícios e a forma como lidamos com o problema da sua referência. (shrink)

In 2015, ‘marriage’ was redefined in the United States to include same-sex couples. In conceptual engineering, this is often assumed to be a paradigm case of Sally Haslanger’s (2020a, 2020b) semantic amelioration. Semantic amelioration changes a concept’s content to make it better. In the case of [MARRIAGE], [MARRIAGE]’s content was broadened to include same-sex couples – which, many contend, made it morally better. Semantic amelioration faces the following challenge, however: Doesn’t changing a concept’s content ‘change the subject?’ By broadening [MARRIAGE]’s (...) content to include same-sex couples in 2015, didn’t we replace [MARRIAGE] with a new concept that sounds and looks like [MARRIAGE] but nevertheless isn’t [MARRIAGE] – something like, [MARRIAGE*]? This is the topic continuity problem (TCP). Here, TCP assumes content essentialism about concepts, i.e., that a concept’s content is essential to it. Thus, since semantic amelioration changes concepts’ contents to make them better, semantic amelioration necessarily replaces concepts, according to this version of TCP. Haslanger recently resists this notion, however. Instead of embracing content essentialism about concepts, Haslanger embraces functional essentialism about concepts – that a concept’s function is essential to it. And since semantic amelioration leaves a concept’s function unchanged, Haslanger denies that semantic amelioration is conceptual replacement. In this paper, I argue that Haslanger’s functional essentialism integrally links concepts’ functions to their contents, such that changing a concept’s content requires changing its function, on Haslanger’s account. Therefore, semantic amelioration still replaces concepts even on Haslanger’s functional essentialism. I think this is avoided, however, if we incorporate Amie Thomasson’s (2020) recent work on concepts into Haslanger’s. Combining Thomasson’s work with Haslanger’s yields a new functional essentialism about concepts – called proper functional essentialism. Proper functional essentialism allows that some functional changes in concepts don't replace them, and hence, it perhaps reveals how to actually not change the subject in semantic amelioration. (shrink)

"Wir mögen an der Natur beobachten, messen, rechnen, wägen und so weiter, wie wir wollen, es ist doch nur unser Maß und Gewicht, wie der Mensch das Maß der Dinge ist." So schrieb Goethe im Jahre 1807. "Die Natur wird uns keine Sonderbehandlung gewähren, nur weil wir uns als 'Krone der Schöpfung' betrachten... Ich fürchte, sie ist nicht eitel genug, um sich an den Menschen als einen Spiegel zu klammern, in dem allein sie ihre eigene Schönheit sehen kann", schreibt der (...) Physiker Hans-Peter Dürr heute. Diesen beiden Stellungnahmen liegen sehr unterschiedliche Vorstellungen vom Verhältnis Mensch - Natur zugrunde. Wie überhaupt die Naturphilosophie von den Vorsokratikern bis in die Gegenwart die unterschiedlichsten Varianten dieser Beziehung durchgespielt hat. Dass der Mensch sich jedoch in einem weit über die alttestamentarische Vorstellungskraft hinausgehenden Maße die Natur "untertan" gemacht und dabei großräumig zerstört hat, steht außer Zweifel. Im Rahmen der ökologischen Krise muss das Verhältnis zur Natur neu überdacht werden. Das vorliegende Lesebuch, das sich auch als Studientext und Diskussionsgrundlage für Schulen und Hochschulen bestens eignet, bietet den Blick in die Geschichte der Naturphilosophie, der dafür unerlässlich ist: Die Schwierigkeiten, die heute im Umgang mit der Natur auftreten, sind vielfach auf immer noch wirksame traditionelle Naturvorstellungen zurückzuführen. Andererseits gibt es einige eigenständige, bisher noch zu wenig berücksichtigte Ansätze, die zu neuen Konzeptionen anregen können. ------------------------------------------------------------- Inhalt: Vorwort; Einführung: Traditionslinien der Naturphilosophie; Heraklit und die Atomisten Leukipp und Demokrit; Platon und Aristoteles; Christliches Naturverstehen im Mittelalter: Aurelius Augustinus, Thomas von Aquin, Jacob Böhme; Naturvorstellungen in der beginnenden Neuzeit: Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton; Kants Naturbegriff; Goethes Naturforschung; Nachkantische Naturphilosophie: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel; Geschichte der Natur und Kritik des Naturalismus: Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill; Kritik des Substanzbegriffes, Alfred North Whitehead, Werner Heisenberg, Ilya Prigogine und Isabelle Stengers; Bibliographie. (shrink)

Logic has pride of place in mathematics and its 20th century offshoot, computer science. Modern symbolic logic was developed, in part, as a way to provide a formal framework for mathematics: Frege, Peano, Whitehead and Russell, as well as Hilbert developed systems of logic to formalize mathematics. These systems were meant to serve either as themselves foundational, or at least as formal analogs of mathematical reasoning amenable to mathematical study, e.g., in Hilbert’s consistency program. Similar efforts continue, but have (...) been expanded by the development of sophisticated methods to study the properties of such systems using proof and model theory. In parallel with this evolution of logical formalisms as tools for articulating mathematical theories (broadly speaking), much progress has been made in the quest for a mechanization of logical inference and the investigation of its theoretical limits, culminating recently in the development of new foundational frameworks for mathematics with sophisticated computer-assisted proof systems. In addition, logical formalisms developed by logicians in mathematical and philosophical contexts have proved immensely useful in describing theories and systems of interest to computer scientists, and to some degree, vice versa. Three examples of the influence of logic in computer science are automated reasoning, computer verification, and type systems for programming languages. (shrink)

According to the account of artifacts developed by Lynne Rudder Baker, artifacts have a certain “proper function” essentially. The proper function of an artifact is the purpose or use intended for the artifact by its “author(s)”, viz., the artifact’s designer(s) and/or producer(s). Baker’s account therefore traces the essences of artifacts back indirectly to the intentions of an artifact’s original author (e.g., its inventor, maker, producer or designer). Like other “author-intention-based” accounts (e.g., those defended by Amie Thomasson, Simon Evnine, and others), (...) Baker’s treatment, or so I have argued, is subject to the concern that, when stated in its most general form, human creative intentions are not nearly as powerful and discriminating as proponents of author-intention-based accounts make them out to be (see Kathrin Koslicki, Form, Matter, Substance, Oxford University Press, 2018, Chapter 8). When Baker responds to a version of this objection launched against her account by Theodore Sider and Dean Zimmerman, she proposes that we cannot simply think things into existence for which “our conventions and practices do not have a place” (Lynne Rudder Baker, The Metaphysics of Everyday Life: An Essay in Practical Realism, 2007, p. 44). For example, I cannot, according to Baker, make up the word, “bonangle”, apply it to a piece of driftwood and thereby succeed in bringing into existence a new artifact, viz., a bonangle, merely by thinking to myself “It would be nice if the world contained bonangles; I hereby make that piece of driftwood a bonangle”. In order for this response to be effective, however, more needs to be said about how our conventions and practices support the creation of some artifacts and artifact kinds, while disallowing the attempted creation of others. In this paper, I examine the effectiveness of Baker’s response in addressing the challenges posed by the inclusion of artifacts in Baker’s practical realist ontology. (shrink)

Depuis Gintis est un économiste senior et j’ai lu certains de ses livres précédents avec intérêt, je m’attendais à un peu plus de perspicacité dans le comportement. Malheureusement, il fait les mains mortes de la sélection de groupe et la phénoménologie dans les pièces maîtresses de ses théories du comportement, et cela invalide en grande partie le travail. Pire encore, puisqu’il montre un si mauvais jugement ici, il remet en question tout son travail précédent. La tentative de ressusciter la sélection (...) de groupe par ses amis à Harvard, Nowak et Wilson, il y a quelques années, c’était l’un des principaux scandales en biologie au cours de la dernière décennie, et j’ai raconté la triste histoire dans mon article 'Altruism, Jesus and the End of the World-how the Templeton Foundation bought a Harvard Professorship and attacked Evolution, Rationality and Civilization -- A review of E.O. Wilson 'The Social Conquest of Earth' (2012) et Nowak and Highfield 'SuperCooperators' (2012).' Contrairement à Nowak, Gintis ne semble pas être motivé par le fanatisme religieux, mais par le fort désir de générer une alternative aux sombres réalités de la nature humaine, facilitée par le manque (quasi universel) de compréhension de la biologie humaine fondamentale et le slateisme vierge des scientifiques comportementaux, d’autres universitaires et du grand public. Gintis attaque à juste titre (comme il l’a fait à maintes reprises) les économistes, les sociologues et d’autres scientifiques du comportement pour ne pas avoir un cadre cohérent pour décrire le comportement. Bien sûr, le cadre nécessaire pour comprendre le comportement est évolutif. Malheureusement, il ne parvient pas à en fournir un lui-même (selon ses nombreux critiques et je suis d’accord), et la tentative de greffer le cadavre pourri de la sélection de groupe sur toutes les théories économiques et psychologiques qu’il a généré dans ses décennies de travail, n’a fait qu’invalider tout son projet. Bien que Gintis fasse un vaillant effort pour comprendre et expliquer la génétique, comme Wilson et Nowak, il est loin d’être un expert, et comme eux, le calcul l’aveugle juste aux impossibilités biologiques et bien sûr c’est la norme en science. Comme Wittgenstein l’a noté sur la première page de la culture et de la valeur « Il n’y a pas de dénomination religieuse dans laquelle l’utilisation abusive des expressions métaphysiques a été responsable de tant de péchés qu’il l’a en mathématiques. » Il a toujours été clair que un gène qui provoque un comportement qui diminue sa propre fréquence ne peut pas persister, mais c’est le cœur de la notion de sélection de groupe. En outre, il a été bien connu et souvent démontré que la sélection de groupe réduit juste à la condition physique inclusive (sélection de parents), qui, comme Dawkins l’a noté, est juste un autre nom pour l’évolution par sélection naturelle. Comme Wilson, Gintis a travaillé dans cette arène pendant environ 50 ans et n’a toujours pas compris, mais après le scandale a éclaté, il ne m’a fallu que 3 jours pour trouver, lire et comprendre le travail professionnel le plus pertinent, comme détaillé dans mon article. Il est ahurissant de se rendre compte que Gintis et Wilson n’ont pas été en mesure d’y parvenir en près d’un demi-siècle. Je discute des erreurs de sélection de groupe et de phénoménologie qui sont la norme dans le milieu universitaire comme des cas spéciaux de l’échec quasi universel de comprendre la nature humaine qui détruisent l’Amérique et le monde. Ceux qui souhaitent un cadre complet à jour pour le comportement humain de la vue moderne de deux systemes peuvent consulter mon livre 'The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle' 2nd ed (2019). Ceux qui s’intéressent à plus de mes écrits peuvent voir «Talking Monkeys --Philosophie, Psychologie, Science, Religion et Politique sur une planète condamnée --Articles et revues 2006-2019 3e ed (2019) et Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2020) et autres. (shrink)

J. N. (Jitendra Nath) Mohanty (1928–2023). -/- Professor J. N. Mohanty has characterized his life and philosophy as being both “inside” and “outside” East and West, i.e., inside and outside traditions of India and those of the West, living in both India and United States: geographically, culturally, and philosophically; while also traveling the world: Melbourne to Moscow. Most of his academic time was spent teaching at the University of Oklahoma, The New School Graduate Faculty, and finally Temple University. Yet his (...) preeminent work in Husserlian phenomenology developed alongside his eminent work in Indian philosophy: describing his interests as “a fusion of disparate horizons.” -/- J. N. Mohanty was born September 26, 1928, in Cuttack (Odisha, East India). After graduating from high school, he went on to study both Indian and Western philosophy in Calcutta, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees. There he read Whitehead and Kant’s First Critique; although he wanted to include mathematics in his curriculum, he was led instead to include Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. On the shelves of his teacher, Ras Vihar Das, he came upon a copy of the English translation (Ideas I, 1931) of Edmund Husserl’s classic Ideen I (1913), which presented Husserl’s ground-breaking conception of phenomenology. In 1952–1954 he left India for the first time, reaching Göttingen to study mathematics and philosophy, which earned him a doctorate in mathematics and “philosophy of mathematical sciences” (in his own words). In Göttingen, Mohanty found the powerful mathematical world that Husserl himself had earlier interacted with, where several Husserl students had formed the Göttingen school of phenomenology. During these years Mohanty studied primarily mathematics, alongside Kant and also Vedic Sanskrit. From his friend Günter Patzig, interpreter of Aristotle and Frege, Mohanty was drawn to Frege in relation to mathematical logic. He attended lectures of Heidegger, intrigued by his ontological thinking. Yet, despite the Husserlian legacy, Mohanty was completely self-taught in his studies of Husserl (as he has reported). With a doctorate in mathematics, and ideas from Kant and Frege in his philosophical background, Mohanty set about crafting his own conception of philosophy grounded in phenomenology, drawing on Husserl’s extensive work, critically sifting through Husserl’s texts and their emerging concepts of intentionality, meaning, subject, intersubjectivity, and world. In between he wrote his first book-length study: on phenomenological insights in Nicolai Hartmann and A. N. Whitehead (1958). -/- Over many decades Mohanty formulated and argued, in analytical detail, for a conception of phenomenology and its place in philosophy, later presented in a clear and concise book titled Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Account (1989). Over these very decades the same scholar explored classical and recent Indian philosophy, thinking through kindred ideas of consciousness, self, and knowledge drawn from the Indian philosophical contexts. While writing on Nyāya theory of truth, he also pondered whether the world and finite individual are illusory or real, and whether Marx, Arendt, Gandhi (whom he heard speak in Calcutta), or Vinoba Bhave (with whom he marched across India for the land-grant movement) could best navigate post-Independent India’s social and svarāj or self-rule reforms. The two Mohantys, thinking through a vision of self and world, turned out to be “non-different” or “non-dual” as they each practiced critical phenomenology from both inside and outside the respective philosophical and cultural traditions. Numerous students, fellows, and colleagues or collaborators have benefited immensely from this infusion and unified approach to diversity in philosophical thought. In the 2000s, moving into retirement, Mohanty wrote two long books devoted to his understanding of Husserl and phenomenology and the calling of philosophy itself. This two-volume study shows Mohanty himself thinking through Husserl, critically, in The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Introduction (2008), and Edmund Husserl’s Freiburg Years: 1916–1938. As Mohanty worked on Husserl, he carefully indicated where he agreed and where he rejected or changed ideas, all part of his practice in phenomenology of “description and interpretation.” It was the same pattern he used in addressing the thought of Husserl vis-à-vis Kant or Frege or even Quine. -/- As Mohanty developed his understanding of phenomenology over the years, he wrote books on theory of meaning and the concept of intentionality, developing a model of ideal meaning and its foundation in intentionality, drawing on Husserl’s results. He followed these with the book Husserl and Frege (1982), linking the thought of those foundational figures for the “continental” and “analytic” traditions, respectively, in twentieth-century Western philosophy. Over his long career Mohanty addressed both traditions in his clear and accessible writing style. While developing his views on phenomenology, Mohanty regularly looked to “Husserl and his others,” evaluating views in Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and then Derrida and others in the wake of Husserl. With his background in Kant, Mohanty also looked toward Heidegger and Hegel in relation to Husserl’s later work in the Crisis (1935–38). Similarly, he looked to contemporary analytic philosophers, adjudicating his own, oft-wise Husserlian views in relation to Frege, Nagel, and others. Amid his active scholarly career, Mohanty co-founded the journal Husserl Studies, and was editorial advisor to Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, Philosophy East & West, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Sophia, among others. -/- Yet all this while Mohanty was also thinking and writing about Indian philosophy and its relation to phenomenology. In his own retrospective, Indian philosophy is “the permanent background” of his Husserlian thinking, while Kant is the recurrent Western background of his Husserlian phenomenology. Mohanty’s form of “transcendental phenomenology” evolved, in his own perspective, against the background of his studies of Navya-Nyāya on logic and Vedānta on consciousness, in Indian philosophy, and against the background of Kant’s First Critique on the transcendental, in Western philosophy. Accordingly, Mohanty’s study of logical form and of the intentionality of consciousness seeks a fusion of East and West in the conception of transcendental phenomenology. (Cf. Mohanty’s apt response to critics in The Empirical and the Transcendental (2000).) Even in the context of North American Husserl scholarship, Mohanty has exercised an earnest fusion of East and West. For the so-called East Coast and West Coast interpretations of Husserl’s crucial notion of noema both find a sympathetic spirit in J. N. Mohanty’s careful and nuanced interpretation of Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. With Mohanty the two faces of the noema are the logical (Fregean) and the phenomenal (Kantian), and these views of intentional structure join in consciousness—in a way resonant with Indian thought. -/- - David Woodruff Smith (UC Irvine) and Purushottama Bilimoria (SFSU, San Francisco; University of Melbourne) -/- For photo of Prof Mohanty visit APA online memorial_minutes2023 Courtesy of APA Memorial Minutes (& Proceedings) 2023 . (shrink)

In recent decades, plural logic has established itself as a well-respected member of the extensions of first-order classical logic. In the present paper, I draw attention to the fact that among the examples that are commonly given in order to motivate the need for this new logical system, there are some in which the elements of the plurality in question are internally singularized (e.g. ‘Whitehead and Russell wrote Principia Mathematica’), while in others they are not (e.g. ‘Some philosophers wrote (...) Principia Mathematica’). Then, building on previous work, I point to a subsystem of plural logic in which inferences concerning examples of the first type can be adequately dealt with. I notice that such a subsystem (here called ‘discrete plural logic’) is in reality a mere variant of first-order logic as standardly formulated, and highlight the fact that it is axiomatizable while full plural logic is not. Finally, I urge that greater attention be paid to discrete plural logic and that discrete plurals are not used in order to motivate the introduction of full-fledged plural logic—or, at least, not without remarking that they can also be adequately dealt with in a considerably simpler system. (shrink)

This is the original, longer draft for my entry on Hume in the 'The Routledge Hand- book of Philosophy of Imagination', edited by Amy Kind and published by Routledge in 2016 (see the separate entry). — Please always cite the Routledge version, unless there are passages concerned that did not make it into the Handbook for reasons of length. — -/- This chapter overviews Hume’s thoughts on the nature and the role of imagining, with an almost exclusive focus on the (...) first book of his Treatise of Human Nature. Over the course of this text, Hume draws and discusses three important distinctions among our conscious mental episodes (or what he calls ‘perceptions’): (i) between impressions (including perceptual experiences) and ideas (including recollections, imaginings and occurrent beliefs); (ii) between ideas of the memory and ideas of the imagination; and (iii), among the ideas of the imagination, between ideas of the judgement (i.e. occurrent beliefs) and ideas of the fancy (i.e. imaginings). I discuss each distinction in turn, also in connection to contemporary views on imagining. In addition, I briefly consider Hume’s views on the imagination as a faculty aimed at the production of ideas, as well as on the role that imagining plays in the wider context of our mental lives, notably in the acquisition of modal knowledge and in the comprehension of, and resistance to, stories and opinions that we take to be false or fictional. (shrink)

Although the economic thought of Marshall and Pigou was united by ethical positions broadly considered utilitarian, differences in their intellectual milieu led to degrees of difference between their respective philosophical visions. This change in milieu includes the influence of the little understood period of transition from the early idealist period in Great Britain, which provided the context to Marshall’s intellectual formation, and the late British Idealist period, which provided the context to Pigou’s intellectual formation. During this latter period, the pervading (...) Hegelianism and influences of naturalism arising from the ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were challenged by Hermann Lotze, a key transitional thinker influencing the Neo-Kantian movement, who recognised significant limits of naturalism, on the one hand, and the metaphysical tenor of absolute idealism, on the other, and attempted to provide a balance between the two. The goal of this paper is to make the provisional case for the argument that Pigou’s views on ethics were not only directly influenced by utilitarian thinkers like Mill and Sidgwick, but they were also indirectly influenced by Hermann Lotze, via the influence of the Neo- Kantian movement on late British idealism. To that end, Pigou’s essays in The Trouble with Theism (1908), including his sympathetic consideration of the ethics of Friedrich Nietzsche, reflect the influence of Lotze indirectly through the impact at Cambridge of: James Ward’s critique of associationist psychology, and consideration of the limits of naturalism including the critique of evolutionary ethics; Bertrand Russell’s rejection of neo-Hegelianism and, together with Alfred North Whitehead, the development of Logicism; and G.E. Moore’s critique of utilitarian ethics on the basis of the naturalistic fallacy and the development of his own intuitionist system of ethics. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell was one of the best-known proponents of logicism: the theory that mathematics reduces to, or is an extension of, logic. Russell argued for this thesis in his 1903 The Principles of Mathematics and attempted to demonstrate it formally in Principia Mathematica (PM 1910–1913; with A. N. Whitehead). Russell later described his work as a further “regressive” step in understanding the foundations of mathematics made possible by the late 19th century “arithmetization” of mathematics and Frege’s logical definitions of (...) arithmetical concepts. The logical system of PM sought to improve on earlier attempts by solving the contradictions found in, e.g., Frege’s system, by employing a theory of types. In this article, I also consider and critically evaluate the most common objections to Russell’s logicism, including the claim that it is undermined by Gödel’s incompleteness results, and Putnam's charge of “if-thenism”. I suggest that if we are willing to accept a slightly revisionist account of what counts as a mathematical truth, these criticisms do not obviously refute Russell’s claim to have established that mathematical truths generally are a species of logical truth. (shrink)

To date, both the United States federal government and twenty-one individual states have passed Religious Freedom Restoration Acts that aim to protect religious persons from having their sincere beliefs substantially burdened by governmental interests. RFRAs accomplish this by offering a three-pronged exemption test for religious objectors that is satisfied only when (1) an objector has a sincere belief that is being substantially burdened; (2) the government has a very good reason (e.g., health or safety) to interfere; and (3) there is (...) a reasonable alternative to serve the compelling interest. Legal balancing tests like those found in RFRA are content neutral insofar as they sideline the belief-content of conscientious objections as irrelevant when determining the permissibility of granting legal accommodations. However, some theorists worry that this legal picture may be backward: perhaps balancing tests should be content non-neutral given the usual features of conscientious objections. For example, Yossi Nehushtan contends that, contrary to their typical codification, religious conscience beliefs seem undeserving of special legal accommodations because they possess uniquely strong empirical and theoretical ties to intolerance. Thus, the illiberally intolerant content of these conscientious objections might actually give the state a reason to refuse to grant legal exemptions. In this paper, I offer a cursory defense of content neutrality with respect to balancing tests like those found in RFRA. To begin, I outline Nehushtan’s argument for content non-neutrality. The cornerstone of his argument is that illiberal intolerance is intolerable such that conscientious objections that are based upon illiberally intolerant values provide the state with strong, normally prevailing reason not to grant an exemption. I argue that, even when the illiberally intolerant content of one’s conscience constitutes a weighty and relevant factor in determining the permissibility of granting a legal exemption, there remain significant problems. It is difficult, for example, to determine which views are illiberally intolerant and difficult to say whether illiberally intolerant views can effectively serve as the principled demarcating line in balancing tests. To conclude, I offer several cursory arguments in favor of adopting content-neutral approaches without necessarily making a comprehensive case. By drawing on the work of Amy Sepinwall, Nadia Sawicki, and Nathan Chapman, I show that content-neutral approaches can help to safeguard robust protections for conscience by permitting atypical exercises of conscience, protect minority thoughts and practices from being coercively supplanted by majoritarian understandings of morality, appropriately maintain the skepticism and humility that we owe each other as compatriots in a pluralistic society, and allow the kind of justifiable civil disobedience that has an important place in political history among other things. (shrink)

L'écologie préénergétique des années 1905-1935 est à la recherche de ses objets d'étude. Des unités fondamentales de la nature (telles que formation végétale, association végétale, climax, biome, communauté biotique, écosystème) se trouvent en compétition et se succèdent les unes aux autres. Autour des années 1920 et 1930, la philosophie organiciste d'Alfred N. Whitehead, ainsi que la perspective évolutionniste d'Herbert Spencer et les propositions émergentistes de Samuel Alexander et Conwy L. Morgan, deviennent des références sous-jacentes au débat épistémologique concernant les (...) unités de base de l'écologie. Des auteurs comme Frederic E. Clements et John Phillips soutiendront plusieurs formes d'organicisme écologique, tandis que Henry A. Gleason interprétera l'association végétale comme le résultat d'une juxtaposition fortuite d'individus. Enfin, et paradoxalement, l'écosystème de Arthur G. Tansley, tout en faisant partie, à l'origine, d'une perspective anti-organiciste, deviendra l'unité fondamentale de programmes de recherche qui se voudront, au moins dans leurs intentions, émergentistes. (shrink)

1.Summary The key terms. 1. Key term: ‘Sunyata’. Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) is known in the history of Buddhism mainly by his keyword ‘sunyata’. This word is translated into English by the word ‘emptiness’. The translation and the traditional interpretations create the impression that Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) declares the objects as empty or illusionary or not real or not existing. What is the assertion and concrete statement made by this interpretation? That nothing can be found, that there is nothing, that nothing exists? Was (...) Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) denying the external world? Did he wish to refute that which evidently is? Did he want to call into question the world in which we live? Did he wish to deny the presence of things that somehow arise? My first point is the refutation of this traditional translation and interpretation. 2. Key terms: ‘Dependence’ or ‘relational view’. My second point consists in a transcription of the keyword of ‘sunyata’ by the word ‘dependence’. This is something that Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) himself has done. Now Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) central view can be named ‘dependence of things’. Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) is not looking for a material or immaterial object which can be declared as a fundamental reality of this world. His fundamental reality is not an object. It is a relation between objects. This is a relational view of reality. This is the heart of Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) ideas. In the 19th century a more or less unknown Italian philosopher, Vincenzo Goberti, spoke about relations as the mean and as bonds between things. Later, in quantum physics and in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead we are talking about interactions and entanglements. These ideas of relatedness or connections or entanglements in Eastern and Western modes of thought are the main idea of this essay. Not all entanglements are known. Just two examples: the nature of quantum entanglements is not known. Quantum entanglements should be faster than light. That's why Albert Einstein had some doubts. A second example: the completely unknown connections between the mind and the brain. Other examples are mysterious like the connections between birds in a flock. Some are a little known like gravitational forces. 3. Key terms: ‘Arm in arm’. But Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) did not stop there. He was not content to repeat this discovery of relational reality. He went on one step further indicating that what is happening between two things. He gave indications to the space between two things. He realized that not the behaviour of bodies, but the behaviour of something between them may be essential for understanding the reality. This open space is not at all empty. It is full of energy. The open space is the middle between things. Things are going arm in arm. The middle might be considered as a force that bounds men to the world and it might be seen as well as a force of liberation. It might be seen as a bondage to the infinite space. 4. Key term: Philosophy. Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva), we are told, was a Buddhist philosopher. This statement is not wrong when we take the notion ‘philosophy’ in a deep sense as a love to wisdom, not as wisdom itself. Philosophy is a way to wisdom. Where this way has an end wisdom begins and philosophy is no more necessary. A.N. Whitehead gives philosophy the commission of descriptive generalization. We do not need necessarily a philosophical building of universal dimensions. Some steps of descriptive generalization might be enough in order to see and understand reality. There is another criterion of Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) philosophy. Not his keywords ‘sunyata’ and ‘pratityasamutpada’ but his 25 philosophical examples are the heart of his philosophy. His examples are images. They do not speak to rational and conceptual understanding. They speak to our eyes. Images, metaphors, allegories or symbolic examples have a freshness which rational ideas do not possess. Buddhist dharma and philosophy is a philosophy of allegories. This kind of philosophy is not completely new and unknown to European philosophy. Since Plato’s allegory of the cave it is already a little known. (Plato 424 – 348 Befor Current Era) The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg has underlined the importance of metaphors in European philosophy. 5. Key terms: Quantum Physics. Why quantum physics? European modes of thought had no idea of the space between two this. They were bound to the ideas of substance or subject, two main metaphysical traditions of European philosophical history, two main principles. These substances and these subjects are two immaterial bodies which were considered by traditional European metaphysics as lying, as a sort of core, inside the objects or underlying the empirical reality of our world. The first European scientist who saw with his inner eye the forces between two things had been Michael Faraday (1791-1867). Faraday was an English scientist who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism. Later physicists like Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and others followed his view in modern physics. This is a fifth point of my work. I compare Nagarjuna (Kumarajiva) with European scientific modes of thought for a better understanding of Asia. I do not compare Nagarjuna (kumarajiva) with European philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, Wittgenstein. The principles and metaphysical foundations of physical sciences are more representative for European modes of thought than the ideas of Hegel, Heidegger and Wittgenstein and they are more precise. And slowly we are beginning to understand these principles. Let me take as an example the interpretation of quantum entanglement by the British mathematician Roger Penrose. Penrose discusses in the year of 2000 the experiences of quantum entanglement where light is separated over a distance of 100 kilometers and still remains connected in an unknown way. These are well known experiments in the last 30 years. Very strange for European modes of thought. The light should be either separated or connected. That is the expectation most European modes of thought tell us. Aristotle had been the first. Aristotle (384 - 322 Before Current Era) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and a teacher of Alexander the Great. He told us the following principle as a metaphysical foundation: Either a situation exists or not. There is not a third possibility. Now listen to Roger Penrose: “Quantum entanglement is a very strange type of thing. It is somewhere between objects being separate and being in communication with each other” (Roger Penrose, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind, Cambridge University Press. 2000 page 66). This sentence of Roger Penrose is a first step of a philosophical generalization in a Whiteheadian sense. 6. Key terms: ‘The metaphysical foundations of modern science’ had been examined particularly by three European and American philosophers: E. A. Burtt, A.N. Whitehead and Hans-Georg Gadamer, by Gadamer eminently in his late writings on Heraclitus and Parmenides. I try to follow the approaches of these philosophers of relational views and of anti-substantialism. By ‘metaphysical foundations’ Edwin Arthur Burtt does not understand transcendental ideas but simply the principles that are underlying sciences. 7. Key terms: ‘Complementarity’, ‘interactions’, ‘entanglements’. Since 1927 quantum physics has three key terms which give an indication to the fundamental physical reality: Complementarity, interactions and entanglement. These three notions are akin to Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) relational view of reality. They are akin and they are very precise, so that Buddhism might learn something from these descriptions and quantum physicists might learn from Nagarjuna’s (Kumarajiva’s) examples and views of reality. They might learn to do a first step in a philosophical generalisation of quantum physical experiments. All of us we might learn how objects are entangled or going arm in arm. [The end of the summary.]. (shrink)

Foundations of Relational Realism presents an intuitive interpretation of quantum mechanics, based on a revised decoherent histories interpretation, structured within a category theoretic topological formalism. -/- If there is a central conceptual framework that has reliably borne the weight of modern physics as it ascends into the twenty-first century, it is the framework of quantum mechanics. Because of its enduring stability in experimental application, physics has today reached heights that not only inspire wonder, but arguably exceed the limits of intuitive (...) vision, if not intuitive comprehension. For many physicists and philosophers, however, the currently fashionable tendency toward exotic interpretation of the theoretical formalism is recognized not as a mark of ascent for the tower of physics, but rather an indicator of sway—one that must be dampened rather than encouraged if practical progress is to continue. -/- In this unique two-part volume, designed to be comprehensible to both specialists and non-specialists, the authors chart out a pathway forward by identifying the central deficiency in most interpretations of quantum mechanics: That in its conventional, metrical depiction of extension, inherited from the Enlightenment, objects are characterized as fundamental to relations—i.e., such that relations presuppose objects but objects do not presuppose relations. The authors, by contrast, argue that quantum mechanics exemplifies the fact that physical extensiveness is fundamentally topological rather than metrical, with its proper logico-mathematical framework being category theoretic rather than set theoretic. -/- By this thesis, extensiveness fundamentally entails not only relations of objects, but also relations of relations. Thus, the fundamental quanta of quantum physics are properly defined as units of logico-physical relation rather than merely units of physical relata as is the current convention. Objects are always understood as relata, and likewise relations are always understood objectively. In this way, objects and relations are coherently defined as mutually implicative. The conventional notion of a history as “a story about fundamental objects” is thereby reversed, such that the classical “objects” become the story by which we understand physical systems that are fundamentally histories of quantum events. -/- These are just a few of the novel critical claims explored in this volume—claims whose exemplification in quantum mechanics will, the authors argue, serve more broadly as foundational principles for the philosophy of nature as it evolves through the twenty-first century and beyond. (shrink)

The thesis that follows proffers a solution to the mind-matter problem, the problem as to how mind and matter relate. The proposed solution herein is a variant of panpsychism – the theory that all (pan) has minds (psyche) – that we name pansentient monism. By defining the suffix 'psyche' of panpsychism, i.e. by analysing what 'mind' is (Chapter 1), we thereby initiate the effacement of the distinction between mind and matter, and thus advance a monism. We thereafter critically examine the (...) prevalent view, antithetical to a pansentient monism, that mind is not identical to matter but emergent therefrom (Chapter 2). This anti-emergentist critique acts also as a fortification of the Genetic Argument for panpsychism: if mind is not emergent (nor distinct) from matter, mind must always have existed with matter. But what is 'matter'? Chapter 3 investigates what we understand by 'matter', or 'the physical', and exposes it as a highly deficient concept and percept that in concreto points to its identity with that denoted by 'mind'. This also acts as a fortification of the Abstraction Argument for panpsychism, employing a new taxonomy of physicalism and a new taxonomy of the varieties of abstraction. Thus do we reach a monism that is a parsimonious psycho-physical identity theory. But here we face what can be called The Identity Problem for Panpsychism: if our panpsychism is a psycho-physical identity theory, how can it respond to the powerful objections that beset the identity theory of the twentieth century? In Chapter 4 it will be argued that, like emergentism, this psycho-neural identity theory presupposed a deficient concept of 'matter', down to which mind was reduced away, let alone identified. But to identify down phenomena to what is actually an abstraction is to commit failure of explanation. When the theory is amended accordingly, we move from a psycho-neural identity theory to a genuine psycho-physical identity theory that as such can overcome the aforementioned identity problem. Furthermore, as Chapter 5 clarifies, our pansentient monism has, in addition to parsimony, the explanatory power to resolve the problem of mental causation that afflicts both the reductive physicalism of psycho-neural identity theory and the non-reductive physicalism of emergentism, by genuinely identifying physical and mental causation. Jaegwon Kim considers the place of consciousness in a physical world and the nature of mental causation to be the two key components of the mind-matter problem. Through the critical analysis of our prosaic understanding of mind and matter in this thesis, which incorporates the thought of both classical and contemporary thinkers through a novel fusion, it is hoped that both components are addressed and redressed. That is to say that I present this pansentient monism as a plausible, parsimonious, explanatory, and thus, I think, powerful position towards this ever-perplexing mind-matter mystery. -/- [This thesis was passed in January 2019 with viva examination from Galen Strawson and Joel Krueger. (shrink)

According to representationalism, the phenomenal character of a mental state reduces to its intentional content. Although representationalism seems plausible with respect to ordinary perceptual states, it seems considerably less plausible for states like moods. Here the problem for representationalism arises largely because moods seem to lack intentional content altogether. In this paper, I explore several possible options for identifying the intentional content of moods and suggest that none of them is wholly satisfactory. Importantly, however, I go on to argue that (...) the plausibility of representationalism should not be seen to rest on the question of whether moods have intentional content but rather on the question of whether the intentional content of moods, were there any, would be sufficient to determine their phenomenal character. As I argue, even if we concede to the representationalist that moods have intentional content, their phenomenal character outstrips their intentional content; thus, the representationalist reduction cannot succeed. Ultimately, then, I conclude that moods do indeed pose a serious objection to the representationalist theory. (shrink)

By the relational realist interpretation of wave function collapse, the quantum mechanical actualization of potentia is defined as a decoherence-driven process by which each actualization (in “orthodox” terms, each measurement outcome) is conditioned both by physical and logical relations with the actualities conventionally demarked as “environmental” or external to that particular outcome. But by the relational realist interpretation, the actualization-in-process is understood as internally related to these “enironmental” data per the formalism of quantum decoherence. The concept of “actualization via wave (...) function collapse” is accounted for solely by virtue of these presupposed logical relations—the same logical relations otherwise presupposed by the scientific method itself—and thus requires no “external” physical-dynamical trigger: e.g., the Gaussian hits of GRW, acts of conscious observation, etc. By the relational realist interpretation, it is the physical and logical relations among quantum actualities (quantum “final real things”) that drives the process of decoherence and, via the latter, the logically conditioned actualization of potentia. In this regard, the relational realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is a praxiological interpretation; that is, these physical and logical relations are ontologically active relations, contributing not just to the epistemic coordination of quantum actualizations, but to the process of actualization itself. (shrink)

This article defends Marjorie Suchocki’s position against two main objections raised by David E. Conner. Conner objects that God as a single actual entity must be temporal because there is succession in God’s experience ofthe world. The reply is that time involves at least two successive occasions separated by perishing, but in God nothing ever perishes. Conner also objects that Suchocki’s personalistic process theism is not experiential but is instead theoretical and not definitive. The reply is that his dismissal of (...) Part V of PR is arbitrary, the interpretation of all experience is theoretical, and no metaphysical interpretations are absolutely definitive, including PR as a whole. Also, Conner ignores religious experience. (shrink)

In the same way that some people are better jugglers than others, some people are better imaginers than others. But while it might be obvious what someone can do if they want to improve their juggling skills, it’s less obvious what someone can do to improve their imaginative skills. This chapter explores this issue and argues that engagement with fiction can play a key role in the development of one’s imaginative skills. The chapter proceeds in three parts. First, using work (...) by Martha Nussbaum as a launching pad, I develop arguments to show how literature helps to cultivate our capacities for one type of imagination in particular, namely, empathetic imagination. Second, I consider the empirical case for these claims. Third, I show how we can extend the argument connecting fiction and empathetic imagination to imagination more broadly. Not only can fiction provide us with practice with respect to empathetic imagination, but it can also provide us with practice with respect to other kinds of imagination as well. (shrink)

We often talk of people as being more or less imaginative than one another – as being better or worse at imagining – and we also compare various feats of imagination to one another in terms of how easy or hard they are. Facts such as these might be taken to suggest that imagination is often implicitly understood as a skill. This implicit understanding, however, has rarely (if ever) been made explicit in the philosophical literature. Such is the task of (...) this chapter. I first attempt to flesh out several conditions for an activity to count as a skill. I then attempt to show how imagination can meet such conditions. The chapter concludes with an attempt to answer various worries that might be raised to the claim that imagination should be thought of as a skill. (shrink)

Imagination has been assigned an important explanatory role in a multitude of philosophical contexts. This paper examines four such contexts: mindreading, pretense, our engagement with fiction, and modal epistemology. Close attention to each of these contexts suggests that the mental activity of imagining is considerably more heterogeneous than previously realized. In short, no single mental activity can do all the explanatory work that has been assigned to imagining.

The puzzle of imaginative desire arises from the difficulty of accounting for the surprising behaviour of desire in imaginative activities such as our engagement with fiction and our games of pretend. Several philosophers have recently attempted to solve this puzzle by introducing a class of novel mental states—what they call desire-like imaginings or i-desires. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the i-desire solution to the puzzle of imaginative desire. The introduction of i-desires is both ontologically profligate and (...) unnecessary, and, most importantly, fails to make sense of what we are doing in the imaginative contexts in question. (shrink)

Some natural languages do not lexically distinguish between modals of possibility and modals of necessity. From the perspective of languages like English, modals in such languages appear to do double duty: they are used both where possibility modals are expected and where necessity modals are expected. The Nez Perce modal suffix o’qa offers an example of this behavior. I offer a simple account of the flexibility of the o’qa modal centered on the absence of scalar implicatures. O’qa is a possibility (...) modal that does not belong to a Horn scale; its use is never associated with a scalar implicature. Accordingly, in an upward entailing environment, φ-o’qa is appropriate whenever there are accessible φ-worlds, even if indeed all accessible worlds are φ-worlds. In a downward entailing environment, the flexibility of the o’qa modal is seen no more. Here, neither o’qa nor English possibility modals are associated with scalar implicatures, and the use of o’qa exactly parallels the use of English modals of possibility. -/- Given that o’qa is a possibility modal that does not contrast with a modal of necessity, just how do you talk about necessities in Nez Perce? Speakers translating into Nez Perce rely on a variety of techniques to paraphrase expressions of simple necessity away. Their strategies highlight an area where Nez Perce and English plausibly differ in the range of propositions they convey. The data cast doubt on any strong form of effability as a language universal. (shrink)

Can one have imaginative access to experiential perspectives vastly different from one’s own? Can one successfully imagine what it’s like to live a life very different from one’s own? These questions are particularly pressing in contemporary society as we try to bridge racial, ethnic, and gender divides. Yet philosophers have often expressed considerable pessimism in this regard. It is often thought that the gulf between vastly different experiential perspectives cannot be bridged. This chapter explores the case for this pessimism. Though (...) the case is often less implicit, the chapter identifies two different arguments that can be found in the literature: the Epistemic Arrogance argument and the Too Big a Gulf argument. Both arguments are found to be considerably weaker than is usually thought. But even if the case for pessimism is unsuccessful, discussion of that case suggests the importance of treading carefully in taking up imaginative explorations of different experiential perspectives. The chapter thus concludes with a cautionary note in this regard. (shrink)

Underlying much current work in philosophy of imagination is the assumption that imagination is a skill. This assumption seems to entail not only that facility with imagining will vary from one person to another, but also that people can improve their own imaginative capacities and learn to be better imaginers. This paper takes up this issue. After showing why this is properly understood as a philosophical question, I discuss what it means to say that one imagining is better than another (...) and then discuss the kinds of imagination training and techniques that might be employed in an effort to get better at imagining. The discussion of these techniques draws insight from consideration of other skills-based activities, as well as from consideration of the creation of art and our engagement with literature and poetry. Over the course of this discussion, we also gain further insight into the nature of imagination. (shrink)

I find it hard to say whether TSC this year was the most balanced or the most biased since the first I attended in 1998. That year there were 35 plenary talks, of which 27 were distinctly materialist — that is, they assumed that consciousness ‘arises’ from ‘physical’ processes in the brain. This year there were also 35 plenaries, with 24 devoted to physicalist accounts. I cannot claim absolute precision for these figures, because it is not always easy to make (...) black-and-white distinctions. Research by Imants Barušs (2008) has shown that many scientists have non-physicalist beliefs but do not say so for fear of jeopardising their careers. In that case they may present apparently physicalist papers although physicalist assumptions are not present. (shrink)

David Lewis has argued that “having an experience is the best way or perhaps the only way, of coming to know what that experience is like”; when an experience is of a sufficiently new sort, mere science lessons are not enough. Developing this Lewisian line, L.A. Paul has suggested that some experiences are epistemically transformative. Until an individual has such an experience it remains epistemically inaccessible to her. No amount of stories and theories and testimony from others can teach her (...) what it is like to have it, nor is she able to achieve this knowledge by way of imaginative projection. It’s this last claim that is the focus of this paper. In particular, I explore the case for the claim that some experiences are in principle imaginatively inaccessible to someone who has not undergone the experience itself or one relevantly similar. As I will suggest, this case is not as strong as is often thought. Close attention to the mechanisms of imagination, and in particular, to cases of skilled imaginers, suggests how techniques of imaginative scaffolding can sometimes be used to give us epistemic access to experiences we have not had, even ones that are radically different from any that we have had before. As a result, considerably fewer experiences remain imaginatively out of reach than proponents of transformative experience would have us believe. Experience may well be the best teacher, but this paper aims to show that imagination comes in a close second. (shrink)

It is now more than twenty years since Knight (1987) first presented his paradigm-shifting theory of how and why the ‘human revolution’ occurred — and had to occur — in modern humans who, as climates dried under ice age conditions and African rainforests shrank, found themselves surrounded by vast prairies and savannahs, with rich herds of game animals roaming across them. The temptation for male hunters, far from any home base, to eat the best portions of meat at the kill (...) site — as do other social carnivores — called for strong measures from human females, who were paying the heavy metabolic and physical costs of bearing large-brained but helpless children. Even in the modern west, with well stocked supermarkets, a pregnant or lactating woman can lose ten percent of the dry weight of her brain, because developing babies demand dietary lipids for brain growth (Horrobin, 1998). Hence the idea of the menstrual sex strike, designed to force males to deliver their kills entirely into the hands of women for cooking and distribution—a practice common in foraging communities to this day. (shrink)

Our ordinary conception of imagination takes it to be essentially a conscious phenomenon, and traditionally that’s how it had been treated in the philosophical literature. In fact, this claim had often been taken to be so obvious as not to need any argumentative support. But lately in the philosophical literature on imagination we see increasing support for the view that imagining need not occur consciously. In this paper, I examine the case for unconscious imagination. I’ll consider four different arguments that (...) we can find in the recent literature—three of which are based on cases and one that is based on considerations relating to action guidance. To my mind, none of these arguments is successful. I conclude that the case for postulating unconscious imagining has not yet been well motivated. (shrink)

How are we to understand the phenomenology of imagining? Attempts to answer this question often invoke descriptors concerning the “vivacity” or “vividness” of our imaginative states. Not only are particular imaginings often phenomenologically compared and contrasted with other imaginings on grounds of how vivid they are, but such imaginings are also often compared and contrasted with perceptions and memories on similar grounds. Yet however natural it may be to use “vividness” and cognate terms in discussions of imagination, it does not (...) take much reflection to see that these terms are ill understood. In this paper, I review both some relevant empirical literature as well as the philosophical literature attempt to get a handle on what it could mean, in an imaginative context, to talk of vividness. As I suggest, this notion ultimately proves to be so problematic as to be philosophically untenable. (shrink)

What is consciousness and why is it so philosophically and scientifically puzzling? For many years philosophers approached this question assuming a standard physicalist framework on which consciousness can be explained by contemporary physics, biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. This book is a debate between two philosophers who are united in their rejection of this kind of "standard" physicalism - but who differ sharply in what lesson to draw from this. Amy Kind defends dualism 2.0, a thoroughly modern version of dualism (...) (the theory that there are two fundamentally different kinds of things in the world: those that are physical and those that are mental) decoupled from any religious or non-scientific connotations. Daniel Stoljar defends non-standard physicalism, a kind of physicalism different from both the standard version and dualism 2.0. The book presents a cutting-edge assessment of the philosophy of consciousness and provides a glimpse at what the future study of this area might bring. (shrink)

In this essay, the focus is not on what imagination is but rather on what it is like. Rather than exploring the various accounts of imagination on offer in the philosophical literature, we will instead be exploring the various accounts of imaginative experience on offer in that literature. In particular, our focus in what follows will be on three different sorts of accounts that have played an especially prominent role in philosophical thinking about these issues: the impoverishment view (often associated (...) with Hume), the will-dependence view (often associated with Wittgenstein), and the nonexistence view (often associated with Sartre). While there are important insights to be drawn from each of these views, each seems to me to be importantly flawed in various ways. As I will suggest, close examination reveals that none of them gives us an adequate account of the character of imaginative experience. Ultimately, in the final section of this paper, I briefly explore what their failure teaches us about the project of giving an account of imaginative experience. (shrink)