Results for 'Charles A. Ziegler'

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  1. Localization and Intrinsic Function.Charles A. Rathkopf - 2013 - Philosophy of Science 80 (1):1-21.
    This paper describes one style of functional analysis commonly used in the neurosciences called task-bound functional analysis. The concept of function invoked by this style of analysis is distinctive in virtue of the dependence relations it bears to transient environmental properties. It is argued that task-bound functional analysis cannot explain the presence of structural properties in nervous systems. An alternative concept of neural function is introduced that draws on the theoretical neuroscience literature, and an argument is given to show that (...)
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  2. Mental evolution: a review of Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back. [REVIEW]Charles A. Rathkopf - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (6):1355-1368.
    From Bacteria To Bach and Back is an ambitious book that attempts to integrate a theory about the evolution of the human mind with another theory about the evolution of human culture. It is advertised as a defense of memes, but conceptualizes memes more liberally than has been done before. It is also advertised as a defense of the proposal that natural selection operates on culture, but conceptualizes natural selection as a process in which nearly all interesting parameters are free (...)
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  3.  88
    A theological Newcomb's dilemma.Zsolt Ziegler - 2022 - European Journal of Science and Theology 18 (4):121-131.
    In this paper, I will argue that the agnostic decision-maker may find himself in a Newcomb-type situation concerning the doctrine of Roman Catholicism. Consequently, if the agnostic wishes to decide according to the causal decision theory, he should refrain from living the Christian life, but if he follows the evidential decision theory, he should follow the Catholic life guidance. In the argument, I have cast the role of Newcomb’s predictive machine as Divine omniscience.
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  4. Kierkegaard’s Deep Diversity: The One and the Many.Charles Blattberg - 2020 - In Mélissa Fox-Muraton (ed.), Kierkegaard and Issues in Contemporary Ethics. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 51-68.
    Kierkegaard’s ideal supports a radical form of “deep diversity,” to use Charles Taylor’s expression. It is radical because it embraces not only irreducible conceptions of the good but also incompatible ones. This is due to its paradoxical nature, which arises from its affirmation of both monism and pluralism, the One and the Many, together. It does so in at least three ways. First, in terms of the structure of the self, Kierkegaard describes his ideal as both unified (the “positive (...)
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  5. “Determinism/Spinozism in the Radical Enlightenment: the cases of Anthony Collins and Denis Diderot”.Charles T. Wolfe - 2007 - International Review of Eighteenth-Century Studies 1 (1):37-51.
    In his Philosophical Inquiry concerning Human Liberty (1717), the English deist Anthony Collins proposed a complete determinist account of the human mind and action, partly inspired by his mentor Locke, but also by elements from Bayle, Leibniz and other Continental sources. It is a determinism which does not neglect the question of the specific status of the mind but rather seeks to provide a causal account of mental activity and volition in particular; it is a ‘volitional determinism’. Some decades later, (...)
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  6. How Kant Thought He Could Reach Hume.Charles Goldhaber - 2021 - In Camilla Serck-Hanssen & Beatrix Himmelmann (eds.), The Court of Reason: Proceedings of the 13th International Kant Congress. De Gruyter. pp. 717–726.
    I argue that Kant thought his Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts could reach skeptical empiricists like Hume by providing an overlooked explanation of the mind's a priori relation to the objects of experience. And he thought empiricists may be motivated to listen to this explanation because of an instability and dissatisfaction inherent to empiricism.
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  7. Newcomb dilemma in development management.Zsolt Ziegler - 2020 - Információs Társadalom 20 (4):8-18.
    Newcomb Dilemmas show a discrepancy between our rational reasoning—evidential and causal decision theory. In this paper, I provide three versions of the dilemma from the original highly technical and abstract one to two more mundane cases of it. I also account for the general schema of the dilemma possibly appearing in macroeconomic situations. Ahmed (2014) aims to provide a solution for macroeconomic cases that opens a room for forming a development management Newcomb Dilemma — an imaginary case of the electric (...)
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  8. Lire le matérialisme.Charles T. Wolfe - 2020 - Lyon, France: ENS Editions.
    Ce livre étudie, à travers une série d'épisodes allant de la philosophie des Lumières à notre époque, le problème du matérialisme dans l'histoire de la philosophie et l’histoire des sciences. Comment comprendre les spécificités de l’histoire du matérialisme, des Lumières à nos jours, au sein de la grande histoire de la philosophie et de l’histoire des sciences ? Quelle est l’actualité de l’opposition classique entre le corps et l’esprit ? Qu’est-ce que le rire ou le rêve peuvent nous apprendre du (...)
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  9. Hume On Is and Ought: Logic, Promises and the Duke of Wellington.Charles Pigden - 2016 - In Paul Russell (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of David Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Hume seems to contend that you can’t get an ought from an is. Searle professed to prove otherwise, deriving a conclusion about obligations from a premise about promises. Since (as Schurz and I have shown) you can’t derive a substantive ought from an is by logic alone, Searle is best construed as claiming that there are analytic bridge principles linking premises about promises to conclusions about obligations. But we can no more derive a moral obligation to pay up from the (...)
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  10. A value sensitive design approach for designing AI-based worker assistance systems in manufacturing.Susanne Vernim, Harald Bauer, Erwin Rauch, Marianne Thejls Ziegler & Steven Umbrello - 2022 - Procedia Computer Science 200:505-516.
    Although artificial intelligence has been given an unprecedented amount of attention in both the public and academic domains in the last few years, its convergence with other transformative technologies like cloud computing, robotics, and augmented/virtual reality is predicted to exacerbate its impacts on society. The adoption and integration of these technologies within industry and manufacturing spaces is a fundamental part of what is called Industry 4.0, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The impacts of this paradigm shift on the human operators (...)
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  11. A New Foundation for the Propensity Interpretation of Fitness.Charles H. Pence & Grant Ramsey - 2013 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 64 (4):851-881.
    The propensity interpretation of fitness (PIF) is commonly taken to be subject to a set of simple counterexamples. We argue that three of the most important of these are not counterexamples to the PIF itself, but only to the traditional mathematical model of this propensity: fitness as expected number of offspring. They fail to demonstrate that a new mathematical model of the PIF could not succeed where this older model fails. We then propose a new formalization of the PIF that (...)
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  12.  46
    A Brief Memo to Pragmatists Concerning Induction.Charles Bakker - manuscript
    This is an open letter addressed to my fellow Pragmatists concerning the Problem of Induction. Others are of course also welcome to read it.
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  13. Sir John F. W. Herschel and Charles Darwin: Nineteenth-Century Science and Its Methodology.Charles H. Pence - 2018 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (1):108-140.
    There are a bewildering variety of claims connecting Darwin to nineteenth-century philosophy of science—including to Herschel, Whewell, Lyell, German Romanticism, Comte, and others. I argue here that Herschel’s influence on Darwin is undeniable. The form of this influence, however, is often misunderstood. Darwin was not merely taking the concept of “analogy” from Herschel, nor was he combining such an analogy with a consilience as argued for by Whewell. On the contrary, Darwin’s Origin is written in precisely the manner that one (...)
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  14. “Was Canguilhem a biochauvinist? Goldstein, Canguilhem and the project of ‘biophilosophy’".Charles Wolfe - 2015 - In Darian Meacham (ed.), Medicine and Society, New Continental Perspectives (Dordrecht: Springer, Philosophy and Medicine Series, 2015). Springer. pp. 197-212.
    Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934; along with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem was the main (...)
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  15. Mapping Controversy: A Cartography of Taxonomy and Biodiversity for the Philosophy of Biology.Charles H. Pence & Stijn Conix - manuscript
    One potentially extremely fruitful use of the tools of corpus analysis in the philosophy of science is to help us understand disputed terrains within the sciences that we study. For philosophers of biology, for instance, few controversies are as heated as those over the concepts we use in taxonomy to classify the living world, with the definition of ‘species’ perhaps most fundamental among them. As many understandings of biodiversity, in turn, involve counting the number of species present in a given (...)
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  16. A New Approach for Zionists.Charles Blattberg - 2007 - Palestine-Israel Journal 14 (2):100-104.
    Posted 30 January 2023. A previous version was published as “A New Approach for Zionists: Conversation,” Palestine-Israel Journal 14, no. 2 (2007): 100–104. For a longer version of the argument, see my “Going Rabin One Further” in Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009).
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  17. A happiness fit for organic bodies: La Mettrie's medical Epicureanism.Charles T. Wolfe - 2009 - In Neven Leddy & Avi Lifschitz (eds.), Epicurus in the Enlightenment. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. pp. 69--83.
    A chapter on the specifically 'medical' Epicureanism of La Mettrie, connecting his materialist approach to mind-body issues and his hedonistic ethics.
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  18.  58
    Hierarchy as a Moral Category: Notes Towards a Theory of Moral Choice.Charles Carroll - 2023 - Original Philosophy.
    This paper seeks to resolve a fairly simple question in ethics: Why do seemingly reasonable people disagree about ethical problems? My paper seeks both to analyze this question and attempts to find a solution. My premise is that disagreement happens because of differences in hierarchical value ranking, or quite simply because some problems are more important to some people than others. Theories of choice, however, influenced by concepts such as "freedom of choice," conceal the hierarchical nature of our choices, leading (...)
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  19. Pourquoi a-t-on le droit d'offenser ?Charles Girard - 2020
    Le droit d’offenser est partie intégrante de la liberté d’expression. Sa justification repose sur la distinction entre les dogmes, qui peuvent faire l’objet de critiques ou de moqueries, et les individus qui peuvent y adhérer. Sans elle, les désaccords moraux et religieux ne pourraient plus s’exprimer dans l’espace public.
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  20. A Relational Theory of Moral Responsibility.Zsolt Ziegler - unknown
    This paper introduces a new theory of moral responsibility that does not rely on any concept of human control. Since an understanding of determinism shapes the possible set of views one can take regarding control, and there is no account of control that could be held simultaneously by both compatibilists and libertarians, the “relational theory of responsibility” is meant to create a common ground between compatibilism and libertarianism which are held to be mutually exclusive. Since the relational account of responsibility (...)
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  21. Gaps: When Not Even Nothing Is There.Charles Blattberg - 2021 - Comparative Philosophy 12 (1):31-55.
    A paradox, it is claimed, is a radical form of contradiction, one that produces gaps in meaning. In order to approach this idea, two senses of “separation” are distinguished: separation by something and separation by nothing. The latter does not refer to nothing in an ordinary sense, however, since in that sense what’s intended is actually less than nothing. Numerous ordinary nothings in philosophy as well as in other fields are surveyed so as to clarify the contrast. Then follows the (...)
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  22. A niggle at Nagel: causally active desires and the explanation of action.Charles Pigden - 2009 - In Constantine Sandis (ed.), New essays on the explanation of action. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 220--40.
    This paper criticizes an influential argument from Thomas Nagel’s THE POSSIBILTIY OF ALTRUISM, an argument that plays a foundational role in the philosophies of (at least) Philippa Foot, John McDowell and Jonathan Dancy. Nagel purports to prove that a person can be can be motivated to perform X by the belief that X is likely to bring about Y, without a causally active or biffy desire for Y. If Cullity and Gaut are to be believed (ETHICS AND PRACTICAL REASONING) this (...)
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  23. Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional Wisdom Revisited.Charles Pigden - 2022 - In Olli Loukola (ed.), Secrets and Conspiracies. Rodopi.
    Conspiracy theories should be neither believed nor investigated - that is the conventional wisdom. I argue that it is sometimes permissible both to investigate and to believe. Hence this is a dispute in the ethics of belief. I defend epistemic ‘oughts’ that apply in the first instance to belief-forming strategies that are partly under our control. I argue that the policy of systematically doubting or disbelieving conspiracy theories would be both a political disaster and the epistemic equivalent of self-mutilation, since (...)
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  24. Quantum sensing and quantum engineering: a strategy for acceleration via metascience.Charles Clark, Mayur Gosai, Terry Janssen, Melissa LaDuke, Jobst Landgrebe, Lawrence Pace & Barry Smith - 2023 - Proceedings of Spie: Quantum Sensing, Imaging, and Precision Metrology 12447.
    Research and engineering in the quantum domain involve long chains of activity involving theory development, hypothesis formation, experimentation, device prototyping, device testing, and many more. At each stage multiple paths become possible, and of the paths pursued, the majority will lead nowhere. Our quantum metascience approach provides a strategy which enables all stakeholders to gain an overview of those developments along these tracks, that are relevant to their specific concerns. It provides a controlled vocabulary, built out of terms that are (...)
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  25. Curriculum Management and Graduate Programmes’ Viability: The Mediation of Institutional Effectiveness Using PLS-SEM Approach.Valentine Joseph Owan, Emmanuel E. Emanghe, Chiaka P. Denwigwe, Eno Etudor-Eyo, Abosede A. Usoro, Victor O. Ebuara, Charles Effiong, Joseph O. Ogar & Bassey A. Bassey - 2022 - Journal of Curriculum and Teaching 11 (5):114-127.
    This study used a partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) to estimate curriculum management's direct and indirect effects on university graduate programmes' viability. The study also examined the role of institutional effectiveness in mediating the nexus between the predictor and response variables. This is a correlational study with a factorial research design. The study's participants comprised 149 higher education administrators (23 Faculty Deans and 126 HODs) from two public universities in Nigeria. A structured questionnaire designed by the researchers was (...)
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  26. On the Triviality of Hume's Law: A Reply to Gerhard Schurz.Charles Pigden - 2010 - In Hume on Is and Ought. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 217-238.
    I argue that No-Ought-From-Is (in the sense that I believe it) is a relatively trivial affair. Of course, when people try to derive substantive or non-vacuous moral conclusions from non-moral premises, they are making a mistake. But No-Non-Vacuous-Ought-From-Is is meta-ethically inert. It tells us nothing about the nature of the moral concepts. It neither refutes naturalism nor supports non-cognitivism. And this is not very surprising since it is merely an instance of an updated version of the conservativeness of logic (in (...)
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  27. Network representation and complex systems.Charles Rathkopf - 2018 - Synthese (1).
    In this article, network science is discussed from a methodological perspective, and two central theses are defended. The first is that network science exploits the very properties that make a system complex. Rather than using idealization techniques to strip those properties away, as is standard practice in other areas of science, network science brings them to the fore, and uses them to furnish new forms of explanation. The second thesis is that network representations are particularly helpful in explaining the properties (...)
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  28. Oyun: A New, Free Program for Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma Tournaments in the Classroom.Charles H. Pence & Lara Buchak - 2012 - Evolution Education and Outreach 5 (3):467-476.
    Evolutionary applications of game theory present one of the most pedagogically accessible varieties of genuine, contemporary theoretical biology. We present here Oyun (OY-oon, http://charlespence.net/oyun), a program designed to run iterated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments, competitions between prisoner’s dilemma strategies developed by the students themselves. Using this software, students are able to readily design and tweak their own strategies, and to see how they fare both in round-robin tournaments and in “evolutionary” tournaments, where the scores in a given “generation” directly determine contribution (...)
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  29.  61
    Not Without a Doubt.Charles Bakker - manuscript
    In this paper, I share my story about some of my experiences with doubt. Along the way, I also share some philosophical reflections. I know this does not tell you very much, but like I said, I am telling a story, and I do not want to spoil the ending.
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  30. As A Matter of Fact.Charles Travis - 2013 - Truth (Aristotelian Society Publication).
    This expounds J.L. Austin's treatment of truth, and compares it with Frege's.
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  31. Substance, Content, Taxonomy and Consequence: A Comment on Stephen Maitzen.Charles Pigden - 2010 - In Hume on Is and Ought. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 313-319.
    This is a response to Stephen Maitzen’s paper. ‘Moral Conclusions from Nonmoral Premises’. Maitzen thinks that No-Ought-From-Is is false. He does not dispute the formal proofs of Schurz and myself, but he thinks they are beside the point. For what the proponents of No-Ought-From-Is need to show is not that you cannot get SUBSTANTIVELY moral conclusions from FORMALLY non-moral premises but that you cannot get SUBSTANTIVELY moral conclusions from SUBSTANTIVELY non-moral premises. And he believes that he can derive substantively moral (...)
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  32. Self-locating Uncertainty and the Origin of Probability in Everettian Quantum Mechanics.Charles T. Sebens & Sean M. Carroll - 2016 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (1):axw004.
    A longstanding issue in attempts to understand the Everett (Many-Worlds) approach to quantum mechanics is the origin of the Born rule: why is the probability given by the square of the amplitude? Following Vaidman, we note that observers are in a position of self-locating uncertainty during the period between the branches of the wave function splitting via decoherence and the observer registering the outcome of the measurement. In this period it is tempting to regard each branch as equiprobable, but we (...)
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  33. Meditations on Western Philosophy.Charles Bakker - manuscript
    In this paper I shall explain how I came to realize that for as long as I believed that there exists an epistemic gap, or veil of perception, separating the world into that which is subjective and internal to the mind from that which is objective and external to the mind, I was unable to provide a compelling argument for the existence of this same Epistemic Gap ontology.
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  34. Getting the Wrong Anderson? A Short and Opinionated History of New Zealand Philosophy.Charles Pigden - 2011 - In Graham Robert Oppy & Nick Trakakis (eds.), The Antipodean philosopher. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books. pp. 169-195.
    Is the history of philosophy primarily a contribution to PHILOSOPHY or primarily a contribution to HISTORY? This paper is primarily contribution to history (specifically the history of New Zealand) but although the history of philosophy has been big in New Zealand, most NZ philosophers with a historical bent are primarily interested in the history of philosophy as a contribution to philosophy. My essay focuses on two questions: 1) How did New Zealand philosophy get to be so good? And why, given (...)
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  35. A 'Sensible Knave'? Hume, Jane Austen and Mr Elliot.Charles R. Pigden - 2012 - Intellectual History Review 22 (3):465-480.
    This paper deals with what I take to be one woman’s literary response to a philosophical problem. The woman is Jane Austen, the problem is the rationality of Hume’s ‘sensible knave’, and Austen’s response is to deepen the problem. Despite his enthusiasm for virtue, Hume reluctantly concedes in the EPM that injustice can be a rational strategy for ‘sensible knaves’, intelligent but selfish agents who feel no aversion towards thoughts of villainy or baseness. Austen agrees, but adds that ABSENT CONSIDERATIONS (...)
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  36. Letter from a Gentleman in Dunedin to a Lady in the Countryside.Charles Pigden - 2010 - In Hume on Is and Ought.
    I argue 1) That in his celebrated Is/Ought passage, Hume employs ‘deduction’ in the strict sense, according to which if a conclusion B is justly or evidently deduced from a set of premises A, A cannot be true and B false, or B false and the premises A true. 2) That Hume was following the common custom of his times which sometimes employed ‘deduction’ in a strict sense to denote inferences in which, in the words of Dr Watts’ Logick, ‘the (...)
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  37. Biopolitical Barriers to a Potterian Bioethics: The (Potentially) Missed Opportunity of Epigenetics.Charles Dupras, Bryn Williams-Jones & Vardit Ravitsky - 2017 - American Journal of Bioethics 17 (9):15-17.
    Lee (2017) calls for greater attention to the shared epistemological and normative grounds of both public health ethics and environmental ethics, and to Potter’s original conception of bioethics, which, as she rightly observes, has been largely disregarded in contemporary North American bioethics scholarship and practice. In a previous publication we also argued in favor of reviving the Potterian approach to bioethics; we built a case grounded in “the relatively new field of molecular epigenetics [that] provides novel information that should serve (...)
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  38. evoText: A new tool for analyzing the biological sciences.Grant Ramsey & Charles H. Pence - 2016 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 57:83-87.
    We introduce here evoText, a new tool for automated analysis of the literature in the biological sciences. evoText contains a database of hundreds of thousands of journal articles and an array of analysis tools for generating quantitative data on the nature and history of life science, especially ecology and evolutionary biology. This article describes the features of evoText, presents a variety of examples of the kinds of analyses that evoText can run, and offers a brief tutorial describing how to use (...)
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  39. Naming Names: A Deep Dive into Saul Kripke’s Philosophy.Nathan Salmón & Charles Carlini - 2023 - Simply Charly.
    Charles Carlini interviews Nathan Salmón about the philosophical work of his mentor and friend, the late Saul Kripke, one of the foremost philosophers of the 20th Century.
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  40. To Discern Divinity- A Discussion and Interpolation of Spinoza's "Ethics" Part 1- Concerning God.Charles Saunders - 2016 - Lake Oswego, Or.: Pulayana Press.
    Spinoza's insistence that a deductive metaphysics built from a single Principle or 'Deus sive Natura' and from there proceeding to deduce in descending order all of the 'common properties' or 'Infinite Modalities', is far superior to the inductive method which begins with observation and measurement of particulars and then proceeds to the general. In fact Spinoza recognized in a universe of an infinite number of particulars no metaphysical assertions could be conjectured with any certainty from any investigation of the 'modes' (...)
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  41. Complots of Mischief.Charles Pigden - 2006 - In David Coady (ed.), Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate. Ashgate. pp. 139-166.
    In Part 1, I contend (using Coriolanus as my mouthpiece) that Keeley and Clarke have failed to show that there is anything intellectually suspect about conspiracy theories per se. Conspiracy theorists need not commit the ‘fundamental attribution error’ there is no reason to suppose that all or most conspiracy theories constitute the cores of degenerating research programs, nor does situationism - a dubious doctrine in itself - lend any support to a systematic skepticism about conspiracy theories. In Part 2. I (...)
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  42. Nihilism, Nietzsche and the Doppelganger Problem.Charles R. Pigden - 2007 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (5):441-456.
    Nihilism, Nietzsche and the Doppelganger Problem Was Nietzsche a nihilist? Yes, because, like J. L. Mackie, he was an error-theorist about morality, including the elitist morality to which he himself subscribed. But he was variously a diagnostician, an opponent and a survivor of certain other kinds of nihilism. Schacht argues that Nietzsche cannot have been an error theorist, since meta-ethical nihilism is inconsistent with the moral commitment that Nietzsche displayed. Schacht’s exegetical argument parallels the substantive argument (advocated in recent years (...)
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  43. Spread Worlds, Plenitude and Modal Realism: A Problem for David Lewis.Charles Pigden & Rebecca E. B. Entwisle - 2012 - In James Maclaurin (ed.), Rationis Defensor.
    In his metaphysical summa of 1986, The Plurality of Worlds, David Lewis famously defends a doctrine he calls ‘modal realism’, the idea that to account for the fact that some things are possible and some things are necessary we must postulate an infinity possible worlds, concrete entities like our own universe, but cut off from us in space and time. Possible worlds are required to account for the facts of modality without assuming that modality is primitive – that there are (...)
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  44. L'interaction humain-machine à la lumière de Turing et Wittgenstein.Charles Bodon - 2023 - Revue Implications Philosophiques.
    Nous proposons une étude de la constitution du sens dans l'interaction humain-machine à partir des définitions que donnent Turing et Wittgenstein à propos de la pensée, la compréhension, et de la décision. Nous voulons montrer par l'analyse comparative des proximités et différences conceptuelles entre les deux auteurs que le sens commun entre humains et machines se co-constitue dans et à partir de l'action, et que c'est précisément dans cette co-constitution que réside la valeur sociale de leur interaction. Il s'agira pour (...)
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  45. Popper revisited, or what is wrong with conspiracy theories?Charles Pigden - 1995 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 25 (1):3-34.
    Conpiracy theories are widely deemed to be superstitious. Yet history appears to be littered with conspiracies successful and otherwise. (For this reason, "cock-up" theories cannot in general replace conspiracy theories, since in many cases the cock-ups are simply failed conspiracies.) Why then is it silly to suppose that historical events are sometimes due to conspiracy? The only argument available to this author is drawn from the work of the late Sir Karl Popper, who criticizes what he calls "the conspiracy theory (...)
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  46. Naturalism.Charles Pigden - 1991 - In Peter Singer (ed.), A Companion to Ethics. Cambridge, Mass., USA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 421-431.
    Survey article on Naturalism dealing with Hume's NOFI (including Prior's objections), Moore's Naturalistic Fallacy and the Barren Tautology Argument. Naturalism, as I understand it, is a form of moral realism which rejects fundamental moral facts or properties. Thus it is opposed to both non-cognitivism, and and the error theory but also to non-naturalism. General conclusion: as of 1991: naturalism as a program has not been refuted though none of the extant versions look particularly promising.
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  47. Conspiracy Theories and the Conventional Wisdom.Charles Pigden - 2007 - Episteme 4 (2):219-232.
    Abstract Conspiracy theories should be neither believed nor investigated - that is the conventional wisdom. I argue that it is sometimes permissible both to investigate and to believe. Hence this is a dispute in the ethics of belief. I defend epistemic “oughts” that apply in the first instance to belief-forming strategies that are partly under our control. But the beliefforming strategy of not believing conspiracy theories would be a political disaster and the epistemic equivalent of selfmutilation. I discuss several variations (...)
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  48. Footnote Fixation- Collegiality in Academic Spinoza Studies A Methodology and a Mindset That Misleads the Unwary.Charles Milton Saunders - manuscript
    Once in a great while a series of unintentional mistakes which could go unremarked, reach a mass and a wide distribution. When that occurs these mistakes take on a new life and somehow become established as a canon of 'scholarly' research. In the case of the extant literature in Spinozan academic writing, this has now gone far beyond the tipping point. Virtually all of the commentary, journals, conferences, courses and internet sites, now uniformly speak as one voice. And that voice (...)
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  49. Délibérer entre égaux. Enquête sur l'idéal démocratique.Charles Girard - 2019 - Paris: Vrin.
    L’idéal démocratique est accusé d’être irréaliste. Le gouvernement du peuple par le peuple et pour le peuple serait une chimère dans les sociétés contemporaines. Il faudrait lui préférer les visées plus modestes associées à l’élection : un droit de vote égal et la satisfaction du plus grand nombre. La démocratie ne se laisse pourtant pas réduire à la compétition électorale. Les acteurs et les institutions politiques qui s’en réclament invoquent non seulement un marché, où rivalisent des intérêts privés, mais un (...)
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  50. Logic and the autonomy of ethics.Charles R. Pigden - 1989 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 67 (2):127 – 151.
    My first paper on the Is/Ought issue. The young Arthur Prior endorsed the Autonomy of Ethics, in the form of Hume’s No-Ought-From-Is (NOFI) but the later Prior developed a seemingly devastating counter-argument. I defend Prior's earlier logical thesis (albeit in a modified form) against his later self. However it is important to distinguish between three versions of the Autonomy of Ethics: Ontological, Semantic and Ontological. Ontological Autonomy is the thesis that moral judgments, to be true, must answer to a realm (...)
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