Interoperability across data sets is a key challenge for quantitative histopathological imaging. There is a need for an ontology that can support effective merging of pathological image data with associated clinical and demographic data. To foster organized, cross-disciplinary, information-driven collaborations in the pathological imaging field, we propose to develop an ontology to represent imaging data and methods used in pathological imaging and analysis, and call it Quantitative Histopathological Imaging Ontology – QHIO. We apply QHIO to breast cancer hot-spot detection with (...) the goal of enhancing reliability of detection by promoting the sharing of data between image analysts. (shrink)

The Ontology for Biomedical Investigations (OBI) is an ontology that provides terms with precisely defined meanings to describe all aspects of how investigations in the biological and medical domains are conducted. OBI re-uses ontologies that provide a representation of biomedical knowledge from the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) project and adds the ability to describe how this knowledge was derived. We here describe the state of OBI and several applications that are using it, such as adding semantic expressivity to (...) existing databases, building data entry forms, and enabling interoperability between knowledge resources. OBI covers all phases of the investigation process, such as planning, execution and reporting. It represents information and material entities that participate in these processes, as well as roles and functions. Prior to OBI, it was not possible to use a single internally consistent resource that could be applied to multiple types of experiments for these applications. OBI has made this possible by creating terms for entities involved in biological and medical investigations and by importing parts of other biomedical ontologies such as GO, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest (ChEBI) and Phenotype Attribute and Trait Ontology (PATO) without altering their meaning. OBI is being used in a wide range of projects covering genomics, multi-omics, immunology, and catalogs of services. OBI has also spawned other ontologies (Information Artifact Ontology) and methods for importing parts of ontologies (Minimum information to reference an external ontology term (MIREOT)). The OBI project is an open cross-disciplinary collaborative effort, encompassing multiple research communities from around the globe. To date, OBI has created 2366 classes and 40 relations along with textual and formal definitions. The OBI Consortium maintains a web resource providing details on the people, policies, and issues being addressed in association with OBI. (shrink)

Ontology is one strategy for promoting interoperability of heterogeneous data through consistent tagging. An ontology is a controlled structured vocabulary consisting of general terms (such as “cell” or “image” or “tissue” or “microscope”) that form the basis for such tagging. These terms are designed to represent the types of entities in the domain of reality that the ontology has been devised to capture; the terms are provided with logical defi nitions thereby also supporting reasoning over the tagged data. Aim: This (...) paper provides a survey of the biomedical imaging ontologies that have been developed thus far. It outlines the challenges, particularly faced by ontologies in the fields of histopathological imaging and image analysis, and suggests a strategy for addressing these challenges in the example domain of quantitative histopathology imaging. The ultimate goal is to support the multiscale understanding of disease that comes from using interoperable ontologies to integrate imaging data with clinical and genomics data. (shrink)

Public discourse is often caustic and conflict-filled. This trend seems to be particularly evident when the content of such discourse is around moral issues (broadly defined) and when the discourse occurs on social media. Several explanatory mechanisms for such conflict have been explored in recent psychological and social-science literatures. The present work sought to examine a potentially novel explanatory mechanism defined in philosophical literature: Moral Grandstanding. According to philosophical accounts, Moral Grandstanding is the use of moral talk to seek social (...) status. For the present work, we conducted six studies, using two undergraduate samples (Study 1, N = 361; Study 2, N = 356); a sample matched to U.S. norms for age, gender, race, income, Census region (Study 3, N = 1,063); a YouGov sample matched to U.S. demographic norms (Study 4, N = 2,000); and a brief, one-month longitudinal study of Mechanical Turk workers in the U.S. (Study 5, Baseline N = 499, follow-up n = 296), and a large, one-week YouGov sample matched to U.S. demographic norms (Baseline N = 2,519, follow-up n = 1,776). Across studies, we found initial support for the validity of Moral Grandstanding as a construct. Specifically, moral grandstanding motivation was associated with status-seeking personality traits, as well as greater political and moral conflict in daily life. (shrink)

Williams Syndrome provides a striking test case for discourses on disability, because the characteristics associated with Williams Syndrome involve a combination of “abilities” and “disabilities”. For example, Williams Syndrome is associated with disabilities in mathematics and spatial cognition. However, Williams Syndrome individuals also tend to have a unique strength in their expressive language skills, and are socially outgoing and unselfconscious when meeting new people. Children with Williams are said to be typically unafraid of strangers and show a greater interest in (...) contact with adults than with their peers. This apparently keen social knowledge is a counterexample to the discussion of disability among academic philosophers, especially philosophers of the early modern period. Locke infamously used the example of disability to claim that Descartes’ arguments in favor of innate ideas were incorrect. On the contrary, Williams Syndrome may stand as an example of innate social knowledge; something that could benefit current discourse in philosophy, disability theory, and medical ethics. (shrink)

In recent years, the growing academic field called “Data Science” has made many promises. On closer inspection, relatively few of these promises have come to fruition. A critique of Data Science from the phenomenological tradition can take many forms. This paper addresses the promise of “participation” in Data Science, taking inspiration from Paul Majkut’s 2000 work in Glimpse, “Empathy’s Impostor: Interactivity and Intersubjectivity,” and some insights from Heidegger’s "The Question Concerning Technology." The description of Data Science provided in the scholarly (...) literature includes “the study of the generalizable extraction of knowledge from data” (Dhar 2013, 64), “data stewardship and data sharing…access to data at higher volumes and more quickly, and the potential for replication and augmentation of existing research” (Hartter et al., 2013, 1), and “personal information, health status, daily activities and shopping preferences that are recorded and used to give us instant feedback and recommendations based on previous online behavior.” (Shin 2013) United States universities have begun to offer graduate programs in “data science”, anticipating the growth of this field for marketing, national security, and health industries. These universities include New York University, Columbia University, Stanford, Northwestern, and Syracuse. (shrink)

This paper addresses the project of philosophical autobiography, using two different perspectives. On the one hand, the societal, economic, and family contexts of William James are addressed, and connected a modern academic context of business ethics research, marketing and purchasing decision making, and the continuing financial crisis. The concepts of “stream of consciousness” and “acting as-if” are connected to recent literature on William James. On the other hand, the significance of family context, and the possible connection between the (...) William James family and the author, is addressed through shared family narratives interspersed throughout the paper. (shrink)

A philosophy of language that incorporates the manifestation of divinity shed liberally upon the psyche of humanity without violence or chaos as in that which is common to the powers and sovereignties of human beings is critical to the understanding of Holy Writ. The discourse presented here is primarily intended to foster a better general understanding of the divine directive given to Moses by Yahweh to build the wilderness sanctuary in order to objectify his majestic presence among them and draw (...) their attention periodically to his Shekinah glory. It is the author’s deep desire to encourage ministers of religion, students and teachers of theology, linguistics, philology, and grammar, to develop an approach to biblical studies that take into account the biblical languages that were the sheaths for the sword of the word. A cursory reading of this script should generate active interest in these languages. (shrink)

Dan O’Brien gives an excellent analysis of testimonial knowledge transmission in his article ‘Communication Between Friends’ (2009) noting that the reliability of the speaker is a concern in both externalist and internalist theories of knowledge. O’Brien focuses on the belief states of Hearers (H) in cases where the reliability of the Speaker (S) is known via ‘intimate trust’, a special case pertaining to friendships with a track record of reliable or unreliable reports. This article considers the notion of ‘intimate trust’, (...) specifically in the context of online fan communities, in which the amount of time as a member of an online fan community and the extent of one’s posting history often results in something like ‘intimate trust’ between fans who are, for all other purposes, strangers. In the last two years, Twitter has provided a number of celebrities with a place to update fans and ‘tweet’ back and forth an innumerable number of times in any given day. This accentuates the intimacy to such a level that it becomes a ‘caricature of intimacy’ – the minute-to-minute updates accentuate the illusion that the fan ‘knows’ the celebrity, but the distance and mediation are still carefully maintained. This is an issue with both ethical and epistemological implications for fan-fan and fan-celebrity relationships online, considering ethics of care and ethics of justice, whether fans ‘owe’ celebrities a certain amount of distance and respect, and whether stars owe the fan something in return, either in the sense of reciprocal Kantian duties or Aristotelian moderation. (shrink)

Disability has been a topic of heightened philosophical interest in the last 30 years. Disability theory has enriched a broad range of sub-specializations in philosophy. The call for papers for this issue welcomed papers addressing questions on normalcy, medical ethics, public health, philosophy of education, aesthetics, philosophy of sport, philosophy of religion, and theories of knowledge. This issue of Essays in Philosophy includes nine essays that approach the philosophy of disability in three distinct ways: The first set of three essays (...) provide a careful analysis of John Rawls, and the application of his work in ethics and justice to societies in which persons with disabilities, especially cognitive disabilities, can take active part in the processes of civil society. The second set of three essays branch out into continental philosophy, and are especially engaged with issues of community membership, communication, translation, and hermeneutics. The third set of three essays address disability specifically through the arts and aesthetics; asking questions on the portrayal of disabled persons in the arts and its implications for normalcy, sexuality, beauty, and the sublime. (shrink)

Dialogue between feminist and mainstream philosophy of science has been limited in recent years, although feminist and mainstream traditions each have engaged in rich debates about key concepts and their efficacy. Noteworthy criticisms of concepts like objectivity, consensus, justification, and discovery can be found in the work of philosophers of science including Philip Kitcher, Helen Longino, Peter Galison, Alison Wylie, Lorraine Daston, and Sandra Harding. As a graduate student in philosophy of science who worked in both literatures, I was often (...) left with the feeling that I had joined a broken family with two warring factions. This is apparent in the number of anthologies that have emerged on both sides in the aftermath of the “Science Wars” (Gross, Paul R., Norman Levitt, and Martin W. Lewis, eds. 1996; Koertge, Noretta, ed. 1998; Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont. 1998; etc.) Depending on one’s perspective on the Science Wars, the breadth of illustrative cases and examples found in Science and Other Cultures can either give more ammunition for the battle, or grounding for a much needed treaty of accord. The most important feature of this book is that it does not merely claim that science is only political, and it does not merely dismiss science as a social phenomenon to be deconstructed using the standard postmodern conceptual tools. Instead, the collection illustrates ways in which postcolonial analysis and multicultural examples can enrich our understanding of “good” science and ethics. Here, the concept of “strong objectivity” from Harding’s earlier books is fleshed out through a variety of cases. The anthology is the culmination of a series of research activities funded by a National Science Foundation grant to the American Philosophical Association. The grant, under the auspices of the NSF Ethics and Values Program, sponsored fourteen summer research projects and thirty-six presentations at four regional APA meetings. (shrink)

William James' Radical Empiricist essays offer a unique and powerful argument for direct realism about our perceptions of objects. This theory can be completed with some observations by Kant on the intellectual preconditions for a perceptual judgment. Finally James and Kant deliver a powerful blow to the representational theory of perception and knowledge, which applies quite broadly to theories of representation generally.

Translating Chinese Classics in a Colonial Context: James Legge and His Two Versions of the Zhongyong, by Hui Wang, Peter Lang Content Type Journal Article Pages 166-167 Authors Paul Boshears, Europäische Universität für Interdisziplinäre Studien/The European Graduate School Journal Comparative and Continental Philosophy Online ISSN 1757-0646 Print ISSN 1757-0638 Journal Volume Volume 4 Journal Issue Volume 4, Number 1 / 2012.

Richard Rorty has argued that Friedrich Nietzsche and William James are both polytheists in the deflationary sense that they are both pluralists about human value. I argue that there is a more philosophically significant sense in which Nietzsche and James might be called polytheists: both advocate a life of openness and receptivity to multiple and potentially incommensurable sources of inspiration outside of our conscious control. The value of these sources is accessed in experiences in which one feels that (...) one is given something in an experience that one could not have obtained through conscious effort. I argue that this moment of passivity plays a crucial role in both James’ treatment of religious experience in his Varieties and Nietzsche’s account of the state of inspiration he experienced while composing Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and that their deep similarity on this point suggests that Nietzsche is closer to Jamesian religion than he is to Rortyan secularism. (shrink)

James Rule is puzzled by the ‘idiosyncratic’ approach that I take to the philosophical study of privacy. As evidence for this idiosyncracy, he cites my relative indifference to the distinction between consequentialist and deontological perspectives on privacy although these differences are proof of ‘intricate, yet enormously consequential intellectual tensions’. My choice of philosophical topics is ‘unsystematic’ and more a reflection of my own ‘intellectual hobby-horses’ than a ‘well-worked-out view of what students most need to know’. Finally, Rule concludes, because (...) ‘the most important privacy questions are excruciating’, we need ‘more systematic guidance than is provided here’. I am grateful to the editors for the chance to respond to these complaints. (shrink)

In this paper, I'm giving an account of William James's reception in the columns of Charles Renouvier's journal, La Critique philosophique. The papers explores the discussions between James and Renouvier on Free Will, Philosophical systems, Consciousness and Pluralism.

I reply to James Marcum’s “What’s the Support for Kuhn’s Incommensurability Thesis? A Response to Mizrahi and Patton”.

I thank Professor Otteson for his review of Escape from Leviathan (EFL). His exposition of what I wrote is relatively accurate. I shall here do my best to correct any misunderstandings and reply to his welcome criticisms, ignoring our various points of agreement and his generous praise.

In a recent article, Christopher Ormell argues against the traditional mathematical view that the real numbers form an uncountably infinite set. He rejects the conclusion of Cantor’s diagonal argument for the higher, non-denumerable infinity of the real numbers. He does so on the basis that the classical conception of a real number is mys- terious, ineffable, and epistemically suspect. Instead, he urges that mathematics should admit only ‘well-defined’ real numbers as proper objects of study. In practice, this means excluding as (...) inadmissible all those real numbers whose decimal expansions cannot be calculated in as much detail as one would like by some rule. We argue against Ormell that the classical realist account of the continuum has explanatory power in mathematics and should be accepted, much in the same way that "dark matter" is posited by physicists to explain observations in cosmology. In effect, the indefinable real numbers are like the "dark matter" of real analysis. (shrink)

Phoebe Ellsworth, in her 1994 article “William James and emotion: Is a century of fame worth a century of misunderstanding?” wryly observed: “Ask anyone about William James’s theory of emotion and you will almost certainly hear about the bear.” This opening sentence sets the stage for Ellsworth’s critique of the standard interpretation of James’ theory of emotion. The standard interpretation of that theory sees James claiming that emotions like anger, disgust, fear, etc. are discrete categories that (...) are constituted exclusively by the perception of internal bodily feelings. This article, coupled with the 1994 release of Antonio Damasio’s explicitly “neo-Jamesian” Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, led to a significant resurgence of scholarly and scientific interest in William James’ emotion theory that persists to this day. Ellsworth’s article has spawned a large secondary literature regarding the proper historical interpretation of William James’ emotion theory, with numerous emotion theorists claiming that their theories are those that are the true inheritors of James’ legacy (see Barrett 2017, Damasio 1994, Prinz 2004, Ekman 1984 for some representative examples). I will begin this paper by outlining the traditional interpretation of James as a proponent of Basic Emotion Theory, and then profile Ellsworth’s alternate interpretation as a counterpoint. I argue that James’ emotion theory has been largely misunderstood, not just by the aforementioned representative examples but also by Ellsworth herself. In arguing for this historical point, I will forward four claims: 1. James was an important precursor to Basic Emotion Theory and his theory is most comfortably identified as a flavor of BET or proto-BET; 2. James’ proto-BET individuates individual emotion categories by the evolutionary, functional roles of emotions rather than by the later BET’s focus on emotion signatures in facial expressions, the autonomic nervous system, etc.; 3. The only necessary condition on something’s being an emotion in James’ theory is that it is a bodily feeling, though appraisals often in fact play important roles in emotion generation; 4., and finally, contrary to both (Barrett 2017) and (Ellsworth 2012), James was loath to offer a definitive list of basic emotions not because he loathed taxonomy, but rather because he thought psychology was not yet a natural science with well-defined theoretical categories. After marshalling evidence for these four claims, I will canvass how many of the most popular and recent readings of James (both friendly and critical) get him wrong and subsequently extract some lessons for the contemporary emotions debate, whose argumentative dialectic is (to this reader at least) largely the same as it was when William James was writing. In particular, I will argue that a proper understanding of James’ emotion theory defangs some traditional critiques of BET and of Neo-Jamesian theory, forcing critics to reformulate their critiques. (shrink)

Michael Ryan's Literary Theory: A Practical Introduction, Second Edition introduces students to the full range of contemporary approaches to the study of literature and culture, from Formalism, Structuralism, and Historicism to Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies, and Global English. Introduces readings from a variety of theoretical perspectives, on classic literary texts. Demonstrates how the varying perspectives on texts can lead to different interpretations of the same work. Contains an accessible account of different theoretical approaches An ideal resource for use in introductory (...) courses on literary theory and criticism. Designed to function both as a stand-alone text and a companion to Rivkin and Ryan’s Literary Theory: An Anthology, Second Edition. (shrink)

The attitude toward nature in James Thomson’s "The Seasons" has not been duly noted by literary commentators. Instead, the reception of "The Seasons" in modern literary criticism has focused on all sorts of aspects, ranging from visual imagery, to “dislocation, deformity and renewal.” However, when nature as a theme in the poem has been tackled, critics have favored its religious implications—specifically, those pertaining to the historical period in English literature, as well as a number of hypotheses about Thomson’s own (...) relation toward god—over Thomson’s conception of nature on its own terms. Furthermore, none has, in my view, concentrated enough on the most emblematic characteristic of "The Seasons": its unresolved stance toward the natural and its strongly polarized attitude toward it. The aim of this essay is to examine these inconsistencies in order to reveal what they tell us about the period’s changing perspectives, to place "The Seasons"’ reception of the natural in the history of eighteenth-century literature, and to uncover the implications and fertile consequences of Thomson’s view of nature—which spill into para-literary domains. (shrink)

La editorial James Clarke & Co., a través de Pickwick Publications, posibilita la publicación de una obra de Andrew Shepherd. El texto, intitulado “The Gift of the Other. Levinas, Derrida, and a Theology of Hospitality”, permite una reflexión a propósito de la noción de Regalo (Gift). La presente reseña asume como objetivo una exposición del texto a partir de una serie de comentarios sobre cada una de las secciones, más un comentario final para concluir. En orden a presentar al (...) lector una guía para la comprensión de la obra se detalla el contenido de la misma: (i) Foreword by Steven Bouma-Prediger, (ii) Preface, (iii) Introduction: A World for all?, (1) The Trascendence of the Other and Infinite Responsability, (2) Unconditional Hospitality, the Gift of Deconstruction, (3) Levinasian and Derridean Hospitality, (4) Gifted, Called, and Named, (5) Sacrificial Substitute, and Eikon, (6) Dwelling in Christ and the In-Dwelling Other, (7) Performing a Different Script, (8) Conclusion. (shrink)

Totalidad e Infinito (TI) resulta ser una obra compleja. Ante el estilo de Levinas para la exposición de sus ideas, resulta oportuno contar con un apoyo para los nuevos lectores, con el objetivo de poder indagar en aspectos que podrían pasar desapercibidos. El trabajo desarrollado por James R. Mensch, profesor de Filosofía de la Charles University en República Checa y de Saint Francis Xavier University en Canadá, le permite incorporarse dentro de la lista de comentadores destacados de Levinas. El (...) acercamiento a TI desde la analítica existencial posibilita un panorama al lector de la obra a partir de la confrontación con un interlocutor ineludible: Martin Heidegger. (shrink)

As Thomas Uebel has recently argued, some early logical positivists saw American pragmatism as a kindred form of scientific philosophy. They associated pragmatism with William James, whom they rightly saw as allied with Ernst Mach. But what apparently blocked sympathetic positivists from pursuing commonalities with American pragmatism was the concern that James advocated some form of psychologism, a view they thought could not do justice to the a priori. This paper argues that positivists were wrong to read (...) class='Hi'>James as offering a psychologistic account of the a priori. They had encountered James by reading Pragmatism as translated by the unabashedly psychologistic Wilhelm Jerusalem. But in more technical works, James had actually developed a form of conventionalism that anticipated the so-called “relativized” a priori positivists themselves would independently develop. While positivists arrived at conventionalism largely through reflection on the exact sciences, though, James’s account of the a priori grew from his reflections on the biological evolution of cognition, particularly in the context of his Darwin-inspired critique of Herbert Spencer. (shrink)

James a maintes fois célébré les rencontres philosophiques et l’on sait les efforts de James et de Bergson pour se voir, lors des passages de James en Europe. Proximité physique ne signifie évidemment pas convergence ni capillarité philosophiques, comme l’apprend à ses dépens Agathon dans le Banquet de Platon. Or, le rapprochement, mais aussi les confusions, entre la philosophie de Bergson et celle de James, voire entre « bergsonisme » et « pragmatisme », restent un passage (...) obligé de l’étude des deux hommes. Si cette confusion — peut-être ces familles de confusions — sont caractéristiques du début du XXe siècle , il serait sans doute illusoire de croire que nous en sommes sortis aujourd’hui. C’est en France une expérience encore très répandue chez le jamesien que devoir se justifier par rapport au « bergsonisme », et c’en est une autre pour le « bergsonien » que de devoir dire qu’il n’est pas forcément « pragmatiste ». Ces glissements ont déjà été maintes fois analysés et je tiendrai ici pour acquis que Horace Kallen , Floris Delattre , Ralph Barton Perry et Millic Capek , qui ont procédé à la revue de détail, nous ont donné suffisamment d’éléments pour qu’il ne soit pas nécessaire de reprendre le dossier dans son ensemble. Le propos sera plutôt de décomposer un travers de lecture que l’on inflige généralement aux deux auteurs à partir d’un terrain plus limité : le thème du « courant », ou flux (stream), de conscience, thème prétendument commun aux deux hommes. Je vais pour cela tenter d’identifier, dans la première section, deux grandes manières d’aborder le rapport entre les deux hommes qui ont conduit à méconnaître leur apport propre. L’une interdit tout simplement de les lire comme philosophes, même si elle est couramment pratiquée, ce que j’illustrerai à la lumière de deux exemples. L’autre type de lecture engage, lui, un contresens sur la thèse même de James, et c’est ici que la face critique de ce chapitre se retourne en argument positif. Le cœur de ce contresens est de croire que James aurait introduit le thème du courant de pensée ou de conscience, et que ce serait là son originalité. Or, comme il est normal chez un auteur pragmatiste après tout, l’originalité réside dans l’usage qui est fait de ce thème. En examinant dans la deuxième section les rouages de ce contresens, dont il n’est pas certain que tous les lecteurs de Bergson l’aient totalement évité alors même qu’ils pensaient le déposer, on tentera donc de préciser tout d’abord en quoi le thème lui-même n’est pas spécifiquement jamesien, ensuite en quoi le propos de James n’est pas tant de décrire ce flux pour lui-même que de nous expliquer ce qui nous guette si nous le négligeons systématiquement, enfin quelles sont les fonctions remplies par les passages sur le courant de conscience dans l’argument de James. (shrink)

The relationship between William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) has recently been the subject of intense scholarly research. We know for instance that the later Wittgenstein's reflections on the philosophy of psychology found in James a major source of inspiration. Not surprisingly therefore, the pragmatist nature of the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein is increasingly acknowledged, in spite of Wittgenstein’s adamant refusal of being labeled a “pragmatist”. In this brief paper I merely want to piece together some of (...) the available evidence of Wittgenstein’s high regard for William James, not only for his thoughts, but even more so for his character. (shrink)

This paper presents an account of akrasia, drawn from the work of William James, that sees akrasia as neither a rational failing (as with most philosophical accounts) nor a moral failing (as with early Christian accounts), but rather a necessary by-product of our status as biological beings. By examining James’s related accounts of motivation and action, I argue that akratic actions occur when an agent attempts to act against her settled habits, but fails to do so. This makes (...) akrasia a product of the agent’s practical failure to adequately structured her environment to bring about her desired action. Akratic action performs the vital function of revealing to the agent the exact point at which her cognitive effort was insufficient for bringing about her intended action. It also reveals that future improvement is within her control. As such, akratic action is the very foundation of James’s meliorism. (shrink)

Critics and defenders of William James both acknowledge serious tensions in his thought, tensions perhaps nowhere more vexing to readers than in regard to his claim about an individual’s intellectual right to their “faith ventures.” Focusing especially on “Pragmatism and Religion,” the final lecture in Pragmatism, this chapter will explore certain problems James’ pragmatic pluralism. Some of these problems are theoretical, but others concern the real-world upshot of adopting James permissive ethics of belief. Although Jamesian permissivism is (...) qualified in certain ways in this paper, I largely defend James in showing how permissivism has philosophical advantages over the non-permissivist position associated with evidentialism. These advantages include not having to treat disagreement as a sign of error or irrationality, and mutual support relations between permissivism and what John Rawls calls the "reasonable pluralism" at the heart of political liberalism. (shrink)

While some scholars neglect the theological component to William James’s ethical views in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” Michael Cantrell reads it as promoting a divine command theory (DCT) of the foundations of moral obligation. While Cantrell’s interpretation is to be commended for taking God seriously, he goes a little too far in the right direction. Although James’s view amounts to what could be called (and what Cantrell does call) a DCT because on it God’s demands (...) are necessary and sufficient for the highest obligations, this is a view with characteristics unusual for a DCT. It only holds for some obligations; on it moral obligation does not derive from God’s authority; it is not obvious that James believes the God required by it even exists; we do not know what God’s demands are; and, finally, since we do not know them, we cannot act on them. -/- (Lest there be any confusion, the titular phrase "taking God seriously, but not too seriously" describes William James' view of God and morality, not my own view.). (shrink)

In this paper we respond to three objections raised by Joshua Harris to our article, “Against a Postmodern Pentecostal Epistemology,” in which we express misgivings about the conjunction of Pentecostalism with James K. A. Smith’s postmodern, story-based epistemolo- gy. According to Harris, our critique: 1) problematically assumes a correspondence theory of truth, 2) invalidly concludes that “Derrida’s Axiom” conflicts with “Peter’s Axiom,” and 3) fails to consider an alternative account of the universality of Christian truth claims. We argue that (...) Harris’s objections either demonstrate a deficient interpretation of the relevant biblical pas- sages or are not directed at us at all. (shrink)

In this short paper I try to present William James’s connection with the Argentinian writer Macedonio Fernández (1874-1952), who was in some sense a mentor of Borges and might be considered the missing link between Borges and James.

The year of the centennial of the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges is probably the right time to exhume one of the links that this universal writer had with William James. In 1945, Emece, a publisher from Buenos Aires, printed a Spanish translation of William James’s book Pragmatism, with a foreword by Jorge Luis Borges.

Those sympathetic to the naturalistic side of James hope that his critique of ‘philosophical materialism’ can be separated from those elements of his thinking that are essential to his pragmatism. Such a separation is possible once we see that James’s critique of materialism grows out of his views about its incompatibility with the existence of objective values. Objective values (as James understands them) are incompatible, however, not with materialism in its most general form, but rather with materialism (...) that understood the ‘material world’ in terms of the sciences of the late nineteen hundreds. In particular, one could not defend the potential objectivity of value in the way that James hoped if one endorsed the particular ‘pessimistic’ cosmology characteristic of the sciences at the turn of the last century. Consequently, if one rejects certain ‘empirical assumptions’ associated with the science of James’s day, the possibility of a type of ‘melioristic materialism’ opens up, and this sort of materialist could still understand value in the way that James proposes. (shrink)

Many philosophers, psychologists, and medical practitioners believe that killing is no worse than letting die on the basis of James Rachels's Bare-Difference Argument. I show that his argument is unsound. In particular, a premise of the argument is that his examples are as similar as is consistent with one being a case of killing and the other being a case of letting die. However, the subject who lets die has both the ability to kill and the ability to let (...) die while the subject who kills lacks the ability to let die. Modifying the latter example so that the killer has both abilities yields a pair of cases with morally different acts. The hypothesis that killing is worse than letting die is the best explanation of this difference. (shrink)

What grounds human rights? How do we determine that something is a genuine human right? This chapter offers a new answer: human beings have human rights to the fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life. The fundamental conditions for pursuing a good life are certain goods, capacities, and options that human beings qua human beings need whatever else they qua individuals might need in order to pursue a characteristically good human life. This chapter explains how this Fundamental Conditions Approach is (...) better than James Griffin’s Agency Approach as well as Martha Nussbaum’s Central Capabilities Approach. It also shows how it can be compatible with the increasingly popular Political Conceptions of human rights defended by John Rawls, Charles Beitz, and Joseph Raz. (shrink)

In this paper I defend the traditional interpretations of Kant’s Formula of a Law of Nature from recent attacks leveled by Faviola Rivera-Castro, James Furner, Ido Geiger, Pauline Kleingeld and Sven Nyholm. After a short introduction, the paper is divided into four main sections. In the first, I set out the basics of the three traditional interpretations, the Logical Contradiction Interpretation, the Practical Contradiction Interpretation and the Teleological Contradiction Interpretation. In the second, I examine the work of Geiger, Kleingeld (...) and Nyholm: these three commentators reject the traditional interpretations entirely, but I argue that this rejection is ill-founded. In the third and fourth, I take a detailed look at Furner’s work, work in which he seeks to revise (rather than reject) the traditional interpretations. I argue that, despite his more modest aims, Furner’s revision is also ill-founded. (shrink)

In this paper I deal with Nietzsche's theory of knowledge in the context of 19th century epistemology. In particular, I argue that, even though Nietzsche shows the ontological lack of content of truths (both on the theoretic and on the moral plane), he nevertheless leaves the space for a practical use of them, in a way that can be compared with William James' pragmatism. I thus deal with Nietzsche's and James' concept of "truth", and show their relationship with (...) some outcomes of Ernst Mach's epistemology. (shrink)

In this paper, I first suggest that Nietzsche and James, two otherwise very different thinkers, both endorse the controversial constructivist view that human representational practices bring all material objects into existence. I then explore their views concerning why and how constructivism can play a vital role in helping us find reality and our lives valuable.

The standard, foundationalist reading of Our Knowledge of the External World requires Russell to have a view of perceptual acquaintance that he demonstrably does not have. Russell’s actual purpose in “constructing” physical bodies out of sense-data is instead to show that psychology and physics are consistent. But how seriously engaged was Russell with actual psychology? I show that OKEW makes some non-trivial assumptions about the character of visual space, and I argue that he drew those assumptions from William James’s (...) Principles. This point helps us take a fresh look at the complex relationship between the two men. In light of this surprising background of agreement, I highlight ways their more general approaches to perception finally diverged in ways that put the two at epistemological odds. (shrink)

ABSTRACT. May scientists rely on substantive, a priori presuppositions? Quinean naturalists say "no," but Michael Friedman and others claim that such a view cannot be squared with the actual history of science. To make his case, Friedman offers Newton's universal law of gravitation and Einstein's theory of relativity as examples of admired theories that both employ presuppositions (usually of a mathematical nature), presuppositions that do not face empirical evidence directly. In fact, Friedman claims that the use of such presuppositions is (...) a hallmark of "science as we know it." But what should we say about the special sciences, which typically do not rely on the abstruse formalisms one finds in the exact sciences? I identify a type of a priori presupposition that plays an especially striking role in the development of empirical psychology. These are ontological presuppositions about the type of object a given science purports to study. I show how such presuppositions can be both a priori and rational by investigating their role in an early flap over psychology's contested status as a natural science. The flap focused on one of the field's earliest textbooks, William James's Principles of Psychology. The work was attacked precisely for its reliance on a priori presuppositions about what James had called the "mental state," psychology's (alleged) proper object. I argue that the specific presuppositions James packed into his definition of the "mental state" were not directly responsible to empirical evidence, and so in that sense were a priori; but the presuppositions were rational in that they were crafted to help overcome philosophical objections (championed by neo-Hegelians) to the very idea that there can be a genuine science of mind. Thus, my case study gives an example of substantive, a priori presuppositions being put to use—to rational use—in the special sciences. In addition to evaluating James's use of presuppositions, my paper also offers historical reflections on two different strands of pragmatist philosophy of science. One strand, tracing back through Quine to C. S. Peirce, is more naturalistic, eschewing the use of a priori elements in science. The other strand, tracing back through Kuhn and C. I. Lewis to James, is more friendly to such presuppositions, and to that extent bears affinity with the positivist tradition Friedman occupies. (shrink)

The paper defends the idea that Jamesian pragmatism, Nietzschean perspectivism, and philosophical anthropology represent a consistent triad, for the similarities and connections between the first two positions rest in their engagement with the anthropological question. As will be argued, a) pragmatism is concerned with anthropology and that it deals with a fundamental issue of Nietzsche’s late thought; b) the problem of the type of man (der Typus Mensch) is involved in Nietzsche’s questioning the value of truth, and perspectivism is an (...) alternative view to Platonic and Christian metaphysics which arises from the same phenomenalist conception of knowledge defended by James ; c) Nietzsche’s interest in developing a philosophy that affirms the perspectival character of existence is primarily anthropological, and this is in fact the pragmatic criterion of validity that one can attribute to Nietzschean perspectivism. (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)

James developed an evolutionary objection to epiphenomenalism that is still discussed today. Epiphenomenalists have offered responses that do not grasp its full depth. I thus offer a new reading and assessment of James’s objection. Our life-essential, phenomenal pleasures and pains have three features that suggest that they were shaped by selection, according to James: they are natively patterned, those patterns are systematically linked with antecedent brain states, and the patterns are “universal” among humans. If epiphenomenalism were true, (...) phenomenal patterns could not have been selected (because epiphenomenalism precludes phenomenal consciousness affecting reproductive success). So epiphenomenalism is likely false. (shrink)