From an author meets critics session on Melissa Merritt's *Kant on Reflection and Virtue*.

Anyone who has been around analytic philosophy the past 20 years knows that consciousness is in. These days much effort is spent playing whack-a-dualist. It seems that anyone who is anyone has written a book on the metaphysics of mind. Colin McGinn's new book marks a refreshing departure from this trend. Mindsight: Image, Dream, Meaning discusses the role imagination plays in the way we represent the world; the role it plays in dreams and some mental illnesses; and the (...) fundamental role it plays in belief and meaning. (shrink)

Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to (...) conceive of colorless bodies, (ii) the very possibility of color experience requires that bodies are sensuously colored, and (iii) the attribution of sensuous colors to bodies provides the best explanation of color constancy. Although some passages might suggest that Cavendish endorses a reductive account of sensuous color, according to which sensuous color reduces to a body's microscopic surface texture (or some other mechanistically respectable property), I argue that she accepts a nonreductive account, on which sensuous color is not thus reducible. (shrink)

According to strong metaphysical readings of Kant, Kant believes there are noumenal substances and causes. Proponents of these readings have shown that these readings can be reconciled with Kant’s claims about the limitations of human cognition. An important new challenge to such readings, however, has been proposed by Markus Kohl, focusing on Kant’s occasional statements about the divine or intuitive intellect. According to Kohl, how an intuitive intellect represents is a decisive measure for how noumena are for Kant, but an (...) intuitive intellect would not represent using metaphysical categories like those of substance and causation. I argue that Kohl’s argument does not succeed, since it overlooks the possibility that the intuitive intellect only indirectly represents certain noumenal facts. In addition, in response to a secondary argument Kohl suggests, I argue that Kant’s apparently anti-metaphysical statements about the content of the categories can be read as merely describing the constitution of the categories, instead of what they represent. Thus, while Kohl advances the debate by raising an under-appreciated question, his argument against the strong metaphysical reading is unsound. (shrink)

The linguistic turn is a central aspect of Richard Rorty’s philosophy, informing his early critiques of foundationalism in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and subsequent critiques of authoritarianism in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. It is argued that we should interpret the linguistic turn as a methodological suggestion for how philosophy can take a non-foundational perspective on normativity. It is then argued that although Rorty did not succeed in explicating normativity without foundations (or authority without authoritarianism), we should take seriously (...) the ambition motivating his project. But taking that ambition seriously may require reconsidering the linguistic turn. (shrink)

Interpreters of Kant’s Refutation of Idealism face a dilemma: it seems to either beg the question against the Cartesian sceptic or else offer a disappointingly Berkeleyan conclusion. In this article I offer an interpretation of the Refutation on which it does not beg the question against the Cartesian sceptic. After defending a principle about question-begging, I identify four premises concerning our representations that there are textual reasons to think Kant might be implicitly assuming. Using those assumptions, I offer a reconstruction (...) of Kant’s Refutation that avoids the interpretative dilemma, though difficult questions about the argument remain. (shrink)

This book is important for philosophy of mathematics and for the study of French philosophy. French philosophers are more concerned than most Anglo-American with mathematical practice outside of foundations. This contradicts the fashionable claim that French intellectuals get science all wrong and we return below to a germane example from Sokal and Bricmont [1999]. The emphasis on practice goes back to mid-20th century French historians of science including those Kuhn cites as sources for his orientation in philosophy of science [Kuhn (...) 1996: p. viii]. And the French often look to the experience, rather than the ideology, of Bourbaki. (shrink)

A long critical notice of Michael Forster's recent book, "Kant and Skepticism." We argue that Forster's characterization of Kant's response to skepticism is both textually dubious and philosophically flawed. -/- .

Extended critical discussion of Stefanie Grüne's *Blinde Anschauung*.

In this paper we analyses the work of the first century Chinese philosopher Wang Chong as in part grappling with epistemology of testimony. Often portrayed as a curmudgeonly skeptic, Wang Chong actually best seen as a demanding piecemeal non-reductionist, which is to say he believed that testimony was a basic source of evidence unless subject to a defeater (non-reductionism), but also that we should evaluate testimony on a claim-by-claim basis (piecemeal) rather than accepting a whole source on the strength of (...) its reputation or authority, and finally he thought one has a strong duty to search for defeaters (demanding). We defend each of these claims as well as the fruitfulness of applying such anachronistic terminology to an ancient thinker. We end with a discussion of how Wang Chong's epistemology relates to his rhetorical method and then consider some problems he faces because of his epistemic commitments. (shrink)

Critical notice of Béatrice Longuenesse's book *I, Me, Mine*.

Once upon a time in the twentieth century, it was considered good sense by some to think that Aristotle began his De anima with a series of very Aristotelian theories about the soul, and that the function of its first book was to eristically taunt his predecessors for failing to appreciate hylomorphism, or patronizingly praise them for getting the odd bit right. Jason Carter deserves our thanks for showing how wrong-headed this reading of Aristotle is. His book begins with the (...) much more sensible assumption that the review of previous δόξαι in DA I plays an important and even constitutive role for theses at the core of Aristotle's theory of soul and living things, prominent among them these two: that the soul... (shrink)

One of the better known of the many bons mots of the Sellarsian corpus concerns his definition of philosophy: it is the attempt to understand “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” When applied to Sellars’s philosophy in particular, one might be forgiven for doubting the possible success of such an endeavor. Richard Rorty once quipped of Sellars’s followers that they were either “left-wing” or “right-wing,” emphasizing one (...) line of thought in Sellars’s work to the exclusion of the other. The two lines of thought to which Rorty referred were, first, Sellars’s conception of the normativity of all thought and language, famously captured by his evocative phrase “the space of reasons.” Second, and equally important to Sellars, was his “scientia mensura,” the notion ðshared with contemporaries such as Quine that “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not” Wilfrid Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1 [1956]: 41,303). The left-wing adherents to the normativity thesis included Rorty himself, along with John McDowell and Robert Brandom. Among the right-wing naturalists are such as Ruth Milliken, Jay Rosenberg, and Paul Churchland. Such a disparate group of philosophers suggests irreconcilable differences. Brandom himself reports in the introduction to his newest book, From Empiricism to Expressivism, that, “for a dismayingly long time, I did not really see how all the pieces of [Sellar's] work hung together, even in the broadest possible sense of the term”. (shrink)

Although social scientists have identified diverse behavioral patterns among children from dissimilarly structured families, marketing scholars have progressed little in relating family structure to consumption-related decisions. In particular, the roles played by members of single-mother families—which may include live-in grandparents, mother’s unmarried partner, and step-father with or without step-sibling(s)—may affect children’s influence on consumption-related decisions. For example, to offset a parental authority dynamic introduced by a new stepfather, the work-related constraints imposed on a breadwinning mother, or the imposition of adult-level (...) household responsibilities on children, single-mother families may attend more to their children’s product preferences. -/- Without a profile that includes socio-economic, behavioral, and psychological aspects, efficient and socially responsible marketing to single-mother households is compromised. Relative to dual-parent families, single-mother families tend to have fewer resources and less buying power, children who consume more materialistic and compulsively, and children who more strongly influence decision making for both own-use and family-use products. Timely research would ensure that these and other tendencies now differentiate single-mother from dual-parent families in ways that marketers should address. Hence, our threefold goal is (1) to consolidate and highlight gaps in existing theory applied to studying children’s influence on consumption-related decision making in single-mother families, and (2) to propose a hybrid framework that merges two theories conducive to such research, and (3) to identify promising research propositions for future research. (shrink)

I try to distinguish McGinn's separation of evil from mere wrong from his aesthetic theory of morality. I argue that the combination is dangeroous.

This is a slightly more polished version of a presentation I wrote for the Author-Meets-Critics session on Colin's book at the Eastern APA session on Jan 4, 2017, in Baltimore. I’ve decided to post this commentary online pretty much as is -- I am afraid I don't have time to prepare a version suitable for publication. I hope the reader will find it helpful. At any rate, please treat this piece as a rough draft originally intended to be delivered (...) to a live audience. Although my commentary is mostly critical, I admire Colin's book for its originality, breadth, and depth. It stimulated my thought like no other books in recent years. (shrink)

This is a brief essay discussing Colin McGinn's theory of human cognition. Mcginn believes that the more profound Metaphysical problems such as the mind-body problem, are unsolvable due to the limitations of our cognitive abilities. I argue that the solutions to these problems lies not in the strength of our cognitive abilities but rather in how we apply these abilities.

In this paper, I discuss Colin McGinn’s claim that the mind is not miraculous but merely mysterious, and that this mystery is due to the limits of our cognitive faculties. To adequately present the flow and unity of McGinn’s overall argument, I offer an extended and uninterrupted précis of his case, followed by a critique. I will argue that McGinn’s argument is unsuccessful if it is intended to persuade non-naturalists, but nevertheless may be a plausible position (...) for a naturalist, qua naturalist, to take on the mind. (shrink)

Nugayev’s book is one of the first Soviet monographs treating the theory change problem. The gist of epistemological model consists in consequent account of intertheoretical relations. His book is based on the works of Soviet authors, as well as on Western studies (K.R. Popper, T.S. Kuhn, I. Lakatos, P. Feyerabend et al.) Key words: epistemological model, Soviet philosophy, Western studies .

In this paper current author proposes a need for studying intricate differences between psychological aspects, factors, cognitions, affect, behaviour and related dynamics. It can be promoted as a separate branch within the domain of Psychology as Intricacy Psychology. Case history taking for the new Intervention Meditation of current author is proposed in line with capturing such intricacies of the client. The current also proposes to study the intricacies belonging to ‘Self’ as an important factor within his new Intervention Meditation approach. (...) View of Self in line with current author’s new Intervention Meditation is also outlined. This paper is at the initial stage of the series of papers planned to develop his new Intervention Meditation approach which is entirely different from all other meditations in vogue. (shrink)

This book review of Lieber and Press's “The myth of the nuclear revolution: Power politics in the atomic age" challenges the authors' position that nuclear weapons essentially have the same properties of conventional weapons. We argue that nuclear weapons alter warfare because they can end human civilization, and they pose a shared risk of mutual destruction.

Ayalon Eidelstein’s Openness and Faith focuses on the centrality of the idea of openness, or open-mindedness, to the educational sphere. The first half presents the challenges in modern ‘divided-consciousness’ and its consequences of egoism, materialism, and hedonism on the one hand, and religious fanatism on the other. Eidelstein’s main audience is the Israeli secular public, to which he proposes an educational and philosophical middle-way rooted in sincere human and inter-human openness. This openness is inspired by the idea of disinterestedness that (...) Kant articulates in his Critique of Judgment. Eidelstein refers to additional authors, including Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas, to conceptualize the idea of open-mindedness. In the second half of the book, he engages classical American Pragmatism, specifically that of William James, in order to establish the possibility for, and the validity of, a humane open-mindedness. Pragmatism thus paves the way for accepting beliefs that may otherwise be excluded as superstitions and accords them a legitimate and productive role in the life of a modern individual. The difficulty, however, lies in Eidelstein’s employment of Kantian disinterestedness, for it is in fact seriously dissonant with the worthy pragmatic educational purposes that Eidelstein elaborates in the second half of his book. Pragmatism is opposed to disinterestedness in that it stresses the entanglement of fact and value, viewing interests as playing a necessary and productive part in moral motivation and action, while Kantian deontology eliminates consequentialism from the moral scope. While for pragmatists (for example John Dewey’s Democracy and Education) the human creature is holistically conceived, as made of flesh and blood and not only as ‘spirit’, Kant maintained the dualistic Cartesian tradition. This tension calls for a rigorous address. Since Eidelstein’s book is making an important claim about the place open-mindedness has within the Judaism, it must be noted that the disinterestedness of a presumed human ‘self’ is also not easily compatible with the dominant voices in normative Jewish tradition. The Bible does not deal to a large extent with the ‘self’ or with mental intentions, and its conception of the human is not categorically different in the Talmudic corpus. On the contrary, the rabbis frequently endorse pragmatic and ‘external’ reasons, as the motivational basis for action. The kind of purism associated with disinterestedness (as in Mishnah Avot 5:18-19) is barely represented in rabbinic thought. Openness and Faith: In Search of Cultural Education Here and Now is nevertheless an important contribution to the intellectual discourse over the individual and public virtues. In our ever-more segregated and fenced-off world, there is an urgency to delineating the virtue of openness, hoping that Ecclesiastes is right in contending that “No person has power over the spirit [רוח] to retain it” (8:8). But to make Eidelstein’s point about openness in the second half of his book educationally viable, there a need for a pragmatic refinement of the philosophical anthropology in its first half. One way or the other, Openness and Faith is praiseworthy for its articulateness and depth, which invites its readers to an open-minded conversation about the concept of openness. (shrink)

The article distinguishes between charity and philanthropy and answers those who argue that monies spent for either are an inefficient deployment of monies for present consumption that could better be deployed by investing in the production of future wealth. It closes by arguing that philanthropists provide a key leadership role in the free-market economy. -/- The author owns the copyright, and there was no agreement, express or implied, not to use the publisher's PDF.

In this paper, I ask whether mishpat ivri (Jewish Law) is appropriately conceived as a “legal system”. I review Menachem Elon’s use of a “Sources” Theory of Law (based on Salmond) in his account of Mishpat Ivri; the status of religious law from the viewpoint of jurisprudence itself (Bentham, Austin and Kelsen); then the use of sources (and the approach to “dogmatic error”) by halakhic authorities in discussing the problems of the agunah (“chained wife”), which I suggest points to (...) a theory more radical than the “sources” theory of law, one more akin to the ultimate phase of the thought of Kelsen (the “non-logical” Kelsen) or indeed to some form of Legal Realism (with which that phase of Kelsen’s thought has indeed been compared)? I finally juxtapose an account based on internal theological resources (a “Jurisprudence of Revelation”). Downloadable at at http://www.biu.ac.il/JS/JSIJ/jsij1.html. (shrink)

Individuals come across extreme Uncertainty situations, feeling rounded–up 360 degrees, as if trapped inside Chakra Vyuha (wheel form strategy). For uncertainty is often related to future, the concept of Future Time perspective (FTP) is relied upon for attaining positive states. But FTP is a critical factor which works both positively and negatively depending on other factors intervening. For politicians and businessmen such states of being trapped in Chakra Vyuha, can mean end of their political life or business life. In the (...) current paper, the author describes the introspection of a Subject while he attempted to alter his Future Time perspective. This introspective report further gave clue for Merged Time Perspective or Seamless Time Horizon instead of FTP and also that Regulatory Focus and Resistance To Change need to be combined, coalesced and treated on a single continuum. Current author also has proposed a therapy outline to help businessmen and politicians to come out of devastating situations in which they feel rounded – up by opponents 360 degrees. (shrink)

The aim behind analyzing the Goodreads dataset is to get a fair idea about the relationships between the multiple attributes a book might have, such as: the aggregate rating of each book, the trend of the authors over the years and books with numerous languages. With over a hundred thousand ratings, there are books which just tend to become popular as each day seems to pass. We proposed an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model for predicting the overall rating of books. (...) The prediction is based on these features (bookID, title, authors, isbn, language_code, isbn13, # num_pages, ratings_count, text_reviews_count), which were used as input variables and (average_rating) as output variable for our ANN model. Our model were created, trained, and validated using data set in JNN environment, which its title is “Goodreads-books”. Model evaluation showed that the ANN model is able to predict correctly 99.78% of the validation samples. (shrink)

Abstract: This research delves into the utilization of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) as a powerful tool for predicting the overall ratings of books by leveraging a diverse set of attributes. To achieve this, we employ a comprehensive dataset sourced from Goodreads, enabling us to thoroughly examine the intricate connections between the different attributes of books and the ratings they receive from readers. In our investigation, we meticulously scrutinize how attributes such as genre, author, page count, publication year, and reader reviews (...) influence a book's overall rating. Through rigorous analysis and experimentation, we construct an advanced ANN model tailored for predictive analysis in the realm of book ratings. The outcomes of our study reveal the remarkable potential of ANNs in this domain. The ANN model exhibits an impressive level of accuracy when it comes to forecasting book ratings, underlining the efficacy and promise of artificial neural networks in enhancing our understanding and prediction of book evaluations. This research opens up new avenues for leveraging machine learning techniques to gain deeper insights into the dynamics of book ratings and reader preferences. (shrink)

Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works, Volume II: Understanding the Human World. Edited with Introduction by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 471-474 DOI 10.1007/s10746-011-9197-6 Authors Eric S. Nelson, Department of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts, Lowell, MA, USA Journal Human Studies Online ISSN 1572-851X Print ISSN 0163-8548 Journal Volume Volume 34 Journal Issue Volume 34, Number 4.

Introduction. The development of online marketing in social networks creates unique opportunities for personal selling. Especially these opportunities are manifested in online education when they buy a brand of an expert with experience in a particular field. That is why a competitive space is being formed in the Instagram social network, where a personal brand acts as a product or service. -/- Materials and methods. Studying the effectiveness of promoting a personal brand in social networks based on the Instagram platform (...) was chosen to have great visual opportunities for self-presentation. As part of the collection of empirical material, two methods were used: a survey (N-200) and content analysis of three blogger accounts with high rates of activity and popularity. -/- Results and discussion. Content analysis of bloggers showed that an algorithmic feed on a social network allows bloggers to control the content. To help them, Instagram provides statistical data on user reach, thereby capturing trends in the movement of the blogger’s audience. The main task of a blogger is to combine real and “virtual” images so as not to lose consumer confidence. A survey of social network users confirmed the importance of a personal brand for them. The survey also made it possible to identify the most popular audience requests that they expect from bloggers and their accounts: valuable reviews and recommendations, case studies and author’s solutions, storytelling, blogger’s reflections and motivating messages, live broadcasts, and stories are important. -/- Conclusions. The results obtained underline followers’ high level of interest in the bloggers’ personal brand on Instagram. The study results show that the most significant number of those involved (those who give feedback and are constantly involved in interaction with the account) is where the formation of a personal brand is built to a greater extent on the emotional level of perception of the individual. (shrink)

Historical Cognitive Science I am lucky to strike three reviewers who extract so clearly my book's spirit as well as its substance. They all both accept and act on my central methodological assumption; that detailed historical research, and consideration of difficult contemporary questions about cognition and culture, can be mutually illuminating. It's gratifying to find many themes which recur in different contexts throughout _Philosophy and Memory_ _Traces_ so well articulated here. The reviews catch my desires to interweave discussion of cognitive (...) theories of memory with moral questions of psychological control and self-mastery, to evoke the virtues and the pleasures of strange, baroque beliefs about fickle 'animal spirits' coursing through the nerves and the brain, to demonstrate that mechanistic explanation (even in its blunt old Cartesian form) can acknowledge complexity, and to develop scientific conceptions of dynamic memory traces and representations which can survive uncharitable philosophical criticism. The book's insistent interdisciplinarity is just an inchoate quest to acknowledge the daunting variety of the phenomena: remembering is both natural and cultural, and is studied by narrative theorists as well as neurobiologists, by physicists as well as psychologists. By fusing the rangy detail of a history of early modern neurophysiology with the committed, even gullible fervor of a defence of 'new connectionist' cognitive science, I wanted to pull out the carpet from all those who are happy to let 'scientific' and 'cultural' approaches to the mind run along independently. Once this general project is given space, as it is by all three reviewers, we can get down to specifics. (shrink)

In his The Meaning of Disgust, Colin McGinn employs elements of the phenomenological theory of disgust advanced by Aurel Kolnai in 1929. Kolnai’s treatment of what he calls “material” disgust and of its primary elicitors—putrefying organic matter, bodily wastes and secretions, sticky contaminants, vermin—anticipates more recent scientific treatments of this emotion as a mode of protective recoil. While Nina Strohminger charges McGinn with neglecting such scientific studies, we here attempt to show how Kolnai goes beyond experimental findings (...) in his careful description of the phenomenological differences between disgust and other emotions of forceful disapproval. (shrink)

A radically dualist view of the relationship between God and the universe is apt to make the problem of Divine intervention more difficult than under other metaphysical conceptions. We need to find a closer relationship than this if the causal picture is to work. We could try saying that God is realized by the universe, without being reducible to the universe. He has no further substance over and above that of the universe, but he is not simply identical to the (...) universe. I am not sure I know what this idea of realization comes to for the case of God and the universe, but it least it promises to make it feasible for God to be enmeshed in the natural causal order, without collapsing into it. It is not so much that God intervenes as supervenes, to use the jargon. On this picture, there is a mega- universe that includes both the physical universe and God, with the two locked somehow together. (shrink)

Abstract: The aim behind analyzing the Goodreads dataset is to get a fair idea about the relationships between the multiple attributes a book might have, such as: the aggregate rating of each book, the trend of the authors over the years and books with numerous languages. With over a hundred thousand ratings, there are books which just tend to become popular as each day seems to pass. We proposed an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model for predicting the overall rating of (...) books. The prediction is based on these features (bookID, title, authors, isbn, language_code, isbn13, # num_pages, ratings_count, text_reviews_count), which were used as input variables and (average_rating) as output variable for our ANN model. Our model were created, trained, and validated using data set in JNN environment, which its title is “Goodreads-books”. Model evaluation showed that the ANN model is able to predict correctly 99.78% of the validation samples. (shrink)

The idea behind this special theme journal issue was to continue the work we have started with the INBIOSA initiative (www.inbiosa.eu) and our small inter-disciplinary scientific community. The result of this EU funded project was a white paper (Simeonov et al., 2012a) defining a new direction for future research in theoretical biology we called Integral Biomathics and a volume (Simeonov et al., 2012b) with contributions from two workshops and our first international conference in this field in 2011. The initial impulse (...) for this effort was given a year earlier by a publication of one of the guest editors of this issue (Simeonov, 2010) in this journal. This time we wish to provide a broader forum and more space to elaborate in detail some of the most interesting concepts we have encountered in our discussions, as well as to invite some new contributions of particular interest in the field. Another goal we had in mind was to collect and review as many provocative perspectives as possible on the same key topic we are interested before making a decision to follow a more focused notion that would lead to a funded research program. Therefore we welcomed the generous suggestion of Professor Denis Noble, FRS, who is also editor of this journal to prepare a special theme issue entitled: “Can biology create a profoundly new mathematics and computation?” It has taken a while to invite and collect the contributions. Most of them had a couple of revision cycles and adjustments after having been thoroughly discussed with colleagues, incl. the editors of this issue. We think that the result we have obtained at the end is a satisfactory one, since we succeeded to integrate a diversity of original, but sometimes controversial and mutually excluding concepts organized within chapters of a self-contained volume. The task of compiling all this was not easy at all. Despite our efforts to position the articles of different authors and themes in a way allowing their easy comprehension and relation to each other within the individual chapters, some of them still require a sort of introduction to dissolve possible ambiguities. This is what we are going to do in the following few paragraphs with the hope that the reader (and some of the authors) would excuse our failures. (shrink)

In Truth by Analysis (2012), Colin McGinn aims to breathe new life into conceptual analysis. Sadly, he fails to defend conceptual analysis, either in principle or by example.

Schopenhauer repeatedly claims that suicide is both foolish and futile. But while many commentators have expressed sympathy for his charge of foolishness, most regard his charge of futility as indefensible even within his own system. In this paper, I offer a defense of Schopenhauer’s futility charge, based on metaphysical and psychological considerations. On the metaphysical front, Schopenhauer’s view implies that psychological connections extend beyond death. Drawing on Parfit’s discussion of personal identity, I argue that those connections have personal significance, such (...) that suicide does not allow one, as Hamlet hopes, simply “not to be.” On the psychological front, I argue that a distinction between agents’ intentions and underlying desires makes room for Schopenhauer to claim that paradigmatic suicidal agents ultimately desire the opposite of what suicide accomplishes. I conclude by showing how the resulting account of futility can buttress the charge of foolishness as well. My interpretation still leaves Schopenhauer vulnerable to certain objections, but shows that his account is significantly more defensible than previous commentators have realized. (shrink)

Henry More argues that materialism cannot account for cases where a single subject or perceiver has multiple perceptions simultaneously. Since we clearly do have multiple perceptions at the same time--for example, when we see, hear, and smell simultaneously--More concludes that we are not wholly material. In response to More's argument, Margaret Cavendish adopts a two-fold strategy. First, she argues that there is no general obstacle to mental unification in her version of materialism. Second, Cavendish appeals to the mind or rational (...) matter--terms she often uses interchangeably—to explain the integration of sensory input from multiple senses. When the mind integrates perceptions across modalities, the different parts of rational matter share their knowledge so that they all come to perceive alike. When rational parts successfully communicate their knowledge, each part knows what all the others know. They pool their knowledge; they perceive alike. Thus, when someone hears, sees, and tastes, each part of her mind hears, sees, and tastes alike, in parallel and in unison. The Cavendishian mind, in short, approximates simplicity by achieving uniformity or homogeneity of perceptions across its parts. (shrink)

According to Jago (2014a), logical omniscience is really part of a deeper paradox. Jago develops an epistemic logic with principles of indeterminate closure to solve this paradox, but his official semantics is difficult to navigate, it is motivated in part by substantive metaphysics, and the logic is not axiomatized. In this paper, I simplify this epistemic logic by adapting the hyperintensional semantic framework of Sedlár (2021). My first goal is metaphysical neutrality. The solution to the epistemic paradox should not require (...) appeal to a metaphysics of truth-makers, situations, or impossible worlds, by contrast with Jago’s official semantics. My second goal is to elaborate on the proof theory. I show how to axiomatize a family of logics with principles of indeterminate epistemic closure. (shrink)

Sutton's response to three reviews, by Catherine Wilson, Theo Meyering, and Michael Mascuch. Topics include historical cognitive science; the historical link between animal spirits and neural nets; conceptual change; control and time in memory; and Descartes the neurophilosopher.

Despite his reputation for neglecting the body, Descartes develops a systematic account of bodily awareness. He holds that in bodily awareness each of us feels intimately connected to our body. We experience this body as inescapable, as infused with bodily sensations and volitions, and as a special object of concern. This multifaceted experience plays an ambivalent role in Descartes’s philosophy. Bodily awareness is epistemically dangerous. It tempts us to falsely judge that we cannot exist apart from our bodies. But bodily (...) awareness isn’t all bad for Descartes. It helps us stay alive. Bodily awareness also serves as a corrective to overly disembodied conceptions of the self. (shrink)

Spinoza’s account of reason in the Short Treatise has been largely neglected. That account, I argue, has at least four features which distinguish it from that of the Ethics: in the Short Treatise, (1) reason is more sharply distinguished from the faculty of intuitive knowledge, (2) reason deals with things as though they were ‘outside’ us, (3) reason lacks clarity and distinctness, and (4) reason has no power over many types of passions. I argue that these differences have a unified (...) explanation, consisting of a principle that Spinoza accepts in both works and a central change in his views. The principle is that whatever we find in ourselves has more power over us than anything which comes from outside, and the change is in making the objects of reason common things or common notions. Understanding this, I claim, sheds important light on the psychological and epistemological motivations behind Spinoza's mature doctrines. (shrink)

Kant: Philosophy of Mind Immanuel Kant was one of the most important philosophers of the Enlightenment Period in Western European history. This encyclopedia article focuses on Kant’s views in the philosophy of mind, which undergird much of his epistemology and metaphysics. In particular, it focuses on metaphysical and epistemological doctrines forming the … Continue reading Kant: Philosophy of Mind →.

Distributive justice decision making tends to require a trade off between different valued outcomes. The present study tracked computer mouse cursor movements in a forced-choice paradigm to examine for tension between different parameters of distributive justice during the decision-making process. Participants chose between set meal distributions, to third parties, that maximised either equality (the evenness of the distribution) or efficiency (the total number of meals distributed). Across different formulations of these dilemmas, responding was consistent with the notion that individuals tend (...) to base decisions in part on the magnitude of these parameters. In addition, dilemmas associated with inconsistent responding across the sample tended to elicit the greatest spatial deviation of the cursor, potentially reflecting dilemma difficulty. One interpretation of these results is that individuals value equality and efficiency in such a way that moral dilemmas are resolved by comparing the perceived value of these qualitatively different parameters, consistent with a value pluralistic framework of decision making. A post-hoc analysis indicated that individuals also incorporated sufficiency concerns during distributive justice decision making. The results are discussed in relation to political philosophy. (shrink)