The issue of skepticism emerges in Experience by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Finding as Founding Stanley Cavell reads Emerson's essay as a contribution to the idealistic debate in order to recuperate Kant's 'thing in itself'. Placing that question in the ordinary space of everyday life makes Emerson a precursor of the attacks by Austin and Wittgenstein particularly regarding philosophy and skepticism. The possibility of redeeming our linguistic praxis and gaining some intimacy between language and world rises through a (...) conversion of our position in the world. However, this strategy of self-redemption seems to lack a warranty: the issue of skepticism still shows all its tragic relevance. (shrink)

H´ector-Neri Casta˜neda-Calder´on (December 13, 1924–September 7, 1991) was born in San Vicente Zacapa, Guatemala. He attended the Normal School for Boys in Guatemala City, later called the Military Normal School for Boys, from which he was expelled for refusing to fight a bully; the dramatic story, worthy of being filmed, is told in the “De Re” section of his autobiography, “Self-Profile” (1986). He then attended a normal school in Costa Rica, followed by studies in philosophy at the University of San (...) Carlos, Guatemala. He won a scholarship to the University of Minnesota, where he received his B.A. (1950), M.A. (1952), and Ph.D. (1954), all in philosophy. His dissertation, “The Logical Structure of Moral Reasoning”, was written under the direction of Wilfrid Sellars. He returned to teach in Guatemala, and then received a scholarship to study at Oxford University (1955–1956), after which he took a sabbatical-replacement position in philosophy at Duke University (1956). His first full-time academic appointment was at Wayne State University (1957– 1969), where he founded the philosophy journal Noˆus (1967, a counter-offer made to him by Wayne State to encourage him to stay there rather than to take the chairmanship of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania). In 1969, he moved (along with several of his Wayne colleagues) to Indiana University, where he eventually became the Mahlon Powell Professor of Philosophy and, later, its first Dean of Latino Affairs (1978–1981). He remained at Indiana until his death. He was also a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin (1962–1963) and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1981–1982). He received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1967–1968), the T. Andrew Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Science Foundation. He was elected President of the American Philosophical Association Central Division (1979– 1980), named to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1990), and received the Presidential Medal of Honor from the Government of Guatemala (1991). Casta˜neda’s philosophical interests spanned virtually the entire spectrum of philosophy, and his theories form a highly interconnected whole.. (shrink)

Two primary roles for propositions are to be i) the objects of the attitudes (especially belief) and ii) the primary bearers of truth and falsity. Interpreters of John Locke are in very broad agreement that propositions, as he presents them, serve this second role. However, whether Locke’s propositions can be said to serve the first role is a more difficult question, as Locke was frequently regarded as having overlooked the force/content distinction, meaning that many interpreters regard him as taking the (...) propositions not to be the objects of the attitudes, but instead, to be identical to the attitudes themselves. In this paper, I present the basics of Locke’s accounts of propositions, truth, and judgment. I then explain the interpretive divide between those scholars who interpret Locke as offering a more philosophically appealing proto-Fregean account of propositions (one which does recognize the force/content distinction), and those who defend the philosophically less satisfying account which identifies propositions with judgments on textual grounds. Finally, I defend the conflation account against one of it’s largest philosophical challenges, by showing how that view can address the Frege-Geach problem. (shrink)

Often, when one faces a choice between alternative actions, there are reasons both for and against each alternative. On one way of understanding these words, what one “ought to do all things considered (ATC)” is determined by the totality of these reasons. So, these reasons can somehow be “combined” or “aggregated” to yield an ATC verdict on these alternatives. First, various assumptions about this sort of aggregation of reasons are articulated. Then it is shown that these assumptions allow for the (...) proof of a “Reasons Aggregation Theorem” – parallel to John Harsanyi’s 1955 “Social Aggregation Theorem”. All reasons for action are grounded in reason-providing values; and, for every such reason-providing value, there is in principle a way of measuring how strongly this value counts against each alternative. The theorem tells us that the appropriate measure of how much reason ATC there is against each alternative is simply a weighted sum of the strengths with which these values count against that alternative; the agent ought not ATC to perform an action iff there is ATC more reason against it than against some available alternative. (shrink)

David Hume fancied himself the Newton of the mind, aiming to reinvent the study of human mental life in the same way that Newton had revolutionized physics. And it was his view that the novel account of belief he proposed in his Treatise of Human Nature was one of that work’s central philosophical contributions. From the earliest responses to the Treatise forward, however, there was deep pessimism about the prospects for his account. It is easy to understand the source of (...) this pessimism: The constraints he employed in theorizing stem from his Newtonian ambitions. Constraints such as his copy principle and his decision to rely only on variations in “force and vivacity” for differentiating types of mental states severely limit his available explanatory resources. However, it is one thing to regard an account as untenable, and quite another to understand where it fails. In this paper, I focus on one long-standing objection to Hume’s account — the objection that Hume cannot offer an account of negative belief or denial — as presented by Hume’s contemporary Thomas Reid, as well as more recently by Barry Stroud, and defend Hume from this objection. I argue that Hume both should and does endorse an account of negative belief based in relations of contrariety between contents, rather than between mental activities, and survey the different options available to Hume for spelling out an account of contrary contents. (shrink)

We defend a functionalist approach to emotion that begins by focusing on emotions as central states with causal connections to behavior and to other cognitive states. The approach brackets the conscious experience of emotion, lists plausible features that emotions exhibit, and argues that alternative schemes are unpromising candidates. We conclude with the benefits of our approach: one can study emotions in animals; one can look in the brain for the implementation of specific features; and one ends up with an architecture (...) of the mind in which emotions are fully accommodated through their relations to the rest of cognition. Our article focuses on arguing for this general approach; as such, it is an essay in the philosophy of emotion rather than in the psychology or neuroscience of emotion. (shrink)

The biological sciences have always proven a fertile ground for philosophical analysis, one from which has grown a rich tradition stemming from Aristotle and flowering with Darwin. And although contemporary philosophy is increasingly becoming conceptually entwined with the study of the empirical sciences with the data of the latter now being regularly utilised in the establishment and defence of the frameworks of the former, a practice especially prominent in the philosophy of physics, the development of that tradition hasn’t received the (...) wider attention it so thoroughly deserves. This review will briefly introduce some recent significant topics of debate within the philosophy of biology, focusing on those whose metaphysical themes (in everything from composition to causation) are likely to be of wide-reaching, cross-disciplinary interest. (shrink)

This is a book about normativity -- where the central normative terms are words like 'ought' and 'should' and their equivalents in other languages. It has three parts: The first part is about the semantics of normative discourse: what it means to talk about what ought to be the case. The second part is about the metaphysics of normative properties and relations: what is the nature of those properties and relations whose pattern of instantiation makes propositions about what ought to (...) be the case true. The third part is about the epistemology of normative beliefs: how we could ever know, or even have rational or justified belief in, propositions about what ought to be the case. (shrink)

Philosophers have routinely taken a pessimistic view of the account of cognition offered by David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature, claiming that Hume's limited explanatory resources cannot capture the rich complexity of our thought, judgment, and reasoning. I provide a qualified defense of Hume's attempt to analyze a cognitive activity in terms of objectual conception, ie conceiving or imagining an object. I defend Hume from objections offered by his contemporary Thomas Reid (and echoed by various recent Hume scholars), (...) presenting an interpretation of the account that resolves these worries. (shrink)

Many philosophers working on the branches of philosophy that deal with the normative questions have adopted a " Reasons First" program. This paper criticizes the foundational assumptions of this program. In fact, there are many different concepts that can be expressed by the term 'reason' in English, none of which are any more fundamental than any others. Indeed, most of these concepts are not particularly fundamental in any interesting sense.

The advent of contemporary evolutionary theory ushered in the eventual decline of Aristotelian Essentialism (Æ) – for it is widely assumed that essence does not, and cannot have any proper place in the age of evolution. This paper argues that this assumption is a mistake: if Æ can be suitably evolved, it need not face extinction. In it, I claim that if that theory’s fundamental ontology consists of dispositional properties, and if its characteristic metaphysical machinery is interpreted within the framework (...) of contemporary evolutionary developmental biology, an evolved essentialism is available. The reformulated theory of Æ offered in this paper not only fails to fall prey to the typical collection of criticisms, but is also independently both theoretically and empirically plausible. The paper contends that, properly understood, essence belongs in the age of evolution. (shrink)

This conference paper contests the validity of some traditional concepts of gardens. It introduces the possibility of considering the passage of time in gardens as a musical, rhythmic phenomonen.

This article examines the fourteen conditions constituting Levinson and Alperson’s taxonomy of conditions for temporal arts. It claims that some of the conditions and several of the lists of arts exemplifying them need revision. It recommends adding a new condition concerned with the effects of the passage of time on gardens, environmental sculpture, and outdoor installations. The article concludes that gardens may be a model for understanding and appreciating other arts sharing the same bi-(multi-) modality.

What is the connection between justification and the kind of consequence relations that are studied by logic? In this essay, I shall try to provide an answer, by proposing a general conception of the kind of inference that counts as justified or rational.

According to epistemological internalism, the rationality of a belief supervenes purely on "internal facts" about the thinker's mind. But what are "internal facts"? Why does the rationality of a belief supervene on them? The standard answers are unacceptable. This paper proposes new answers. "Internal facts" are facts about the thinker's nonfactive mental states. The rationality of a belief supervenes on such internal facts because we need rules of belief revision that we can follow directly, not by means of following any (...) other rules, and the proximate explanation of any belief revision always consists of such internal facts. (shrink)

Sometimes, we think of belief as a phenomenon that comes in degrees – that is, in the many different levels of confidence that a thinker might have in various different propositions. Sometimes, we think of belief as a simple two-place relation that holds between a thinker and a proposition – that is, as what I shall here call "outright belief".

The thesis explores the adequacy of five well-known conceptions of art to the case of gardens. It concludes that, of those conceptions, the cluster theory is best suited to the case of gardens.

Our approach to emotion emphasized three key ingredients. We do not yet have a mature science of emotion, or even a consensus view—in this respect we are more hesitant than Sander, Grandjean, and Scherer or Luiz Pessoa. Relatedly, a science of emotion needs to be highly interdisciplinary, including ecology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. We recommend a functionalist view that brackets conscious experiences and that essentially treats emotions as latent variables inferred from a number of measures. But our version of functionalism (...) is not definitional or ontological. It is resolutely methodological, in good part because it is too early to attempt definitions. (shrink)

Dispositional properties are often referred to as ‘causal powers’, but what does dispositional causation amount to? Any viable theory must account for two fundamental aspects of the metaphysics of causation – the causal complexity and context sensitivity of causal interactions. The theory of mutual manifestations attempts to do so by locating the complexity and context sensitivity within the nature of dispositions themselves. But is this theory an acceptable first step towards a viable theory of dispositional causation? This paper argues that (...) the reconceptualization that the theory entails comes at too high a price, and is an unnecessary step in the wrong direction: these two central aspects concerning the metaphysics of causation can and should be accounted for in a dispositional account of causation without it. (shrink)

Thomas Reid is notorious for rejecting the orthodox theory of conception (OTC), according to which conceiving of an object involves a mental relationship to an idea of that object. In this paper, I examine the question of what this rejection amounts to, when we limit our attention to bare conception (rather than the more widely discussed case of perception). I present some of the purported advantages of OTC, and assess whether they provide a genuine basis for preferring OTC to a (...) Reidian alternative. I argue that Reid’s approach is no worse off than OTC at explaining intentionality of our conceptions, and suggest that OTC diverges less from Reid’s view than it would at first seem. (shrink)

Side effects are ubiquitous in medicine and they often play a role in treatment decisions for patients and clinicians alike. Philosophers and health researchers often use side effects to illustrate issues with contemporary medical research and practice. However, technical definitions of ‘side effect’ differ among health authorities. Thus, determining the side effects of an intervention can differ depending on whose definition we assume. Here I review some of the common definitions of side effect and highlight their issues. In response, I (...) offer an account of side effects as jointly (i) unintended and (ii) effects due to the causal capacities or invariances of an intervention. I discuss (i) by examining the intentions or reasons behind therapeutic interventions, and I discuss (ii) by appealing to a manipulationist model of causation. The analysis here highlights that side effects are conceptually distinct from related outcomes like adverse events, adverse drug reactions, and placebo effects. The analysis also allows for reflection on the utility of ‘side effect’ as a technical term in medical research and practice. (shrink)

Editor's Intro to the journal issue. Wittgenstein's methods are more important than his solutions or views on particular problems. He also attacks processes which give rise to philosophical problems, such as Cartesian dualism and Platonism and other more narrow pictures or assumptions. His recommendations that progress be based on what we get from juxtaposing examples with philosophical temptations are still being absorbed by the discipline. This is more the case now, fifteen years aftr I wrote this introduction.

In this paper, I investigate the prospects for using the distinction between rejection and denial to resolve Saul Kripke’s puzzle about belief. One puzzle Kripke presents in A Puzzle About Belief poses what would have seemed a fairly straightforward question about the beliefs of the bilingual Pierre, who is disposed to sincerely and reflectively assent to the French sentence Londres est jolie, but not to the English sentence London is pretty, both of which he understands perfectly well. The question to (...) be answered is whether Pierre believes that London is pretty, and Kripke argues, of each answer, that it is unacceptable. On my proposal, either answer to the question is to be rejected, but neither answer is to be denied, using the resource of partially-defined predicates. After demonstrating how this serves as a solution to the puzzle, I illustrate some philosophical motivations—independent of Kripke’s puzzle —for adopting a view on which belief is a partially defined predicate. I conclude that there are decent prospects for the proposed response to Kripke’s puzzle. (shrink)

This paper defends the institution of civil marriage against the objection that it is inconsistent with political liberalism, and so should be either totally abolished or else transformed virtually beyond recognition.

Here is a definition of knowledge: for you to know a proposition p is for you to have an outright belief in p that is correct precisely because it manifests the virtue of rationality. This definition resembles Ernest Sosa’s “virtue theory”, except that on this definition, the only virtue that must be manifested in all instances of knowledge is rationality, and no reductive account of rationality is attempted—rationality is assumed to be an irreducibly normative notion. This definition is compatible with (...) “internalism” about rationality, and with a form of “pragmatic encroachment” on the conditions of rational outright belief. An interpretation is given of this definition, and especially of the sense of ’because’ that it involves. On this interpretation, this definition entails that both safety and adherence are necessary conditions on knowledge; it supports a kind of contextualism about terms like ‘knowledge’; and it provides resources to defend safety, adherence, and contextualism, against some recent objections. (shrink)

According to the proponents of Developmental Systems Theory and the Causal Parity Thesis, the privileging of the genome as “first among equals” with respect to the development of phenotypic traits is more a reflection of our own heuristic prejudice than of ontology - the underlying causal structures responsible for that specified development no more single out the genome as primary than they do other broadly “environmental” factors. Parting with the methodology of the popular responses to the Thesis, this paper offers (...) a novel criterion for ‘causal primacy’, one that is grounded in the ontology of the unique causal role of dispositional properties. This paper argues that, if the genome is conceptualised as realising dispositional properties that are “directed toward” phenotypic traits, the parity of ‘causal roles’ between genetic and extra-genetic factors is no longer apparent, and further, that the causal primacy of the genome is both plausible and defensible. (shrink)

Exploratory experiments are widely characterized as experiments that do not test hypotheses. Experiments that do test hypotheses are characterized as confirmatory experiments. Philosophers have pointed out that research programmes can be both confirmatory and exploratory. However, these definitions preclude single experiments being characterized as both exploratory and confirmatory; how can an experiment test and not test a hypothesis? Given the intuition that some experiments are exploratory, some are confirmatory, and some are both, a recharacterization of the relationship between exploratory and (...) confirmatory experimentation is needed. I discuss ‘phase IV’ trials to show what this recharacterization could look like. Phase IV trials can be exploratory and confirmatory insofar as they concurrently test hypotheses and explore for unforeseen phenomena. Even if it is uncontroversial that a single experiment can have multiple aims, the recharacterization of the relationship between exploratory and confirmatory experimentation is still required for these aims to be held together coherently. I offer an alternative characterization of the relationship between exploratory and confirmatory experimentation where the former remains a distinct kind of experimentation but is not characterized as non-hypothesis-testing. (shrink)

Behavioural flexibility is often treated as the gold standard of evidence for more sophisticated or complex forms of animal cognition, such as planning, metacognition and mindreading. However, the evidential link between behavioural flexibility and complex cognition has not been explicitly or systematically defended. Such a defence is particularly pressing because observed flexible behaviours can frequently be explained by putatively simpler cognitive mechanisms. This leaves complex cognition hypotheses open to ‘deflationary’ challenges that are accorded greater evidential weight precisely because they offer (...) putatively simpler explanations of equal explanatory power. This paper challenges the blanket preference for simpler explanations, and shows that once this preference is dispensed with, and the full spectrum of evidence—including evolutionary, ecological and phylogenetic data—is accorded its proper weight, an argument in support of the prevailing assumption that behavioural flexibility can serve as evidence for complex cognitive mechanisms may begin to take shape. An adaptive model of cognitive-behavioural evolution is proposed, according to which the existence of convergent trait–environment clusters in phylogenetically disparate lineages may serve as evidence for the same trait–environment clusters in other lineages. This, in turn, could permit inferences of cognitive complexity in cases of experimental underdetermination, thereby placing the common view that behavioural flexibility can serve as evidence for complex cognition on firmer grounds. (shrink)

Suppose that it is rational to choose or intend a course of action if and only if the course of action maximizes some sort of expectation of some sort of value. What sort of value should this definition appeal to? According to an influential neo-Humean view, the answer is “Utility”, where utility is defined as a measure of subjective preference. According to a rival neo-Aristotelian view, the answer is “Choiceworthiness”, where choiceworthiness is an irreducibly normative notion of a course of (...) action that is good in a certain way. The neo-Humean view requires preferences to be measurable by means of a utility function. Various interpretations of what exactly a “preference” is are explored, to see if there is any interpretation that supports the claim that a rational agent’s “preferences” must satisfy the “axioms” that are necessary for them to be measurable in this way. It is argued that the only interpretation that supports the idea that the rational agent’s preferences must meet these axioms interprets “preferences” as a kind of value-judgment. But this turns out to be version of the neo-Aristotelian view, rather than the neo-Humean view. Rational intentions maximize expected choiceworthiness, not expected utility. (shrink)

What reasons for action do we have? What explains why we have these reasons? This paper articulates some of the basic structural features of a theory that would provide answers to these questions. According to this theory, reasons for action are all grounded in intrinsic values, but in a way that makes room for a thoroughly non-consequentialist view of the way in which intrinsic values generate reasons for aaction.

According to John Broome, akrasia consists in a failure to intend to do something that one believes one ought to do, and such akrasia is necessarily irrational. In fact, however, failing to intend something that one believes one ought to do is only guaranteed to be irrational if one is certain of a maximally detailed proposition about what one ought to do; if one is uncertain about any part of the full story about what one ought to do, it could (...) be perfectly rational not to intend to do something that one believes one ought to do. This paper seeks to remedy this problem, by proposing an anti-akrasia principle that covers cases of uncertainty (as well as cases of such complete certainty). It is argued that this principle is in effect the fundamental principle of practical rationality. (shrink)

According to dispositionalism, de re modality is grounded in the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties. Those properties are able to serve as the ground of de re modal truths, it is said, because they bear a special relation to counterfactual conditionals, one of truthmaking. However, because dispositionalism purports to ground de re modality only on the intrinsic natures of dispositional properties, it had better be the case that they do not play that truthmaking role merely in virtue of their being (...) embedded in some particular, extrinsic causal context. This paper examines a recent argument against dispositionalism that purports to show that the intrinsicality of that relation cannot be maintained, due to the ceteris paribus nature of the counterfactuals that dispositions make-true. When two prominent responses are examined, both are found wanting: at best, they require unjustified special pleading, and at worst, they amount to little more than ad hoc conceptual trickery. (shrink)

According to a widely held view of the matter, whenever we assess beliefs as ‘rational’ or ‘justified’, we are making normative judgements about those beliefs. In this discussion, I shall simply assume, for the sake of argument, that this view is correct. My goal here is to explore a particular approach to understanding the basic principles that explain which of these normative judgements are true. Specifically, this approach is based on the assumption that all such normative principles are grounded in (...) facts about values, and the normative principles that apply to beliefs in particular are grounded in facts about alethic value––a kind of value that is exemplified by believing what is true and not believing what is false. In this chapter, I shall explain what I regard as the best way of interpreting this approach. In doing so, I shall also show how this interpretation can solve some problems that have recently been raised for approaches of this kind by Selim Berker, Jennifer Carr, Michael Caie, and Hilary Greaves. (shrink)

The underreporting of suspected adverse drug reactions hinders pharmacovigilance. Solutions to underreporting are oftentimes directed at clinicians and health care professionals. However, given the recent rise of public inclusion in medical science, solutions may soon begin more actively involving patients. I aim to offer an evaluative framework for future possible proposals that would engage patients with the aim of mitigating underreporting. The framework may also have value in evaluating current reporting practices. The offered framework is composed of three criteria that (...) are bioethical, social-epistemic, and pragmatic: (i) patients should not be exposed to undue harms, e.g., nocebo effects; (ii) data should be collected, analyzed, and communicated prioritizing pharmacovigilance’s aims, i.e., free from industry bias; and (iii) proposals should account for existing and foreseeable pragmatic constraints like clinician ‘buy in’ and existing reporting infrastructure. Proposals to engage patients in pharmacovigilance that fulfil or address these criteria are preferable to those that do not. (shrink)

An account of Plato’s theory of knowledge is offered. Plato is in a sense a contextualist: at least, he recognizes that his own use of the word for “knowledge” varies – in some contexts, it stands for the fullest possible level of understanding of a truth, while in other contexts, it is broader and includes less complete levels of understanding as well. But for Plato, all knowledge, properly speaking, is a priori knowledge of necessary truths – based on recollection of (...) aspects of the Forms – and so in contemporary terms, it meets the conditions of “safety” and “adherence” (or “indefeasibility”) to the highest degree. This account is defended on the basis of the text of Meno, Phaedo, and the Republic, against some objections – especially objections that are due to Gail Fine. (shrink)

Enactivism has the potential to provide a sense of teleology in purpose-directed action, but without violating the principles of efficient causation. Action can be distinguished from mere reaction by virtue of the fact that some systems are self-organizing. Self-organization in the brain is reflected in neural plasticity, and also in the primacy of motivational processes that initiate the release of neurotransmitters necessary for mental and conscious functions, and which guide selective attention processes. But in order to flesh out the enactivist (...) approach in a way that is plausible and not merely an epiphenomenon, it is necessary to confront the problem of causal closure in a serious way. Atoms and molecules in the brain do not violate the normal causal principles that govern them in other contexts. The theory of self-organizing dynamical systems must be developed in a way that is compatible with causal closure rather than contradicting it. (shrink)

Browne 1 (this issue ) argues that what may appear to be a benevolent practice-disclosing the sex of a fetus to expecting parents who wish to know-is in fact an epistemically problematic and, as a result, ethically questionable medical practice. Browne worries that not only will the disclosure of fetal sex encourage sex-selective abortions (an issue we will not take up here), but also that it will convey a misleading and pernicious message about the relationship between sex and gender. More (...) specifically, she contends that the practice of disclosure is problematic because (1) it purports to establish the gender of the developing baby based on information about the baby's sex, whereas this is not a warranted inference because while sex is determined by biological factors, gender is determined by social factors and (2) it conflates (biological) sex with (social) gender or encourages such conflation or reduction and thereby promotes 'essentialistic' thinking about gender that is closely linked to sexism and social injustice. If (1) is true, then disclosing fetal sex amounts to misinforming or misleading prospective parents-and since misinforming patients is wrong, the act of disclosing is also wrong. However, beyond the wrongs of misinforming patients, the practice also perpetuates the harms associated with a rigidly gendered society through endorsing the message in (2), thus lending the authority of the medical profession to the gender-essentialist ideas that have underpinned, and continue to drive, sexism and social injustice. This analysis leads Browne to recommend that clinicians be prohibited from informing parents about the sex of their developing fetus. -/- We agree with Browne that gender essentialism-the notion that 'femaleness' and 'maleness' carve out distinct natural classes with innate, immutable properties-is not only a false metaphysical thesis, but also a pernicious idea insofar as the sexist attitudes it fosters motivate policies that systematically violate the human rights of women, as well as those of the LGBTQ community. However, we do not think that the disclosure of fetal sex misinforms prospective parents about the gender of their baby, nor do we believe that such disclosure presupposes or promotes gender essentialism properly understood. (shrink)

Consciousness and emotion feature prominently in our personal lives, yet remain enigmatic. Recent advances prompt further distinctions that should provide more experimental traction: we argue that emotion consists of an emotion state (functional aspects, including emo- tional response) as well as feelings (the conscious experience of the emotion), and that consciousness consists of level (e.g. coma, vegetative state and wake- fulness) and content (what it is we are conscious of). Not only is consciousness important to aspects of emotion but structures (...) that are important for emotion, such as brainstem nuclei and midline cortices, overlap with structures that regulate the level of consciousness. The intersection of consciousness and emotion is ripe for experimental investigation, and we outline possible examples for future studies. (shrink)

As there is currently a neo-Aristotelian revival currently taking place within contemporary metaphysics and dispositions, or causal powers are now being routinely utilised in theories of causality and modality, more attention is beginning to be paid to a central Aristotelian concern: the metaphysics of substantial unity, and the doctrine of hylomorphism. In this paper, I distinguish two strands of hylomorphism present in the contemporary literature and argue that not only does each engender unique conceptual difficulties, but neither adequately captures the (...) metaphysics of Aristotelian hylomorphism. Thus both strands of contemporary hylomorphism, I argue, fundamentally misunderstand what substantial unity amounts to in the hylomorphic framework – namely, the metaphysical inseparability of matter and form. (shrink)

We attribute three major insights to Hegel: first, an understanding of the real numbers as the paradigmatic kind of number ; second, a recognition that a quantitative relation has three elements, which is embedded in his conception of measure; and third, a recognition of the phenomenon of divergence of measures such as in second-order or continuous phase transitions in which correlation length diverges. For ease of exposition, we will refer to these three insights as the R First Theory, Tripartite Relations, (...) and Divergence of Measures. Given the constraints of space, we emphasize the first and the third in this paper. (shrink)

Though the realm of biology has long been under the philosophical rule of the mechanistic magisterium, recent years have seen a surprisingly steady rise in the usurping prowess of process ontology. According to its proponents, theoretical advances in the contemporary science of evo-devo have afforded that ontology a particularly powerful claim to the throne: in that increasingly empirically confirmed discipline, emergently autonomous, higher-order entities are the reigning explanantia. If we are to accept the election of evo-devo as our best conceptualisation (...) of the biological realm with metaphysical rigour, must we depose our mechanistic ontology for failing to properly “carve at the joints” of organisms? In this paper, I challenge the legitimacy of that claim: not only can the theoretical benefits offered by a process ontology be had without it, they cannot be sufficiently grounded without the metaphysical underpinning of the very mechanisms which processes purport to replace. The biological realm, I argue, remains one best understood as under the governance of mechanistic principles. (shrink)

Phenomenology and physiology become commensurable through a self-organizational physiology and an "enactive" view of consciousness. Self-organizing processes appropriate and replace their own needed substrata, rather than merely being caused by interacting components. Biochemists apply this notion to the living/nonliving distinction. An enactive approach sees consciousness as actively executed by an agent rather than passively reacting to stimuli. Perception does not result from mere stimulation of brain areas by sensory impulses; unless motivated organismic purposes first anticipate and "look for" emotionally relevant.stimuli, (...) brain-sensory processing is not accompanied by perceptual consciousness. To see a soccer ball requires looking for it in the right place. The sell-organizing, emotionally motivated agent instigates this looking-for activity. (shrink)

Proportional relationships of simple numbers were commonly used in architecture during the Renaissance period. These proportional relationships were based on the primary musical consonances of the Greek musical system: the octave (2:1), fifth (3:2), and fourth (4:3). In a similar manner, Obrecht uses the proportional relationships created by periods of rest and the last notes of the cantus firmus segments. These proportional relationships are found in the same voice as the cantus firmus, and appear when the statements of the cantus (...) firmus segments are absent. Together with the statements of the cantus firmus segments, these proportional relationships provide the entire form and structure for the various parts of Obrecht's segmentation masses. (shrink)

This essay critiques the return to objects posited by certain new materialisms, most specifically the speculative realism of Harman, Meillassoux and Brassier. It argues that their “non-relational” and “autonomous” ontology represents a neo-positivist conception of reality. In place of such an atomistic ontology, I will suggest that the new materialisms develop a more productive, “non-reductive materialism”—a term drawn from analytic philosophy of mind. I will interpret Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Luc Nancy as crucial examples of such a materialism on the continental side. (...) Rather than being based on the non-relational innerness of an object, this position instead takes into account matter’s fundamentally extended nature. Confirmed by examples such as the growing evidence for neuroplasticity, the externalist, non-reductive view advances the new materialist argument that matter is “agentive” and “active” rather than “mechanic” and “passive,” without slipping into an anti-social-constructionist biologism or behaviorism. (shrink)

Although they are continually compositionally reconstituted and reconfigured, organisms nonetheless persist as ontologically unified beings over time – but in virtue of what? A common answer is: in virtue of their continued possession of the capacity for morphological invariance which persists through, and in spite of, their mereological alteration. While we acknowledge that organisms‟ capacity for the “stability of form” – homeostasis - is an important aspect of their diachronic unity, we argue that this capacity is derived from, and grounded (...) in a more primitive one – namely, the homeodynamic capacity for the “specified variation of form”. In introducing a novel type of causal power – a „structural power‟ – we claim that it is the persistence of their dynamic potential to produce a specified series of structurally adaptive morphologies which grounds organisms‟ privileged status as metaphysically “one over many” over time. (shrink)

Here I review the edited volume "Kierkegaard's God and the Good Life." I attempt to highlight the various contributions while locating the book's significance within the broader scholarship surrounding Kierkegaard.