Using a theoretical framework derived from my ongoing engagement with what I have called a ‘Gynocentric matrix’ of Indic sensibility, along with James Hillman’s polytheistic psychology and Wallace Stevens’ notion of a Supreme Fiction, this paper offers a reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s (b. 1967) short stories beyond postcolonial criticism. Stemming from a depth consciousness where life, living and death, joy, indifference and sorrow, generation, de/re-generation, and transformation are intricately intertwined, Lahiri’s fictional multiverse, opposed to universe, is peopled by (...) a new generation of characters who speak to the soul of the reader, while in the process, she sculpts a reality that does not tolerate any homogenizing impulse in the name of an abstract unity. (shrink)

In different versions, from Heraclitus to Plato and from Plotinus to the Romantic poets, many thinkers have put forward the idea that the universe has a soul, the so called anima mundi. If the soul of a human being can be thought as the totality of the traits which form character and personality, that of the universe too can be imagined as a complex of distinct traits and dispositions which can be recognised in the phenomenal world. Then, we may ask (...) ourselves:are there events which suggest the idea of the existence of the soul of the world? In what sense do they differ from other events which drift away into nothing? How do they move us? Can they be captured by a photography? I reflect on these questions intertwining philosophy, travel tales, poetry and photography studies. Molti filosofi hanno sostenuto che l’universo ha un’anima, la cosiddetta anima mundi. Di questa idea sono state proposte diverse versioni a partire dalle cosmologie orientali e dal pensiero di Eraclito e Platone. Se l’anima di un essere umano puo' essere pensata come la totalita' dei tratti che formano la sua personalita', allora anche quella dell’universo puo' essere immaginata come un complesso di tratti distintivi e disposizioni rintracciabili nel mondo dei fenomeni. Ci possiamo allora chiedere: quali sono gli eventi che suggeriscono l’esistenza dell’anima del mondo o rivelano alcuni dei suoi tratti? In che senso differiscono da altri eventi che si perdono nel flusso indistinto e ininterrotto del tempo? Come ci emozionano? Possono essere catturati da una fotografia? Sciortino riflette su queste domande intrecciando filosofia, racconto di viaggio, poesia e critica della fotografia. Ne emerge un avvincente racconto, corredato da bellissime fotografie, di come la bellezza raggiunge i nostri cuori, muove la nostra immaginazione e ci rivela l’essenza delle cose. (shrink)

Despre moarte, durere, doliu, viaţa de după moarte şi nemurire. De ce trebuie să murim ca oameni pentru a trăi ca specie. "Nimeni nu vrea să moară. Chiar și cei care doresc să ajungă în cer, nu ar vrea să moară pentru a ajunge acolo. Și totuși, moartea este destinația pe care o împărtășim cu toții. Nimeni nu a scăpat vreodată. Și aşa şi trebuie, pentru că Moartea este foarte probabil cea mai bună invenție a Vieții. Este agentul de schimbare (...) a Vieţii. Ea şterge pe cele vechi pentru a face loc celor noi. În momentul ăsta noul eşti tu, dar într-o zi, nu peste mult timp, vei deveni treptat vechi, și vei fi şters la rândul tău. Îmi pare rău că sună aşa de dramatic, dar este cât se poate de adevărat. Timpul tau este limitat, așa că nu-l irosi trăind viața altcuiva. Ai grijă să nu fii prins în dogme - trăind prin rezultatele gândirii altor oameni. Nu lăsa zgomotul opiniilor altora să înece propria ta voce interioară. Și cel mai important, ai curajul să urmezi inima și intuiția ta. Ele știu cumva deja ce îți dorești tu cu adevărat să devii. Orice altceva este de importanţă secundară." (Steve Jobs) CUPRINS: Moartea - Termeni asociaţi - Senectutea - Semne de moarte biologică - Conceptul de moarte - Moartea în societate şi cultură - Uitarea veşnică - - Uitarea şi Subiectivitatea - - În filosofie Moartea programată a celulelor - Istorie - Tipuri - - Apoptoza - - Autofagia - - Alte tipuri - Originea evolutivă Obiceiuri mortuare - Înmormântarea - - Istorie - - Motivaţii pentru înmormântare umană - Cimitire - - Obiceiuri şi practici în cimitire - - - Flori - - - Pietre - - - Cruci - - Cimitire şi superstiţie - Preotulsul în religia ortodoxă - - Serviciul religios - - Coliva - - Când se practică parastasul - - Litate Doliul - Procesul de doliu - Reacţii - Cinci identităţi ale persoanelor în doliu - Ştiinţa durerii - - Cele patru traiectorii Bonanno ale durerii - Teoria celor cinci etape - Procese fiziologice şi neurologice - Teorii evolutive ale doliului - - Riscuri - - Complicaţii ale doiului Experienţe aproape de moarte - Caracteristici - Studii - - Varianţa în studiile EAM - - Analiza neurobiologică şi psihologică - - Starea REM - - Visul lucid - - Psihologia computaţională - - Efecte - - Cercetarea inter-culturală - - Studiile Van Lommel - - Studiul AWARE Nemurirea - Abordări ştiinţifice - Abordări religioase - Nemurirea biologică - - Specii biologice nemuritoare - - Evoluţia îmbătrânirii - Speranţe privind nemurirea biologică umană - - Substanţe care prelungesc durata de viaţă - - Nemurirea tehnologică - - Crionica - - Încărcarea minţii la calculator - - Cibernetica - - Nemurirea evoluţionară - Puncte de vedere religioase - - Religia greacă antică - - Marii maeştri - - Budism - - Creştinism - Etica nemuririi - - Indezirabilitatea nemuririi - Sufletul - - Abordări filosofice - - - Socrate şi Platon - - - Aristotel - - - Avicenna şi Ibn al-Nafis - - - Toma de Aquino - - - Immanuel Kant - - - James Hillman - - - Filosofia minţii - Scientologia Viaţa de Apoi (Viaţa de după moarte) - Filozofia vieţii de Apoi - - Filozofia modernă - - Filozofia procesului - Ştiinţa despre viaţa de Apoi - Modele metafizice ale Vieţii de Apoi - - Reîncarnarea - - Raiul şi iadul - - Limbo - - Purgatoriul - Religiile abrahamice - - Iudaism - - Olam Haba - - Reîncarnarea în tradiţia evreiască - - Creştinismul - Istoricitatea şi originea Învierii lui Isus - - Contextul istoric - - Învierea lui Iisus Nemorţi - Fantome - - Tipologia - - - Context antropologic - - Fantomele şi viaţa de apoi - - Teama de fantome - - Atribute comune - - Locaţii - Moroi - Scheleţi - - Mit şi folclor - Strigoi - - Etimologie - - Istorie - - Diferite tipuri de strigoi - - Cum ajunge cineva strigoi - - Prevenţie - - În cultura populară - Vampiri - - Etimologie - - Credinţe populare - - - Descriere şi caracteristicile comune - - - Credinţe non-europene - - Vampiri psihici - - - Vampiri energetici - Vârcolaci - - Caracteristici - - Apotropaice - - Vârcolacul şi Occidentul - Zombi - - Apocalipsa zombi - - - Ideea - - - Elementele arhetipale Aspecte culturale ale morţii - Înmormântarea în diferite culturi - Durerea şi doliul - Tradiţii mortuare - - Sacrificii umane şi animale - - Filozofia, religia şi mitologia morţii - - Personificări ale morţii - - Simbolismul numeric în Asia de Est - - Glorificarea şi fascinaţia morţii - Mitul originii morţii - - Africa - - Oceania - - - Polinezia - - Civilizaţia occidentală - - - Mitologia greacă - Moartea pe Internet - - E-mail - - Facebook - - Dropbox - - Google - - MySpace - - Twitter - - Wikipedia - - YouTube - - Moştenirea digitală Dispariţia omului ca specie - Percepţia riscului de extincţie umană - Soluţii propuse - În cultura populară Arta - Sculptura - - Gisant - - Îngerul durerii - Picturi - - Moartea lui Sardanapal - Poezii - - Alexandru Vlahuţã, "Din prag..." - - George Bacovia, “Decor” - - George Coşbuc, “Moartea lui Fulger” - - Lucian Blaga, “Omule” - - Mihai Eminescu, “Cu mâine zilele-ţi adaogi” - - Ştefan Augustin Doinaş, “Moartea Ofeliei” Citate Referinţe Despre autor - Nicolae Sfetcu - - De același autor - - Contact Editura - MultiMedia Publishing . 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I argue that, although education should have positive effects on students’ epistemic character, it is often actually damaging, having bad effects. Rather than cultivating virtues of the mind, certain forms of education lead to the development of the vices of the mind - it is therefore epistemically corrupting. After sketching an account of that concept, I offer three illustrative case studies.

Ill persons suffer from a variety of epistemically-inflected harms and wrongs. Many of these are interpretable as specific forms of what we dub pathocentric epistemic injustices, these being ones that target and track ill persons. We sketch the general forms of pathocentric testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, each of which are pervasive within the experiences of ill persons during their encounters in healthcare contexts and the social world. What’s epistemically unjust might not be only agents, communities and institutions, but the theoretical (...) conceptions of health that structure our responses to illness. Thus, we suggest that although such pathocentric epistemic injustices have a variety of interpersonal and structural causes, they are also sustained by a deeper naturalistic conception of the nature of illness. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that certain theoretical conceptions of health, particularly those described as ‘biomedical’ or ‘naturalistic’, are viciously epistemically unjust. Drawing on some recent work in vice epistemology, we identity three ways that abstract objects (such as theoretical conceptions, doctrines, or stances) can be legitimately described as epistemically vicious. If this is right, then robust reform of individuals, social systems, and institutions would not be enough to secure epistemic justice: we must reform the deeper conceptions of health that (...) underlie them. (shrink)

According to a venerable ideal, the core aim of philosophical practice is wisdom. The guiding concern of the ancient Greek, Indian, and Chinese traditions was the nature of the good life for human beings and the nature of reality. Central to these traditions is profound recognition of the subjection to adversities intrinsic to human life. I consider paradigmatic exemplars of wisdom, from ancient Western and Asian traditions, and the ways that experiences of adversity shaped their life. The suggestion is that (...) these exemplars, if any, will show how to live wisely in adversity. (shrink)

Since subjection to harm is an intrinsic feature of our social and epistemic lives, there is a perpetual need for individual and collective agents with the virtue of epistemic courage. In this chapter, I survey some of the main issues germane to this virtue, such as the nature of courage and of harm, the range of epistemic activities that can manifest courage, and the status of epistemic courage as a collective and as a professional virtue.

Many people report that reading first-person narratives of the experience of illness can be morally instructive or educative. But although they are ubiquitous and typically sincere, the precise nature of such educative experiences is puzzling—for those narratives typically lack the features that modern philosophers regard as constitutive of moral reason. I argue that such puzzlement should disappear, and the morally educative power of illness narratives explained, if one distinguishes two different styles of moral reason: an inferentialist style that generates the (...) puzzlement and an alternative exemplarist style that offers a compelling explanation of the morally educative power of pathographic literature. (shrink)

The doctrine of the resurrection says that God will resurrect the body that lived and died on earth—that the post-mortem body will be numerically identical to the pre-mortem body. After exegetically supporting this claim, and defending it from a recent objection, we ask: supposing that the doctrine of the resurrection is true, what are the implications for the mind-body relation? Why would God resurrect the body that lived and died on earth? We compare three accounts of the mind-body relation that (...) have been applied to the doctrine of the resurrection: substance dualism, constitutionalism, and animalism. We argue that animalism offers a superior explanation for the necessity of the resurrection: since human persons just are their bodies, life after death requires resurrection of one’s body. We conclude that those endorsing the doctrine of the resurrection should be animalists. (shrink)

Theism and its cousins, atheism and agnosticism, are seldom taken to task for logical-epistemological incoherence. This paper provides a condensed proof that not only theism, but atheism and agnosticism as well, are all of them conceptually self-undermining, and for the same reason: All attempt to make use of the concept of “transcendent reality,” which here is shown not only to lack meaning, but to preclude the very possibility of meaning. In doing this, the incoherence of theism, atheism, and agnosticism is (...) secondary to the more general incoherence of any attempts to refer to so-called “transcendent realities.” A recognition of the conceptually fundamental incoherence of theism, atheism, and agnosticism compels our rational assent to a position the author names “paratheism.”. (shrink)

Recent empirical work on non-philosophers’ intuitions about epistemic normativity reveals patterns that cannot be fully accounted for by direct epistemic consequentialism. On the basis of these results, one might picture participants as “epistemic deontologists.” We present the results of two new experiments that support a more nuanced picture. We examine intuitions about guesses and hypotheses, and about beliefs. Our results suggest a two-factor model of intuitions, wherein both consequentialist and non-consequentialist considerations affect participants’ judgments about epistemic permissibility.

If a person requires an organ or tissue donation to survive, many philosophers argue that whatever moral responsibility a biological relative may have to donate to the person in need will be grounded at least partially, if not entirely, in biological relations the potential donor bears to the recipient. We contend that such views ignore the role that a potential donor's unique ability to help the person in need plays in underwriting such judgments. If, for example, a sperm donor is (...) judged to have a significant moral responsibility to donate tissue to a child conceived with his sperm, we think this will not be due to the fact that the donor stands in a close biological relationship to the recipient. Rather, we think such judgments will largely be grounded in the presumed unique ability of the sperm donor to help the child due to the compatibility of his tissues and organs with those of the recipient. In this paper, we report the results of two studies designed to investigate the comparative roles that biological relatedness and unique ability play in generating judgments of moral responsibility in tissue donation cases. We found that biologically related individuals are deemed to have a significant moral responsibility to donate tissue only when they are one of a small number of people who have the capacity to help. (shrink)

The paper begins by acknowledging that weakened systematic precision in phenomenology has made its application in philosophy of science obscure and ineffective. The defining aspirations of early transcendental phenomenology are, however, believed to be important ones. A path is therefore explored that attempts to show how certain recent developments in the logic of self-reference fulfill in a clear and more rigorous fashion in the context of philosophy of science certain of the early hopes of phenomenologists. The resulting dual approach is (...) applied to several problems in the philosophy of science: on the one hand, to proposed rejections of scientific objectivity, to the doctrine of radical meaning variance, and to the Quine-Duhem thesis, and or. the other, to an analysis of hidden variable theory in quantum mechanics. (shrink)

My argument proceeds in two stages. In §I, I sum up the intuitions of a popular argument for 'satisfaction accounts' of Purgatory that I label, TAP. I then offer an argument, taken from a few standard orthodox Christian beliefs and one axiom of Christian theology, to so show that TAP is unsound. In the same section, I entertain some plausible responses to my argument that are prima facie consistent with these beliefs and axiom. I find these responses wanting. In §II, (...) I offer a sorites problem for TAP, given the orthodox Christian understanding of Christ’s parousia, showing that TAP and the intuitions driving it are faulty. To attempt something of a corrective, I end by offering some modest theological suggestions for thinking through “the logic of total transformation.”. (shrink)

There has been a general failure among mental health theorists and social psychologists to understand the etiology of work-engendered depression. Yet the condition is increasingly prevalent in highly industrialized societies, where an exclusionary focus upon work, money, and the things that money can buy has displaced values that traditionally exerted a liberating and humanizing influence. Social critics have called the result an impoverishment of the spirit, a state of cultural bankruptcy, and an incapacity for genuine leisure. From a clinical perspective, (...) the condition has been diagnosed as widespread narcissism and obsessive work. -/- Acedia, a concept developed by the Scholastics, throws clarifying light on the origin of this form of depression. (shrink)

I propose that Confucianism incorporates a latent commitment to the closely related epistemic virtues of curiosity and inquisitiveness. Confucian praise of certain people, practices, and dispositions is only fully intelligible if these are seen as exercises and expressions of epistemic virtues, of which curiosity and inquisitiveness are the obvious candidates. My strategy is to take two core components of Confucian ethical and educational practice and argue that each presupposes a specific virtue. To have and to express a ‘love of learning’ (...) requires the virtue of curiosity, while the normative practice of good questioning requires exercise of the virtue of inquisitiveness. Taken together, people engaging in the foundational Confucian project of moral self-cultivation must desire and acquire a range of epistemic goods, a set of dispositions that manifest in the virtues of curiosity and inquisitiveness, possession of which is admirable and excellent. Such, at least, is the claim defend in this chapter, which is an exercise in cross-cultural virtue epistemology. (shrink)

This paper proposes that spiritual persons are an excellent focus for the study of 'living religion' and offers a methodology for doing so. By ‘spiritual persons’, I have in mind both exemplary figures – like Jesus or the Buddha – and the multitude of ‘ordinary’ spiritual persons whose lives are led in aspiration to the spiritual goods the exemplars manifest (enlightenment, say, or holiness). I start with Linda Zagzebski's recent argument that moral persuasion primarily occurs through encounters with exemplars of (...) moral qualities, of a sort that invite admiration and emulation. A plurality of modes of spiritual exemplarity is distinguished, each reflecting a distinct form of spiritual aspiration, which will show in the lives of the members of different traditions. I develop this claim by focusing on the ways that spiritual aspirants can encounter exemplars through their depictions in spiritual narrative. It emerges that narrative encounters can activate certain forms of admiration and enable certain forms of emulation if they depict the suffering of exemplars. (shrink)

A study of the psychology of demoralization affecting university faculty in the liberal arts. This form of demoralization is not adequately understood in terms of the concept of career burnout. Instead, demoralization that affects university faculty in the liberal arts requires a broadened understanding of the historical and psychological situation in which these professors find themselves today.

Feyerabend is well-known as a pluralist, and notorious for his defences of, and sympathetic references to, heterodox subjects, such as parapsychology. Focusing on the latter, I ask how we should understand the relationship between the pluralism and the defences, drawing on Marcello Truzzi's and Martin Gardner's remarks on Feyerabend along the way.

The collaboration of Language and Computing nv (L&C) and the Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS) is guided by the hypothesis that quality constraints on ontologies for software ap-plication purposes closely parallel the constraints salient to the design of sound philosophical theories. The extent of this parallel has been poorly appreciated in the informatics community, and it turns out that importing the benefits of phi-losophical insight and methodology into application domains yields a variety of improvements. L&C’s LinKBase® (...) is one of the world’s largest medical domain ontologies. Its current primary use pertains to natural language processing ap-plications, but it also supports intelligent navigation through a range of struc-tured medical and bioinformatics information resources, such as SNOMED-CT, Swiss-Prot, and the Gene Ontology (GO). In this report we discuss how and why philosophical methods improve both the internal coherence of LinKBase®, and its capacity to serve as a translation hub, improving the interoperability of the ontologies through which it navigates. (shrink)

This is a study of the relativity of facts in relation to the frameworks of reference in terms of which those facts are established. In this early paper from 1975, intended for a less technical audience, the author proposes an understanding of facts and their associated frameworks in terms of complementarity. This understanding of facts leads to an integrated yet pluralistic concept of reality. In the Addendum, readers will find a partial listing of related publications by the author that extend (...) the research described in this paper. (shrink)

This essay revisits the topic of how we should measure the things that matter, at a time when we continue to mismeasure our lives, as we hold fast to outworn myths of usefulness, popularity, and the desire to influence others. /// Three central, unquestioned presumptions have come to govern much of contemporary society, education, and the professions. They are: the high value placed on usefulness, on the passion to achieve popularity, and on the desire to influence others. In this essay, (...) the psychologist-philosopher author makes the case against these presumptions, presumptions which lead to exclusionary commitments that stand in the way of human cultural development. (shrink)

Whether truth, morality, and beauty have an objective basis has been a perennial question for philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics, while for a great many relativists and skeptics it poses a problem without a solution. In this essay, the author proposes an innovative approach that shows how cognitive intelligence, moral intelligence, and aesthetic intelligence provide the basis needed for objective judgments about truth, morality, and beauty.

The use of protocol analysis in the traning of cognitive skills.

In this essay, I explore a documentary about the curious case of Charlie and his Orchestra. While swing music was outlawed in Nazi Germany as “degenerate,” the Nazi regime created a radio program called “Charlie and his Orchestra” for foreign consumption. The propaganda lay in the changes to the original lyrics of the songs played, making them convey the anti-Semitic and other themes of the Nazi ideology. The review discusses just how good the musicians were, and how popular the program (...) was. (shrink)

In this essay, I review in great detail Ian Garden’s outstanding book, The Third Reich’s Celluloid War. Garden begins by discussing propaganda theory and then discusses not just Nazi feature films and documentaries, but television as well. (The Nazis had the earliest TV network). All in all, the regime produced over 1,300 feature films during its time in power. Garden also compares Nazi propaganda films to British and American ones.

The elimination of ambiguity and redundancy are unquestioned goals in the exact sciences, and yet, as this paper shows, there are inescapable lower bounds that constrain our wish to eliminate them. The author discusses contributions by Richard Hamming (inventor of the Hamming code) and Satosi Watanabe (originator of the Theorems of the Ugly Duckling). Utilizing certain of their results, the author leads readers to recognize the unavoidable, central roles in effective communication, of redundancy, and of ambiguity of meaning, reference, and (...) identification. (shrink)

This paper discusses the philosophical and logical motivations for rejectivism, primarily by considering a dialogical approach to logic, which is formalized in a Question–Answer Semantics. We develop a generalized account of rejectivism through close consideration of Mark Textor's arguments against rejectivism that the negative expression ‘No’ is never used as an act of rejection and is equivalent with a negative sentence. In doing so, we also shed light upon well-known issues regarding the supposed non-embeddability and non-iterability of force indicators.

A psychological and historical study of college students from the standpoint of the psychology and history of American higher education and of liberal arts values.

Most historians explains changes in conceptions of the epistemic virtues and vices in terms of social and historical developments. I argue that such approaches, valuable as they are, neglect the fact that certain changes also reflect changes in metaphysical sensibilities. Certain epistemic virtues and vices are defined relative to an estimate of our epistemic situation that is, in turn, defined by a broader vision or picture of the nature of reality. I defend this claim by charting changing conceptions of the (...) virtue of epistemic humility in 19th century intellectual culture - specifically the scientific naturalists. (shrink)

In this essay, I review a French-American gem of a movie, The Artist. This movie was an homage to the silent film era and is itself almost all silent. I discuss both the artistic and financial success of silent movies, and I praise this film for successfully interesting modern theater-goers despite its almost total lack of sound. The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and—for its outstanding lead actor, Jean Dujardin—Best Actor. It is the only French-produced (...) movie to win Best Picture, and the only (almost entirely) silent movie to win Best Picture since the start of the Academy Awards in 1929. (shrink)

This essay is my review of Bob Bowden’s excellent documentary The Cartel. It is a powerful indictment of public schools and public school teachers’ unions. In a crucial part of the film, we see minority parents at a charter school lottery. Charter schools, like voucher private schools, give parents school choice—although charter schools are public schools technically, but run fairly independently. They are so popular, and the school districts allow so few of them, that parents must apply by lottery for (...) the few slots. The looks of grief on the faces of the parents who lose the lottery—and hence must keep their children in failing public schools—is telling. It is ironic that the nation most admired by American progressives—Sweden—completely voucharized its entire K-12 school system thirty years ago. (shrink)

This is Vol. I in French. Vol. II in English is available separately from this website. -/- The principal objective of the work is to construct an analytically precise methodology which can serve to identify, eliminate, and avoid a certain widespread conceptual fault or misconstruction, called a "projective misconstruction" or "projection" by the author. -/- It is argued that this variety of error in our thinking (i) infects a great number of our everyday, scientific, and philosophical concepts, claims, and theories, (...) (ii) has largely been undetected, and (iii), when remedied, leads to a less controversial and more rigorous elucidation of the transcendental preconditions of human knowledge than has traditionally been possible. -/- The dissertation identifies, perhaps for the first time, a projective variety of self-referential inconsistency, and proposes an innovative, self-reflexive approach to transcendental argument in a logical and phenomenological context. The strength of the approach lies, it is claimed, in the fact that a rejection of the approach is possible only on pain of self-referential inconsistency. The argument is developed in the following stages: -/- A general introduction identifies the central theme of the work, defines the scope of applicability of the results reached, and sketches the direction of the studies that follow. The preliminary discussion culminates in a recognition of the need for a critique of impure reason. -/- The body of the work is divided into two parts: Section I seeks to develop a methodology, on a purely formal basis, which is, on the one hand, capable of being used to study the transcendental foundations of the special sciences, including its own proper transcendental foundation. On the other hand, the methodology proposed is intended as a diagnostic and therapeutic tool for dealing with projective uses of concepts. -/- The approach initiates an analysis of concepts from a perspective which views knowledge as coordination. Section I describes formal structures that possess the status of preconditions in such a coordinative account of knowledge. Special attention is given to the preconditions of identifying reference to logical particulars. The first section attempts, then, to provide a self-referential, transcendental methodology which is essentially revisionary in that it is motivated by a concern for conceptual error-elimination. -/- Phenomenology, considered in its unique capacity as a self-referential, transcendental discipline, is of special relevance to the study. Section II accordingly examines a group of concepts which come into question in connection with the central theme of phenomenological constitution. The "de-projective methodology" developed in Section I is applied to these concepts that have a foundational importance in transcendental phenomenology. A translation is, in effect, proposed from the language of consciousness to a language in which preconditions of referring are investigated. The result achieved is the elimination of self-defeating, projective concepts from a rigorous, phenomenological study of the constitutive foundations of science. -/- The dissertation was presented in a two volume, double-language format for the convenience of French and English researchers. Each volume contains an analytical index. (shrink)

This paper examines the integration and unification of the philosophy and psychology of well-being. For the most part, these disciplines investigate well-being without reference to each other. In recent years, however, with the maturing of each discipline, there have been a growing number of calls to integrate the two. While such calls are welcome, what it means to integrate well-being philosophy and psychology can vary greatly depending on one’s theoretical and practical ends. The aim of this paper is to provide (...) a novel conceptual framework for thinking about integrating well-being philosophy and psychology that systematically categorizes different kinds of integration projects. We divide existing attempts in the literature into three broad categories according to the perspective from which the integration takes place: (1) top-down meta-theoretical unification; (2) psychological integration within philosophy; and (3) philosophical integration within psychology. These categories are then broken down into various further subcategories. Our aim in providing this framework is both to facilitate the assessment and comparison of existing integration attempts and to provide a roadmap for future integration attempts. For each category, we discuss one or two representative examples of the approaches. By doing so, we hope to generate interest in the wide variety of existing integration projects, as well as to generate discussion concerning the benefits and pitfalls of different approaches. (shrink)

Mathematicians often speak of conjectures as being confirmed by evidence that falls short of proof. For their own conjectures, evidence justifies further work in looking for a proof. Those conjectures of mathematics that have long resisted proof, such as the Riemann hypothesis, have had to be considered in terms of the evidence for and against them. In recent decades, massive increases in computer power have permitted the gathering of huge amounts of numerical evidence, both for conjectures in pure mathematics and (...) for the behavior of complex applied mathematical models and statistical algorithms. Mathematics has therefore become (among other things) an experimental science (though that has not diminished the importance of proof in the traditional style). We examine how the evaluation of evidence for conjectures works in mathematical practice. We explain the (objective) Bayesian view of probability, which gives a theoretical framework for unifying evidence evaluation in science and law as well as in mathematics. Numerical evidence in mathematics is related to the problem of induction; the occurrence of straightforward inductive reasoning in the purely logical material of pure mathematics casts light on the nature of induction as well as of mathematical reasoning. (shrink)

One feature of language is that we are able to make mistakes in our use of language. Amongst other sorts of mistakes, we can misspeak, misspell, missign, or misunderstand. Given this, it seems that our metaphysics of words should be flexible enough to accommodate such mistakes. It has been argued that a nominalist account of words cannot accommodate the phenomenon of misspelling. I sketch a nominalist trope-bundle view of words that can.

This essay is my review of Philip Booth’s Wellbeing and the Role of Government. The book is an anthology of original articles by eminent researchers in modern happiness economics, such as: Booth himself; Paul Omerod; David Sacks, Betsey Stephenson, and Justin Wolfers; Christopher Snowden; J. R. Shackleton; Christian Bjornskov; Peter Boettke and Christopher Coyne; and Pedro Schwartz. I conclude by offering several criticisms of the work.

Western philosophy begins with Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Or so we are told by Aristotle and many members of the later doxographical tradition. But a good case can be made that several centuries before the Milesian thinkers began their investigations, the poets of archaic Greece reflected on the limits of human intelligence and concluded that no mortal being could know the full and certain truth. Homer belittled the mental capacities of ‘creatures of a day’ and a series of poets of (...) the archaic period declared that mortals think only in terms of ‘what they meet with’ while failing to detect the larger cycles that make for success or failure. While Xenophanes embraced this pessimistic tradition, a number of early thinkers (Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Philolaus) expressed a more positive view of the powers of human intelligence, at least in those who heard and took to heart their novel philosophical teachings. (shrink)

Most agree that, in some special scenarios, prudence can speak against feeling a fitting emotion. Some go further, arguing that the tension between fittingness and prudence afflicts some emotions in a fairly general way. This paper goes even further: it argues that, when it comes to anxiety, the tension between fittingness and prudence is nearly inescapable. On any plausible theory, an enormous array of possible outcomes are both bad and epistemically uncertain in the right way to ground fitting anxiety. What’s (...) more, the fittingness of an emotion is a demanding, not a permissive, normative status. So the norms of fitting emotion demand a great deal of anxiety. For almost any realistic agent, it would be deeply imprudent to feel anxiety in a way that meets the demands set by norms of fitting emotion. (shrink)

Subject-sensitive invariantism posits surprising connections between a person’s knowledge and features of her environment that are not paradigmatically epistemic features. But which features of a person’s environment have this distinctive connection to knowledge? Traditional defenses of subject-sensitive invariantism emphasize features that matter to the subject of the knowledge-attribution. Call this pragmatic encroachment. A more radical thesis usually goes ignored: knowledge is sensitive to moral facts, whether or not those moral facts matter to the subject. Call this moral encroachment. This paper (...) argues that, insofar as there are good arguments for pragmatic encroachment, there are also good arguments for moral encroachment. (shrink)

There is a meaning crisis correlated with the exponential rate of technology; As it disrupts our lives and forces society and its individuals to adapt increasingly quickly, we lose meaning. The challenge to deal with this immediately becomes philosophical, as we have never before needed to define and understand what “meaning” is on such a conscious level.