Forcing occurs when a magician influences the audience's decisions without their awareness. To investigate the mechanisms behind this effect, we examined several stimulus and personality predictors. In Study 1, a magician flipped through a deck of playing cards while participants were asked to choose one. Although the magician could influence the choice almost every time (98%), relatively few (9%) noticed this influence. In Study 2, participants observed rapid series of cards on a computer, with one target card shown longer than (...) the rest. We expected people would tend to choose this card without noticing that it was shown longest. Both stimulus and personality factors predicted the choice of card, depending on whether the influence was noticed. These results show that combining real-world and laboratory research can be a powerful way to study magic and can provide new methods to study the feeling of free will. (shrink)

The fields of gender and social movements have traditionally consisted of separate literatures. Recently, however, a number of scholars have begun a fruitful exploration of the ways in which gender shapes political protest. This study adds three things to this ongoing discussion. First, the authors offer a systematic typology of the various ways in which movements are gendered and apply that typology to a wide variety of movements, including those that do not center on gender issues in any obvious way. (...) Second, the authors discuss the process by which movements become gendered. In doing so, they go beyond current scholarship by bringing “others” squarely into the gendered analysis. The article concludes by speculating about the outcomes of these processes and suggests that movements that draw on feminine stereotypes face a double bind that hampers their success. Illustrations come from movements in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. (shrink)

The Standard View of personal identity says that someone who exists now can exist at another time only if there is continuity of her mental contents or capacities. But no person is psychologically continuous with a fetus, for a fetus, at least early in its career, has no mental features at all. So the Standard View entails that no person was ever a fetus--contrary to the popular assumption that an unthinking fetus is a potential person. It is also mysterious what (...) does ordinarily happen to a human fetus, if it does not come to be a person. Although an extremely complex variant of the Standard View may allow one to persist without psychological continuity before one becomes a person but not afterwards, a far simpler solution is to accept a radically non-psychological account of our identity. (shrink)

Scientific literacy is built on critical thinking. The postbaccalaureate workforce enhances our economies and societies by contributing a wealth of knowledge and skill sets to local communities, respective industries, and beyond as our world becomes increasingly interconnected. Education in scientific literacy should teach students how to learn about science and how to cultivate and communicate a positive attitude about science. Learners in a 200-level nonmajors biotechnology course engaged with a series of ethical dilemmas after mastering the basic elements of argument (...) structure and advanced tools in argument evaluation. To introduce collaboration as a constructive process in undergraduate education, student interactions with peers require guidance, flexibility, and compassion to learn from each other. Students gain critical thinking mastery from two modules addressing how we argue and evaluate claims. Students apply these critical thinking skills to various ethical arguments involving responsible conduct of research training. Using our structured and interdisciplinary approach, new scholars learn through practice how to read, analyze, and evaluate research scenarios and respond to potential ethical situations. This strategy allows students to develop important scholarly skills, including a systematic approach to evaluating credibility and applying generosity to theirs and others' understanding of their circumstances. (shrink)

Experimenters claim some nonhuman mammals have metacognition. If correct, the results indicate some animal minds are more complex than ordinarily presumed. However, some philosophers argue for a deflationary reading of metacognition experiments, suggesting that the results can be explained in first-order terms. We agree with the deflationary interpretation of the data but we argue that the metacognition research forces the need to recognize a heretofore underappreciated feature in the theory of animal minds, which we call Unity. The disparate mental states (...) of an animal must be unified if deflationary accounts of metacognition are to hold and untoward implications avoided. Furthermore, once Unity is acknowledged, the deflationary interpretation of the experiments reveals an elevated moral standing for the nonhumans in question. (shrink)

This paper attempts to answer two questions: What is epistemic agency? And what are the motivations for having this concept? In response to the first question, it is argued that epistemic agency is the agency one has over one’s belief-forming practices, or doxastic dispositions, which can directly affect the way one forms a belief and indirectly affect the beliefs one forms. In response to the second question, it is suggested that the above conception of epistemic agency is either implicitly endorsed (...) by those theorists sympathetic to epistemic normativity or, at minimum, this conception can make sense of the legitimacy of the normative notions applicable to how and what one should believe. It is further contended that belief formation in some respects is a skill that can be intentionally developed and refined. Accepting this contention and the existence of certain epistemic norms provide inconclusive yet good reasons to endorse this concept. Recent challenges to this concept by Hillary Kornblith and Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij are also considered. (shrink)

In special cases of partial twinning, two heads, each supporting a more-orless normal human mental life, emerge from a single torso. It is often argued that there must be two people in such a case, even if there is only one biological organism. That would pose a problem for ‘animalism’, the view that people are organisms. The paper argues that it is very hard to say what sort of non-organisms the people in such cases would be. Reflection on partial twinning (...) is no more comfortable for those who think we’re not organisms than for those who think we are. We may have to accept that a single person could have two separate mental lives. (shrink)

It is widely held that every person is a person essentially, where being a person is having special mental properties such as intelligence and self-consciousness. It follows that nothing can acquire or lose these properties. The paper argues that this rules out all familiar psychological-continuity views of personal identity over time. It also faces grave difficulties in accounting for the mental powers of human beings who are not intelligent and self-conscious, such as foetuses and those with dementia.

There is ample justification for having analogical material in standardized tests for graduate school admission, perhaps especially for law school. We think that formal-analogy questions should compare different scenarios whose structure is the same in terms of the number of objects and the formal properties of their relations. The paper deals with this narrower question of how legitimately to have formal analogy test items, and the broader question of what constitutes a formal analogy in general.

The contention discussed here, is that one might be able to get around the puzzle contained in the results of Kim and Chan:— That a quantity of inertial mass is effectively lost, (a so called non-classical-rotational inertia NCRI,) but that being a “supersolid” there is no path for the normal fraction to slip past the 1 – 2 % supersolid fraction, which (it is supposed) remains stationary within the annulus. As a solution we argue that the effective loss of inertial (...) mass might be a real loss of inertial mass– that it might be intrinsic to a supersolid or superfluid “pool,” (a portion which has gone supersolid or superfluid.) In this way the puzzle would be resolved because the normal part and the supersolid part do not need to slip past each other in order to produce the experimental results. (shrink)

We present ethical reasons that the court should grant the Nonhuman Rights Project’s (NhRP) request for habeas corpus relief for Happy, an elephant. Happy has a basic interest in not being confined, an interest that should be legally protected just as the human interest in not being confined is legally protected. Since the decision in The Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v Breheny failed to weigh Happy’s interests properly, we ask this body to correct the error.

The question of whether perception can be penetrated by cognition is in the limelight again. The reason this question keeps coming up is that there is so much at stake: Is it possible to have theory-neutral observation? Is it possible to study perception without recourse to expectations, context, and beliefs? What are the boundaries between perception, memory, and inference (and do they even exist)? Are findings from neuroscience that paint a picture of perception as an inherently bidirectional and interactive process (...) relevant for understanding the relationship between cognition and perception? We have assembled a group of philosophers and psychologists who have been considering the thesis of cognitive (im)penetrability in light of these questions (Abdel Rahman & Sommer, 2008; Goldstone, Landy, & Brunel, 2011; Lupyan, Thompson-Schill, & Swingley, 2010; Macpherson, 2012; Stokes, 2011). Rather than rehashing previous arguments which appear, in retrospect, to have been somewhat ill-posed (Pylyshyn, 1999), this symposium will present a thesis of cognitive (im)penetrability that is at once philosophically satisfying, empirically testable, and relevant to the questions that cognitive scientists find most interesting. (shrink)

A number of philosophers argue that because of its history of systematic disagreement, philosophy has made little to no epistemic progress – especially in comparison to the hard sciences. One argument for this conclusion contends that the best explanation for systematic disagreement in philosophy is that at least some, potentially all, philosophers are unreliable. Since we do not know who is reliable, we have reason to conclude that we ourselves are probably unreliable. Evidence of one’s potential unreliability in a domain (...) purportedly defeats any first-order support one has for any judgments in that domain. This paper defends philosophy. First, accepting that science is rightfully treated as the benchmark of epistemic progress, I contend that a proper conception of epistemic progress highlights that philosophy and science are relevantly similar in terms of such progress. Secondly, even granting that systematic disagreement is a mark of unreliability and that it does characterize philosophy, this paper further argues that evidence of unreliability is insufficient for meta-level, domain-wide, defeat of philosophical judgments more generally. (shrink)

With the desperate usurpation of global spaces under the everexpanding capitalist mode of production, the political struggle still necessitates an emancipatory class politics as aimed by Marx and Engels. This paper will be a synthesis of Marxist geographer David Harvey’s theory of capitalist production of space and MarxEngels’ notion of freedom, and their notion of emancipatory class politics. According to David Harvey, its survival as a system is through its widescale control on the production of spaces. I will first expose (...) the theory of the Marxist geographer David Harvey on how capitalism produces a space through his theory of the capitalist production of space. This necessary strategy of capitalism to own and extend to spaces is essential to its nature to increase capital and profit. According to him, capitalism always needs to expand territories to create new sources of labor, wealth, and new markets. This necessitates obtaining profits to sustain capital accumulation amidst its problem of crises. The spatial ontology of capital will be the springboard showing a possible construction of the type of freedom or emancipation that is necessary in forwarding a class politics of spatiality. In effect, emancipating the place is tied with the classical notion of the liberation of the proletariat. I conceptualize the concept of place as a signifier of the spaces that humanity produces—may it be their home, their work, or geometries of modern life—but have been put under the dictates and design of capital. Thus, I will go back to the classical notion of emancipatory politics of Marx and Engels. This synthesis combines the possibility of emancipatory class politics based on the ontology of the present capitalist production of space. (shrink)

This chapter explains Franz Brentano's metaethical theory and how it purports to deal with such difficulties. Brentano explains correctness in emotions by analogy with correctness in judgements. For a judgement to be correct is for it to concord with a judgement made by someone who judges with self-evidence (Evidenz). Self-evident judgements are guaranteed to be correct, and they are based either on "inner perception" or on presentations of objects that are rejected apodictically. Brentano's metaethical theory concerns first and foremost the (...) psychology of valuing and of moral judgement. Brentano is clearly a cognitivist about evaluative and moral judgement; such judgements are judgements about the correctness of feelings, and judgements are cognitive acts. However, one aspect of his position that seems congenial to contemporary expressivism. This has to do with expressivist treatments of disagreement. Brentano's views seem akin to the kind of foundationalist intuitionism that is traditionally associated with non-naturalism. (shrink)

One big question in biology is what life is, but another is how life divides into living things. This is the problem of biological individuality. Proposed statements of the problem have been vague and incomplete. And proposed theories of biological individuality are not detailed enough to solve the problem even if they are correct. The root of these troubles is that their authors have not recognized the metaphysical claims presupposed in their statement of the problem. Making these claims explicit will (...) enable us to see better what the problem is and what form a solution to it would need to have. (shrink)

It is often assumed that how we talk about the world matters a great deal. This is one reason why conceptual engineers seek to improve our linguistic practices by advocating novel uses of our words, or by inventing new ones altogether. A core idea shared by conceptual engineers is that by changing our language in this way, we can reap all sorts of cognitive and practical benefits, such as improving our theorizing, combating hermeneutical injustice, or promoting social emancipation. But how (...) do changes at the linguistic level translate into any of these worthwhile benefits? In this paper, we propose the nameability account as a novel answer to this question. More specifically, we argue that what linguistic resources are readily available to us directly affects our cognitive performance on various categorization-related tasks. Consequently, our performance on such tasks can be improved by making controlled changes to our linguistic resources. We argue that this finding supports and extends recent motivations for conceptual engineering, as categorization plays an important role in both theoretical and practical contexts. (shrink)

Transhumanists want to free us from the constraints imposed by our humanity by means of “uploading”: extracting information from the brain, transferring it to a computer, and using it to create a purely electronic person there. That is supposed to move us from our human bodies to computers. This presupposes that a human being could literally move to a computer by a mere transfer of information. The chapter questions this assumption, then asks whether the procedure might be just as good, (...) as far as our interests go, even if it could not move us to a computer. (shrink)

Some adaptationist explanations are regarded as maximally solid and others fanciful just-so stories. Just-so stories are explanations based on very little evidence. Lack of evidence leads to circular-sounding reasoning: “this trait was shaped by selection in unseen ancestral populations and this selection must have occurred because the trait is present.” Well-supported adaptationist explanations include evidence that is not only abundant but selected from comparative, populational, and optimality perspectives, the three adaptationist subdisciplines. Each subdiscipline obtains its broad relevance in evolutionary biology (...) via assumptions that can only be tested with the methods of the other subdisciplines. However, even in the best-supported explanations, assumptions regarding variation, heritability, and fitness in unseen ancestral populations are always present. These assumptions are accepted given how well they would explain the data if they were true. This means that some degree of “circularity” is present in all evolutionary explanations. Evolutionary explanation corresponds not to a deductive structure, as biologists usually assert, but instead to ones such as abduction or induction. With these structures in mind, we show the way to a healthier view of “circularity” in evolutionary biology, and why integration across the comparative, populational, and optimality approaches is necessary. (shrink)

In the past 60 years or so, the philosophical subject of artistic expression has generally been handled as an inquiry into the artistic expression of emotion. In my view this has led to a distortion of the relevant territory, to the artistic expression of feeling’s too often being overlooked. I explicate the emotion-feeling distinction in modern terms, and urge that the expression of feeling is too central to be waived off as outside the proper philosophical subject of artistic expression. Restricting (...) the discussion to the art of painting, I sketch a partial psychological model for the exrtistic expression of feelipression of feeling. Although the feeling-emotion contrast is seldom made clear in their writings, I stress that many, or even most of the eminent pre-1960’s voices in aesthetics and art criticism—Croce, Dewey, Langer, Bosanquet, Berenson and others—would more or less agree that feeling is no less important for expression than emotion, and indeed can be interpreted as anticipating many points that I set forth. (shrink)

Our thesis is that reasoning plays a greater—or at least a different—role in understanding oral discourse such as lectures and speeches than it does in understanding comparatively long written discourse. For example, both reading and listening involve framing hypotheses about the direction the discourse is headed. But since a reader can skip around to check and revise hypotheses, the reader’s stake in initially getting it right is not as great as the listener’s, who runs the risk of getting hopelessly lost. (...) We also consider how representing the content of discourse and dealing with its pragmatic logic differs in reading and listening. (shrink)

As British and American idealism waned, new realisms displaced them. The common background of these new realisms emphasized the problem of the external world and the mind-body problem, as bequeathed by Reid, Hamilton, and Mill. During this same period, academics on both sides of the Atlantic recognized that the natural sciences were making great strides. Responses varied. In the United States, philosophical response focused particularly on functional psychology and Darwinian adaptedness. This article examines differing versions of that response in William (...) James and Roy Wood Sellars. James viewed the mind as a “fighter for ends.” His neutral monism, by taming the mind-body problem and the problem of the external world, provided a secure metaphysics of mind as functional activity. In contrast, Sellars ’s scientific realism endorsed physical reality but was not mechanistic or reductionist. His critical realism and evolutionary naturalism offered novel metaphysical and epistemological positions in comparison with other American and British realisms. James and Sellars are distinguished from British philosophy in 1890–1918 in the types of realism they endorsed and in their success at introducing Darwinian evolutionary considerations and functional psychology into mainstream philosophy. (shrink)

Justin Fisher (2007) has presented a novel argument designed to prove that all forms of mental internalism are false. I aim to show that the argument fails with regard to internalism about phenomenal experiences. The argument tacitly assumes a certain view about the ontology of phenomenal experience, which (inspired by Alva Noe) I call the “snapshot conception of phenomenal experience.” After clarifying what the snapshot conception involves, I present Fisher with a dilemma. If he rejects the snapshot conception, then his (...) argument against phenomenal internalism collapses. But if he embraces the snapshot conception, then internalists may argue that in light of the snapshot conception, their view is not so implausible—and that if Fisher still disagrees, he owes us an argument that shows why phenomenal internalism is false even given the snapshot conception. I conclude the paper by showing that Fisher cannot escape my criticism by adjusting his argument so that it no longer depends on the snapshot conception. (shrink)

There is a fundamental incompatibility between a developmental orientation to education and instrumental and scientistic conceptions of rationality that dominate educational inquiry. An expanded conception of rationality is provided in the critical theory of Jurgen Habermas. This study draws on Habermas' work to present a theory of inquiry that is consistent with a developmental perspective. I distinguish three interdependent realms of experience--the objective world of nature, the intersubjective world of society and the subjective world of each individual. Then, I argue (...) that current conceptions of rationality tend to reduce personal and interpersonal experience to the objective material realm. Under prevailing conceptions, human action is rational when it pursues valued ends guided by knowledge about the world and effective means-ends relationships. Both theories of knowledge and theories of value in these conceptions are inadequate for a developmental orientation. -/- First, knowledge is defined as justified true belief. Theories of truth are based on the correspondence of beliefs with an external world; theories of justification are based on perceptual certainty. These conceptions objectify experience by making experience an object of natural science and instrumental action separate from and external to the person. Such conceptions reduce experience to the objective material dimension and cannot adequately account for the personal and interpersonal dimensions of human experience and understanding. -/- Second, because value claims are not capable of justification by these standards, they are considered ultimately irrational and treated as subjectively held empirical properties of individuals. The only standard of rationality is efficiency and economy in the selection of means. Ethics is reduced to empirical science. But the removal of practical questions from public discourse divests action of ethical significance. With its strict separation of descriptive and normative domains, empirical-analytic inquiry can neither acknowledge its standard of instrumental efficiency nor reach into the practical arena to guide the selection of values and ends that orient and gude human action. Practical questions that cannot be framed in terms of technical problems cannot be taken seriously. -/- Whereas these conceptions of rationality are generally derived from theories of experienced based on individual consciousness, Habermas looks to language for a more adequate account of the intersubjective nature of experience. This account provides an expanded conception of rationality with theories for justifying beliefs and actions that incorporate the personal and interpersonal dimensions of experience so critical to a developmental perspective. Through an analysis of the universal pragmatic structure of language directed to the resolution of problematic truth claims and moral claims, this study presents a consensus theory of truth (for a more adequate theory of knowledge) and a communicative theory of ethics (based on a more adequate theory of human values). -/- The concept of truth refers to a universal pragmatic convention of the unforced agreement of an ideal community of inquirers. Ethical conduct is guided by norms that reflect a rational general will and that regulate genuine human needs. Problematic truth claims and moral claims are discursively justified by the force of the better argument under the conditions of an anticipated "ideal speech situation" inherent in the very structure of communication. Furthermore, a theory of inquiry is developed in which inquiry processes are represented as historically evolved extensions of developmental process in the three realms of experience. Three interrelated forms of inquiry are derived--empirical-analytic, hermeneutic and critical. I derive each from its respective experiential realm, and indicate the logic of inquiry, object domain, and kind of knowledge gained from each. -/- An exploration of the relationship between inquiry and development provides a foundation for a developmental orientation to education. Finally, the theory is contrasted with prevailing inquiry approaches in education and illustrated with an application to a particular educational problem. (shrink)

Very plausibly, nothing can be a genuine computing system unless it meets an input-sensitivity requirement. Otherwise all sorts of objects, such as rocks or pails of water, can count as performing computations, even such as might suffice for mentality—thus threatening computationalism about the mind with panpsychism. Maudlin in J Philos 86:407–432, ( 1989 ) and Bishop ( 2002a , b ) have argued, however, that such a requirement creates difficulties for computationalism about conscious experience, putting it in conflict with the (...) very intuitive thesis that conscious experience supervenes on physical activity. Klein in Synthese 165:141–153, ( 2008 ) proposes a way for computationalists about experience to avoid panpsychism while still respecting the supervenience of experience on activity. I argue that his attempt to save computational theories of experience from Maudlin’s and Bishop’s critique fails. (shrink)

Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian "physics" or "natural philosophy" of the soul, conceived as an animating power that included vital, sensory, and rational functions. C. Wolff restricted the term " psychology " to sensory, cognitive, and volitional functions and placed the science under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Near the middle of the eighteenth century, Krueger, Godart, and Bonnet proposed approaching the mind with the techniques of the new natural science. At nearly the same time, Scottish thinkers (...) placed psychology within moral philosophy, but distinguished its "physical" laws from properly moral laws. British and French visual theorists developed mathematically precise theories of size and distance perception; they created instruments to test these theories and to measure visual phenomena such as the duration of visual impressions. By the end of the century there was a flourishing discipline of empirical psychology in Germany, with a professorship, textbooks, and journals. The practitioners of empirical psychology at this time typically were dualists who included mental phenomena within nature. Accordingly, psychology as a natural scientific disciplines was not invented in the 18th and 19th centuries, but *remade* from the extant empirical psychology. (shrink)

White progressives in the U.S. are currently experiencing two profound reckonings that typically are assumed to be unrelated. On the one hand, the Dobbs verdict overturned the assumption that the right to choose with respect to abortion is too socially entrenched, juridically settled, or politically sacred to be denied. On the other hand, climatological conditions of possibility for comfortable existence are increasingly under threat in locales in which residents have come to expect to enjoy secure lives and livelihoods. This essay (...) highlights what Indigenous communities across the U.S. already know well. Namely, threats to reproductive freedom and climate crisis are neither new nor separable. Both phenomena have common colonial roots that continue to proliferate. Each is a result of the disruption and destruction of Indigenous kinship assemblages. Indeed, in aiming to remediate their current reckonings, white progressives routinely (if unthinkingly) support forms of settler state violence that perpetuate reproductive and climate injustice in Indigenous communities. We appeal to white progressives, notably including white feminists, to embrace the proposition that their reckonings cannot be properly understood, nor successfully addressed without prioritizing Indigenous futurity. We call for centering forms of Indigenous feminist praxis that facilitate robust Indigenous coalitions of anti-colonial resistance. (shrink)

I respond to Ned Block’s claim that it is ridiculous to suppose that consciousness is a cultural construction based on language and learned in childhood. Block is wrong to dismiss social constructivist theories of consciousness on account of it being ludicrous that conscious experience is anything but a biological feature of our animal heritage, characterized by sensory experience, evolved over millions of years. By defending social constructivism in terms of both Julian Jaynes’ behaviorism and J.J. Gibson’s ecological psychology, I draw (...) a distinction between the experience or what-it-is-like of nonhuman animals engaging with the environment and the secret theater of speechless monologue that is familiar to a linguistically competent human adult. This distinction grounds the argument that consciousness proper should be seen as learned rather than innate and shared with nonhuman animals. Upon establishing this claim, I defend the Jaynesian definition of consciousness as a social–linguistic construct learned in childhood, structured in terms of lexical metaphors and narrative practice. Finally, I employ the Jaynesian distinction between cognition and consciousness to bridge the explanatory gap and deflate the supposed hard problem of consciousness. (shrink)

While the claim that certain functional states are sufficient for conscious experience has received substantial critical attention, the claim that functional states are necessary is rarely addressed. Yet the latter claim is perhaps now more common than the former. I aim to revive and revise a neglected argument against the necessity claim, by Michael Antony. The argument involves manipulating a conscious subject's brain so as to cancel a disposition which is supposedly crucial to the realization of an experience that the (...) subject is having at the time. The key step in the argument is to show that, contrary to what the functional necessity claim implies, the experience can survive such a manipulation. I defend that key step in a new way, by arguing that since the manipulation cannot influence the subject's thoughts, emotions, or behavior, there is no reason to suppose that it alters his conscious experience. (shrink)

In this essay we take the view that too much reality has been afforded to the notion of ‘particles’ and to ‘flow of supercurrent,’ in the superconducting state. Instead we take the original point of view of Josephson that “ It is clear that intuition is of no great help in understanding the supercurrent as a flow of Cooper pairs “ which is more akin to, and in line with, a “telegraphing of amplitudes” approach. With this conception in mind, we (...) examine the results of Jillie et al and Smith et al. of two Josephson junctions connected in series by a superconducting join. We argue that their results can best be understood in terms of the entanglement of current elements via the interfering of amplitudes. We sketch an approach to calculating the current spanning two entangled Josephson junctions, which reduces to the relation for a single junction when the current is set zero in either of the pair, or the entanglement ceases. We speculate that if this interfering of amplitudes was found to persist, after the separation of the junctions in space, there still remaining a connection in their common past, then this would furnish, at least the possibility, of a new means of signalling without wires. Experiments are suggested. (shrink)

This work will argue that Mahāyāna philosophy need not result in endorsement of some cosmic Absolute in the vein of the Advaitin ātman-Brahman. Scholars such as Bhattacharya, Albahari and Murti argue that the Buddha at no point denied the existence of a cosmic ātman, and instead only denied a localised, individual ātman (what amounts to a jīva). The idea behind this, then, is that the Buddha was in effect an Advaitin, analysing experience and advocating liberation in an Advaitin sense: through (...) a rejection of the individual ātman and knowledge (jñāna) of and immersion into the universal ātman-Brahman. I will explore how different religious traditions define and shape the Absolute according to their own religious convictions, illustrating a divergence in conception from the very start, before exploring key differences between the Advaitin conception of the Absolute as put forth by Śaṅkara and as defended by Bhattacharya in The Ātman-Brahman in Ancient Buddhism. I then challenge Bhattacharya’s claims that prajñāpāramitā literature necessarily endorses the ātman-Brahman and that Mahāyāna philosophies reorientate Buddhists towards the truth of the ātman-Brahman. I do this by arguing that there are viable interpretations of Vasubandhu’s Yogācāra and Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka that do not advocate such a belief, that prajñāpāramitā literature can be viewed as a project in episteme rather than ontology, and that we need not find a ground of the same sort as the ātman-Brahman in the Buddhist flux of experience. I conclude by showing that whilst Absolutism is a theme in some schools of Buddhism, it need not be – contra Bhattacharya – the conclusion of two major Mahāyāna philosophies. (shrink)

Psychology considered as a natural science began as Aristotelian "physics" or "natural philosophy" of the soul. C. Wolff placed psychology under metaphysics, coordinate with cosmology. Scottish thinkers placed it within moral philosophy, but distinguished its "physical" laws from properly moral laws (for guiding conduct). Several Germans sought to establish an autonomous empirical psychology as a branch of natural science. British and French visual theorists developed mathematically precise theories of size and distance perception; they created instruments to test these theories and (...) to measure visual phenomena such as the duration of visual impressions. These investigators typically were dualists who included mental phenomena within nature. (shrink)

Does Carnap’s treatment of philosophical questions about existence, such as “Are there numbers?” and “Are there physical objects?”, depend on his analytic–synthetic distinction? If so, in what way? I answer these questions by clarifying, defending, and developing the reading of Carnap’s paper “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” that W. V. Quine proposes, with little justification or explanation, in his paper “On Carnap’s Views on Ontology”. The primary methodological value of studying Quine’s reading of “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” is that it prompts (...) us to look for, and helps us to see the significance of, passages by Carnap that reveal the logical foundations of his views on ontology. Guided in this way by Quine’s reading, I show that (1) in “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” Carnap’s preferred treatment of philosophical questions relies on paraphrasing them so that their answers are immediately obvious elementary logical truths, and are therefore, by his standards, trivially analytic; and (2) in its most general form, Carnap’s treatment of philosophical questions about existence depends on his controversial view that the analytic truths of a language L may include sentences that are not elementary logical truths, but that are nevertheless, by Carnap’s standards, analytic-in-L simply because we have stipulated that they are to be among the “meaning postulates” of L. (shrink)

This chapter poses questions about the existence and character of the Scientific Revolution by deriving its initial categories of analysis and its initial understanding of the intellectual scene from the writings of the seventeenth century, and by following the evolution of these initial categories in succeeding centuries. This project fits the theme of cross cultural transmission and appropriation -- a theme of the present volume -- if one takes the notion of a culture broadly, so that, say, seventeenth and eighteenth (...) or nineteenth century European intellectual cultures are deemed sufficiently distinct that one can speak of the "transmission" of texts and ideas from the one to the other as cross cultural. I maintain that a process of transforming and assimilating seventeenth century achievements manifests itself in two distinct cultures of interpretation, one developed by historians of philosophy, the other by scientists and historians of science. The first, following actor's categories, interprets the revolution in the seventeenth century as a philosophical displacement, partly fomented by a radical change in astronomical theory; the second, retrospectively applying the post nineteenth century sense of the term "science" to seventeenth century events, finds a "scientific" revolution, or the birth of modern science. The chapter proposes interpreting the Scientific Revolution as a revolution in natural philosophy and metaphysics. (shrink)

We describe a simple, flexible exercise that can be implemented in the philosophy of science classroom: students are asked to determine the contents of a closed container without opening it. This exercise has revealed itself as a useful platform from which to examine a wide range of issues in the philosophy of science and may, we suggest, even help us think about improving the public understanding of science.

It seems intuitively obvious that metameric matching of color samples entails a loss of information, for spectrophotometrically diverse materials appear the same. This intuition implicitly relies on a conception of the function of color vision and on a related conception of how color samples should be individuated. It assumes that the function of color vision is to distinguish among spectral energy distributions, and that color samples should be individuated by their physical properties. I challenge these assumptions by articulating a different (...) conception of the function of color vision, according to which color vision serves to partition object surfaces into discrimination classes. (shrink)

Problematic perceptions about race damage our society. These attitudes can seem impossible to overcome, but philosophers Dr Jennifer Mensch, at Western Sydney University in Australia, and Dr Michael Olson, at Marquette University in the US, beg to differ. They are compiling a collection of 18th-century philosophical and scientific texts that helped shape the way people saw race across the Western world, and were used to justify colonisation. They believe that by exposing these historical roots of racism, opportunities to improve (...) societal attitudes to race will become easier to identify. -/- This article was produced by Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEM), and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE). (shrink)

Phylogeography, a relatively new subdicipline of evolutionary biology that attempts to unify the fields of phylogenetics and population biology in an explicit geographical context, has hosted in recent years a highly polarized debate related to the purported benefits and limitations that qualitative versus quantitative methods might contribute or impose on inferential processes in evolutionary biology. Here we present a friendly, non-technical introduction to the conflicting methods underlying the controversy, and exemplify it with a balanced selection of quotes from the primary (...) biological literature, to invite the philosophy of biology community to pay attention to the elements that have played a primary role in its presumed resolution. We also present the basic features of our own metascientific take on the debate, and point out—as a preliminary step in preparation for upcoming, more detailed treatments—the importance that appeals to authority in fields external to phylogeography per se have played in the current status of this highly visible evolutionary biology dispute. (shrink)

In Just Fodder, Milburn argues for a relational account of our duties to animals. Following Clare Palmer, he argues that, though all animals have negative rights that we have a duty not to violate, we only gain positive obligations towards animals in the contexts of our relationships with them, which can be personal or political. He argues that human beings have collective positive duties towards domesticated animals, in virtue of the kind of relationship between us established by domestication. However, when (...) it comes to wild animals, he argues that we have no such morally relevant relationships, and so we have only negative duties towards them. I argue that throughout history and even prehistory human beings have morally entangled themselves with wild animals sufficiently that we may in fact have collective positive duties towards many, if not all, wild animals. (shrink)

As against the view represented here by Peter Hacker and John Canfield, I urge that the philosophies of Quine and Wittgenstein can be reconciled. Both replace the orthodox view of language as resting on reference: Quine with the notion of linguistic disposition, Wittgenstein with the notions of grammar and forms of life. I argue that Wittgenstein's insistence, in the rule-following discussion, that at bottom these are matters of practice, of ‘what we do’, is not only compatible in a rough sort (...) of way with Quine's outlook, but is very close to Quine's naturalistic view of language. And I argue that the likely objections to this can on the one hand be explained away as Quine's having been interested in a very narrow slice of language in comparison with Wittgenstein, and on the other by a failure to take into account later developments in Quine’s views. (shrink)

With his 1998 book, In Nature’s Interests? Gary Varner proved to be one of our most original and trenchant of environmental ethicists. Here, in the first of a promised two volume set, he makes his mark on another field, animal ethics, leaving an even deeper imprint. Thoroughly grounded in the relevant philosophical and scientific literatures, Varner is as precise in analysis as he is wide-ranging in scope. His writing is clear and rigorous, and he explains philosophical nuances with extraordinary (...) economy of expression. Never one to add an unnecessary clause to a sentence, Varner nonetheless constructs a formidable edifice while always dealing fairly with the authors he criticizes. His explication of the properties and moral status of what he calls near-persons is a crucial addition to the discussion of personhood initiated by Parfit in Reasons and Persons and subsequently applied to animals by McMahan in The Ethics of Killing. The comparison to McMahan is intentional for, to my mind, Varner vies with him as the most important animal ethicist since Singer and Regan. (shrink)

This essay is my critical review of Al Gini and Alexei Marcoux’s fine text, The Ethics of Business. Unlike most business ethics texts, Gini/Marcoux recognize that most businesses are small, and that business is not inherently immoral and always in need of reform. And they put their focus on using ethical theory to find action-guiding principles to help guide business behavior. Moreover, they adopt the Schumpeterian view that business is an entrepreneurial activity—one that not merely executes transactions, but seeks them (...) out. I critically probe a number of issues with their book such as their reliance upon virtue ethics as their main ethical theory, and their view that trust plays an overwhelming role in business. (shrink)

This essay is my analysis of Eamonn Butler’s fine book, Public Choice: a Primer. I suggest that Butler’s book is especially useful for philosophers, most of whom are to this day unfamiliar with public choice theory. This body of economics studies the role that universal self-interest plays in politics. This is an unpleasant truth for many philosophers, who have the Hegelian view of government as the realm of disinterested charity. Butler reviews the history of public choice economics, discusses the various (...) schools of the theory, and the major areas of application. (shrink)

This essay is my extended review of Eamonn Butler’s outstanding primer, Classical Liberalism. In his book, Butler notes that the phrase “classical liberal” encompasses a wide spectrum of views, from conservatism to libertarianism. Butler lays out 10 principles that characterize classical liberalism, sketches its history, and discusses the value classical liberals place on freedom and toleration. He also examines the classical liberal views of politics, government, and society, and some useful compendia for the reader.

Christopher Johnson has put forward in this journal the view that ad hominem reasoning may be more generally reasonable than is allowed by writers such as myself, basing his view on virtue epistemology. I review his account, as well as the standard account, of ad hominem reasoning, and show how the standard account would handle the cases he sketches in defense of his own view. I then give four criticisms of his view generally: the problems of virtue conflict, vagueness, conflation (...) of speech acts, and self-defeating counsel. I then discuss four reasons why the standard account is superior: it better fits legal reality, the account of other fallacies, psychological science, and political reality. (shrink)