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)

There are a bewildering variety of claims connecting Darwin to nineteenth-century philosophy of science—including to Herschel, Whewell, Lyell, German Romanticism, Comte, and others. I argue here that Herschel’s influence on Darwin is undeniable. The form of this influence, however, is often misunderstood. Darwin was not merely taking the concept of “analogy” from Herschel, nor was he combining such an analogy with a consilience as argued for by Whewell. On the contrary, Darwin’s Origin is written in precisely the manner that one (...) would expect were Darwin attempting to model his work on the precepts found in Herschel’s Preliminary Discourse on Natural Science. While Hodge has worked out a careful interpretation of both Darwin and Herschel, drawing similar conclusions, his interpretation misreads Herschel’s use of the vera causa principle and the verification of hypotheses. The new reading that I present here resolves this trouble, combining Hodge’s careful treatment of the structure of the Origin with a more cautious understanding of Herschel’s philosophy of science. This interpretation lets us understand why Darwin laid out the Origin in the way that he did and also why Herschel so strongly disagreed, including in Herschel’s heretofore unanalyzed marginalia in his copy of Darwin’s book. (shrink)

John Rawls’ gamification of justice leads him – along with many other monist political philosophers, not least Ronald Dworkin – to fail to take politics seriously enough. I begin with why we consider games frivolous and then show how Rawls’ theory of justice is not merely analogous to a game, as he himself seems to claim, but is in fact a kind of game. As such, it is harmful to political practice in two ways: one as regards the citizens (...) who participate directly in it, and the other as regards those who do no more than follow it. Similar harms, I then argue, come from taking politics too seriously, which is the attitude I ascribe to pluralist political philosophers such as Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Bernard Williams. To them, the plural, incommensurable nature of values means that they cannot be reconciled and so that politics must be a matter of negotiating dirty, and often tragic, compromises. What we need instead, I conclude, is a third way, one that is neither monist nor pluralist but in-between the two extremes. (shrink)

The ‘liberal-communitarian’ debate arose within anglophone political philosophy during the 1980s. This essay opens with an account of the main outlines of the debate, showing how liberals and communitarians tended to confront each other with opposing interpretations of John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1999; originally published in 1971) and Political Liberalism (2005; originally published in 1993). The essay then proceeds to discuss four forms of ‘liberalism after communitarianism’: Michael Freeden’s account of liberalism as an ideology; Joseph Raz and Will (...) Kymlicka’s perfectionist liberalisms; the liberalism of value pluralists such as Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams; and Judith N. Shklar’s liberalism of fear. It concludes with the suggestion that there are times when liberals of every kind should set aside their ideology, even if only temporarily, in order to listen to their interlocutors with truly open minds. (shrink)

A critique of John Rawls' gamification of justice.

Just war theory − as advanced by Michael Walzer, among others − fails to take war seriously enough. This is because it proposes that we regulate war with systematic rules that are comparable to those of a game. Three types of claims are advanced. The first is phenomenological: that the theory's abstract nature interferes with our judgment of what is, and should be, going on. The second is meta-ethical: that the theory's rules are not, in fact, systematic after all, there (...) being inherent contradictions between them. And the third is practical: that by getting people to view war as like a game, the theory promotes its ‘aestheticization’ (play being a central mode of the aesthetic) such that those who fight are encouraged to act in dangerous ways. And war, it goes without saying, is already dangerous enough. (shrink)

This presentation of Aristotle's natural deduction system supplements earlier presentations and gives more historical evidence. Some fine-tunings resulted from conversations with Timothy Smiley, Charles Kahn, Josiah Gould, John Kearns,John Glanvillle, and William Parry.The criticism of Aristotle's theory of propositions found at the end of this 1974 presentation was retracted in Corcoran's 2009 HPL article "Aristotle's demonstrative logic".

Is the history of philosophy primarily a contribution to PHILOSOPHY or primarily a contribution to HISTORY? This paper is primarily contribution to history (specifically the history of New Zealand) but although the history of philosophy has been big in New Zealand, most NZ philosophers with a historical bent are primarily interested in the history of philosophy as a contribution to philosophy. My essay focuses on two questions: 1) How did New Zealand philosophy get to be so good? And why, given (...) that is so good (a point I am at pains to establish), has it apparently had so slight a cultural impact within New Zealand itself? Did we get the wrong Anderson – the uninspiring William, who was Professor at Auckland, rather than his talented younger brother John, who had such a huge cultural influence as Professor of Philosophy at Sydney? Perhaps but that can only be part of the story since we managed to attract even bigger stars, (notably Karl Popper) as well as breeding bigger talents of our own (Prior, Baier, Bennett, Mulgan, Hursthouse, Waldron and many more). Do we export our best talent? Sometimes – but the stars that stay and the stars who arrive don’t seem to have much impact in New Zealand itself however brightly they shine in the international philosophical firmament. Is it too esoteric? Perhaps, but esoteric philosophy can still have a cultural impact, witness, Moore, Popper and the younger Anderson. Is it, like many of New Zealand’s cultural products (from romance novels to movies), primarily intended for an international audience? That’s a large part of the answer but only a part. Another part of the answer is that philosophy HAS had a cultural impact but that impact is not readily apparent. For NZ philosophers have been less keen to push their ideological barrows and more keen to produce critical thinkers, and critical thinkers don’t all think alike. The logician George Hughes was apparently a life-changing teacher not because he had a nostrum but because he taught people to think. As one of his students said ‘the only ism you believe in is the syllogism’. On the whole the history of New Zealand Philosphy is a ‘From Log Cabin to White House’ tale, ‘From colonial obscurity through struggle and adversity to philosophical excellence’. But there are shadows in the picture. Some departments have nearly come to grief through bureaucratic and political misadventures, and it is hard to resist the suspicion that there is often an element of hostility to philosophers on the part of both university bureaucrats and fellow-academics. I speculate as to why this is the case (we are too argumentative and don’t confine our argumentative tendencies to the cloister) but conclude with some upbeat reflections. on the future of New Zealand Philosophy. (shrink)

This paper criticizes an influential argument from Thomas Nagel’s THE POSSIBILTIY OF ALTRUISM, an argument that plays a foundational role in the philosophies of (at least) Philippa Foot, John McDowell and Jonathan Dancy. Nagel purports to prove that a person can be can be motivated to perform X by the belief that X is likely to bring about Y, without a causally active or biffy desire for Y. If Cullity and Gaut are to be believed (ETHICS AND PRACTICAL REASONING) (...) this is widely regarded within the practical reasoning industry as an established fact. My thesis is a simple one. Nagel’s argument is an abject failure and the philosophies that are founded on it are built upon sand. There is a little bit of rather amateurish X-Phi at the end, but I don’t want readers to get too excited about this as it is essentially icing on the cake. This paper is not primarily an exercise in Experimental Philosophy but in Baby Logic, and it’s central thesis is a logical one, namely that Nagel (to put the point politely) fails to prove his thesis. (shrink)

Short article on the history of the Otago Department.

Corcoran’s 27 entries in the 1999 second edition of Robert Audi’s Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge UP]. -/- ancestral, axiomatic method, borderline case, categoricity, Church (Alonzo), conditional, convention T, converse (outer and inner), corresponding conditional, degenerate case, domain, De Morgan, ellipsis, laws of thought, limiting case, logical form, logical subject, material adequacy, mathematical analysis, omega, proof by recursion, recursive function theory, scheme, scope, Tarski (Alfred), tautology, universe of discourse. -/- The entire work is available online free at more than (...) one website. Paste the whole URL. http://archive.org/stream/RobertiAudi_The.Cambridge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy/Robert.Audi_The.Cambrid ge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy -/- The 2015 third edition will be available soon. Before you think of buying it read some reviews on Amazon and read reviews of its competition: For example, my review of the 2008 Oxford Companion to Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Logic,29:3,291-292. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01445340701300429 -/- Some of the entries have already been found to be flawed. For example, Tarski’s expression ‘materially adequate’ was misinterpreted in at least one article and it was misused in another where ‘materially correct’ should have been used. The discussion provides an opportunity to bring more flaws to light. -/- Acknowledgements: Each of these entries was presented at meetings of The Buffalo Logic Dictionary Project sponsored by The Buffalo Logic Colloquium. The members of the colloquium read drafts before the meetings and were generous with corrections, objections, and suggestions. Usually one 90-minute meeting was devoted to one entry although in some cases, for example, “axiomatic method”, took more than one meeting. Moreover, about half of the entries are rewrites of similarly named entries in the 1995 first edition. Besides the help received from people in Buffalo, help from elsewhere was received by email. We gratefully acknowledge the following: José Miguel Sagüillo, John Zeis, Stewart Shapiro, Davis Plache, Joseph Ernst, Richard Hull, Concha Martinez, Laura Arcila, James Gasser, Barry Smith, Randall Dipert, Stanley Ziewacz, Gerald Rising, Leonard Jacuzzo, George Boger, William Demopolous, David Hitchcock, John Dawson, Daniel Halpern, William Lawvere, John Kearns, Ky Herreid, Nicolas Goodman, William Parry, Charles Lambros, Harvey Friedman, George Weaver, Hughes Leblanc, James Munz, Herbert Bohnert, Robert Tragesser, David Levin, Sriram Nambiar, and others. -/- . (shrink)

Corcoran, J. 2007. Syntactics, American Philosophy: an Encyclopedia. 2007. Eds. John Lachs and Robert Talisse. New York: Routledge. pp.745-6. -/- Syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics are the three levels of investigation into semiotics, or the comprehensive study of systems of communication, as described in 1938 by the American philosopher Charles Morris (1903-1979). Syntactics studies signs themselves and their interrelations in abstraction from their meanings and from their uses and users. Semantics studies signs in relation to their meanings, but still (...) in abstraction from their uses and users. Pragmatics studies signs as meaningful entities used in various ways by humans. Taking current written English as the system of communication under investigation, it is a matter of syntactics that the two four-character strings ‘tact’ and ‘tics’ both occur in the ten-character string ‘syntactics’. It is a matter of semantics that the ten-character string ‘syntactics’ has only one sense and, in that sense, it denotes a branch of semiotics. It is a matter of pragmatics that the ten-character string ‘syntactics’ was not used as an English word before 1937 and that it is sometimes confused with the much older six-character string ‘syntax’. Syntactics is the simplest and most abstract branch of semiotics. At the same time, it is the most basic. Pragmatics presupposes semantics and syntactics; semantics presupposes syntactics. The basic terms of syntactics include the following: ‘character’ as alphabetic letters, numeric digits, and punctuation marks; ‘string’ as sign composed of a concatenation of characters; ‘occur’ as ‘t’ and ‘c’ both occur twice in ‘syntactics’. However, perhaps the most basic terms of syntactics are ‘type’ and ‘token’ in the senses introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), America’s greatest logician, who could be considered the grandfather of syntactics, if not the father. These are explained below. (shrink)

This presentation includes a complete bibliography of John Corcoran’s publications relevant on Aristotle’s logic. The Sections I, II, III, and IV list respectively 23 articles, 44 abstracts, 3 books, and 11 reviews. Section I starts with two watershed articles published in 1972: the Philosophy & Phenomenological Research article—from Corcoran’s Philadelphia period that antedates his discovery of Aristotle’s natural deduction system—and the Journal of Symbolic Logic article—from his Buffalo period first reporting his original results. It ends with works published in (...) 2015. Some items are annotated as listed or with endnotes connecting them with other work and pointing out passages that, in retrospect, are seen to be misleading and in a few places erroneous. In addition, Section V, “Discussions”, is a nearly complete secondary bibliography of works describing, interpreting, extending, improving, supporting, and criticizing Corcoran’s work: 10 items published in the 1970s, 24 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s, 60 in the 2000s, and 70 in the current decade. The secondary bibliography is also annotated as listed or with endnotes: some simply quoting from the cited item, but several answering criticisms and identifying errors. Section VI, “Alternatives”, lists recent works on Aristotle’s logic oblivious of Corcoran’s research and, more generally in some cases, even of the Łukasiewicz-initiated tradition. As is evident from Section VII, “Acknowledgements”, Corcoran’s publications benefited from consultation with other scholars, most notably George Boger, Charles Kahn, John Mulhern, Mary Mulhern, Anthony Preus, Timothy Smiley, Michael Scanlan, Roberto Torretti, and Kevin Tracy. All of Corcoran’s Greek translations were done in collaboration with two or more classicists. Corcoran never published a sentence without discussing it with his colleagues and students. (shrink)

Corcoran, J. 2007. Psychologism. American Philosophy: an Encyclopedia. Eds. John Lachs and Robert Talisse. New York: Routledge. Pages 628-9. -/- Psychologism with respect to a given branch of knowledge, in the broadest neutral sense, is the view that the branch is ultimately reducible to, or at least is essentially dependent on, psychology. The parallel with logicism is incomplete. Logicism with respect to a given branch of knowledge is the view that the branch is ultimately reducible to logic. Every branch (...) of knowledge depends on logic. Psychologism is found in several fields including history, political science, economics, ethics, epistemology, linguistics, aesthetics, mathematics, and logic. Logicism is found mainly in branches of mathematics: number theory, analysis, and, more rarely, geometry. Although the ambiguous term ‘psychologism’ has senses with entirely descriptive connotations, it is widely used in senses that are derogatory. No writers with any appreciation of this point will label their own views as psychologistic. It is usually used pejoratively by people who disapprove of psychologism. The term ‘scientism’ is similar in that it too has both pejorative and descriptive senses but its descriptive senses are rarely used any more. It is almost a law of linguistics that the negative connotations tend to drive out the neutral and the positive. Dictionaries sometimes mark both words with a usage label such as “Usually disparaging”. In this article, the word is used descriptively mainly because there are many psychologistic views that are perfectly respectable and even endorsed by people who would be offended to have their views labeled psychologism. A person who subscribes to logicism is called a logicist, but there is no standard word for a person who subscribes to psychologism. ‘Psychologist’, which is not suitable, occurs in this sense. ‘Psychologician’, with stress on the second syllable as in ‘psychologist’, has been proposed. In the last century, some of the most prominent forms of psychologism pertained to logic; the rest of this article treats only such forms. Psychologism in logic is very “natural”. After all, logic studies reasoning, which is done by the mind, whose nature and functioning is studied in psychology—using the word ‘psychology’ in its broadest etymological sense. (shrink)

C. I. Lewis (I883-I964) was the first major figure in history and philosophy of logic—-a field that has come to be recognized as a separate specialty after years of work by Ivor Grattan-Guinness and others (Dawson 2003, 257).Lewis was among the earliest to accept the challenges offered by this field; he was the first who had the philosophical and mathematical talent, the philosophical, logical, and historical background, and the patience and dedication to objectivity needed to excel. He was blessed with (...) many fortunate circumstances, not least of which was entering the field when mathematical logic, after only six decades of toil, had just reaped one of its most important harvests with publication of the monumental Principia Mathematica. It was a time of joyful optimism which demanded an historical account and a sober philosophical critique. Lewis was one of the first to apply to mathematical logic the Aristotelian dictum that we do not understand a living institution until we see it growing from its birth. (shrink)

The issue of the relation of the sacred to the secular has become paramount in virtually every country in the world. From church-state relations in the US, with the debates around abortion and same-sex marriage, to the vitriolic discussions in France over the veil (hijab) sacred-secular, faith-reason, transcendence-imminence -- impacts every aspect of personal, social, and political life. Indeed, the questions often asked are whether Huntington s, Clash of Civilizations is today s reality? Is clash and conflict inevitable? This volume (...) collects papers from scholars from all around the globe and digs into that question. Do the sacred and the secular necessarily end in conflict? Building on scholars such as Charles Taylor, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermaus, and John Rawls, as well as the world s great religious traditions, the authors assembled here respond with a nuanced, but resounding, NO. A deeper read demands the possibility, indeed, necessity, of complementarity. It has become ever more urgent to discover the proper and complementary relation between the two so that both can be promoted through mutual collaboration. The deeper implications of the discussion can be perceived in many current global problems: cultural identity, multiculturalism, pluralism, nationalism, economic inequality, race, terrorism, migration, public education, and climate change. The volume unfolds in seven sections: Foundations; Sacred and Secular; Complement or Conflict; Hermeneutics; African traditions; South Asian Traditions; Chinese Traditions; and Islamic Traditions. It is fascinating to observe how the various authors grapple with unfolding the relation of sacred/secular, faith/reason, church-mosque/state, transcendence/imminence. The section on Islam illustrates this. These chapters deal with the thorny, usually misunderstood debate between the scholars and those, westerners refer to as fundamentalists or radicals. In the latter, there is no space left to reason, interpretation, or historical criticism. This ugly divide usually emerges in the hot-button issues like the treatment of women and religion-related terrorism. However, these oversimplifications betray the intellectual roots of Islamic tradition. Here the argument is advanced that there are common and multiple meanings of rationality in the Islamic primary sources and that doctrine, the Qur an, and the Sunnah, open considerable space for the rational and the secular in Islamic teachings. Unknown to most in the West, the grappling within Islam goes on. Moreover, the grappling seems to be heating up in all traditions. We are all called to the discussion. Our globe needs it! (shrink)

Peter H. Hare (1935-2008) developed informed, original views about the proposition: some published (Hare 1969 and Hare-Madden 1975); some expressed in conversations at scores of meetings of the Buffalo Logic Colloquium and at dinners following. The published views were expository and critical responses to publications by Curt J. Ducasse (1881-1969), a well-known presence in American logic, a founder of the Association for Symbolic Logic and its President for one term.1Hare was already prominent in the University of Buffalo's Philosophy Department in (...) 1969 when I was appointed. Soon after, he became Chair. As his Associate Chair from 1971to 1975, I spent many hours with him in Buffalo and on professional trips .. (shrink)

In this paper we suggest a revisionist perspective on two significant figures in early modern life science and philosophy: William Harvey and John Locke. Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, is often named as one of the rare representatives of the ‘life sciences’ who was a major figure in the Scientific Revolution. While this status itself is problematic, we would like to call attention to a different kind of problem: Harvey dislikes abstraction and controlled experiments (aside (...) from the ligature experiment in De Motu Cordis), tends to dismiss the value of instruments such as the microscope, and emphasizes instead the privileged status of ‘observed experience’. To use a contemporary term, Harvey appears to rely on, and chiefly value, ‘tacit knowledge’. Secondly, Locke’s project is often explained with reference to the image he uses in the Epistle to the Reader of his Essay, that he was an “underlabourer” of the sciences. In fact, despite the significant medical phase of his career, Locke’s ‘empiricism’ turns out to be above all a practical (i.e. ‘moral’) project, which focuses on the delimitation of our powers in order to achieve happiness, and rejects the possibility of naturalizing knowledge. When combined, these two cases suggest a different view of some canonical moments in early modern natural philosophy. (shrink)

Van Ingen's aim aim is to vindicate the moral life by mounting and then meeting a powerful challenge. But he makes it so easy to be moral - it is enough to care about one other person - and so tough to be amoral - it involves being absolutely selfish - that his challenge is no challenge at all. It's not much of a vindication of morality if the morality you vindicate makes Tony Soprano a moral person.

In this article, we explore some of the roles of cameras in policing in the United States. We outline the trajectory of key new media technologies, arguing that cameras and social media together generate the ambient surveillance through which graphic violence is now routinely captured and circulated. Drawing on Michel Foucault, we suggest that there are important intersections between this video footage and police subjectivity, and propose to look at two: recruit training at the Washington state Basic Law Enforcement Academy (...) and the Seattle Police Department’s body-worn camera project. We analyze these cases in relation to the major arguments for and against initiatives to increase police use of cameras, outlining what we see as techno-optimistic and techno-pessimistic positions. Drawing on the pragmatism of John Dewey, we argue for a third position that calls for field-based inquiry into the specific co-production of socio-techno subjectivities. (shrink)

All of us, including scientists, make judgments about what is true or false, probable or improbable. And in the process, we frequently appeal to concepts such as evidential support or explanation. Bayesian philosophers of science have given illuminating formal accounts of these concepts. This paper aims to follow in their footsteps, providing a novel formal account of various additional concepts: the likelihood-prior trade-off, successful accommodation of evidence, ad hocness, and, finally, consilience—sometimes also called “unification”. Using these accounts, I also provide (...) a new Bayesian analysis of how someone such as Charles Darwin hypothetically could have reasoned in favor of evolution over special creationism. Lastly, I explore how these accounts relate to other topics and accounts in philosophy, and I chart out some areas for further research. (shrink)

Abstract Charles Darwin, in his discussions with Asa Gray and in his published works, doubted whether God could so arrange it that exactly the desired contingent events would occur to cause particular outcomes by natural selection. In this paper, I argue that even a limited or neo-Leibnizian deity could have chosen a world that satisfied some arbitrary set of goals or functions in its outcomes and thus answer Darwin's conundrum. In more general terms, this supports the consistency of natural (...) selection with providentialism, and makes “theistic evolutionism” a coherent position to hold. (shrink)

A critique of a kind of 'moral realism' that is in fact a rather thinly disguised version of global historicist idealism. If you don't like the idea that facts are hard and values are soft, you can pump up the values to make them as hard as the facts or soften down the facts to make them as soggy as the values. Lovibond prefers the latter strategy. After some critical remarks about Lovibond's book (including its implicit authoritarianism) I conclude with (...) some equally critical remarks about McDowell's blurb. Unusually for a review and for a first publication, this has actually been cited in the literature, for instance in the second edition of Platts' *Ways of Meaning*. (shrink)

This paper is a discussion of Frege's maxim that it is only in the context of a sentence that a word has a meaning. Quine reads the maxim as saying that the sentence is the fundamental unit of significance. Dummett rejects this as a truism. But it is not a truism since it stands in opposition to a conception of meaning held by John Locke and others. The maxim denies that a word has a sense independently of any sentence (...) in which it occurs. Dummett says this denial is inconsistent with the fact that people understand sentences they have never heard before. The maxim is defended against this attack. (shrink)

Getting physical: Empiricism’s medical History Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9474-4 Authors John Gascoigne, School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2056, Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

The thesis explores and suggests a solution to a problem that I identify in John McDowell’s and Lynne Rudder Baker’s approaches to mental and intention-dependent (ID) causation in the physical world. I begin (chapter 1) with a brief discussion of McDowell’s non-reductive and anti-scientistic account of mind and world, which I believe offers, through its vision of the unbounded conceptual and the world as within the space of reasons, to liberate and renew philosophy. However, I find an inconsistency in (...) McDowell’s criticism of Davidson’s anomalous monism (chapter 2), stemming from a tension between McDowell’s naïve common sense view of mental causation and an understanding of ordinary physical causation which I think McDowell ought to embrace, which portrays it as both objective, in the sense of being recognition- independent, and as belonging within the space of reasons. The question of the relation between these two concepts of causation is an aspect of the more general question of the relation between the space of reasons and the realm of law. In chapter 3 I begin examining the possibility that Baker’s account of material and property constitution could form the basis of a bridge between the two spaces, and find it generally promising. However, I find that her defence of her version of non-reductive monism against Kim’s causal arguments also runs into problems, which I attribute to the fact that she holds a view of causation as secondary to causal explanation. 2 3 In chapter 4 I develop an account of what I call manifest physical causation – of objective causal relations in the world of Sellars’s manifest image. Based upon McDowell’s transcendental empiricism, which takes the existence of the ordinary perceived world as a condition of the possibility of our possession of conceptual capacities, I contend that it is this picture of reality, rather than that of fundamental physics, that should be the starting point of our theorizing. Causation in the manifest image, I argue, covers the behaviour of the familiar physical world as well as that of its well-understood extensions into the special sciences and engineering. Manifest physical causation, on my account, is productive, acts through mechanisms which are almost entirely mechanical, electromagnetic, and/ or chemical, and is causally closed. In my view, normative, semantic, contentful property-instances are not part of the manifest physical causal nexus. In my final chapter I suggest a modification of Baker’s constitution account, which I call Constituted Causation, whereby higher-level – mental and other ID – causal relations are constituted, in favourable circumstances, by lower-level ones. ID causal relations belong in their own causal nexus but are connected to the manifest physical world through constitution, a relation of unity without identity. Causation and constitution are, respectively, intra- and inter-level relations, and they are non-overlapping. The constituted network of rational and normative relations bears, I believe, striking parallels with McDowell’s view of reality. According to Baker’s view of constitution, the essential properties of constituted entities subsume those of their constituters; extending this to my account enables us to say that the real cause and explanation of someone’s action is that they consciously performed it 4 rather than that certain manifest causal processes occurred at the lower level. (shrink)

The New Age philosopher, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), was the most prolific and arguably the most influential philosopher of his era. He assembled a substantial library, of approximately 9,000 items, which has been preserved intact since his death. Most of Rudolf Steiner’s books are in German, his native language however there are books in other languages, including English, French, Italian, Swedish, Sanskrit and Latin. There are more books in English than in any other foreign language. Steiner esteemed English as “a universal (...) world language”. The present paper identifies 327 books in English in Rudolf Steiner’s personal library. Fifty percent of the English-language books identified are on Theosophy (n=164). Rudolf Steiner was the General Secretary of the German branch of the Theosophy Society from 1902, and he hived off his own Anthroposophy Society in 1912. The present study reveals that Steiner maintained his interest in Theosophy throughout his life as he stayed up to date with the proliferating portfolio of Theosophy publications. The publication dates of Steiner’s Theosophy collection range from 1877 to 1923. The leading exponents of Theosophy in his day are well represented in Steiner’s collection, including Annie Besant (n=61), Charles Leadbeater (n=13), William Westcott (n=13) and Helena Blavatsky (n=10). Of the other 50% of the Anglo-books identified, 20% are in the category of Religion (n=67), 10% are Social Science (n=33), 6% are Philosophy (n=21), 4% are Science (n=13), and 3% each are Anthroposophy (n=11), History (n=9) and Arts (n=9). The publication dates of Steiner’s Anglo-books span the period 1659 to 1925. This demonstrates that Steiner was acquiring Anglo-books right to the end of his life. The Steiner library throws light on the development of the thoughts of this remarkable individual and the present paper reveals Steiner’s engagement throughout his life with the world of Anglo-publishing and thought. (shrink)

The phenomenon of ‘plant sleep’ – whereby vegetables rhythmically open and close their leaves or petals in daily cycles – has been a continual source of fascination for those with botanical interests, from the Portuguese physician Cristóbal Acosta and the Italian naturalist Prospero Alpini in the sixteenth century to Percy Bysshe Shelley and Charles Darwin in the nineteenth. But it was in 1757 that the topic received its earliest systemic treatment on English shores with the prodigious author, botanist, actor, (...) and Royal Society critic John Hill’s The Sleep of Plants, and Cause of Motion in the Sensitive Plant. As the present article aims to illustrate, Hill and his respondents used this remarkable behaviour, exhibited by certain plants, as a lens through which to reassess the nature of vegetables, and to address pressing questions of wider natural philosophical import, particularly the degree of continuity between the structures and functions of plants and animals and whether similar mechanisms necessarily account for related movements in different life forms. These disputes, this paper contends, also had profound methodological implications regarding the proper way to conduct experiments, the extent to which it was acceptable to extrapolate from observations, and the status of causal explanations. (shrink)

Kant holds that the whole “higher faculty of knowledge” (‘reason’ or ‘understanding’ in a broad sense), is a spontaneous faculty. But what could this mean? It seems that it could either be a perfectly innocent claim or a very dangerous one. The innocent thought is that reason is spontaneous because it is not wholly passive, not just a slave to what bombards the senses. If so, then the rejection of Hume’s radical empiricism would suffice for Kant’s claim. But the dangerous (...) thought is that reason, and the ‘I think’ which expresses it, is free, having the power to produce something entirely from itself. While this freedom is characteristic of practical reason, could it be characteristic of reason in general, even in its theoretical employment? Some contemporary interpreters have admirably defended the ‘dangerous’ conception by stripping it of the implication that it makes reason in general entirely self-sufficient. I attempt to add to this effort. However, what I contend is that this weightier conception of spontaneity (‘absolute’ or ‘non-relative’ spontaneity) requires abandoning a certain approach to the question that has been assumed by virtually everyone in the debate—namely, that the question can be answered by siding with either the so-called ‘metaphysical’ or the ‘epistemic’ interpreters of Kant. My goal is to suggest that the proper perspective on reason’s spontaneity resists such characterizations all together, and thereby resists any of the conditions under which it could be understood as ‘relative’ to anything. (shrink)

Kant describes the understanding as a faculty of spontaneity. What this means is that our capacity to judge what is true is responsible for its own exercises, which is to say that we issue our judgments for ourselves. To issue our judgments for ourselves is to be self-conscious – i.e., conscious of the grounds upon which we judge. To grasp the spontaneity of the understanding, then, we must grasp the self-consciousness of the understanding. I argue that what Kant requires for (...) explaining spontaneity is a conception of judgment as an intrinsic self-consciousness of the total unity of possible knowledge. This excludes what have been called ‘relative’ accounts of the spontaneity of the understanding, according to which our judgments are issued through a capacity fixed by external conditions. If so, then Kant conceives of understanding as entirely active. Or, to put it another way, he conceives of this capacity as absolutely spontaneous. (shrink)

Sebastian Rödl’s 2018 book articulates and unfolds the thought that judgment’s self-consciousness is identical with its objectivity. This view is laid forth in a Hegelian spirit, against the spirit of Kant’s merely formal or transcendental idealism. I review Rödl’s central theses and then offer a criticism of his reading of Kant. I hold that we can agree with Rödl that self-consciousness is identical with objectivity (though only in a ‘formal’ sense). We can also agree with Rödl that this identity enables (...) us to see the completeness and the incompleteness of judgment as two sides of one coin. And, it is not necessary to reject the formality or ‘emptiness’ of Kant’s ‘I think’ in order to establish these points. Indeed, the virtues of these theses flows directly from such notions in Kant. And, because Rödl need not reject the central features of Kant’s formal idealism, he also need not locate them as the source of the need for a turn to Hegel. (shrink)

I argue that, for Kant, there is a point at which the notions of self-consciousness and self-limitation become one. I proceed by spelling out a logical progression of forms of self-consciousness in Kant’s philosophy, where at each stage we locate the limits of the capacity in question and ask what it takes to know those limits. After briefly sketching a notion of self-consciousness available even to the animal, we look at whether there could be a notion of self-consciousness available to (...) the capacity of human sensibility. At this stage I argue that Kant and Heidegger (or Heidegger’s Kant) share a conception of what it is to be self-limiting through self-consciousness. I then critically examine this conception, and, specifically, the way in which it fails to account for the most essential form of self-limitation in Kant’s critical philosophy—namely, the form of self-limitation which rejects spatial and temporal articulation. The conclusion we reach is that Kant’s theory of transcendental self-consciousness is a theory of the activity of thinking as determining itself (including its limits) non-spatially and non-temporally. (shrink)

This essay presents a critique of what Robert Hanna has recently called the ‘sensibility first’ reading of Kant. I first spell out, in agreement with Hanna, why the contemporary debate among Kant scholars over conceptualism and non-conceptualism must be understood only from within the perspective of what I dub the ‘priority question’—that is, the question whether one or the other of our “two stems” of cognition may ground the objectivity and normativity of the other. I then spell out why the (...) priority question may be asked only from within the perspective of self-consciousness. Specifically, the central issue to be dealt with is how what Kant calls the original combination of understanding and sensibility is a synthesis internal to an act of self-consciousness. Only then can we ask what that original synthesis might tell us about the possibility of prioritizing one capacity over another in a story of cognition generally. Once we see the central issue more clearly, then I will look at the ‘sensibility first’ view in its most general form and propose that it should be criticized for its failure to account for Kant’s notion of an objective unity of self-consciousness. (shrink)

Autor prostredníctvom skúmania literárnych diel Charlesa Dickensa, Williama Makepeaca Thackeryho, George Eliotovej a Thomasa Hardyho vytvára mozaiku viktoriánskej morálky Anglicka 19. storočia. Dospel k záveru, že uvedená doba vôbec nebola taká puritánska, ako si ju zvykneme predstavovať a morálne problémy, ktoré ľudstvo rieši v priebehu svojho vývoja sú vo svojej podstate univerzálne, hoci nie totožné. Líšia sa vo svojich individuálnych podobách, v akých sa s nimi stretávame v jednotlivých obdobiach dejín ľudstva.

In Cathy Mason’s piece What’s Bad about Friendship with Bad People, she affirms that being friends with someone who has deep moral failings is itself corrupt. (529) Indeed her claim is true, but it is fallacious as she mistakenly ascribes the wrongfulness of such relationships to friends taking each other’s opinions seriously. But the mere consideration of unethical views is not a moral fault but a virtue and a skill. The real problem is that in befriending amoral people, we by (...) definition accept, approve of, and respect objectionable beliefs. (shrink)

We often think about competition as a foil to friendship as it seems to fundamentally compromise, even preclude norms of love. Indeed friendships can persist between rivals, but traditionally despite competitive fora. Competition between friends is often unavoidable and divisive; if left unchecked and unreconciled, the friendship is undermined. Questions about of how we ought to resolve this fraught dynamic persist; should we aim to compartmentalize and separate competition out of friendship, do we accept the “primacy” of our social or (...) professional ventures at the expense of our friendships, or are our competitive sensibilities better left unnamed, avoided, and unaddressed in friendships? My goal here is to argue for a model of friendship that proposes competition as a mechanism by which two friends might be unified, where the value of rivalry is not only useful as a means to enhance an end, but actually capable of engendering good in and of itself. (shrink)

In this article, network science is discussed from a methodological perspective, and two central theses are defended. The first is that network science exploits the very properties that make a system complex. Rather than using idealization techniques to strip those properties away, as is standard practice in other areas of science, network science brings them to the fore, and uses them to furnish new forms of explanation. The second thesis is that network representations are particularly helpful in explaining the properties (...) of non-decomposable systems. Where part-whole decomposition is not possible, network science provides a much-needed alternative method of compressing information about the behavior of complex systems, and does so without succumbing to problems associated with combinatorial explosion. The article concludes with a comparison between the uses of network representation analyzed in the main discussion, and an entirely distinct use of network representation that has recently been discussed in connection with mechanistic modeling. (shrink)

In this paper I shall explain how I came to realize that for as long as I believed that there exists an epistemic gap, or veil of perception, separating the world into that which is subjective and internal to the mind from that which is objective and external to the mind, I was unable to provide a compelling argument for the existence of this same Epistemic Gap ontology.

This paper describes one style of functional analysis commonly used in the neurosciences called task-bound functional analysis. The concept of function invoked by this style of analysis is distinctive in virtue of the dependence relations it bears to transient environmental properties. It is argued that task-bound functional analysis cannot explain the presence of structural properties in nervous systems. An alternative concept of neural function is introduced that draws on the theoretical neuroscience literature, and an argument is given to show that (...) this alternative concept of may help to overcome the explanatory limitations of task-bound functional analysis. (shrink)

This paper introduces a new, expanded range of relevant cognitive psychological research on collaborative recall and social memory to the philosophical debate on extended and distributed cognition. We start by examining the case for extended cognition based on the complementarity of inner and outer resources, by which neural, bodily, social, and environmental resources with disparate but complementary properties are integrated into hybrid cognitive systems, transforming or augmenting the nature of remembering or decision-making. Adams and Aizawa, noting this distinctive complementarity argument, (...) say that they agree with it completely: but they describe it as “a non-revolutionary approach” which leaves “the cognitive psychology of memory as the study of processes that take place, essentially without exception, within nervous systems.” In response, we carve out, on distinct conceptual and empirical grounds, a rich middle ground between internalist forms of cognitivism and radical anti-cognitivism. Drawing both on extended cognition literature and on Sterelny’s account of the “scaffolded mind” (this issue), we develop a multidimensional framework for understanding varying relations between agents and external resources, both technological and social. On this basis we argue that, independent of any more “revolutionary” metaphysical claims about the partial constitution of cognitive processes by external resources, a thesis of scaffolded or distributed cognition can substantially influence or transform explanatory practice in cognitive science. Critics also cite various empirical results as evidence against the idea that remembering can extend beyond skull and skin. We respond with a more principled, representative survey of the scientific psychology of memory, focussing in particular on robust recent empirical traditions for the study of collaborative recall and transactive social memory. We describe our own empirical research on socially distributed remembering, aimed at identifying conditions for mnemonic emergence in collaborative groups. Philosophical debates about extended, embedded, and distributed cognition can thus make richer, mutually beneficial contact with independently motivated research programs in the cognitive psychology of memory. (shrink)

Antisemitism is fun. This essay explains why and proposes a new approach to combating it.

The ninth and tenth chapters of the Origin mark a profound, if perhaps difficult to detect, shift in the book’s argumentative structure. In the previous few chapters and in the ninth, Darwin has been exploring a variety of objections to natural selection, some more obvious (where are all the fossils of transitional forms?) and some showing careful attention to challenging consequences of evolution (could selection really produce instincts?). Starting in the tenth, however, Darwin turns to showing us what kinds of (...) new and unexpected results evolutionary theory might be able to offer us, again in domains both predictable (extinction) and unexpected (biogeography, embryology). It is notable that it is the fossil record that serves as this pivot point, being both a source of potentially powerful objections to evolutionary theory and home to some of its most compelling new explanations. In this chapter, I present both sets of arguments and consider what role Darwin gave to fossil evidence, in the process attempting to discover why it might have played this unique role in two different parts of Darwin’s “long argument” for evolution by natural selection. Geology’s special place, I argue, derives at least in part from its particular importance in Darwin’s social and intellectual context. (shrink)

We are living through an era of increased robotisation. Some authors have already begun to explore the impact of this robotisation on legal rules and practice. In doing so, many highlight potential liability gaps that might arise through robot misbehaviour. Although these gaps are interesting and socially significant, they do not exhaust the possible gaps that might be created by increased robotisation. In this article, I make the case for one of those alternative gaps: the retribution gap. This gap arises (...) from a mismatch between the human desire for retribution and the absence of appropriate subjects of retributive blame. I argue for the potential existence of this gap in an era of increased robotisation; suggest that it is much harder to plug this gap than it is to plug those thus far explored in the literature; and then highlight three important social implications of this gap. (shrink)

Will brain imaging technology soon enable neuroscientists to read minds? We cannot answer this question without some understanding of the state of the art in neuroimaging. But neither can we answer this question without some understanding of the concept invoked by the term "mind reading." This article is an attempt to develop such understanding. Our analysis proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, we provide a categorical explication of mind reading. The categorical explication articulates empirical conditions that must be (...) satisfied if mind reading is to be achieved. In the second stage, we develop a metric for judging the proficiency of mind reading experiments. The conception of mind reading that emerges helps to reconcile folk psychological judgments about what mind reading must involve with the constraints imposed by empirical strategies for achieving it. (shrink)

This paper adds another argument to the rising tide of panic about robots and AI. The argument is intended to have broad civilization-level significance, but to involve less fanciful speculation about the likely future intelligence of machines than is common among many AI-doomsayers. The argument claims that the rise of the robots will create a crisis of moral patiency. That is to say, it will reduce the ability and willingness of humans to act in the world as responsible moral agents, (...) and thereby reduce them to moral patients. Since that ability and willingness is central to the value system in modern liberal democratic states, the crisis of moral patiency has a broad civilization-level significance: it threatens something that is foundational to and presupposed in much contemporary moral and political discourse. I defend this argument in three parts. I start with a brief analysis of an analogous argument made in pop culture. Though those arguments turn out to be hyperbolic and satirical, they do prove instructive as they illustrates a way in which the rise of robots could impact upon civilization, even when the robots themselves are neither malicious nor powerful enough to bring about our doom. I then introduce the argument from the crisis of moral patiency, defend its main premises and address objections. (shrink)

If a robot sends a deceptive signal to a human user, is this always and everywhere an unethical act, or might it sometimes be ethically desirable? Building upon previous work in robot ethics, this article tries to clarify and refine our understanding of the ethics of robotic deception. It does so by making three arguments. First, it argues that we need to distinguish between three main forms of robotic deception (external state deception; superficial state deception; and hidden state deception) in (...) order to think clearly about its ethics. Second, it argues that the second type of deception – superficial state deception – is not best thought of as a form of deception, even though it is frequently criticised as such. And third, it argues that the third type of deception is best understood as a form of betrayal because doing so captures the unique ethical harm to which it gives rise, and justifies special ethical protections against its use. (shrink)