I survey the philosophical literature on grounding explanation and its connection to metaphysical ground.

Entitlement is defined as a sort of epistemic justification that one can possess by default – a sort of epistemic justification that does not need to be earned or acquired. Epistemologists who accept the existence of entitlement generally have a certain anti-sceptical role in mind for it – entitlement is intended to help us resist what would otherwise be compelling radical sceptical arguments. But this role leaves various details unspecified and, thus, leaves scope for a number of different potential conceptions (...) of entitlement. At one extreme there are conceptions that portray entitlement as a weak, attenuated epistemic status and, at the other, we have conceptions that portray entitlement as something potent and strong. Certain intermediate conceptions are also possible. In this paper, I shall argue that the weak and intermediate conceptions of entitlement do not survive careful scrutiny, and the stronger conceptions – while they do, in a way, strain credulity – are the only conceptions that are ultimately viable. (shrink)

In this paper I explore some ideas inspired by Federico Picinali’s Justice In-Between: A Study of Intermediate Criminal Verdicts. Picinali makes a case for the introduction of intermediate options in criminal trials – verdicts with consequences that are harsher than an acquittal, but not so harsh as a conviction. From a certain perspective, the absence of intermediate options in criminal trials is puzzling – out of kilter with much of our everyday decision-making and, perhaps, with the recommendations of expected utility (...) theory. I will argue, however, that the lack of intermediate options is much less puzzling when put in the context of our ordinary practices of blame and non-legal punishment. (shrink)

Computer-Assisted Argument Mapping (CAAM) is a new way of understanding arguments. While still embryonic in its development and application, CAAM is being used increasingly as a training and development tool in the professions and government. Inroads are also being made in its application within education. CAAM claims to be helpful in an educational context, as a tool for students in responding to assessment tasks. However, to date there is little evidence from students that this is the case. This paper outlines (...) the use of CAAM as an educational tool within an Economics and Commerce Faculty in a major Australian research university. Evaluation results are provided from students from a CAAM pilot within an upper-level Economics subject. Results indicate promising support for the use of CAAM and its potential for transferability within the disciplines. If shown to be valuable with further studies, CAAM could be included in capstone subjects, allowing computer technology to be utilised in the service of generic skill development. (shrink)

Many philosophers have found change puzzling. How can it be that something changes in its properties and yet remains the same thing? How can one and the same thing have these different properties? Questions of this sort, about the persistence of things through change, have been an ongoing feature of philosophical discussion since the beginning of the discipline. I think that there is something puzzling here, and that investigating change can be a fruitful way of trying to understand a nest (...) of connected issues concerning identity, time, tense, objects, properties, and instantiation. But not all agree. In some fairly recent papers, for instance, it has been argued that change is not problematic: there is nothing to be worried about. The phenomenon of change, it is suggested, is not one of particular philosophical interest, and we shouldn’t expect it to illuminate our wider discussion. As I have said, I think that change is problematic. I think it is initially mysterious how things can change. I believe working through the problem can tell us things about what the world is like, and thus that it is worthwhile doing so. In this paper I’ll defend the problem from the attempted dissolutions of it. In brief, my argument will be that what we are offered is not a real dissolution of the problem but rather an existing solution to the problem, namely adverbialism. This solution is not universally or even generally accepted. Pointing to a contested solution to a problem is doesn’t successfully dissolve that problem, so the problem of change is not successfully dissolved. (shrink)

Kant holds that whenever we fail to act from duty, we are driven by self-love. In this paper, we argue that there are a variety of different ways in which people go wrong, and we show why it is unsatisfying to reduce all of these to self-love. In doing so, we present Kant with five cases of wrongdoing that are difficult to account for in terms of self-love. We end by suggesting a possible fix for Kant, arguing that he should (...) either accept a pluralistic account of self-love, or move beyond the duty/self-love dichotomy entirely. (shrink)

Harry Frankfurt has published On Inequality, but this is not the first time he has written about this subject. Frankfurt already criticized a rationalistic notion of equality on other occasions (Frankfurt, 1987 & 1997). In these works he says a rationalistic notion of equality cannot fit in with our belief that agents possess their own volitional necessities, which shape volitional structures of the human will. However, Frankfurt's explanatory connection between volitions, love and identification make it difficult to talk about personal (...) freedom. (shrink)

Reconstructability analysis (RA) decomposes wholes, namely data in the form either of set theoretic relations or multivariate probability distributions, into parts, namely relations or distributions involving subsets of variables. Data is modeled and compressed by variable-based decomposition, by more general state-based decomposition, or by the use of latent variables. Models, which specify the interdependencies among the variables, are selected to minimize error and complexity.

Group agents like businesses, political parties, universities, and charity organisations dominate our social and political landscapes. Their activities dictate our legal structures, the availability of education and healthcare, and our collective leap into climate crisis. Hence, it is crucial that we understand both the norms of these group agents and how these norms arise. will argue for applying the organisational account of normativity to group agents as the best means to achieve this understanding. Roughly, the organisational account says that the (...) norms of an agent are determined by that agent’s structure insofar as that structure dictates both what the agent is capable of and what is necessary for its persistence in its present environment. I argue that expanding the organisational account to group agents best positions us to understand both what a group’s norms are and how they arise. I suggest that the organisational account provides us with a powerful tool for addressing unjust collective behaviours in the social and political spheres. (shrink)

NOTE: This paper is a reworking of some aspects of an earlier paper – ‘What else justification could be’ and also an early draft of chapter 2 of Between Probability and Certainty. I'm leaving it online as it has a couple of citations and there is some material here which didn't make it into the book (and which I may yet try to develop elsewhere). My concern in this paper is with a certain, pervasive picture of epistemic justification. On this (...) picture, acquiring justification for believing something is essentially a matter of minimising one’s risk of error – so one is justified in believing something just in case it is sufficiently likely, given one’s evidence, to be true. This view is motivated by an admittedly natural thought: If we want to be fallibilists about justification then we shouldn’t demand that something be certain – that we completely eliminate error risk – before we can be justified in believing it. But if justification does not require the complete elimination of error risk, then what could it possibly require if not its minimisation? If justification does not require epistemic certainty then what could it possibly require if not epistemic likelihood? When all is said and done, I’m not sure that I can offer satisfactory answers to these questions – but I will attempt to trace out some possible answers here. The alternative picture that I’ll outline makes use of a notion of normalcy that I take to be irreducible to notions of statistical frequency or predominance. (shrink)

Determinism which denies freedom of action is a common philosophical view. Is the action of such determinists incompatible with Kant’s claim that a rationally willed being “cannot act otherwise than under the idea of freedom” [G 4, 448]? In my paper, I examine Kant’s argument for this claim at the beginning of the Third Section of the Groundwork and argue that it amounts to the assertion that one cannot act while being aware of being guided by invalid principles. Belief in (...) determinism does not necessarily amount to such awareness. A structurally similar argument based on the contrast between deliberation and prediction is examined and similarly found wanting. (shrink)

This book explores a question central to philosophy--namely, what does it take for a belief to be justified or rational? According to a widespread view, whether one has justification for believing a proposition is determined by how probable that proposition is, given one's evidence. In this book this view is rejected and replaced with another: in order for one to have justification for believing a proposition, one's evidence must normically support it--roughly, one's evidence must make the falsity of that proposition (...) abnormal in the sense of calling for special, independent explanation. This conception of justification bears upon a range of topics in epistemology and beyond. Ultimately, this way of looking at justification guides us to a new, unfamiliar picture of how we should respond to our evidence and manage our own fallibility. This picture is developed here. (shrink)

Tento text se soustřeďuje na prozkoumání vztahu dvou knih Alfreda Northa Whiteheada, Procesu a reality a Funkce rozumu, které byly publikovány ve stejném roce, v roce 1929. Autor textu nejprve představuje Whiteheadovo pojetí spekulativní filosofie, tak jak je představeno na úvodních stránkách Procesu a reality. Poukazuje, že Whitehead pro potřeby konstrukce filosofického schématu odmítl matematickou axiomatickou metodu a metodu rigidního empirismu a představuje Whiteheadovu vlastní filosofickou metodu, metodu deskriptivní generalizace. Ta může být ve stručnosti shrnuta jako imaginativní konstrukce spekulativního schématu, (...) založená na předchozích pozorováních, která je zpětně testována dalšími pozorováními. Text poukazuje na to, že v Procesu a realitě není předvedena imaginativní konstrukce Whiteheadovy filosofie. Jedna z fází deskriptivní generalizace tedy chybí. Text tvrdí, že tuto chybějící fázi deskriptivní generalizace můžeme najít ve Funkci rozumu. (shrink)

Martin E. Rosenberg -/- The Gift of Silence: Towards an Anthropology of Jazz Improvisation as Neuro-Resistance. -/- ABSTRACT: -/- This essay addresses how the complex processes that occur during jazz improvisation enact behaviors that resemble the logic of gift exchange first described by Marcel Mauss. It is possible to bring to bear structural, sociological, political economical, deconstructive or even ethical approaches to what constitutes gift exchange during the performance of jazz. Yet, I would like to shift from focusing this analysis (...) of jazz improvisation with reference to the language of music as symbolic action (which all of these approaches require), to grounding improvisation in embodied and distributed cognition, the performance of which begins with a ritual gift of silence. By silence, I refer to the embodied, yet shared pure duration as felt synchrony within an individual performer, that extends to the members of an ensemble. Thus, I refer to both aesthetic and micro-political implications of embodied, yet also distributed musical cognition in real time. -/- For jazz musicians, embodied silence becomes the initial condition for processes of cognitive bifurcation. For it is bifurcation that attracts us to jazz in the first place. Here I expand my previous work establishing similarities in the behavior of bifurcating systems in physical and cognitive sciences to the unfolding of ambiguity in real time during improvisation with respect to polyphony, polytonality and polyrhythms in the history of jazz from Charlie Parker to Ornette Coleman. We can therefore re-conceptualize jazz improvisation as a subversive antidote for processes of determination identified in a sub-discipline of cultural studies called “cognitive capitalism.” By examining silence from this anthropological perspective, we can conceive of jazz performance as a ritualized resistance to top-down cognitive control immanent with social and digital networks. The ritual enactment that is jazz improvisation points towards an aesthetics of bifurcation that is simultaneously a micro-politics of neuro-resistance. In other words, I argue that freedom of thought requires freedom from thought as an initial condition. -/- Yet, I emphasize the empirical rather than mystical grounds to this gift of silence. The valorization of silence by jazz musicians is not simply etiquette, an ethics of reciprocity for performers exchanging “riffs,” but an initial condition that jazz performers (and, I would argue, listeners) experience in their bodies, thus linking embodied cognition to a collective field of cultural production that emerges from each embodied individual, and yet also pervades the ensemble in ways reminiscent of feedback loops in complex systems. The recent and remarkable research on music and the brain has demonstrated that it is now possible to describe jazz improvisation as possessing both embodied and distributed cognitive properties. The emergent neuronal ensemble behavior within the individual that is visible in jazz improvisors, discovered by the neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins led by Charles Limb, bears striking resemblance to the interactive behaviors of the jazz ensemble itself. Thus, it is by recourse to recent research by myself and others into the cognitive neuroscience of music generally, and jazz improvisation specifically, that the empirical grounds for an anthropology of neuro-resistance become visible. (shrink)

In Knowledge and Lotteries, John Hawthorne offers a diagnosis of our unwillingness to believe, of a given lottery ticket, that it will lose a fair lottery – no matter how many tickets are involved. According to Hawthorne, it is natural to employ parity reasoning when thinking about lottery outcomes: Put roughly, to believe that a given ticket will lose, no matter how likely that is, is to make an arbitrary choice between alternatives that are perfectly balanced given one’s evidence. It’s (...) natural to think that parity reasoning is only applicable to situations involving lotteries dice, spinners etc. – in short, situations in which we are reasoning about the outcomes of a putatively random process. As I shall argue in this paper, however, there are reasons for thinking that parity reasoning can be applied to any proposition that is less than certain given one’s evidence. To see this, we need only remind ourselves of a kind of argument employed by John Pollock and Keith Lehrer in the 1980s. If this argument works, then believing any uncertain proposition, no matter how likely it is, involves a (covert) arbitrary or capricious choice – an idea that contains an obvious sceptical threat. (shrink)

So-called "transparency theories" of self-knowledge, inspired by a remark of Gareth Evans, claim that we can obtain knowledge of our own beliefs by directing out attention towards the world, rather than introspecting the contents of our own minds. Most recent transparency theories concentrate on the case of self-knowledge concerning belief and desires. But can a transparency account be generalised to knowledge of one's own perceptions? In a recent paper, Alex Byrne (2012) argues that we can know what we see by (...) inferring from visual facts about our environment because such facts can exclusively be known by us through vision. I discuss his proposal and object that visual facts, as conceived of by Byrne, are odd: they cannot be remembered and we cannot, as yet, write them down. More needs to be said about them to make his account plausible. (shrink)

Disjointism is the view that co-located objects do not share any parts. A human-shaped statue is composed from a torso, head and limbs; the co-located lumpof clay is only composed from chunks of clay. This essay discusses the tenability of this relatively neglected view, focusing on two objections. The first objection is that disjointism implies co-located copies of microphysical particles. I argue that it doesn’t imply this and that there are more plausible disjointist views of tiny parts available. The second (...) objection is that disjointism is at a loss to explain how material objects can be co-located and why the weights of co-located objects don’t add up. The standard pluralist account appeals to the fact that co-located objects stand in mereological relations and this account is not available to the disjointist. I sketch an alternative account that appeals to a notion of ‘material identity’: the statue is taken to be the same matter as the lump of clay. The resort to a new theoretical primitive may seem to invite a quick rejection on grounds of unnecessary theoretical complexity but I argue that an abductive comparison with rival forms of pluralism shows that such a rejection is misguided. (shrink)

This chapter aims to direct attention to the political dimension of the social media age. Although current events like the Cambridge Analytica data breach managed to raise awareness for the issue, the systematically organized and orchestrated mechanisms at play still remain oblivious to most. Next to dangerous monopoly-tendencies among the powerful players on the market, reliance on automated algorithms in dealing with content seems to enable large-scale manipulation that is applied for economical and political purposes alike. The successful replacement of (...) traditional parties by movements based on personality cults around marketable young faces like Emmanuel Macron or Austria’s Sebastian Kurz is strongly linked to products and services offered by an industry that simply provides likes and followers for cash. Inspired by Trump’s monopolization of the Twitter-channel, these new political acteurs use the potential of social media for effective message control, allowing them to avoid confrontations with professional journalists. In addition, an extremely active minority of organized agitators relies on the viral potential of the web to strongly influence and dictate public discourse – suggesting a shift from the Spiral of Silence to the dangerous illusion of a Nexus of Noise. (shrink)

Rawls’s notion of civil disobedience, which still dominates the literature on this subject, comprises at least these three characteristics: it involves breaking the law, is non-violent and public. But implicit in this notion is a certain tension: it shows pessisimism about the proper functioning of the public sphere as earlier normal appeals have failed, but it also displays a certain optimism about its proper functioning as it assumes that civil disobedience may be effective. In my paper I argue that Rawls (...) cannot explain how civil disobedience may be effective as a public appeal for social justice because he does not fully understand what it means for civil disobedience to be public in relation to the public sphere. His analysis would require an additional notion of publicity which, as I argue, is the notion of hermeneutical publicity. From a Bourdieusian perspective I then make a case for the claim that public spheres always suffer from hermeneutic invisibility. This may explain why non-violent appeals for social justice fail as dialogical practices. Finally I suggest how we nevertheless could understand that civil disobedience can be effective as a dialogical practice. (shrink)

There is something puzzling about statistical evidence. One place this manifests is in the law, where courts are reluctant to base affirmative verdicts on evidence that is purely statistical, in spite of the fact that it is perfectly capable of meeting the standards of proof enshrined in legal doctrine. After surveying some proposed explanations for this, I shall outline a new approach – one that makes use of a notion of normalcy that is distinct from the idea of statistical frequency. (...) The puzzle is not, however, merely a legal one. Our unwillingness to base beliefs on statistical evidence is by no means limited to the courtroom, and is at odds with almost every general principle that epistemologists have proposed as to how we ought to manage our beliefs. (shrink)

According to Object-Oriented Ontology, matter does not exist. Here I will challenge that idea, by advancing some arguments that aim to establish that mat-ter can be conceptualized both as a sensual object as well as a real object. I will also argue that matter is not fictional, and that the word “matter” can be under-stood as a term that is grammatically singular but referentially plural. This being so, matter itself is a plurality of things, each of which has some kind (...) and quantity of energy. (shrink)

The paper sketches the place of dynamic semantics within a broader picture of developments in philosophical and linguistic theories of meaning. Some basic concepts of dynamic semantics are illustrated by means of a detailed analysis of anaphoric definite and indefinite descriptions, which are treated as contextually dependent quantificational expressions. It is shown how a dynamic view sheds new light on the contextual nature of interpretation, on the difference between monologue and dialogue, and on the interplay between direct and indirect information.

The paper identifies some background assumptions of compositionality in formal semantics and investigates how they shape formal semantics as a scientific discipline.

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in metaphysical explanation, and philosophers have fixed on the notion of ground as the conceptual tool with which such explanation should be investigated. I will argue that this focus on ground is myopic and that some metaphysical explanations that involve the essences of things cannot be understood in terms of ground. Such ‘essentialist’ explanation is of interest, not only for its ubiquity in philosophy, but for its being in a sense an ultimate (...) form of explanation. I give an account of the sense in which such explanation is ultimate and support it by defending what I call the inessentiality of essence. I close by suggesting that this principle is the key to understanding why essentialist explanations can seem so satisfying. (shrink)

Dieter Henrich’s reconstruction of the transcendental deduction in "Identität und Objektivität" has been criticised (probably unfairly) by Guyer and others for assuming that we have a priori Cartesian certainty about our own continuing existence through time. In his later article "The Identity of the Subject in the Transcendental Deduction", Henrich addresses this criticism and proposes a new, again entirely original argument for a reconstruction. I attempt to elucidate this argument with reference to Evans’s theory of the Generality Constraint and a (...) remark of Strawson’s in Individuals. Its logical form of a sentence-operator requires that the "I think" be capable of accompanying every thought that we can form. Henrich seems to rely on this point, claiming in addition that we must be aware of this property of the "I think". I object that we cannot assume everyone to be capable of doing the philosophy of her own situation. (shrink)

Las teorías lockeanas de la identidad personal afirman que una persona persiste en el tiempo si su conciencia persiste y los criterios para la persistencia de su conciencia son principalmente psicológicos. Una posible motivación para tal teoría es la idea de que “la identidad de una persona no debería ser distinta de lo que la persona misma considera que es”(Rovane 1990, 360). ¿Pero es posible que la propia identidad dependa de lo que uno mismo piensa que es? En este trabajo (...) se investigan tres posibles maneras de interpretar esta afirmación: la identidad temporal de una persona podría depender 1)del conocimiento que ella tiene de su propia identidad, 2) de alguna creencia que tiene sobre su identidad o 3) de lo que ella ha decidido sobre su identidad. Se argumenta que 1) es incoherente, 2) no es plausible y 3) incompatible con la lógica de nuestro concepto de identidad. Como alternativa se esboza una teoría animalista de la identidad temporal de las personas. (shrink)

This volume compiles international contributions that explore the potential risks and chances coming along with the wide-scale migration of society into digital space. Suggesting a shift of paradigm from Spiral of Silence to Nexus of Noise, the opening chapter provides an overview on systematic approaches and mechanisms of manipulation – ranging from populist political players to Cambridge Analytica. After a discussion of the the juxtaposition effects of social media use on social environments, the efficient instrumentalization of Twitter by Turkish politicans (...) in the course of the US-decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital is being analyzed. Following a case study of Instagram, Black Lives Matter and racism is a research about the impact of online pornography on the academic performance of university students. Another chapter is pointing out the potential of online tools for the successful relaunch of shadow brands. The closing section of the book deals with the role of social media on the opinion formation about the Euromaidan movement during the Ukrainian revolution and offers a comparative study touching on Russian and Western depictions of political documentaries in the 2000s. (shrink)

What does environmental ethics have to say about the urban context? Is the city an environment that has only negative value or is it possible, and in fact necessary, to develop ethical recommendations about how to design it? In this paper, I argue for the second of these disjuncts and sketch some ideas for an environmental city ethics. I try to show that the most important principle of such an ethics is procedural: anyone affected by a decision about the urban (...) environment must have the possibility to participate in the process of making it. This principle has certain preconditions and there are also limitations on its applicability. For example, it is plausible that there are certain ecocentric ethical obligations, which are valid independently of the implementation of the principle. I sketch an idea for how a city’s green areas can help to raise citizens’ awareness of these obligations. -/- ¿Qué se puede decir, desde la ética ambiental, acerca del contexto urbano? ¿Se trata de un ambiente únicamente con valor negativo o es posible, e incluso necesario, desarrollar recomendaciones éticas sobre cómo diseñarlo? En este texto argumento en favor de la segunda afirmación y esbozo algunas ideas respecto de una ética ambiental para la ciudad. Defiendo que el principio más importante es procedimental: toda persona afectada debe tener la posibilidad de participar en la toma de las decisiones sobre el ambiente urbano. Este principio tiene ciertas precondiciones y también algunas restricciones. Por ejemplo, es plausible pensar en obligaciones éticas ecocéntricas válidas independientemente de la implementación del principio. Esbozo cómo las áreas verdes de una ciudad pueden ayudar a sensibilizar a los citadinos con estas obligaciones. (shrink)

According to a captivating picture, epistemic justification is essentially a matter of epistemic or evidential likelihood. While certain problems for this view are well known, it is motivated by a very natural thought—if justification can fall short of epistemic certainty, then what else could it possibly be? In this paper I shall develop an alternative way of thinking about epistemic justification. On this conception, the difference between justification and likelihood turns out to be akin to the more widely recognised difference (...) between ceteris paribus laws and brute statistical generalisations. I go on to discuss, in light of this suggestion, issues such as classical and lottery-driven scepticism as well as the lottery and preface paradoxes. (shrink)

En este pequeño texto, resumo brevemente tres experimentos psicológicos que Peter Carruthers (2010) cita como evidencia para la tesis según la cual no tenemos un acceso introspectivo y exclusivo de la primera persona a nuestras actitudes proposicionales, sino sólo uno interpretativo. Si Carruthers tiene razón, sólo conocemos nuestras creencias, intenciones y otras actitudes a través de un proceso inconsciente de interpretación de nuestro propio comportamiento y, por ende, de la misma manera en que conocemos las mentes de otras personas. Esta (...) exposición tiene el propósito de mostrar la utilidad y necesidad de acercarse al problema del autoconocimiento desde una perspectiva interdisciplinaria. (shrink)

Conocemos la propia mente mejor que la mente de otras personas. Explicaciones racionalistas dicen que este fenómeno se debe a nuestra racionalidad: Somos capaces de ajustar nuestras creencias e intenciones racionalmente en vista de su coherencia o de nueva evidencia y tal ajuste requiere que conozcamos nuestras creencias e intenciones con la autoridad de la primera persona. Examino pasajes de McGinn, Shoemaker y Burge, criticando el argumento en tres puntos: (1) Es posible pensar racionalmente sin autoconocimiento. (2) Los requerimientos racionalistas (...) parecen ser incoherentes. (3) Los racionalistas no explican cómo es posible que tengamos un autoconocimiento autoritativo. Como alternativa a las teorías racionalistas, ofrezco una explicación de la autoridad de la primera persona inspirada en una observación de Evans. (shrink)

What is critical thinking, especially in the context of higher education? How have research and scholarship on the matter developed over recent past decades? What is the current state of the art here? How might the potential of critical thinking be enhanced? What kinds of teaching are necessary in order to realize that potential? And just why is this topic important now? These are the key questions motivating this volume. We hesitate to use terms such as “comprehensive” or “complete” or (...) “definitive,” but we believe that, taken in the round, the chapters in this volume together offer a fair insight into the contemporary understandings of higher education worldwide. We also believe that this volume is much needed, and we shall try to justify that claim in this introduction. (shrink)

The views of John Dewey and Kurt Vonnegut are often criticized for opposite reasons: Dewey’s philosophy is said to be naively optimistic while Vonnegut’s work is read as cynical. The standard debates over the views of the two thinkers cause readers to overlook the similarities in the way each approaches tragic experience. This paper examines Dewey’s philosophic account of time and meaning and Vonnegut’s use of time travel in his autobiographical novel Slaughterhouse-Five to illustrate these similarities. This essay demonstrates how (...) both Dewey and Vonnegut embrace the ameliorative possibilities of art for preserving individuality and meaning in the face of tragic experience. (shrink)

In "Individuals", Peter Strawson talks about identifying, discriminating and picking out particular objects, regarding discriminating and picking out as ways of identifying. I object that, strictly speaking, identification means to say of two things that they are the same. In contrast, discriminating an object from all others can be done by just ascribing some predicate to it that does not apply to the others. Picking out an object does not even seem to require to distinguish it from all others. The (...) object picked is distinct in that it is the picked one, but it is not clear - even in the context of sensorily picking out - that I have to be aware of this in order to do the picking. (shrink)

There is a traditional interpretation of the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson that portrays him as a champion of nature, wilderness, or country life and an opponent of the city, technology, or urban life. Such a view, though, neglects the role of human activity in the universe as Emerson saw it. Furthermore, this view neglects the proper relation between soul and nature in the universe and risks entailing a philosophy of materialism--an unacceptable position for Emerson. An examination of Emerson's philosophy (...) will show that it is not fundamentally hostile to urban life or technology, and that, in fact, an anti-urban position is opposed to the most central themes of Emerson's philosophical vision. (shrink)

This paper1 explores, quite tentatively, possible consequences for the concept of semantics of two phenomena concerning meaning and interpretation, viz., radical interpretation and normativity of meaning. Both, it will be argued, challenge the way in which meaning is conceived of in semantics and thereby the status of the discipline itself. For several reasons it seems opportune to explore these issues. If one reviews the developments in semantics over the past two decades, one observes that quite a bit has changed, and (...) one may well wonder how to assess these changes. This relates directly to the status of semantics. If semantics is an empirical discipline, one might expect that most changes are informed by empirical considerations. However, one may also note that the core notion of semantics, meaning, today is conceived of quite differently than in, say, the seventies. How can that be? How can that what semantics is about, be different now from what is was back then? Or is this perhaps an indication that semantics is not as empirical as it is often thought to be? Moreover, it seems that in some deep sense meaning as explicated in semantics and interpretation as studied in various philosophical approaches are strangely at odds. Meaning is what interpretation is concerned with: meaning is, at least so it seems, what in the process of interpretation language users try to recover (or analogously, what they try to convey in production). Yet, the way meaning is conceived of in semantics seems not to square all that neatly with how the process of interpretation is supposed to proceed. In particular it seems to lack some of the intrinsic features that various approaches to interpretation assume it to have. Given these discrepancies, one wonders how the two can be incorporated within a single theory. And that such a theory is desirable goes, it may be presumed, without saying These are the reasons that figure in this paper. At the background there are some others.. (shrink)

By Martin Roderick & Jacquelyn Allen-Collinson -/- To date, no sociological studies of professional athletes have investigated the lived experiences of sportspeople in highly publicly-visible occupations that provide relatively few opportunities for back-stage relaxation from role demands. Drawing on findings from a British Academy-funded project examining high-profile sports workers, and employing Goffman’s dramaturgical insights, this article provides a novel examination of high-profile athletes who work in highly publicly visible contexts. This working context can render them ‘open’ persons in interactional situations. (...) To explore this sociologically significant occupational domain, interviews were conducted with 26 UK-based professional athletes (female and male) from seven different sports. For these athletes, dramaturgical demands were found to be relentless and unremitting, as back-stage regions proved so challenging to access. -/- . (shrink)

Better than any other single work, Daniel enables us to understand the significance of the transition Buber made from his early mysticism to the philosophy of dialogue. The book is written in the form of five dialogues, in each of which Daniel and his friends explore a crucial philosophical problem-the nature of interconnection of unity, creativity, action, form, and realization as these illuminate the relations of man to God and the world. Daniel occupies a central position in Buber's life work.

In this paper, I respond to criticisms of my book Being and Reason recently made by Yitzhak Melamed.

This paper argues that general skills and the varieties of subject-specific discourse are both important for teaching, learning and practising critical thinking. The former is important because it outlines the principles of good reasoning simpliciter (what constitutes sound reasoning patterns, invalid inferences, and so on). The latter is important because it outlines how the general principles are used and deployed in the service of ‘academic tribes’. Because critical thinking skills are—in part, at least—general skills, they can be applied to all (...) disciplines and subject-matter indiscriminately. General skills can help us assess reasoning independently of the vagaries of the linguistic discourse we express arguments in. The paper looks at the debate between the ‘specifists’—those who stress the importance of critical thinking understood as a subject-specific discourse—and the ‘generalists’—those that stress the importance of critical thinking understood independently of disciplinary context. The paper suggests that the ‘debate’ between the specifists and the generalists amounts to a fallacy of the false alternative, and presents a combinatory-‘infusion’ approach to critical thinking. (shrink)

In this paper I draw attention to a peculiar epistemic feature exhibited by certain deductively valid inferences. Certain deductively valid inferences are unable to enhance the reliability of one's belief that the conclusion is true—in a sense that will be fully explained. As I shall show, this feature is demonstrably present in certain philosophically significant inferences—such as GE Moore's notorious 'proof' of the existence of the external world. I suggest that this peculiar epistemic feature might be correlated with the much (...) discussed phenomenon that Crispin Wright and Martin Davies have called 'transmission failure'—the apparent failure, on the part of some deductively valid inferences to transmit one's justification for believing the premises. (shrink)