Ontologies, as the term is used in informatics, are structured vocabularies comprised of human- and computer-interpretable terms and relations that represent entities and relationships. Within informatics fields, ontologies play an important role in knowledge and data standardization, representation, integra- tion, sharing and analysis. They have also become a foundation of artificial intelligence (AI) research. In what follows, we outline the Coronavirus Infectious Disease Ontology (CIDO), which covers multiple areas in the domain of coronavirus diseases, including etiology, transmission, epidemiology, pathogenesis, diagnosis, (...) prevention, and treatment. We emphasize CIDO development relevant to COVID-19. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty each attempted to articulate a non-mechanistic concept of the body by stressing the importance of skill: skillful behavior constituting cognition in Ryle’s work, and the skill body constituting perception in Merleau-Ponty’s work. In this chapter, I turn to their cautions and insights. By drawing out the relation between these two seemingly unrelated theorists, I hope to show that together Ryle and Merleau-Ponty have much to offer philosophy today.

Collective action is interpreted as a matter of people doing something together, and it is assumed that this involves their having a collective intention to do that thing together. The account of collective intention for which the author has argued elsewhere is presented. In terms that are explained, the parties are jointly committed to intend as a body that such-and-such. Collective action problems in the sense of rational choice theory—problems such as the various forms of coordination problem and the prisoner’s (...) dilemma—are then considered. An explanation is given of how, when such a problem is interpreted in terms of the parties’ inclinations, a suitable collective intention resolves the problem for agents who are rational in a broad sense other than the technical sense of game theory. Key Words: rationality • collective action • collective intention • joint commitment. (shrink)

I compare Bratman’s theory with Gilbert’s. I draw attention to their similarities, query Bratman’s claim that his theory is the more parsimonious, and point to one theoretical advantage of Gilbert’s theory.

If novels can be arguments, that fact should shape logic or argumentation studies as well as literary studies. Two senses the term ‘narrative argument’ might have are (a) a story that offers an argument, or (b) a distinctive argument form. I consider whether there is a principled way of extracting a novel’s argument in sense (a). Regarding the possibility of (b), Hunt’s view is evaluated that many fables and much fabulist literature inherently, and as wholes, have an analogical argument structure. (...) I argue that a better account is that some novels inherently exhibit a transcendental argument structure. (shrink)

The ideas contained in this paper were first formulated as part of a chapter in my doctoral dissertation, which was completed in 1997. Some years later I added to my initial thoughts, scribbled some notes, and presented them at the 12th Annual Philosophy in Schools Conference, held in Brisbane in 2002. This presentation surfaced as a paper in Critical & Creative Thinking: The Australasian Journal of Philosophy in Schools (Burgh 2003a). Soon thereafter I revised the paper (Burgh 2003b) and it (...) appeared in abridged form in the Asia-Pacific Philosophy Education Network for Democracy (APPEND) Philosophy Series, Volume 4: Philosophy, Democracy and Education, edited by Philip Cam. It was once again revised, but also expanded, and appeared in Chapter 5 of Ethics and the community of inquiry: Education for deliberative democracy, a collaborative authorship with Terri Field and Mark Freakley (2006). Some sections have been further revised and appear in other publications (Burgh 2009, 2010; Burgh & Yorshansky 2011). These revisions would suggest that my thoughts on these matters are constantly changing. To some degree this is true, but each time the changes have built on previous ideas rather than new ideas replacing old ones. I welcomed the invitation to revise the original paper, which includes sections not included in later versions. However, with almost 11 years passing since the original publication, I found myself deleting sections and replacing others. Subsequently, this paper is a culmination of all the revisions and incorporates ideas from each. (shrink)

The common view is that no novel IS an argument, though it might be reconstructed as one. This is curious, for we almost always feel the need to reconstruct arguments even when they are uncontroversially given as arguments, as in a philosophical text. We make the points as explicit, orderly, and (often) brief as possible, which is what we do in reconstructing a novel’s argument. The reverse is also true. Given a text that is uncontroversially an explicit, orderly, and brief (...) argument, in order to enhance plausibility, our first instinct is to flesh it out with illustrations and relationships to everyday life. If this process is fictive (e.g., with “thought experiments”) and orderly, it is story-telling. This paper investigates whether there is a principled way of determining a novel’s argument, which should contribute as much to understanding arguments as to understanding novels. (shrink)

This paper’s main thesis is that in virtue of being believable, a believable novel makes an indirect transcendental argument telling us something about the real world of human psychology, action, and society. Three related objections are addressed. First, the Stroud-type objection would be that from believability, the only conclusion that could be licensed concerns how we must think or conceive of the real world. Second, Currie holds that such notions are probably false: the empirical evidence “is all against this idea…that (...) readers’ emotional responses track the real causal relations between things.” Third, responding with a full range of emotions to a novel surely requires that it be believable. Yet since we know the novel is fiction, we do not believe it. So in what does its believability consist? (shrink)

Although in some contexts the notions of an ordinary argument’s presumption, assumption, and presupposition appear to merge into the one concept of an implicit premise, there are important differences between these three notions. It is argued that assumption and presupposition, but not presumption, are basic logical notions. A presupposition of an argument is best understood as pertaining to a propositional element (a premise or the conclusion) e of the argument, such that the presupposition is a necessary condition for the truth (...) of e or for a term in e to have a referent. In contrast, an assumption of an argument pertains to the argument as a whole in that it is integral to the reasoning or inferential structure of the argument. A logical assumption of an argument is essentially a proposition that must be true in order for the argument aside from that proposition to be fully cogent. Nothing that is both comparable and distinguishing can be said about presumptions of arguments. Rather, presumptions of arguments are distinctively conventional; they are introduced through conventional rules (e.g., those that concern how to treat promises). So not all assumptions and not all presuppositions of arguments are presumptions of those arguments, although all presumptions of arguments are either assumptions or presuppositions of those arguments. This account avoids making the (monological) notion of presumption vacuous and dissolving the distinction between assumption and presumption, which is a vulnerability of alternative views such as Hansen’s and Bermejo-Luque’s, as is shown. (shrink)

What can make storytelling “evil” in the sense that the storytelling leads to accepting a view for no good reason, thus allowing ill-reasoned action? I mean the storytelling can be argumentatively evil, not trivially that (e.g.) the overt speeches of characters can include bad arguments. The storytelling can be argumentatively evil in that it purveys false premises, or purveys reasoning that is formally or informally fallacious. My main thesis is that as a rule, the shorter the fictional narrative, the greater (...) the potential for argumentative evil. Here, the notion of length is to be understood such that it is generally a proxy for more abstract features such as how complex and nuanced the piece is. In other argumentative contexts, length generally appears to make no comparable difference. This feature would put fictional narrative arguments in a special class beyond what is determined by obvious features, such as the definitional fact that they in some way(s) collapse two of the four traditional types of discourse: exposition, description, narration, and argument. The nonobvious features that distinguish this class have been a source of puzzlement and inquiry. (shrink)

In the late 1960s Matthew Lipman and his colleagues at IAPC developed an educational philosophy he called Philosophy for Children. At the heart of Philosophy for Children is the community of Inquiry, with its emphasis on classroom dialogue, in the form of collaborative philosophical inquiry. In this paper we explore the development of educational practice that has grown out of Philosophy for Children in the context of Australia. -/- Australia adapted Lipman’s ideas on the educational value of practicing philosophy with (...) children in order to advance children’s social and intellectual capacities and dispositions. This has subsequently led to its development by both scholars and practitioners in directions that may or may not have been what Lipman had initially intended and to discussions on the nature and educational value of varied approaches that have been implemented in the classroom. To understand fully the effects of these changes requires an understanding of the towering influences that Peirce and especially Dewey were to Lipman. Whilst Lipman developed his own educational philosophy, he freely acknowledged that philosophy for children owes a debt to Peirce for the concept of the community of inquiry and to Dewey for his guidelines on education. -/- We will explore various ways in which the practice of philosophy for children has been implemented and analyse its expansion. This will achieve a better understanding of the possible future directions for classroom practice and research. (shrink)

“Ethical criticism” is an approach to literary studies that holds that reading certain carefully selected novels can make us ethically better people, e.g., by stimulating our sympathetic imagination (Nussbaum). I try to show that this nonargumentative approach cheapens the persuasive force of novels and that its inherent bias and censorship undercuts what is perhaps the principal value and defense of the novel—that reading novels can be critical to one’s learning how to think.

In this paper we will explore how Albert Camus has much to offer philosophers of education. Although a number of educationalists have attempted to explicate the educational implications of Camus’ literary works (Denton, 1964; Oliver, 1965; Götz, 1987; Curzon-Hobson, 2003; Marshall, 2007, 2008; Weddington, 2007; Roberts, 2008, 2013; Gibbons, 2013; Heraud, 2013; Roberts, Gibbons & Heraud, 2013) these analyses have not attempted to extrapolate pedagogical guidelines to develop an educational framework for children’s philosophical practice in the way Matthew Lipman did (...) from John Dewey’s philosophy of education, which informed his philosophy for children curriculum and pedagogy. To this end we offer comparisons and contrasts between Camus and the pragmatist educational discourse centred on communities of philosophical inquiry (or, more broadly, collaborative philosophical inquiry). In particular we focus on the phenomenology of inquiry, namely, that “inquiry must begin with a problem, question, or doubt and must aim at a solution or resolution, both of which are genuinely felt—something in which the inquirer actually has a stake” (Gregory & Granger, 2012: 13). We conclude that what Camus calls lucidity has implications for the notion of reconstruction, prominent in Dewey’s thoughts on education, and central to Lipman’s focus on philosophy functioning educationally. (shrink)

An analysis of the counter-intuitive properties of infinity as understood differently in mathematics, classical physics and quantum physics allows the consideration of various paradoxes under a new light (e.g. Zeno’s dichotomy, Torricelli’s trumpet, and the weirdness of quantum physics). It provides strong support for the reality of abstractness and mathematical Platonism, and a plausible reason why there is something rather than nothing in the concrete universe. The conclusions are far reaching for science and philosophy.

The nontechnical ability to identify or match argumentative structure seems to be an important reasoning skill. Instruments that have questions designed to measure this skill include major standardized tests for graduate school admission, for example, the United States-Canadian Law School Admission Test (LSAT), the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), and the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT). Writers and reviewers of such tests need an appropriate foundation for developing such questions--they need a proper representation of phenomenological argumentative structure--for legitimacy, and because these (...) tests affect people's lives. This paper attempts to construct an adequate and appropriate representation of such structure, that is, the logical structure that an argument is perceived to have by mature reasoners, albeit ones who are untrained in logic. (shrink)

The initial one-third of the paper is devoted to exposing the first chapter (“Sense-Certainty”) of Hegel’s PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT as a thesis about reference, viz., that singular demonstrative reference is impossible. In the remainder I basically argue that such a view commits one to radically undermining our conceptions of space, time, and substance (concrete individuality), and rests on the central mistake of construing <this> on the model of a predicable (or property).

Gilbert Ryle famously wrote that practical knowledge (knowing how) is distinct from propositional knowledge (knowing that). This claim continues to have broad philosophical appeal, and yet there are many unsettled questions surrounding Ryle’s basic proposal. In this article, I return to his original work in order to perform some intellectual archeology. I offer an interpretation of Ryle’s concept of action that I call ‘adverbialism’. Actions are constituted by bodily behaviours performed in a certain mode, style or manner. I present (...) various challenges to adverbialism – scenarios in which it seems we publicly behave one way, but privately feel another. And I offer a response – Ryle’s stated practice of re-describing those situations in ways that pose no threat to his adverbialism. I also present an interpretation of practical knowledge in Ryle’s work. Knowing how is a special kind of action, undertaken only when we progressively self-modify our behaviours in the presence of new challenges or opportunities. (shrink)

I propose that there are two kind's of qualia realism, and that Harman's observations about the transparency of experience pose a threat to only one of these.

Expressing a widely-held view, David Hitchcock claims that "an enthymematic argument ... assumes at least the truth of the argument's associated conditional ... whose antecedent is the conjunction of the argument's explicit premises and whose consequent is the argument's conclusion." But even definitionally, this view is problematic, since an argument's being "enthymematic" or incomplete with respect to its explicit premises means that the conclusion is not implied by these premises alone. The paper attempts to specify the ways in which the (...) view is incorrect, as well as seemingly correct (e.g., the case of a Modus Ponens wherein the major premise is implicit). -/- . (shrink)

The paper interprets Kant’s neglected argument at FOUNDATIONS 401 as consisting of these two premises and conclusion: (1) It follows from consequentialism that in a natural paradise people would not be obligated to be morally good. (2) But this is absurd; one ought to be morally good no matter what. Therefore, consequentialism is false. It is shown that this argument is a powerful one, mainly by showing that independent grounds support (2) and that (1) may survive a number of strong (...) possible objections. One that it does not appear to survive, though, is that the paradise envisioned is not logically possible. (shrink)

Plato is known to have given only one public lecture, called "On the Good." We have one highly reliable quotation from Plato himself, stating his doctrine that "the Good is one." The lecture was a set of ideas that existed as an historical event but is now lost--and it dealt with ideas of supreme importance, in brief form, by the greatest of philosophers. Any reading of the lecture is speculative. My approach is philosophical rather than historiographic. The liminal existence of (...) the lecture is taken as an exemplar of the retrieval of what is lost in historical time. Through the lecture-event I examine several major schools of Platonic interpretation--the esotercists of the 1950's, and after, and Hans-Georg Gadamer and the "aporetic" reading--and reject most of it. My method is to establish in tandem an explanation of the lecture doctrine, especially by a reading of issue of normative ethics in the Philebus, and an account of how we are to understand Plato's way of teaching. Plato affirms the existence of the Good itself and was concerned with explaining its relation to persons as moral agents, which includes teaching, amidst the determinants of moral life and in transmission across time. The tension between universal good and plural goods suggests a fruitful relationship between normative ethics and historical theory. I apply this especially to the viability of intellectual history, to material culture studies, and to our understanding of the way in which history "lives." For this I suggest "a moral turn" in historiography in support of cultural theory. (shrink)

I argue against the skeptical epistemological view exemplified by the Groarkes that “all theories of informal argument must face the regress problem.” It is true that in our theoretical representations of reasoning, infinite regresses of self-justification regularly and inadvertently arise with respect to each of the RSA criteria for argument cogency (the premises are to be relevant, sufficient, and acceptable). But they arise needlessly, by confusing an RSA criterion with argument content, usually premise material.

This paper aims to shed light on an underexplored aspect of Gilbert Ryle’s interest in the notion of “knowing-how”. It is argued that in addition to his motive of discounting a certain theory of mind, his interest in the notion also stemmed (and perhaps stemmed more deeply) from two ethical interests: one concerning his own life as a philosopher and whether the philosopher has any meaningful task, and one concerning the ancient issue of whether virtue is a kind of (...) knowledge. It is argued that Ryle saw know-how as crucial in both respects and, also, that he continued to be interested in these ethical issues throughout his career. (shrink)

A finished sketch for a light-and-shadow projection device by the Paduan mechanical artisan Johannes de Fontana (c.1395–1455), in his manuscript book of drawings now known as Liber Bellicorum Instrumentorum, depicts a machine for communicating ideas or information through spectacle. The manuscript is fairly well known, and this sketch is just one of many interesting images worthy of study in its 70 leaves. A couple dozen manuscripts of the mechanical arts from this period survive, the best-studied of which fall into the (...) “Sienese school” and the “German school.” Fontana falls outside these, for he had far less influence than the Sienese. His work also is too early, it seems, to count in narratives directed toward the flowering of technological illustration in the sixteenth century. Of his images of subjects other than hydraulic and military machines only one deep study has been made, concerning two of the automata, although the present sketch has lately attracted a glance or two. Historians of technology pay scant attention to the first half of the fifteenth century, five decades that seem merely to repeat medieval knowledge and have the disadvantage to their prestige of falling “before Leonardo.” Whether one views Fontana as an engineer or as a science fiction illustrator, a great deal in the manuscript has not been given its due. The brief normative account in the literature so far on Fontana focuses on politics and warfare. My account in the case of his castellus image in this paper emphasizes issues of imagery, communication, subjectivity, moral feeling, spiritual life, and personhood. This account runs along two lines. For the first, I will suggest some untried ideas for approaching this image. In part this is in pursuit of what Jonathan Sawday calls the imaginative history of machines and mechanisms, though more largely it concerns contributing to a broad-range history of communication and persuasion. If we look at the image from our standpoint in aworld accustomed to the reproduction of images, we readily see in it an early step toward our present control of the display and diffusion of images. Fontana’s castle of shadows(castellus umbrarum), based on a worldwide transfer of technical knowledge about imagery in antiquity (and even in pre-history), presents some of the continuing questions driving thereproduction of imagery and the dispersal of information. As a practical matter, a sense ofproximity to Fontana and his time, as opposed to a sense of untranslatable distance, helps to broaden the historiography. My second line of thought is to oppose my account of Fontana’s’s castellus to an interpretation, and to the thinking behind it, that has started to appear on the borders of disciplinary history. This other interpretation reflects an increasingly influential approach to the history of technology and cultural theory that employs a growing and powerful line of philosophical thought. In 2003 Philippe Codognet, a philosopher of technology, published an essay in which he described Fontana’s castle of shadows as a specimen of the pre-historyof virtual reality devices. His reference of the castle of shadows is a bit casual, perhaps accidental in feeling; but it has begun to stimulate interest in Fontana’s striking idea and hasgiven it a bit of renown. Codognet’s view (along with his reproduction of the image) has been picked up by thinkers who are concerned with post-humanistic ideas derived from philosophical work in which the distinction between human persons and objects is deflated in such a way that both persons and objects are correctly characterized by attributes commonly divided into subjective and objective. What’s more, they are characterized by attributes that, under this view, are incorrectly distinguished from one another as the human, the organic, and the inorganic. The ontology supporting this approach denies the privileged epistemological relationship of humans to the world. This school of thought is object-oriented ontology, also known in a more radical form as speculative realism. Its potential influence on historiography is great, and part of it is and will be valuable. Its current actual influence is centered on medieval cultural studies and on the history of technology. (shrink)

In 1713 the scientific instrument-maker Jakob Leupold published designs for three machines were the first attempt to design machinery with internal moving parts that replaced human agency in creating original images. This paper first analyzes his text and engravings in order to explain how he proposed to do this, given contemporary materials and command of physical forces. Next, it characterizes the devices as a transition from concepts of incision to concepts of mirroring, taken as models of the history of mechanical (...) reproduction. And finally, Leupold’s replacement of the sighting grid with differential gears points to a set of problems appearing in contemporary philosophy represented in Rococo artistic production of this period as well. Taking the proposed devices in context, they help to theorize the complex notions of creative activity in Rococo visual culture. Taken as an episode in the history of communications, they instance the development of conceptions of personhood and of physical forces at stake in the invention of automated media. (shrink)

World news can be discouraging these days. In order to counteract the effects of fake news and corruption, scientists have a duty to present the truth and propose ethical solutions acceptable to the world at large. -/- By starting from scratch, we can lay down the scientific principles underlying our very existence, and reach reasonable conclusions on all major topics including quantum physics, infinity, timelessness, free will, mathematical Platonism, happiness, ethics and religion, all the way to creation and a special (...) type of multiverse. -/- This article amounts to a summary of my personal Theory of Everything. -/- DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.36046.31049. (shrink)

The demonstration of a loophole-free violation of Bell's inequality by Hensen et al. (2015) leads to the inescapable conclusion that timelessness and abstractness exist alongside space-time. This finding is in full agreement with the triple-aspect monism of reality, with mathematical Platonism, free will and the eventual emergence of a scientific morality.

According to Val Plumwood (1995), liberal-democracy is an authoritarian political system that protects privilege but fails to protect nature. A major obstacle, she says, is radical inequality, which has become increasingly far-reaching under liberal-democracy; an indicator of ‘the capacity of its privileged groups to distribute social goods upwards and to create rigidities which hinder the democratic correctiveness of social institutions’ (p. 134). This cautionary tale has repercussions for education, especially civics and citizenship education. To address this, we explore the potential (...) of what Gerard Delanty calls ‘cultural citizenship’ as an alternative to the disciplinary citizenship that permeates Western liberal discourse. Cultural citizenship emphasises citizenship as communication and continual learning processes, rejecting the idea of citizenship as a fixed set of cultural ideals, norms or values defined and enforced by liberal society’s legal, political and cultural institutions, including education and ‘citizenship training’. However, we contend that a critical first step, essential to democratic correctiveness, is to clear away obstacles created by the privileging of a dominant epistemic position. We conclude that Plumwood’s philosophy alongside John Dewey’s work on democracy and education provide a theoretical framework for effective democratic inquiry aimed towards interconnective, deliberative practice and corrective methodology for epistemic accountability. (shrink)

The methods of intellectual history have not yet been applied to studying the invention of technology for printing texts and images ca. 1375–ca. 1450. One of the several conceptual developments in this period refl ecting the possibility of mechanical replication is a view of the relationship of eternity to durational time based on Gregory of Nyssa’s philosophy of time and William of Ockham’s. Th e article considers how changes in these ideas helped enable the conceptual possibilities of the dissemination of (...) ideas. It describes a direct connection of human perceptual knowledge to divine knowledge that enhanced the authority of printed production to transfer and reproduce the true and the good. (shrink)

At its founding and during its first three decades, the Carthusian order developed a distinctive and forceful concept of communication among the members and between the members and the extramural world.2 Saint Bruno’s life, contemporary twelfth-century exegesis, and the physical situation of La Grande Chartreuse established the necessary context in which this concept evolved. A review of historical background, the relevant documentary texts, and early development demonstrate the shaping of two steps in this concept. Close reading of the principal testimonies (...) of Carthusians Bruno, Guigo I, Guigo II, and some other witnesses, as well as of some passages in Saint Augustine, argues that Carthusian scribal work was more preliminary practice for spiritual development than it was the sacralization of codices and texts. The two-step structure, composed of contrary movements of presentation and effacement, guarded what the Carthusians regarded as spiritual activity within a changing historical environment and became a fundamental part of Latin Christian mysticism in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (shrink)

The Rococo period in the arts, flourishing mainly from about 1710 to about 1750, was stylistically unified, but nevertheless its tremendous productivity and appeal throughout Occidental culture has proven difficult to explain. Having no contemporary theoretical literature, the Rococo is commonly taken to have been a final and degenerate form of the Baroque era or an extravagance arising from the supposed careless frivolity of the elites, including the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Neither approach adequately accounts for Rococo style. Naming the (...) Rococo raises profound issues for understanding the relations between conception and production in historical terms. Against the many difficulties that the term has involved in accounting for an immense but elusive cultural movement, this thesis argues that some of the chief philosophical conceptions of the period clarify the particular character and significance of Rococo production. Rococo production is here studied chiefly in decor, architecture, and the plastic arts. This thesis also makes an extended general argument for the value of intellectual history. Rococo style is a group of visual effects of which the central character is atectonicity. This is established by a synthesizing overview of Rococo ornamental motifs. Principal theorists of post-Cartesian thought have failed to see how these distinguish Rococo style from both Baroque and Enlightenment culture. The analysis addresses the historical narratives of Benjamin, Adorno, Foucault, Deleuze, and others about Baroque and Enlightenment culture. The core historical claim of this thesis is that Rococo atectonic effects are visual forms of the anti-materialist, idealist ontology of George Berkeley and of the metaphysics and ontology in the early work of Giambattista Vico. Close readings of important passages from works of both philosophers published in 1710 develop the relationship between atectonics and idealist ontology. Both men rejected the Baroque hierarchical cosmology in favor of finitude as the key to human understanding. The readings center on the issue of causality, including Berkeley’s views of the perfect contingency of the world and on Vico’s theories of truth and ingenium. A reading of Diderot’s critique of the Rococo, which led the reaction to it, shows that he recognized the power of idealist ontology in the Rococo cultural production. The larger force in the rejection of Rococo is the emergence of the sublime as a morally fearful feature of physical nature. Montesquieu’s aesthetic work also shows the transition to a more rigidly determined view of existence, which was expressed but constrained in the little-recognized lattice motif in Rococo arts. The result of these readings is the influence during and after the Rococo period of the concept of continuous creation, in which the memory and imagination of the human subject relays God-given powers of creation into the production of culture. Continuous creation also suggested a human capability to animate material nature. Rococo style displays this as pre-cinematic effects that represent the non-material, non-causal deep structure of reality. (shrink)

Suppositional reasoning can seem spooky. Suppositional reasoners allegedly (e.g.) “extract knowledge from the sheer workings of their own minds” (Rosa), even where the knowledge is synthetic a posteriori. Can literary fiction pull such a rabbit out of its hat? Where P is a work’s fictional ‘premise’, some hold that some works reason declaratively (supposing P, Q), imperatively (supposing P, do Q), or interrogatively (supposing P, Q?), and that this can be a source of knowledge if the reasoning is good. True, (...) I will argue, although only within the context of judicious critical interpretation. Further evident constraints include that the form of the suppositional reasoning needs to be declarative or imperative, and that the fictional ‘premise’ of the work needs to be a metaphysical counterfactual possibility, not merely a temporal counterfactual and not merely an epistemic possibility or probabilistic supposition. (shrink)

This article reviews John Wood’s Truth in Fiction: Rethinking its Logic.

This paper will examine the notion of information in the early cybernetics and in Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy. First, we will be outlining the notion of information of early (or first-order) cyberneticians. Secondly, we will summarize Simondon’s concept of information. Finally, the last part of the paper will be dealing shortly with the present understanding of information which has expanded since the beginning of the 20th century. -/- Presented at Doctoral Congress in Philosophy 22.–24.10.2018, University of Tampere, Finland.

Recently, Margaret Gilbert has argued that it appears that the wisdom of a society impinges, greatly, on its freedom. In this article, I show that Gilbert’s “negative argument” fails to be convincing. On the other hand, there are important lessons, particularly for democratic theory, that can be by looking carefully, and critically, at her argument. This article will proceed as follows. First, I present Gilbert’s argument. Next, I criticize her understanding of freedom, and then, using arguments from (...) Christopher McMahon, criticize her understanding of a wise society. Finally, I discuss how what has been said can inform how one should think about democratic theory. (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)

The mechanistic concept of the body, as inherited from René Descartes, has generated considerable trouble in philosophy—including, at least in part, the mind-body problem itself. Still, the corps mécanique remains perhaps the most prevalent though least examined assumption in recent philosophy of mind. I discuss two notable exceptions. Gilbert Ryle and Maurice Merleau-Ponty rejected this assumption for surprisingly similar reasons. Writing at about the same time, though in different languages and in very different circles, they each attempted to articulate (...) a non-mechanistic concept of the body by stressing the importance of skill: skillful behavior constituting cognition in Ryle’s case, and the skill body constituting perception in Merleau-Ponty’s case. In this article, I turn to their cautions and insights. By drawing out the relation between these two seemingly unrelated theorists, I hope to show that together Ryle and Merleau-Ponty have much to offer philosophy today. (shrink)

The Concept of Mind is the best known and the most important work of Gilbert Ryle. Ryle is thought to have accomplished two major tasks. First, he was seen to have put the final nail in the coffin of Carteisan dualism. Ryle rejects Descartes’ dualistic theory of the relation between mind and body. This doctrine of separation between mind and body is referred by Ryle as “the dogma of the ghost in the machine.” Second, he himself anticipated and suggested (...) dualism’s replacement, the doctrine known as philosophical (sometimes analytical) behaviourism. This is an attempt of this paper is to draw outlines of his criticism of Dualism his dispositional theory of mind and how it is relevant in today’s philosophy of mind. (shrink)

How should we understand knowledge-how – knowledge how to do something? And how is it related to knowledge-that – knowledge that something is the case? In this paper, I will discuss a very important and influential aspect of this question, namely the claim – dubbed ‘Intellectualism’ by Gilbert Ryle – that knowledge-how can be reduced to knowledge-that. Recently, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson have tried to establish Intellectualism with the aid of linguistic considerations. This project – Linguistic Intellectualism – (...) will be criticized on three levels. First, I will reconstruct and object to Stanley and Williamson’s positive argument in favour of Intellectualism. Second, I will assess their view of the relationship between knowledge-how and practical ability and argue that their stance is not well-motivated. Third, I will discuss their criticism of Ryle’s objection against Intellectualism. After distinguishing between different versions of Ryle’s argument, I will show that its strongest version is both immune to the objection by Stanley and Williamson and a decisive argument against their own theory. Given that Intellectualism fails for these three reasons, I finally draw on a broader reading of Ryle in order to develop the beginnings of a positive account of knowledge-how and its relationship to knowledge-that. (shrink)

The development of predictive brain implant (PBI) technology that is able to forecast specific neuronal events and advise and/or automatically administer appropriate therapy for diseases of the brain raises a number of ethical issues. Provided that this technology satisfies basic safety and functionality conditions, one of the most pressing questions to address is its relation to the autonomy of patients. As Frederic Gilbert in his article asks, if autonomy implies a certain idea of freedom, or self-government, how can an (...) individual be considered to decide freely if the implanted device stands at the inception of the causal chain producing his decisions? He claims that PBIs threaten persons’ autonomy by diminishing their post-operative experience of self-control. In this commentary, I wish to discuss this claim. Contrary to Gilbert, I will suggest that PBIs do not pose a significant threat to patient’s autonomy, as self-control, but rather to his/her sense of authenticity. My claim is that the language of authenticity, already introduced in the recent bioethical literature, may offer a better way to voice some of the concerns with PBIs that Gilbert recognized. (shrink)

Recent philosophical work on the relation between reasoning and bodily action is dominated by two views. It is orthodox to have it that bodily actions can be at most causally involved in reasoning. Others have it that reasoning can constitutively involve bodily actions, where this is understood as a matter of non‐mental bodily events featuring as constituents of practical reasoning. Reflection on cases of reasoning out‐loud suggests a neglected alternative on which both practical and theoretical reasoning can have bodily actions (...) as constituents, where such bodily actions themselves amount to contentful mental events. Furthermore, the natural lines of resistance to this view trade on type‐token errors, or on a questionable common‐factor assumption. (shrink)

One of the most oft-cited parts of Francis Hutcheson’s Illustrations upon the Moral Sense (1728) is his discussion of “exciting reasons.” In this paper I address the question: What is the function of that discussion? In particular, what is its relation to Hutcheson’s attempt to show that the rationalists’ normative thesis ultimately implies, contrary to their moral epistemology, that moral ideas spring from a sense? Despite first appearances, Hutcheson’s discussion of exciting reasons is not part of that attempt. Mainly, it (...) is part of Hutcheson’s comeback to Gilbert Burnet’s objections to Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725). (shrink)

Existing accounts of shared intention do not claim that a single token of intention can be jointly framed and executed by multiple agents; rather, they claim that multiple agents can frame distinct, individual intentions in such a way as to qualify as jointly intending something. In this respect, the existing accounts do not show that intentions can be shared in any literal sense. This article argues that, in failing to show how intentions can be literally shared, these accounts fail to (...) resolve what seems problematic in the notion of shared intention. It then offers an account in which the problem of shared intention is resolved, because intention can indeed be literally shared. This account is derived from Margaret Gilbert's notion of a "pool of wills," to which it applies Searle's definition of intention. (shrink)

Bimal Krishna Matilal (1935-1991) was a Harvard-educated Indian philosopher best known for his contributions to logic, but who also wrote on wide variety of topics, including metaethics. Unfortunately, the latter contributions have been overlooked. Engaging with Anglo-American figures such as Gilbert Harman and Bernard Williams, Matilal defends a view he dubs ‘pluralism.’ In defending this view he draws on a wide range of classical Indian sources: the Bhagavad-Gītā, Buddhist thinkers like Nāgārjuna, and classical Jaina concepts. This pluralist position is (...) somewhere between relativism and absolutist realism. Unlike the relativist, he argues that there is a genuinely universal morality; unlike the absolutist, he argues that there are multiple, but often conflicting and incommensurable, moral frameworks and ideals. This paper will explain his objections to relativism, as well as flesh out his suggestive remarks about his own pluralistic account. (shrink)

The constituents of social entities (and of social continuants in particular) determine whether or not a social thing comes to be, persists and perishes. John Searle hints at two very different accounts for the persistence of social entities, a mere past related account and an acceptance theoretic account, whereas Margaret Gilbert's account is based on deontic entities like obligations or joint commitments. I demonstrate that Gilbert's account can also accommodate Searle's examples. While oblivion, protests or violence can be (...) historical causes of the destruction of social entities, they cannot be considered to be the ultimate causes of the perishing from Gilbert's point of view. Social entities rather perish because of the treatises or divorces that dissolve their deontic constituents. (shrink)

William Gilbert’s work, De magnete (1600), often is referred to as the first monographic study on magnetism in the early-modern period. Recently, however, it has been argued that the Jesuit, Leonardo Garzoni, wrote an experimental study on the subject twenty years earlier and that his research influenced particularly the work of Giambattista Della Porta and Paolo Sarpi,two important protagonists in the history of studies in magnetism. However, to date, Garzoni’s authorship of an anonymous treatise in manuscript, located at the (...) Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, and taken to bear witness to his research, has been based only on circumstantial evidence. This article outlines the identification of two further manuscript copies of this treatise, which have not been studied so far. It shall be argued that the evidence contained in these manuscripts corroborates the assumption that Garzoni indeed is the author of the work that was transmitted anonymously. Moreover, it can be shown that the work was completed and prepared for print later on. These findings also allow us to argue more conclusively that Paolo Sarpi knew Garzoni’s work and passed it to Giambattista Della Porta, who bequethed his copy to the Accademia dei Lincei and thereby made it available to some of the academy’s most important members, Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc and Cassiano Dal Pozzo. Finally, the dynamics of this textual transmission provide insights into how scholars approached the study of ‘magnetism’ in the early-modern period. (shrink)