A Guide to Good Reasoning has been described by reviewers as “far superior to any other critical reasoning text.” It shows with both wit and philosophical care how students can become good at everyday reasoning. It starts with attitude—with alertness to judgmental heuristics and with the cultivation of intellectual virtues. From there it develops a system for skillfully clarifying and evaluating arguments, according to four standards—whether the premises fit the world, whether the conclusion fits the premises, whether the argument fits (...) the conversation, and whether it is possible to tell. (shrink)

This essay reviews the recently released Handbook of Philosophy of Management, using it as a jumping off point to explore some potential confusions in contemporary philosophy of management. The handbook itself, comprising 58 articles and some 1,000 pages, is a milestone for the field. At the same time, it brings a few problems into sharp relief. I argue for more clarity about the distinction between the philosophy of management and the philosophy of management research. I make the case that logic (...) as a de facto method for conducting inquiry may or may not be useful, while logic as a de jure standard for evaluating its conclusions is indispensable. I develop the view that neither management nor management studies is properly considered a science, or even an applied science. I contend that the seminal contributions of Alasdair MacIntyre are unjustly neglected by the field. And I advance the thesis that perhaps the leading issue for the philosophy of management today is the question of the purpose of management, pointing in some suggested directions for answering the question. (shrink)

This essay examines the concept of leadership as it is commonly understood within the field of leadership studies today. The inquiry is framed by an analysis of three generally accepted definitions of leadership. I look at the selected definitions from four angles, which I call the four dimensions of leadership: the behavioral (what the leader does, or ought to do, that makes it leadership), the asymmetrical (in what sense a leader is different from the others in the group), the social (...) (what it is that the leader is leading), and the teleological (what the direction is). By doing this, I find that these definitions can be problematic, if instructively so. I identify two underlying concerns. The first problem is the tendency to fuse informal and formal leadership into a single concept. I argue that informal and formal leadership can be more helpfully understood, rather, as two separate, if sometimes overlapping, concepts, each needing its own definition and analysis. This is because formal leadership is a functional concept, while informal leadership is not; this entails not only that each type of leader is leading a different type of entity, but also that each is judged by different standards. The second problem is, paradoxically, a bias against leadership. To put this less polemically: scholars who recognize that organizational success can be hindered by excessive emphasis upon hierarchy, and who thus study the dynamics of egalitarian collaboration, can inadvertently generate confusion by allowing the honorific of “leadership” to be applied also to that work. So, I propose definitions of the two key concepts, formal and informal leadership, with the suggestion that this provides a helpful method of sorting leadership scholarship into three categories: formal leadership; informal leadership; and egalitarianism. (shrink)

According to the PubMed resource from the U.S. National Library of Medicine, over 750,000 scientific articles have been published in the ~5000 biomedical journals worldwide in the year 2007 alone. The vast majority of these publications include results from hypothesis-driven experimentation in overlapping biomedical research domains. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of information being generated by the biomedical research enterprise has made it virtually impossible for investigators to stay aware of the latest findings in their domain of interest, let alone to (...) be able to assimilate and mine data from related investigations for purposes of meta-analysis. While computers have the potential for assisting investigators in the extraction, management and analysis of these data, information contained in the traditional journal publication is still largely unstructured, free-text descriptions of study design, experimental application and results interpretation, making it difficult for computers to gain access to the content of what is being conveyed without significant manual intervention. In order to circumvent these roadblocks and make the most of the output from the biomedical research enterprise, a variety of related standards in knowledge representation are being developed, proposed and adopted in the biomedical community. In this chapter, we will explore the current status of efforts to develop minimum information standards for the representation of a biomedical experiment, ontologies composed of shared vocabularies assembled into subsumption hierarchical structures, and extensible relational data models that link the information components together in a machine-readable and human-useable framework for data mining purposes. (shrink)

David Miller has objected to the cosmopolitan argument that it is arbitrary and hence unfair to treat individuals differently on account of things for which they are not responsible. Such a view seems to require, implausibly, that individuals be treated identically even where (unchosen) needs differ. The objection is, however, inapplicable where the focus of cosmopolitan concern is arbitrary disadvantage rather than arbitrary treatment. This 'unfair disadvantage argument' supports a form of global luck egalitarianism. Miller also objects that cosmopolitanism (...) is unable to accommodate special obligations generated by national membership. Cosmopolitanism can, however, accommodate many special obligations to compatriots. Those which it cannot accommodate are only morally compelling if we assume what the objection claims to prove - that cosmopolitanism is mistaken. Cosmopolitanism construed as global luck egalitarianism is therefore able to withstand both of Miller's objections, and has significant independent appeal on account of the unfair disadvantage argument. (shrink)

This essay argues that David Miller's criticisms of global egalitarianism do not undermine the view where it is stated in one of its stronger, luck egalitarian forms. The claim that global egalitarianism cannot specify a metric of justice which is broad enough to exclude spurious claims for redistribution, but precise enough to appropriately value different kinds of advantage, implicitly assumes that cultural understandings are the only legitimate way of identifying what counts as advantage. But that is an assumption always (...) or almost always rejected by global egalitarianism. The claim that global egalitarianism demands either too little redistribution, leaving the unborn and dissenters burdened with their societies' imprudent choices, or too much redistribution, creating perverse incentives by punishing prudent decisions, only presents a problem for global luck egalitarianism on the assumption that nations can legitimately inherit assets from earlier generations – again, an assumption very much at odds with global egalitarian assumptions. (shrink)

Some have argued that the possibility of faultless disagreement gives relativist semantic theories an important explanatory advantage over their absolutist and contextualist rivals. Here I combat this argument, focusing on the specific case of aesthetic discourse. My argument has two stages. First, I argue that while relativists may be able to account for the possibility of faultless aesthetic disagreement, they nevertheless face difficulty in accounting for the intuitive limits of faultless disagreement. Second, I develop a new non-relativist theory which can (...) account for the full range of data regarding faultless disagreement. This view—‘Humean Absolutism’—integrates two of Hume’s central principles from Of the Standard of Taste into a truth-conditional framework, resulting in a non-bivalent theory of aesthetic truth. I argue that Humean Absolutism can underwrite the possibility of faultless disagreement whilst retaining reasonable limits around the phenomenon. I close by relating this positive account of faultless disagreement to broader issues concerning the cognitive role of truth-value gaps. -/- *NB - this is an unpublished paper and is no longer in progress.*. (shrink)

This book introduces readers to the topic of explanation. The insights of Plato, Aristotle, J.S. Mill and Carl Hempel are examined, and are used to argue against the view that explanation is merely a problem for the philosophy of science. Having established its importance for understanding knowledge in general, the book concludes with a bold and original explanation of explanation.

All contributions included in the present issue were originally prepared for an “Author Meets Critics” session organized by Carl Sachs for the Eastern Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Savannah, Georgia, on 5th January, 2018.

The homeostatic property cluster theory is widely influential for its ability to account for many natural-kind terms in the life sciences. However, the notion of homeostatic mechanism has never been fully explicated. In 2009, Carl Craver interpreted the notion in the sense articulated in discussions on mechanistic explanation and pointed out that the HPC account equipped with such notion invites interest-relativity. In this paper, we analyze two recent refinements on HPC: one that avoids any reference to the causes of (...) the clustering of properties and one that replaces homeostatic mechanisms with causal networks represented by causal graphs. We argue that the former is too slender to account for some inductive inference in science and the latter, thicker account invites interest-relativity, as the original HPC does. This suggests that human interest will be an un-eliminative part of a satisfactory account of natural kindness. We conclude by discussing the implication of interest-relativity to the naturalness, reality, or objectivity of kinds and indicating an overlooked aspect of natural kinds that requires further studies. (shrink)

Animalism is the theory that we are animals: in other words, that each of us is numerically identical to an animal. An alternative theory maintains that we are not animals but that each of us is constituted by an animal. Call this alternative theory neo-Lockean constitutionalism or Lockeanism for short. Stephan Blatti (2012) offers to advance the debate between animalism and Lockeanism by providing a new argument for animalism. In this note, we present our own objection to Blatti's argument, and (...) argue that Carl Gillett's earlier reply misses the fundamental problem. We also use Blatti's argument to illustrate a common methodological error, namely, uncritical deference to best theories from other disciplines. (shrink)

During the last years of his life, the mathematician Karl Menger worked on a biography of his father, the economist and founder of the Austrian School of Economics, Carl Menger. The younger Menger never finished the work. While working in the Menger collections at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, we discovered draft chapters of the biography, a valuable source of information given that relatively little is known about Carl Menger’s life nearly a (...) hundred years after his death. The unfinished biography covers Carl Menger’s family background and his life through early 1889. In this article, we discuss the biography and the most valuable new insights it provides into Carl Menger’s life, including Carl Menger’s family, his childhood, his student years, his time working as a journalist and newspaper editor, his early scientific career, and his relationship with Crown Prince Rudolf. (shrink)

Although their contributions to the history of economic thought and their scholarly reputations are firmly established, relatively little is known about the relationship between Carl Menger, founder of the Austrian School of economics, and his son, Karl Menger, the mathematician, geometer, logician, and philosopher of science, whose famous Mathematical Colloquium at the University of Vienna was central to the early literature on the existence of general equilibrium and the concomitant development of mathematical economics. The present paper begins to fill (...) this gap. Karl Menger’s diaries, held in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University, offer insight into the intimate relationships within the Menger clan, Karl’s work and study habits, and the development of his uncommonly broad intellect, as well as on life in a vanquished city, Vienna, in the immediate wake of the humiliating defeat of the First World War and the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire. (shrink)

David Friedrich Strauss is best known for his mythical interpretation of the Gospel narratives. He opposed both the supernaturalists (who regarded the Gospel stories as reliable) and the rationalists (who offered natural explanations of purportedly supernatural events). His mythical interpretation suggests that many of the stories about Jesus were woven out of pre-existing messianic beliefs and expectations. Picking up this suggestion, I argue that the Gospel writers thought paradigmatically rather than historically. A paradigmatic explanation assimilates the event-to-be- explained to (...) what is thought to be a prototypical instance of divine action. It differs from a historical or scientific explanation insofar as it does not specify the conditions under which it should be applied. It is, therefore, a wonderfully flexible way to understand the present in the light of the past. (shrink)

The indirect argument (IA) for incompatibilism is based on the principle that an action to which there is no alternative is unfree, which we shall call ‘PA’. According to PA, to freely perform an action A, it must not be the case that one has ‘no choice’ but to perform A. The libertarian and hard determinist advocates of PA must deny that free will would exist in a deterministic world, since no agent in such a world would perform an action (...) to which there were alternatives: an action there being the necessary consequence of preceding events and the laws of nature, it would not be possible for a person to perform actions besides those he actually performs. Determinism is seen here as “indirectly” ruling out free will by making the satisfaction of a necessary condition of free agency impossible, the former requiring, according to the leading proponent of libertarianism, Robert Kane, the performance of free actions. To have a free will, on his view, is to have committed “self-forming” actions, that is, to have done things to which there were alternatives the doing of which led to the development of the desires, preferences, and beliefs that make up one’s character. -/- The range of phenomena obeying probabilistic laws has yet to be ascertained. Under certain assumptions, both STR and GTR entail an indeterministic mechanics. But, contrary what is often claimed, quanta do not behave indeterministicly: the wave function/probabilistic laws being necessary only insofar as we wish to macroscopicly describe their behavior. It is far less clear, however, that the macro-events involved in human decision making and behavior, such as the releasing of neurotransmitters and the contracting of muscles, occur indeterministically. The ontological status of these events-whether or not they are the necessary effects of prior occurrences-is, of course, what matters in the free will debate. For present purposes, however, this question will be put aside. Instead, I will concentrate on buttressing the existing case against PA, aiming to show that even if deterministic laws hold at the level of macro-phenomena, free will remains a possibility. That is to say, I shall defend the thesis that so-called “Frankfurt cases” demonstrate that alternatives are not required to perform an action that is free in the sense of being something for which its agent is responsible. -/- My defense will be carried out in three stages. First, I must respond to those who maintain that a Frankfurt case is not a counterexample to PA because it is not an example of someone acting without alternatives. Here, I confront the question of how “robust” an alternative must bein order to provide an agent with a way of avoiding praise or blame for the action that she actually commits. Secondly, I must show that an agent may be praiseworthy or blameworthy despite lacking alternatives at the time at which she acts, i.e., an appropriate object of one of a Strawsonian “reactive attitude” sans what I shall call “local” alternatives. At this point, I must attend to David Widerker’s recent critique of the use of Frankfurt cases as counterexamples to PA. Finally, I set for myself what I take to be the most difficult task of a compatibilist: demonstrating that not even an “historical” alternative-the possibility of having chosen a different path in life than the one that one has actually taken-is needed to have a free will. In this connection, it will be incumbent upon me to explain why it would be fair to hold someone accountable for behavior issuing from a self she did not create, dispositions originating from natural conditions she did not establish. That is to say, in denying that a free will entails the ability to transcend oneself, I shall be faced with what Kane calls the “ultimacy” problem: how to explain away the incompatibilist’s intuition that it is senseless to adopt a reactive attitude towards someone incapable of self-transcendence, even if such a reaction is itself unavoidable. By showing that the desire for self-transcendence is itself irrational, I intend to solve this problem. I will, thus, be left defending a version of compatibilism according to which a free will is to be understood as a healthy faculty-the will-being exercised in an environment conducive to self-realization, which is its purpose. (shrink)

Does consciousness collapse the quantum wave function? This idea was taken seriously by John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner but is now widely dismissed. We develop the idea by combining a mathematical theory of consciousness (integrated information theory) with an account of quantum collapse dynamics (continuous spontaneous localization). Simple versions of the theory are falsified by the quantum Zeno effect, but more complex versions remain compatible with empirical evidence. In principle, versions of the theory can be tested by experiments with (...) quantum computers. The upshot is not that consciousness-collapse interpretations are clearly correct, but that there is a research program here worth exploring. (shrink)

Causation is one of philosophy's most venerable and thoroughly-analyzed concepts. However, the study of how ordinary people make causal judgments is a much more recent addition to the philosophical arsenal. One of the most prominent views of causal explanation, especially in the realm of harmful or potentially harmful behavior, is that unusual or counternormative events are accorded privileged status in ordinary causal explanations. This is a fundamental assumption in psychological theories of counterfactual reasoning, and has been transported to philosophy by (...) Hitchcock and Knobe (2009). A different view--the basis of the culpable control model of blame (CCM)--is that primary causal status is accorded to behaviors that arouse negative evaluative reactions, including behaviors that stem from nefarious motives, negligence or recklessness, a faulty character, or behaviors that lead to harmful or potentially harmful consequences. This paper describes four empirical studies that show consistent support for the CCM. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a clarification of the long debate on whether enhancement will or will not diminish authenticity. It focuses particularly on accounts provided by Carl Elliott and David DeGrazia. Three clarifications will be presented here. First, most discussants only criticise Elliott’s identity argument and neglect that his conservative position in the use of enhancement can be understood as a concern over social coercion. Second, Elliott’s and DeGrazia’s views can, not only co-exist, but even converge together (...) as an autonomy based theory of authenticity. Third, the current account of autonomy provided by DeGrazia fails to address the importance of rationality and the ability of self-correction, which, as a result impedes the theory to provide a fully developed account for authenticity. In conclusion, a satisfactory account of authenticity cannot focus only on identity or subjective preference. (shrink)

A number of philosophers endorse, without argument, the view that there’s something it’s like consciously to think that p, which is distinct from what it’s like consciously to think that q. This thesis, if true, would have important consequences for philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In this paper I offer an argument for it, and attempt to induce examples of it in the reader. The argument claims it would be impossible introspectively to distinguish conscious thoughts with respect to their (...) content if there weren’t something it’s like to think them. This argument is defended against several objections. Then I use what I call “minimal pair” experiences—sentences read without and with understanding—to induce in the reader an experience of the kind I claim exists. Further objections are considered and rebutted. (shrink)

We propose a formal framework for interpretable machine learning. Combining elements from statistical learning, causal interventionism, and decision theory, we design an idealised explanation game in which players collaborate to find the best explanation for a given algorithmic prediction. Through an iterative procedure of questions and answers, the players establish a three-dimensional Pareto frontier that describes the optimal trade-offs between explanatory accuracy, simplicity, and relevance. Multiple rounds are played at different levels of abstraction, allowing the players to explore overlapping causal (...) patterns of variable granularity and scope. We characterise the conditions under which such a game is almost surely guaranteed to converge on a optimal explanation surface in polynomial time, and highlight obstacles that will tend to prevent the players from advancing beyond certain explanatory thresholds. The game serves a descriptive and a normative function, establishing a conceptual space in which to analyse and compare existing proposals, as well as design new and improved solutions. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence has historically been conceptualized in anthropomorphic terms. Some algorithms deploy biomimetic designs in a deliberate attempt to effect a sort of digital isomorphism of the human brain. Others leverage more general learning strategies that happen to coincide with popular theories of cognitive science and social epistemology. In this paper, I challenge the anthropomorphic credentials of the neural network algorithm, whose similarities to human cognition I argue are vastly overstated and narrowly construed. I submit that three alternative supervised learning (...) methods—namely lasso penalties, bagging, and boosting—offer subtler, more interesting analogies to human reasoning as both an individual and a social phenomenon. Despite the temptation to fall back on anthropomorphic tropes when discussing AI, however, I conclude that such rhetoric is at best misleading and at worst downright dangerous. The impulse to humanize algorithms is an obstacle to properly conceptualizing the ethical challenges posed by emerging technologies. (shrink)

What does it mean to know how to do something? This book develops a comprehensive account of know-how, a crucial epistemic goal for all who care about getting things right, not only with respect to the facts, but also with respect to practice. It proposes a novel interpretation of the seminal work of Gilbert Ryle, according to which know-how is a competence, a complex ability to do well in an activity in virtue of guidance by an understanding of what it (...) takes to do so. This idea is developed into a full-fledged account, Rylean responsibilism, which understands know-how in terms of the normative guidance and responsible control of one's acts. Within the complex current debate about know-how, this view occupies a middle ground position between the intellectualist claim that know-how just is propositional or objectual knowledge and the anti-intellectualist claim that know-how just is ability. In genuine know-how, practical ability and guiding intellect are both necessary, but essentially intertwined. (shrink)

A growing literature is premised on the claim that quantum mechanics provides evidence for metaphysical indeterminacy. But does it? None of the currently fashionable realist interpretations involve fundamental indeterminacy and the ‘standard interpretation’, to the extent that it can be made out, doesn't require indeterminacy either.

Cognitive neuroscience is an interdisciplinary enterprise aimed at explaining cognition and behavior. It appears to be succeeding. What accounts for this apparent explanatory success? According to one prominent philosophical thesis, cognitive neuroscience explains by discovering and describing mechanisms. This "mechanist thesis" is open to at least two interpretations: a strong metaphysical thesis that Carl Craver and David Kaplan defend, and a weaker methodological thesis that William Bechtel defends. I argue that the metaphysical thesis is false and that the (...) methodological thesis is too weak to account for the explanatory promise of cognitive neuroscience. My argument draws support from a representative example of research in this field, namely, the neuroscience of decision-making. The example shows that cognitive neuroscience explains in a variety of ways and that the discovery of mechanisms functions primarily as a way of marshaling evidence in support of the models of cognition that are its principle unit of explanatory significance. -/- The inadequacy of the mechanist program is symptomatic of an implausible but prominent view of scientific understanding. On this view, scientific understanding consists in an accurate and complete description of certain "objective" explanatory relations, that is, relations that hold independently of facts about human psychology. I trace this view to Carl Hempel's logical empiricist reconceptualization of scientific understanding, which then gets extended in Wesley Salmon's causal-mechanistic approach. I argue that the twin objectivist ideals of accuracy and completeness are neither ends we actually value nor ends we ought to value where scientific understanding is concerned. -/- The case against objectivism motivates psychologism about understanding, the view that understanding depends on human psychology. I propose and defend a normative psychologistic framework for investigating the nature of understanding in the mind sciences along three empirically-informed dimensions: 1) What are the ends of understanding? 2) What is the nature of the cognitive strategy that we deploy to achieve those ends; and 3) Under what conditions is our deployment of this strategy effective toward achieving those ends? To articulate and defend this view, I build on the work of Elliot Sober to develop a taxonomy of psychologisms about understanding. Epistemological psychologism, a species of naturalism, is the view that justifying claims about understanding requires appealing to what scientists actually do when they seek understanding. Metaphysical psychologism is the view that the truth-makers for claims about understanding include facts about human psychology. I defend both views against objections. (shrink)

MARGARET LYNN SCHABAS (Toronto, 1954) is professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and served as the head of the Philosophy Department from 2004-2009. She has held professoriate positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and at York University, and has also taught as a visiting professor at Michigan State University, University of Colorado-Boulder, Harvard, CalTech, the Sorbonne, and the École Normale de Cachan. As the recipient of several fellowships, she has enjoyed visiting terms at Stanford, Duke, (...) MIT, Cambridge, the LSE, and the MPI-Berlin. In addition to her doctorate in the history and philosophy of science and technology (Toronto 1983), she holds a bachelor of science in music (oboe) and the philosophy of science (Indiana 1976), a master’s degree in the history and philosophy of science (Indiana 1977), and a master’s degree in economics (Michigan1985). -/- She has published four books and over forty articles or book chapters in science studies. Some of the journals in which her articles can be found are Isis, Monist, History of Political Economy, Public Affairs Quarterly, Daedaelus, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. Her first book, A world ruled by number (1990) examines the emergence of mathematical economics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Her second book, The natural origins of economics (2005), traces the transformation of economics from a natural to a social science. She also has two co-edited collections, Oeconomies in the age of Newton (2003), with Neil De Marchi, and David Hume’s political economy (2008), with Carl Wennerlind. She is currently writing a monograph on Hume’s economics, as well as articles on the history and philosophy of bioeconomics. She is currently president of the History of Economics Society. -/- EJPE interviewed Margaret Schabas at the University of British Columbia in March 2013. In this interview, she recounts her earliest foray into the history and philosophy of economics, the conceptual trade between economics and natural science, and her most recent undertaking: the history and philosophy of bioeconomics. (shrink)

Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843): A Philosophy of the Exact Sciences -/- Shortened version of the article of the same name in: Tabula Rasa. Jenenser magazine for critical thinking. 6th of November 1994 edition -/- 1. Biography -/- Jakob Friedrich Fries was born on the 23rd of August, 1773 in Barby on the Elbe. Because Fries' father had little time, on account of his journeying, he gave up both his sons, of whom Jakob Friedrich was the elder, to the Herrnhut Teaching (...) Institution in Niesky in 1778. Fries attended the theological seminar in Niesky in autumn 1792, which lasted for three years. There he (secretly) began to study Kant. The reading of Kant's works led Fries, for the first time, to a deep philosophical satisfaction. His enthusiasm for Kant is to be understood against the background that a considerable measure of Kant's philosophy is based on a firm foundation of what happens in an analogous and similar manner in mathematics. -/- During this period he also read Heinrich Jacobi's novels, as well as works of the awakening classic German literature; in particular Friedrich Schiller's works. In 1795, Fries arrived at Leipzig University to study law. During his time in Leipzig he became acquainted with Fichte's philosophy. In autumn of the same year he moved to Jena to hear Fichte at first hand, but was soon disappointed. -/- During his first sojourn in Jenaer (1796), Fries got to know the chemist A. N. Scherer who was very influenced by the work of the chemist A. L. Lavoisier. Fries discovered, at Scherer's suggestion, the law of stoichiometric composition. Because he felt that his work still need some time before completion, he withdrew as a private tutor to Zofingen (in Switzerland). There Fries worked on his main critical work, and studied Newton's "Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica". He remained a lifelong admirer of Newton, whom he praised as a perfectionist of astronomy. Fries saw the final aim of his mathematical natural philosophy in the union of Newton's Principia with Kant's philosophy. -/- With the aim of qualifying as a lecturer, he returned to Jena in 1800. Now Fries was known from his independent writings, such as "Reinhold, Fichte and Schelling" (1st edition in 1803), and "Systems of Philosophy as an Evident Science" (1804). The relationship between G. W. F. Hegel and Fries did not develop favourably. Hegel speaks of "the leader of the superficial army", and at other places he expresses: "he is an extremely narrow-minded bragger". On the other hand, Fries also has an unfavourable take on Hegel. He writes of the "Redundancy of the Hegelistic dialectic" (1828). In his History of Philosophy (1837/40) he writes of Hegel, amongst other things: "Your way of philosophising seems just to give expression to nonsense in the shortest possible way". In this work, Fries appears to argue with Hegel in an objective manner, and expresses a positive attitude to his work. -/- In 1805, Fries was appointed professor for philosophy in Heidelberg. In his time spent in Heidelberg, he married Caroline Erdmann. He also sealed his friendships with W. M. L. de Wette and F. H. Jacobi. Jacobi was amongst the contemporaries who most impressed Fries during this period. In Heidelberg, Fries wrote, amongst other things, his three-volume main work New Critique of Reason (1807). -/- In 1816 Fries returned to Jena. When in 1817 the Wartburg festival took place, Fries was among the guests, and made a small speech. 1819 was the so-called "Great Year" for Fries: His wife Caroline died, and Karl Sand, a member of a student fraternity, and one of Fries' former students stabbed the author August von Kotzebue to death. Fries was punished with a philosophy teaching ban but still received a professorship for physics and mathematics. Only after a period of years, and under restrictions, he was again allowed to read philosophy. From now on, Fries was excluded from political influence. The rest of his life he devoted himself once again to philosophical and natural studies. During this period, he wrote "Mathematical Natural Philosophy" (1822) and the "History of Philosophy" (1837/40). -/- Fries suffered from a stroke on New Year's Day 1843, and a second stroke, on the 10th of August 1843 ended his life. -/- 2. Fries' Work Fries left an extensive body of work. A look at the subject areas he worked on makes us aware of the universality of his thinking. Amongst these subjects are: Psychic anthropology, psychology, pure philosophy, logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, religious philosophy, aesthetics, natural philosophy, mathematics, physics and medical subjects, to which, e.g., the text "Regarding the optical centre in the eye together with general remarks about the theory of seeing" (1839) bear witness. With popular philosophical writings like the novel "Julius and Evagoras" (1822), or the arabesque "Longing, and a Trip to the Middle of Nowhere" (1820), he tried to make his philosophy accessible to a broader public. Anthropological considerations are shown in the methodical basis of his philosophy, and to this end, he provides the following didactic instruction for the study of his work: "If somebody wishes to study philosophy on the basis of this guide, I would recommend that after studying natural philosophy, a strict study of logic should follow in order to peruse metaphysics and its applied teachings more rapidly, followed by a strict study of criticism, followed once again by a return to an even closer study of metaphysics and its applied teachings." -/- 3. Continuation of Fries' work through the Friesian School -/- Fries' ideas found general acceptance amongst scientists and mathematicians. A large part of the followers of the "Fries School of Thought" had a scientific or mathematical background. Amongst them were biologist Matthias Jakob Schleiden, mathematics and science specialist philosopher Ernst Friedrich Apelt, the zoologist Oscar Schmidt, and the mathematician Oscar Xavier Schlömilch. Between the years 1847 and 1849, the treatises of the "Fries School of Thought", with which the publishers aimed to pursue philosophy according to the model of the natural sciences appeared. In the Kant-Fries philosophy, they saw the realisation of this ideal. The history of the "New Fries School of Thought" began in 1903. It was in this year that the philosopher Leonard Nelson gathered together a small discussion circle in Goettingen. Amongst the founding members of this circle were: A. Rüstow, C. Brinkmann and H. Goesch. In 1904 L. Nelson, A. Rüstow, H. Goesch and the student W. Mecklenburg travelled to Thuringia to find the missing Fries writings. In the same year, G. Hessenberg, K. Kaiser and Nelson published the first pamphlet from their first volume of the "Treatises of the Fries School of Thought, New Edition". -/- The school set out with the aim of searching for the missing Fries' texts, and re-publishing them with a view to re-opening discussion of Fries' brand of philosophy. The members of the circle met regularly for discussions. Additionally, larger conferences took place, mostly during the holidays. Featuring as speakers were: Otto Apelt, Otto Berg, Paul Bernays, G. Fraenkel, K. Grelling, G. Hessenberg, A. Kronfeld, O. Meyerhof, L. Nelson and R. Otto. On the 1st of March 1913, the Jakob-Friedrich-Fries society was founded. Whilst the Fries' school of thought dealt in continuum with the advancement of the Kant-Fries philosophy, the members of the Jakob-Friedrich-Fries society's main task was the dissemination of the Fries' school publications. In May/June, 1914, the organisations took part in their last common conference before the gulf created by the outbreak of the First World War. Several members died during the war. Others returned disabled. The next conference took place in 1919. A second conference followed in 1921. Nevertheless, such intensive work as had been undertaken between 1903 and 1914 was no longer possible. -/- Leonard Nelson died in October 1927. In the 1930's, the 6th and final volume of "Treatises of the Fries School of Thought, New Edition" was published. Franz Oppenheimer, Otto Meyerhof, Minna Specht and Grete Hermann were involved in their publication. -/- 4. About Mathematical Natural Philosophy -/- In 1822, Fries' "Mathematical Natural Philosophy" appeared. Fries rejects the speculative natural philosophy of his time - above all Schelling's natural philosophy. A natural study, founded on speculative philosophy, ceases with its collection, arrangement and order of well-known facts. Only a mathematical natural philosophy can deliver the necessary explanatory reasoning. The basic dictum of his mathematical natural philosophy is: "All natural theories must be definable using purely mathematically determinable reasons of explanation." Fries is of the opinion that science can attain completeness only by the subordination of the empirical facts to the metaphysical categories and mathematical laws. -/- The crux of Fries' natural philosophy is the thought that mathematics must be made fertile for use by the natural sciences. However, pure mathematics displays solely empty abstraction. To be able to apply them to the sensory world, an intermediatory connection is required. Mathematics must be connected to metaphysics. The pure mechanics, consisting of three parts are these: a) A study of geometrical movement, which considers solely the direction of the movement, b) A study of kinematics, which considers velocity in Addition, c) A study of dynamic movement, which also incorporates mass and power, as well as direction and velocity. -/- Of great interest is Fries' natural philosophy in view of its methodology, particularly with regard to the doctrine "leading maxims". Fries calls these "leading maxims" "heuristic", "because they are principal rules for scientific invention". -/- Fries' philosophy found great recognition with Carl Friedrich Gauss, amongst others. Fries asked for Gauss's opinion on his work "An Attempt at a Criticism based on the Principles of the Probability Calculus" (1842). Gauss also provided his opinions on "Mathematical Natural Philosophy" (1822) and on Fries' "History of Philosophy". Gauss acknowledged Fries' philosophy and wrote in a letter to Fries: "I have always had a great predilection for philosophical speculation, and now I am all the more happy to have a reliable teacher in you in the study of the destinies of science, from the most ancient up to the latest times, as I have not always found the desired satisfaction in my own reading of the writings of some of the philosophers. In particular, the writings of several famous (maybe better, so-called famous) philosophers who have appeared since Kant have reminded me of the sieve of a goat-milker, or to use a modern image instead of an old-fashioned one, of Münchhausen's plait, with which he pulled himself from out of the water. These amateurs would not dare make such a confession before their Masters; it would not happen were they were to consider the case upon its merits. I have often regretted not living in your locality, so as to be able to glean much pleasurable entertainment from philosophical verbal discourse." -/- The starting point of the new adoption of Fries was Nelson's article "The critical method and the relation of psychology to philosophy" (1904). Nelson dedicates special attention to Fries' re-interpretation of Kant's deduction concept. Fries awards Kant's criticism the rationale of anthropological idiom, in that he is guided by the idea that one can examine in a psychological way which knowledge we have "a priori", and how this is created, so that we can therefore recognise our own knowledge "a priori" in an empirical way. Fries understands deduction to mean an "awareness residing darkly in us is, and only open to basic metaphysical principles through conscious reflection.". -/- Nelson has pointed to an analogy between Fries' deduction and modern metamathematics. In the same manner, as with the anthropological deduction of the content of the critical investigation into the metaphysical object show, the content of mathematics become, in David Hilbert's view, the object of metamathematics. -/-. (shrink)

This is a corrected version of the final proofs. I've fixed a number of typos, and corrected a blunder in chapter 4. In chapter 4 I say that 'this is this' is analytic, and 'this is not this' is antonymous. This is inconsistent with what I say in chapter 5, and not what I actually think. Rather, 'this is this' is taugologous, and 'this is not this' is contradictory. Analyticity and autnonmy are sense properties while tautologousness and contradictoriness are formal (...) logical properties. Heading, ToC and Index updated accordingly. (Oxford will make these corrections in their online version and in future print runs.). (shrink)

This article uses the case study of ethnobiological classification to develop a positive and a negative thesis about the state of natural kind debates. On the one hand, I argue that current accounts of natural kinds can be integrated in a multidimensional framework that advances understanding of classificatory practices in ethnobiology. On the other hand, I argue that such a multidimensional framework does not leave any substantial work for the notion “natural kind” and that attempts to formulate a general account (...) of naturalness have become an obstacle to understanding classificatory practices. (shrink)

The simulation hypothesis has recently excited renewed interest, especially in the physics and philosophy communities. However, the hypothesis specifically concerns {computers} that simulate physical universes, which means that to properly investigate it we need to couple computer science theory with physics. Here I do this by exploiting the physical Church-Turing thesis. This allows me to introduce a preliminary investigation of some of the computer science theoretic aspects of the simulation hypothesis. In particular, building on Kleene's second recursion theorem, I prove (...) that it is mathematically possible for us to be in a simulation that is being run on a computer \textit{by us}. In such a case, there would be two identical instances of us; the question of which of those is ``really us'' is meaningless. I also show how Rice's theorem provides some interesting impossibility results concerning simulation and self-simulation; briefly describe the philosophical implications of fully homomorphic encryption for (self-)simulation; briefly investigate the graphical structure of universes simulating universes simulating universes, among other issues. I end by describing some of the possible avenues for future research that this preliminary investigation reveals. (shrink)

The task of the congress of the German Society for Semiotics in Passau / Germany in September 2017 was to explore and describe "boundaries". A total of 12 sections of the society wrote a call for paper for this purpose. With the present anthology it has to be made evident, how concretely also the boundaries of the own, the other and the foreign can be negotiated via pictures. -/- Papers: -/- - Martina Sauer: Ikonische Grenzverläufe. Szenarien des Eigenen, Anderen und (...) Fremden im Bild. Eine Einführung, 4 - Barbara Margarethe Eggert: Das andere Geschlecht im Altarraum – exklusive Textilien als inklusive Medien. Studien zum Gösser Ornat, 7 - Birke Sturm: Politik der Schönheit: Zur Konstruktion einer ›wissenschaftlichen‹ Bildästhetik schöner weiblicher Körper um 1900 am Beispiel des Gynäkologen Carl Heinrich Stratz, 22 - Melis Avkiran: Das rassifizierte Fremde im Bild. Zur Genese differenzbildender Konzepte in der Kunst des 15. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel des Malers Hans Memling, 40 - Leonie Licht: weiß zwischen schwarz zwischen weiß – Geschichten von Identität im Bild, 75 - Julia Austermann: Queere Interventionen im kommunistischen Polen – Krzysztof Jung und sein ›plastisches Theater‹, 91 - Sabine Engel: Tizians Porträt der Laura Dianti. Aneignung und Transformation zwischen Orient und Okzident, 111 - Anna Christina Schütz: Osman Hamdi Beys Türkische Straßenszene. Der Teppich als Verhandlungsort kultureller Identitäten im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert, 146 - Benjamin Häger, Claudia Jürgens: Ikonische Stadtstrategien. Das Fassadenplakat und die Musterfassade als Instrumente machtpolitischer Repräsentation, 175 - Irene Schütze: Fehlende Verweise, rudimentäre ›Markierungen‹: aufgeweichte Grenzverläufe zwischen Kunst und Alltag, 204 - Stefan Römer: Interesse an und in einem Bildarchiv für Migrant/innen und Flüchtlinge, 221 - Viola Nordsieck: Von der Fähigkeit, einen Stuhl zu ignorieren. A. N. Whiteheads Konzept der Wahrnehmung als symbolisierender Tätigkeit und die Art, wie wir Bilder als Bilder sehen, 239 - David Jöckel: Mythos und Bild. Roland Barthes’ Semiologie bildlicher Stereotypisierung, 255 -/- - Kurzbiographien der Autorinnen und Autoren, 274 - Impressum, 278. (shrink)

Current controversies about knowledge integration reflect conflicting ideas of what it means to “take Indigenous knowledge seriously”. While there is increased interest in integrating Indigenous and Western scientific knowledge in various disciplines such as anthropology and ethnobiology, integration projects are often accused of recognizing Indigenous knowledge only insofar as it is useful for Western scientists. The aim of this article is to use tools from philosophy of science to develop a model of both successful integration and integration failures. On the (...) one hand, I argue that cross-cultural recognition of property clusters leads to an ontological overlap that makes knowledge integration often epistemically productive and socially useful. On the other hand, I argue that knowledge integration is limited by ontological divergence. Adequate models of Indigenous knowledge will therefore have to take integration failures seriously and I argue that integration efforts need to be complemented by a political notion of ontological self-determination. (shrink)

Some analytic philosophers have recently been defending the thesis that there’s “something it’s like” to consciously think a particular thought, which is qualitatively different from what it’s like to be in any other kind of conscious mental state and from what it’s like to think any other thought, and which constitutes the thought’s intentional content. (I call this the “intentional phenomenology thesis”). One objection to this thesis concerns the introspective availability of such content: If it is true that intentional phenomenology (...) is constitutive of intentional content, and that conscious phenomenology is always introspectively available, then it ought to be true that the content of any concept consciously entertained is always introspectively available. But it is not. For example, one can know introspectively that one is thinking that one knows that p without knowing introspectively what the content of the concept of knowledge is. Hence, it cannot be that intentional content is constituted by cognitive phenomenology. -/- I explore three responses to this objection. First, it is not clear that all of the contents of consciousness must be equally available to introspection. The capacities for conscious experience and introspective attention to it are distinct. It is not implausible that the resolving power of the latter might be insufficient to discern all of the fine-grained details of the former, or that its scope might be limited. Second, it is possible that in cases of incomplete accessibility one is entertaining only part of the concept the relevant term expresses in one’s language. In the knowledge case, for example, perhaps one is thinking only that one has justified true belief that p (one’s self-attribution of a thought about knowledge is in fact false). Finally, in such cases one might be consciously entertaining only part of the relevant concept, the rest remaining unconscious, and so unavailable to conscious introspection. I conclude that the objection is not decisive against the intentional phenomenology thesis. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show that externalist accounts of cognition such as Clark and Chalmers' (1998) “active externalism” lead to an explosion of knowledge that is caused by online resources such as Wikipedia and Google. I argue that externalist accounts of cognition imply that subjects who integrate mobile Internet access in their cognitive routines have millions of standing beliefs on unexpected issues such as the birth dates of Moroccan politicians or the geographical coordinates of villages in southern (...) Indonesia. Although many externalists propose criteria for the bounds of cognition that are designed to avoid this explosion of knowledge, I argue that these criteria are flawed and that active externalism has to accept that information resources such as Wikipedia and Google constitute extended cognitive processes. (shrink)

Shepherd appears to endorse something like the following biconditonal regarding qualities and objects. □(An object, O, exists ↔ Some bundle of qualities, Q1, Q2, … Qn exists). There is a growing consensus in the secondary literature that she also takes the right side of this biconditional to ground the left side. I.e. Shepherd is a bundle theorist who takes an object to be nothing but a mass of qualities, or causal powers. I argue here that despite appearances, this interpretation reverses (...) Shepherd's actual view. I.e. I argue that for Shepherd qualities, or causal powers, are grounded in the intrinsic constitutions of objects. In the case of "external objects", these intrinsic constitutions are unknowable to us; in the case of "internal objects", we have direct knowledge of them. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche was Less Well-Read in the history of philosophy than were many of his peers in the pantheon, whether Hegel before him or Heidegger after, but he was not for that reason any less hesitant to pronounce judgment on the worth of the other great philosophers: Plato was “boring”; Descartes was “superficial”; Hobbes, Hume, and Locke signify “a debasement and lowering of the concept of ‘philosophy’ for more than a century”; Kant was an “idiot” and a “catastrophic spider,” etc.1 (...) Against this overarching trend of negativity, his uncharacteristically positive response to one thinker, a thinker who initially appears to us as quite different from him, is all the more surprising. In the summer of .. (shrink)

In the course of daily life we solve problems often enough that there is a special term to characterize the activity and the right to expect a scientific theory to explain its dynamics. The classical view in psychology is that to solve a problem a subject must frame it by creating an internal representation of the problem’s structure, usually called a problem space. This space is an internally generable representation that is mathematically identical to a graph structure with nodes and (...) links. The nodes can be annotated with useful information, and the whole representation can be distributed over internal and external structures such as symbolic notations on paper or diagrams. If the representation is distributed across internal and external structures the subject must be able to keep track of activity in the distributed structure. Problem solving proceeds as the subject works from an initial state in mentally supported space, actively constructing possible solution paths, evaluating them and heuristically choosing the best. Control of this exploratory process is not well understood, as it is not always systematic, but various heuristic search algorithms have been proposed and some experimental support has been provided for them. (shrink)

Psychological and philosophical studies have extended J. J. Gibson’s notion of affordances. Affordances are possibilities for bodily action presented to us by the objects of our perception. Recent work has argued that we should extend the actions afforded by perception to mental action. I argue that we can extend the notion of affordance itself. What I call ‘Introspective Affordances’ are possibilities for mental action presented to us by introspectively accessible states. While there are some prima facie worries concerning the non-perceptual (...) nature of introspection, I will argue that our internal mental lives share enough commonalities with experiences in our environment to warrant this extension. I will demonstrate the value of introspective affordances by showing how they allow us to explain an underexplored aspect of thought insertion. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to argue that ontological choices in scientific practice undermine common formulations of the value-free ideal in science. First, I argue that the truth values of scientific statements depend on ontological choices. For example, statements about entities such as species, race, memory, intelligence, depression, or obesity are true or false relative to the choice of a biological, psychological, or medical ontology. Second, I show that ontological choices often depend on non-epistemic values. On the basis of (...) these premises, I argue that it is often neither possible nor desirable to evaluate scientific statements independently of non-epistemic values. Finally, I suggest that considerations of ontological choices do not only challenge the value-free ideal but also help to specify positive roles of non-epistemic values in an often neglected area of scientific practice. (shrink)

This article outlines a program of ethnoontology that brings together empirical research in the ethnosciences with ontological debates in philosophy. First, we survey empirical evidence from heterogeneous cultural contexts and disciplines. Second, we propose a model of cross‐cultural relations between ontologies beyond a simple divide between universalist and relativist models. Third, we argue for an integrative model of ontology building that synthesizes insights from different fields such as biological taxonomy, cognitive science, cultural anthropology, and political ecology. We conclude by arguing (...) that a program of ethnoontology provides philosophers both with insights about traditional issues such as debates about natural kinds and with novel strategies for connecting philosophy with pressing global issues such as the conservation of local environments and the self‐determination of Indigenous communities. (shrink)

Libertarian self-ownership views have traditionally maintained that we enjoy very powerful deontological protections against any infringement upon our property. This stringency yields very counter-intuitive results when we consider trivial infringements such as very mildly toxic pollution or trivial risks such having planes fly overhead. Maintaining that other people's rights against all infringements are very powerful threatens to undermine our liberty, as Nozick saw. In this paper I consider the most sophisticated attempts to rectify this problem within a libertarian self-ownership framework. (...) I argue that all of these responses are significantly flawed. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to discuss the relation between indigenous and scientific kinds on the basis of contemporary ethnobiological research. I argue that ethnobiological accounts of taxonomic convergence-divergence patters challenge common philosophical models of the relation between folk concepts and natural kinds. Furthermore, I outline a positive model of taxonomic convergence-divergence patterns that is based on Slater's [2014] notion of “stable property clusters” and Franklin-Hall's [2014] discussion of natural kinds as “categorical bottlenecks.” Finally, I argue that this model (...) is not only helpful for understanding the relation between indigenous and scientific kinds but also makes substantial contributions to contemporary debates about natural kinds.to contemporary debates about natural kinds. (shrink)

There have recently been a number of strong claims that normative considerations, broadly construed, influence many philosophically important folk concepts and perhaps are even a constitutive component of various cognitive processes. Many such claims have been made about the influence of such factors on our folk notion of causation. In this paper, we argue that the strong claims found in the recent literature on causal cognition are overstated, as they are based on one narrow type of data about a particular (...) type of causal cognition; the extant data do not warrant any wide-ranging conclusions about the pervasiveness of normative considerations in causal cognition. Of course, almost all empirical investigations involve some manner of ampliative inference, and so we provide novel empirical results demonstrating that there are types of causal cognition that do not seem to be influenced by moral considerations. (shrink)

There is a difference between merely thinking that P and really grasping that P. For example, Jackson's (1982) black-and-white Mary cannot (before leaving her black-and-white room) fully grasp what it means to say that fire engines are red, but she can perfectly well entertain the thought that fire engines are red. The contrast between merely thinking and grasping is especially salient in the context of certain moral decisions. For example, an individual who grasps the plight of starving children thanks to (...) evocative images seems much more likely to donate for the children's benefit than someone who is merely told about their plight. This paper offers a phenomenal account of grasping according to which grasping a content (whether a proposition or concept) consists in one's thoughts about the content being constituted by phenomenal experiences of constituents of the content. This account improves on earlier phenomenal accounts of grasping (Bourget 2017a, 2018) by allowing for partial grasping and generalizing to concepts. The paper also addresses objections to phenomenal accounts of grasping, including the objection that recent developments in AI technology show that consciousness is irrelevant to grasping and understanding. (shrink)

This paper is about the principle that success entails ability, which I call Success. I argue the status of Success is highly puzzling: when we focus on past instances of actually successful action, Success is very compelling; but it is in tension with the idea that true ability claims require an action be in the agent's control. I make the above tension precise by considering the logic of ability. I argue Success is appealing because it is classically equivalent to two (...) genuinely valid inferences, which I call Past Success and Can't-Entails-Won't; but also that Success itself has counterexamples. I show how to invalidate Success while validating Past Success and Can't-Entails-Won't by connecting the meaning of ‘can’ to facts about what is settled or open. I define an operator W with features attributed to ‘will’ in the literature on future contingents. I then give a conditional analysis of ability ascriptions stated with W-conditionals, where "S can A" says, roughly, there’s some action available to S such that if S does it, then W(S A). I show this semantics invalidates Success while still explaining its appeal. (shrink)

The article discusses retributive justice and punitive restraint in response to the worst types of crime. I take the Breivik Case as a starting point. Anders Behring Breivik was sentenced to 21 years of preventive detention for killing 69 people, mainly youths, at Utøya and 8 people in Oslo on July 22nd, 2011. Retributivist theories as well as commonly held retributive intuitions suggest that much harsher punishment is required for such crimes. According to some retributivist theories, most notably on the (...) influential theories of Kant and Hegel, the death penalty is warranted for murderers like Breivik. This suggests that the rationale for punitive restraint in a case like the Breivik Case can only be found in forward- looking, consequentialist theories of punishment, or by adding to retributivist theories a side-constraint in the form of a principle of parsimony. However, I argue that if we look closer at the function of punishment in the retributivist theories of Kant and Hegel, they too imply a rationale for punitive restraint, even for such horrific crimes as here discussed. Against Kant and Hegel’s own views on the death penalty, I argue that their broader “freedom theories” of retributive justice do not imply the justice of the death penalty or life imprisonment. In the last part of the article, I explore differences in the concepts of freedom entailed by Kant and Hegel’s theories, and I relate these to some of the background factors relevant to the Breivik Case. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a framework for fostering argumentative skills in a systematic way in Philosophy and Ethics classes. We start with a review of curricula and teaching materials from the German-speaking world to show that there is an urgent need for standards for the teaching and learning of argumentation. Against this backdrop, we present a framework for such standards that is intended to tackle these difficulties. The spiral-curricular model of argumentative competences we sketch helps teachers introduce the relevant (...) concepts and skills to students early on in their school career. The focus is on secondary schools, but the proposal can also be of use for learning and teaching in universities, especially in introductory classes. (shrink)