In analyzing oppressive systems like racism, social theorists have articulated accounts of the dynamic interaction and mutual dependence between psychological components, such as individuals’ patterns of thought and action, and social components, such as formal institutions and informal interactions. We argue for the further inclusion of physical components, such as material artifacts and spatial environments. Drawing on socially situated and ecologically embedded approaches in the cognitive sciences, we argue that physical components of racism are not only shaped by, but also (...) shape psychological and social components of racism. Indeed, while our initial focus is on racism and racist things, we contend that our framework is also applicable to other oppressive systems, including sexism, classism, and ableism. This is because racist things are part of a broader class of oppressive things, which are material artifacts and spatial environments that are in congruence with an oppressive system. (shrink)

One of the most common judgments of normative life takes the following form: With respect to some things that matter, one item is better than the other, with respect to other things that matter, the other item is better, but all things considered – that is, taking into account all the things that matter – the one item is better than the other. In this paper, I explore how all-things-considered judgments are possible, assuming that they (...) are. In particular, I examine the question of how the different considerations relevant to an all-things-considered judgment come together in a way that gives each relevant consideration its proper due. I propose an answer which provides a unified account of all-things-considered judgments and highlights a deep connection between value and reason. My suggestion is that ‘all things considered’ is, in effect, a placeholder for a more comprehensive, sometimes nameless, value that includes the things considered as parts, and that this more comprehensive value determines how the things considered normatively relate. (shrink)

Each thing is fundamental. Not only is no thing any more or less real than any other, but no thing is prior to another in any robust ontological sense. Thus, no thing can explain the very existence of another, nor account for how another is what it is. I reach this surprising conclusion by undermining two important positions in contemporary metaphysics: hylomorphism and hierarchical views employing so-called building relations, such as grounding. The paper has three main parts. First, I observe (...) hylomorphism is alleged by its proponents to solve various philosophical problems. However, I demonstrate, in light of a compelling account of explanation, that these problems are actually demands to explain what cannot be but inexplicable. Second, I show how my argument against hylomorphism illuminates an account of the essence of a thing, thereby providing insight into what it is to exist. This indicates what a thing, in the most general sense, must be and a correlative account of the structure in reality. Third, I argue that this account of structure is incompatible not only with hylomorphism, but also with any hierarchical view of reality. Although hylomorphism and the latter views are quite different, representing distinct philosophical traditions, I maintain they share untenable accounts of structure and fundamentality and so should be rejected on the same grounds. (shrink)

According to orthodoxy, the most fundamental kind of causation involves one event causing another event. I argue against this event‐causal view. Instead, the most fundamental kind of causation is thing causation, which involves a thing causing a thing to do something. Event causation is reducible to thing causation, but thing causation is not reducible to event causation, because event causation cannot accommodate cases of fine‐grained causation. I defend my view from objections, including C. D. Broad's influential “timing” argument, and I (...) conclude with implications for agent‐causal theories of free will. (shrink)

Critical Notice of Alex Worsnip's 'Fitting Things Together: Coherence and the Demands of Structural Rationality' (OUP 2021).

The Sure-Thing Principle famously appears in Savage’s axiomatization of Subjective Expected Utility. Yet Savage introduces it only as an informal, overarching dominance condition motivating his separability postulate P2 and his state-independence postulate P3. Once these axioms are introduced, by and large, he does not discuss the principle any more. In this note, we pick up the analysis of the Sure-Thing Principle where Savage left it. In particular, we show that each of P2 and P3 is equivalent to a dominance condition; (...) that they strengthen in different directions a common, basic dominance axiom; and that they can be explicitly combined in a unified dominance condition that is a candidate formal statement for the Sure-Thing Principle. Based on elementary proofs, our results shed light on some of the most fundamental properties of rational choice under uncertainty. In particular they imply, as corollaries, potential simplifications for Savage’s and the Anscombe- Aumann axiomatizations of Subjective Expected Utility. Most surprisingly perhaps, they reveal that in Savage’s axiomatization, P3 can be weakened to a natural strengthening of so-called Obvious Dominance. (shrink)

Are there any things that are such that any things whatsoever are among them. I argue that there are not. My thesis follows from these three premises: (1) There are two or more things; (2) for any things, there is a unique thing that corresponds to those things; (3) for any two or more things, there are fewer of them than there are pluralities of them.

This article juxtaposes two of the most influential thinkers of the previous century, Georges Bataille and Martin Heidegger: my overarching claim will be that a contrastive approach allows a better understanding of two central dynamics within their work. First, I show that both were deeply troubled by a certain methodological anxiety; namely, that the practice of writing might distort and deform their insights. By employing a comparative strategy, I suggest that we can gain a better understanding of the very specific (...) form this fear takes in them: in each case, it is articulated and justified in terms of the ‘chose’ or ‘Ding’ (‘thing’) or the ‘objet’ or ‘Objekt’ (‘object’). Second, I argue that close textual comparison allows us to identify an important, new dimension in their reactions to this shared anxiety: the thing or object which was originally the site of the anxiety gradually becomes, through series of ontological and textual shifts, the solution to it. I track this transformation across a range of case studies including Heidegger’s later work on the term ‘Ding’ and Bataille’s treatment of prostitution. I close by indicating how these results might create avenues for further research. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of how we do things with music—that is, the way that we use music as an esthetic technology to enact micro-practices of emotion regulation, communicative expression, identity construction, and interpersonal coordination that drive core aspects of our emotional and social existence. The main thesis is: from birth, music is directly perceived as an affordance-laden structure. Music, I argue, affords a sonic world, an exploratory space or nested acoustic environment that further affords possibilities for, among (...) other things, (1) emotion regulation and (2) social coordination. When we do things with music, we are engaged in the work of creating and cultivating the self, as well as creating and cultivating a shared world that we inhabit with others. I develop this thesis by first introducing the notion of a musical affordance . Next, I look at how emotional affordances in music are exploited to construct and regulate emotions. I summon empirical research on neonate music therapy to argue that this is something we emerge from the womb knowing how to do. I then look at social affordances in music, arguing that joint attention to social affordances in music alters how music is both perceived and appropriated by joint attenders within social listening contexts. In support, I describe the experience of listening to and engaging with music in a live concert setting. Thinking of music as an affordance-laden structure thus reaffirms the crucial role that music plays in constructing and regulating emotional and social experiences in everyday life. (shrink)

Does time seem to pass, even though it doesn’t, really? Many philosophers think the answer is ‘Yes’—at least when ‘time’s passing’ is understood in a particular way. They take time’s passing to be a process by which each time in turn acquires a special status, such as the status of being the only time that exists, or being the only time that is present. This chapter suggests that, on the contrary, all we perceive is temporal succession, one thing after another, (...) a notion to which modern physics is not inhospitable. The contents of perception are best described in terms of ‘before’ and ‘after’, rather than ‘past’, ‘present, and ‘future’. (shrink)

There is a fundamental ontological difference between two kinds of entity: things and objects. Unlike things, objects are not identical to any fusion of particulars. Unlike things, objects do not have mereological parts. While things are ontologically innocent, objects are not. Objects are meaty. I defend the distinction between things and objects, and provide an account of the nature of objects.

Diffusionism in anthropology posits centres of creativity from which things diffuse, such as ideas and innovations. But what sort of place is likely to be such a centre of creativity? I distinguish two cases, the second of which poses a problem for diffusionism.

Things and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...

My goal in this paper is twofold. First, I want to analyze two early texts by Vilém Flusser in order to explore what may have been his conceptualization of the relationship between science and philosophy. My analysis suggests that Flusser thought of both as tools to analyze reality by analyzing language. While he saw science as a (sometimes too vigorous) force forward, he viewed philosophy as what can prevent some of the negative consequences of such progress. In direct comparison, Flusser (...) thought of science as a discourse with the purpose to provide novel information and of philosophy as what can keep objective science in check by moving the discourse into the realm of the subjective. It remains to be explored whether these results also apply to Flusser’s later writings. My second goal is to show the relationship between three aspects of modern science (crisis, contrast, and trying out) and what I see as Flusser’s early (mid 1960s) view of science in relation to philosophy and poetry. -/- . (shrink)

Do spatial features appear the same whether they are perceived through vision or touch? This question is at stake in the puzzle that William Molyneux posed to John Locke, concerning whether a man born blind whose sight was restored would be able immediately to identify the shapes of the things he saw. A recent study purports to answer the question negatively, but I argue here that the subjects of the study likely could not see well enough for the result (...) to have been meaningful. I then propose a way to improve the study, by including cues from object motion. (shrink)

What colour does a white wall look in the pinkish light of the late afternoon? Philosophers disagree: they hold variously that it looks pink, white, both, and no colour at all. A new approach is offered. After reviewing the dispute, a reinterpretation of perceptual constancy is offered. In accordance with this reinterpretation, it is argued that perceptual features such as color must always be predicated of perceptual objects. Thus, it might be that in pinkish light, the wall looks white and (...) the light looks pink. The paper concludes by discussing some criteria for object identification in perceptual states. (shrink)

Ethical codes, ethics committees, and respect for autonomy have been key to the development of medical ethics —elements that digital ethics would do well to emulate.

Objective reasons are given by the facts. Subjective reasons are given by one’s perspective on the facts. Subjective reasons, not objective reasons, determine what it is rational to do. In this paper, I argue against a prominent account of subjective reasons. The problem with that account, I suggest, is that it makes what one has subjective reason to do, and hence what it is rational to do, turn on matters outside or independent of one’s perspective. After explaining and establishing this (...) point, I offer a novel account of subjective reasons which avoids the problem. (shrink)

In a letter to William Molyneux John Locke states that in reviewing his chapter 'Of Power' for the second edition of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding he noticed that he had made one mistake which, now corrected, has put him "into a new view of things" which will clarify his account of human freedom. Locke says the mistake was putting “things for actions” on p.123 of the first edition, a page on which the word 'things' does not (...) appear (The Correspondence of John Locke. E.S. de Beer, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), Vol.4, no.1643, 15 July, 1693.) It is the aim of this paper to (1) elucidate where the correction occurs, (2) give an analysis of why the correction is needed, and (3) give an explanation of why Locke believed replacing 'things' with 'actions' was an important change. (shrink)

According to David Rosenthal’s higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, a mental state is conscious just in case one is aware of being in that state via a suitable HOT. Jesse Mulder (2016) recently objects: though HOT theory holds that conscious states are states that it seems to one that one is in, the view seems unable to explain how HOTs engender such seemings. I clarify here how HOT theory can adequately explain the relevant mental appearances, illustrating the explanatory power (...) of HOT theory. (shrink)

I discuss Aristotle’s views in Metaphysics VII-6 (Z-6) on the issue whether each thing is the same as its essence. I propose a deflationary interpretation according to which Z-6 develops a “logical approach” (logikos) in which “sameness” amounts only to coextensiveness between definiendum and definiens with no attention to more specific issues about ontological and explanatory features of definitions.

A perennial epistemological question is whether things can be known just as they are in the absence of any awareness of them. This epistemological question is posterior to ontological considerations and more specific ones pertaining to mind. In light of such considerations, the author propounds a naïve realist, foundationalist account of knowledge of things in themselves, one that makes crucial use of the work of Brentano. After introducing the resources provided by Brentano’s study of mind, the author reveals (...) the ontological framework in which it takes place. Doing so is instrumental to illuminating acquaintance, the state that enables the direct engagement of a mind and some other thing. The author discusses this state and shows how it has the epistemic heft, with a Brentanian account of judgment, to provide the foundations of one’s knowledge of the world. A naïve realist, foundationalist account of knowledge is open to a compelling objection; the author presents this objection with the means of undermining it. In conclusion, the author recurs to the opening theme of the primacy of ontology and suggests that familiar misgivings about knowing things in themselves are all based on questionable—and ultimately untenable—ontological presuppositions. (shrink)

For one to simply think, philosophy as a rational investigation of truths and principles of knowledge, being, and conduct, that is, philosophy as a "science," is not required. For thinking, what requisite is a reason, a human endowment constitutive of one's intelligence. One only needs a mind to be able to think. But something more is exigent for one to think twice, is to think again, to reconsider and see something from a different perspective. To think things twice, one (...) needs a conscious apprehension of the notion of truth, a deliberate and critical engagement with principles, and a learned competency of habits of thinking that discloses the eternal freshness of reality. These are the elements that constitute philosophy not simply as a way of life, but as an academic discipline with methods and theories. Here lies philosophy's vocational relevance. Thinking things twice is not the mental disorder of indecisiveness or the unfortunate product of capriciousness. To think things twice is the stubborn instinct of human intelligence which remains restless in entrenched patterns of thought. The apprehension of the possibility of thinking things twice is the initial promise of liberation, the first step towards unshackling the mind and its powers from mental scripts that do not give birth to creativity. This explains why it is said that in the domain of philosophical discourses, questions always outlive their answers. Indeed, though philosophy, in its many faces and guises, has offered opinions, beliefs and sometimes divergent truths to the fundamental questions of life. The more important are the questions asked than the answers proffered. The convoluted transformations and shifting grounds in the history of ideas show to us how, philosophically considered, answers have no finality. (shrink)

A familiar complaint against the principle that “ought” implies “can” is that it seems that agents can intentionally make it the case that they cannot perform acts that they nonetheless ought to perform. I propose a related principle that I call the principle that “the thing to do” implies “can.” I argue that the principle that “the thing to do” implies “can” is implied by important but underappreciated truths about practical reason, and that it is not vulnerable to the familiar (...) complaint against “ought” implies “can.” Moreover, I suggest that “the thing to do” implies “can” has interesting implications for “ought” implies “can” - implications that depend on the relation between claims about what we ought to do and claims about the thing to do. (shrink)

‘Thing’ in the titular question should be construed as having the utmost generality. In the relevant sense, a thing just is an entity, an existent, a being. The present task is to say what a thing of any category is. This task is, I believe, the primary one of any comprehensive and systematic metaphysics. Indeed, an answer provides the means for resolving perennial disputes concerning the integrity of the structure in reality—whether some of the relations among things are necessary (...) merely given those relata themselves—and the intricacy of this structure—whether some things are more or less fundamental than others. After considering some reasons for thinking the generality of the titular question makes it unanswerable, I propound the methodology, original inquiry, required to answer it. The key to this methodology is adopting a singular perspective; confronting the world as merely the impetus to inquiry, one can attain an account of what a thing must be. Radical ontology is a systematic metaphysics—broadly Aristotelian, essentialist and nonhierarchical—that develops the consequences of this account. With it, it is possible to move past stalemate in metaphysics by revealing the grounds of a principled choice between seemingly incommensurable worldviews. (shrink)

In ‘Knowing What Things Look Like,’ I argued against the immediacy of visual objectual knowledge, i.e. visual knowledge that a thing is F, for an object category F, such as avocado, tree, desk, etc. Joseph Shieber proposes a challenging dilemma in reply. Either knowing what Fs look like requires having concepts such as looks or it doesn’t. Either way my argument fails. If knowing what Fs look like doesn’t require having such concepts, then he claims we can give an (...) immediacy-friendly anti-intellectualist account of knowing what Fs look like, one that I neglected. If it does require having such concepts, then knowledge of what Fs look like plays no important role in ordinary cases of knowing things to be F by their looks. I argue for several claims. First, Shieber's anti-intellectualist proposal fails for independent reasons. Second, I give reasons for thinking that knowing what Fs look like doesn't require having a general concept of looks, which lessens worries about nonhuman animals having such knowledge. Finally, I consider the possibility, important to Shieber's argument, that nonhuman animals are simply incapable of knowing what Fs look like. I argue the implications for human knowledge are far from clear. (shrink)

I begin by considering a question that has driven much scholarship on transcendental idealism: are appearances numerically identical to the things in themselves that appear, or numerically distinct? I point out that much of the debate on this question has assumed that this is equivalent to the question of whether they are the same objects, but go on to provide textual, historical, and philosophical evidence that “object” (Gegenstand) and “thing” (Ding) have different meanings for Kant. A thing is a (...) locus of intensively gradable causal force, reality. I argue that appearances and things in themselves are not identical as objects, because the very concept of object-identity is tied, for Kant, to the concept of an intellect that would cognize the numerical identity of the objects in question. Because no intellect can be both discursive and intellectual, no intellect could cognize the numerical identity of objects across the phenomenal/noumenal divide, and thus the claim that they are identical has no content. However, the very same things, the same reality, can be given to our sensible intellects, and to divine intuitive intellect, as two non-overlapping domains of objects. Identity readers are thus shown to be right about the same thing relation, while non-identity readers are vindicated on the numerical identity of objects. (shrink)

Phenomenal beliefs are beliefs about the phenomenal properties of one's concurrent conscious states. It is an article of common sense that such beliefs tend to be justified. Philosophers have been less convinced. It is sometimes claimed that phenomenal beliefs are not on the whole justified, on the grounds that they are typically based on introspection and introspection is often unreliable. Here we argue that such reasoning must guard against a potential conflation between two distinct introspective phenomena, which we call fact-introspection (...) and thing -introspection; arguments for the unreliability of introspection typically target only the former, leaving the reliability of the latter untouched. In addition, we propose a theoretical framework for understanding thing -introspection that may have a surprising consequence: thing -introspection is not only reliable, but outright infallible. This points at a potential line of defense of phenomenal-belief justification, which here we only sketch very roughly. (shrink)

Use of the word “worry” is on the rise. Does that reflect our anxious time — or make it worse?

When we experience the world – see, hear, feel, taste, or smell things – we gain all sorts of knowledge about the things around us. And this knowledge figures heavily in our reasoning about the world – about what to think and do in response to it. But what is the nature of this knowledge? On one commonly held view, all knowledge is constituted by beliefs in propositions. But in this paper I argue against this view. I argue (...) that some knowledge is constituted, not by beliefs in propositions, but by awareness of properties and objects. To make my case, I focus on the role of visual perception in reasoning. I start by introducing a principle about the relationship between knowledge and reasoning, which says that to learn something new by reasoning, one must know the bases of one’s reasoning. Then I argue that in some cases of genuine, knowledge-conferring reasoning, the bases of our reasoning are not propositions that we believe; rather, they’re properties or objects that we see. Thus, I conclude that some such knowledge is non-propositional and is rather what some call “knowledge of things”. (shrink)

In exploring how our brains contribute to shaping our mind’s construction of reality McGilchirst draws together the domains of neuropsychology, epistemology and metaphysics; how we can come to know, and the nature of what it is that is known are subjects inextricable from the equipment we rely upon in our exploration. His contention is that today there is an urgent need to transform how we see the world and thus what we make of ourselves. As such his ambition is to (...) disclose a way of looking at the world which diverges significantly from the manner of seeing that has dominated human civilisations for millennia and which, he contends, has produced systemic misunderstandings of the nature of reality. with The Matter With Things, McGilchirst takes the reader on a tour de force of the world of ideas and into a landscape not of a material world composed of ‘things’, but rather discloses the more fundamental ‘process’ quality of reality. We explore the relevance and application to the philosophy of cognitive science and psychological practice. (shrink)

The text is translated from the book W.V.O.Quine: Theories and Things. Second printing, 1982. pp. 1-24.

What is the human body? Both the most familiar and unfamiliar of things, the body is the centre of experience but also the site of a prehistory anterior to any experience. Alien and uncanny, this other side of the body has all too often been overlooked by phenomenology. In confronting this oversight, Dylan Trigg’s The Thing redefines phenomenology as a species of realism, which he terms unhuman phenomenology. Far from being the vehicle of a human voice, this unhuman phenomenology (...) gives expression to the alien materiality at the limit of experience. -/- By fusing the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, and Levinas with the horrors of John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and H.P. Lovecraft, Trigg explores the ways in which an unhuman phenomenology positions the body out of time. At once a challenge to traditional notions of phenomenology, The Thing is also a timely rejoinder to contemporary philosophies of realism. The result is nothing less than a rebirth of phenomenology as redefined through the lens of horror. (shrink)

Chinua Achebe, the contemporary Nigerian novelist, is considered as one of the prominent figures in African anti-colonial literature. What makes his works specific is the way he approaches the issues of colonization of Africa in an objective manner and through an innovative language which aims at providing a pathology; a pathological reading meant to draw on the pre-colonial and colonial history without any presumptions so as to present the readers with possible alternative African discourses in future. His first novel (...) class='Hi'>Things Fall Apart can be taken as the best representative of such a penchant in Achebe. The present study seeks to approach Things Fall apart by reflecting on those discursive features which have provided the ground for constructing such a pathological reading and an alternative to the colonial discourse. To this end, some key terms introduced by Homi Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin such as ‘hybridity’, ‘otherness’ and ‘polyphony’, constitute the cornerstone of this study. Presumably, such an innovative reading of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is to lead to a better understanding of his discourse and the efforts made by him to help the African readers figure out how to piece together what once fell apart; what they can rely on for building an independent future in the so-called postcolonial era. (shrink)

This article compares the use of Romantic metaphor with the Chinese literary device xiang 象 (which I translate as “thing-metaphor”) in regard to how they embody different metaphysical relations between humans and things. Whereas Romantic metaphor transports a physical thing to the immaterial realm of imagination, xiang is a literary device in which the material qualities of the thing, while creatively interpreted to generate human meaning, retain ontologically a strong physical presence. Xiang therefore epitomizes a theory of creation that (...) challenges the Western dualistic paradigm: that the poet creates not virtual copies of the thing, but meanings of the thing, and therefore our relationships with things. The article concludes with Heidegger’s discourses on metaphor to suggest that my discussion of thing-metaphor has universal applicability. (shrink)

Considering whether existence, i.e., being, is a thing might seem like the height of aimless metaphysical chin stroking. However, the issue—specifically, whether existence is a quality—is significant, bearing on how reality, this all-encompassing totality, is. On one view, reality at large is ontologically fixed, the sum total of things does not (and cannot) vary; on another view, reality is ontologically transient, the sum total of things varies. I first show that if existence is a thing, that reality is (...) ontologically fixed follows. So I consider whether existence is indeed a thing. I demonstrate that “it” could not be: existence is no existent. I then discuss what it is to exist, given existence is nothing at all. I maintain there are no grounds for the view that reality is ontologically fixed. I argue, from the irrefragable basis of temporal differentiation—the world going from thus…to as so—that reality is ontologically transient. I consider some objections to ontological transience and conclude by considering the key to understanding the overall structure in reality and what it reveals about how very inconstant all this is. (shrink)

Differently illuminated, things in one sense look different, but in another sense look the same.

Among the contemporary philosophers using the concept of the Anthropocene, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers are prominent examples. The way they use this concept, however, diverts from the most common understanding of the Anthropocene. In fact, their use of this notion is a continuation of their earlier work around the concept of a ‘parliament of things.’ Although mainly seen as a sociology or philosophy of science, their work can be read as philosophy of technology as well. Similar to Latour’s (...) claim that science is Janus-headed, technology has two faces. Faced with the Anthropocene, we need to shift from technologies of control to technologies of negotiations, i.e., a parliament of things. What, however, does a ‘parliament of things’ mean? This paper wants to clarify what is conceptually at stake by framing Latour’s work within the philosophy of Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers. Their philosophy implies a ‘postlinguistic turn,’ where one can ‘let things speak in their own name,’ without claiming knowledge of the thing in itself. The distinction between object and subject is abolished to go back to the world of ‘quasi-objects’ (Serres). Based on the philosophy of science of Latour and Stengers the possibility for a politics of quasi-objects or a ‘cosmopolitics’ (Stengers) is opened. It is in this framework that their use of the notion of the Anthropocene must be understood and a different view of technology can be conceptualized. (shrink)

The idea of a distinctively political normativity came under sustained fire lately. Here I formulate, test, and reject a moderate and promising way of conceiving it. According to this conception, political normativity is akin to the kind of normativity at play in all-things-considered judgments, i.e., those judgments that weight together all the relevant reasons to determine what practical rationality as such requires to do. I argue that even when we try to conceive political normativity in this all-things considered (...) way, and even when we do not concede from the get-go that moral reasons necessarily trump or overrides normative reasons of a different kind, political normativity is still reducible to morality, because the peculiar content of all-things-considered political oughts remain explainable through general moral principles and contextual facts that do not obtain exclusively in political scenarios, but in many others too. If my arguments are correct, I provide political realists with one more reason to withdraw from the metaethical battle over the idea of a distinctively political normativity and show that the moralist approach is defensible against a prima facie promising, but ultimately untenable, alternative. (shrink)

Penelope Mackie and Scott Soames argue, contrary to my Reference and Essence (R&E), that Hilary Putnam was correct that the direct-reference theory of natural-kind terms, taken in conjunction with empirical or otherwise uncontroversial premises, yields non-trivial essentialism, such as the conclusion that water is essentially two-parts hydrogen, one-part oxygen. A controversial distinction is drawn between rigid and non-rigid general terms. A new criterion for general-term rigidity is proposed, and Putnam’s ostensive definition of ‘water’ is reformulated accordingly to generate the consequence (...) that ‘water’ rigidly designates. Mackie and Soames propose a reformulation of Putnam’s ostensive definition that putatively yields the desired result. This reformulation, however, does not correctly explain the meaning of ‘water’ as a substance designator. Furthermore, if taken instead as a redefinition of ‘water’, the essentialism thereby generated is trivial. (shrink)

The Meaning of Things explores the meanings of household possessions for three generation families in the Chicago area, and the place of materialism in American culture. Now regarded as a keystone in material culture studies, Halton's first book is based on his dissertation and coauthored with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. First published by Cambridge University Press in 1981, it has been translated into German, Italian, Japanese, and Hungarian. The Meaning of Things is a study of the significance of material possessions (...) in contemporary urban life, and of the ways people carve meaning out of their domestic environment. Drawing on a survey of eighty families in Chicago who were interviewed on the subject of their feelings about common household objects, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton provide a unique perspective on materialism, American culture, and the self. They begin by reviewing what social scientists and philosophers have said about the transactions between people and things. In the model of 'personhood' that the authors develop, goal-directed action and the cultivation of meaning through signs assume central importance. They then relate theoretical issues to the results of their survey. An important finding is the distinction between objects valued for action and those valued for contemplation. The authors compare families who have warm emotional attachments to their homes with those in which a common set of positive meanings is lacking, and interpret the different patterns of involvement. They then trace the cultivation of meaning in case studies of four families. Finally, the authors address what they describe as the current crisis of environmental and material exploitation, and suggest that human capacities for the creation and redirection of meaning offer the only hope for survival. A wide range of scholars - urban and family sociologists, clinical, developmental and environmental psychologists, cultural anthropologists and philosophers, and many general readers - will find this book stimulating and compelling. Translations: Il significato degli oggetti. Italian translation. Rome: Edizione Kappa, 1986. Der Sinn der Dinge. German translation. Munich: Psychologie Verlags Union, 1989. Japanese translation 2007. Targyaink tukreben. Hungarian translation, 2011. (shrink)

The one-world interpretation of Kant's idealism holds that appearances and things in themselves are, in some sense, the same things. Yet this reading faces a number of problems, all arising from the different features Kant seems to assign to appearances and things in themselves. I propose a new way of understanding the appearance/thing in itself distinction via an Aristotelian notion that I call, following Kit Fine, a ‘qua-object.’ Understanding appearances and things in themselves as qua-objects provides (...) a clear sense in which they can be the same things while differing in many of their features. (shrink)

It has been argued that the tenseless view of time is incompatible with endurantism. This has been disputed, perhaps most famously by Hugh Mellor and Peter Simons. They argue that things can endure in tenseless time, and indeed must endure if tenseless time is to contain change. In this paper I will point out some difficulties with Mellor’s and Simons’ claims that in tenseless time a particular can be ‘wholly present’ at various times, and therefore endure, as well as (...) have incompatible properties at those different times, and thereby change. In effect I argue that they do not resolve the charge that the tenseless view of time is incomatible with endurantism because the tenseless view does not allow anything to change temporal location and thereby come to be ‘wholly present’ at various times. (shrink)

Our day-to-day experience of the world regularly brings us into contact with middlesized objects such as apples, dogs, and other human beings. These objects possess observable properties, properties that are available or accessible to the unaided senses, such as redness and roundness, as well as properties that are not so available, such as chemical ones. Both of these kinds of properties serve as valuable sources of information about our familiar middle-sized objects at least to the extent that they enable us (...) to understand the behaviours of those objects and their effects on each other and on us. I see the apple on the table before me, and in doing so I see its redness, its roundness, and so on. I do not see, but know that it has, a certain chemical constitution. The knowledge gained of the apple by means of both properties tells me something about the nature of that apple. In general, most, if not all, of the properties that objects in the observable world possess serve as the basis of our knowledge of such objects. But the subject-predicate form of much of our discourse and thought about objects suggests that substances are one kind of thing, properties another. We use subject terms such as names to identify objects, predicate terms to attribute properties to them. What, then, is it for an object to have a property? And what is the relation between an object and its properties? (shrink)

What did Heidegger learn and fail to learn from Laozi and Zhuangzi? This book reconstructs Heidegger's philosophy through its engagement with Daoist and Asian philosophy and offers a Daoist transformation of Heidegger on things, nothingness, and freedom. PDF includes the introduction, bibliography, and index.

Any good theory of knowledge ascriptions should explain and predict our judgments about their felicity. I argue that any such explanation must take into account a distinction between three ways of using knowledge ascriptions: to suggest acceptance of the embedded proposition, to explain or predict a subject's behavior or attitudes, or to understand the relation of knowledge as such. The contextual effects on our judgments about felicity systematically differ between these three types of uses. Using such a distinction is, in (...) principle, open to both contextualist and pragmatic invariantist accounts of knowledge ascriptions. However, there are some implications pertaining to the use of the “method of cases” in the debate about knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

In her analysis of the politics of biotechnology, Sheila Jasanoff argued that modern democracy cannot be understood without an analysis of the ways knowledge is created and used in society. She suggested calling these ways to “know things in common” civic epistemologies. Jasanoff thus approached knowledge as fundamentally social. The focus on the social nature of knowledge allows drawing parallels with some developments in philosophy of science. In the first part of the paper, I juxtapose Jasanoff’s account with the (...) philosopher Helen Longino’s approach. Longino argued that objectivity of scientific knowledge is made possible by the social nature of knowledge production. In the process of community-wide discussion, claims that are not intersubjectively acceptable are rejected and communally acceptable knowledge emerges. Longino called this knowledge-creating critical dialogue transformative. I suggest that Longino’s account can be seen as providing epistemological support for the civic epistemologies Jasanoff described. They are capable of producing knowledge in the normative philosophical sense of the word to the degree that they are able to support this transformative critical dialogue. In the second part of the paper, I explore in the light of Longino’s criteria for effective knowledge-productive dialogue one of the controversies in biotechnology policy that Jasanoff analysed. I suggest that Longino’s criteria allow identifying some fundamental obstacles for initiating and maintaining this kind of responsive critical dialogue and that the controversy can be seen as caused by inability to overcome these obstacles. In such a case, the controversy signals an epistemic failure as well as a failure of democratic policy. (shrink)

We regularly appeal to claims of the form it seems that p in defense of a claim p. When we do so, we typically take it seems that p to be a reason for thinking that p but also a reason that “gets at” a relevant body of facts and its support for p. Other things being equal, we should want to vindicate our ordinary beliefs on this matter. We should want to vindicate the claim that facts about (...) class='Hi'>things seeming certain ways can be reasons to think that things are that way while at the same time being somehow derivative reasons, that is, reasons only because they “get at” support from a certain body of facts. However, on the dominant view of how things seem—subjectivism—it is hard to see how to secure this result. Subjectivism takes how things seem to be a matter of how things do or would seem to some relevant subject. What we need is a defensible, nonsubjectivist account of how things seem. I propose and defend an account according to which, roughly, it seems that p iff the body of facts in the relevant perspective supports that p. (shrink)

One fairly common view about practical reason has it that whether you have a reason to act is not determined by what you know, or believe, or are justified in believing. Your reasons are determined by the facts. Perhaps there are two kinds of reasons, and however it goes with motivating reasons, normative reasons are determined by the facts, not your take on the facts. One fairly common version of this view has it that what's reasonable for you to do (...) is determined by what you know or believe. Any view that drives this kind of wedge between reasons and rationality is inherently unstable. I argue against this view, criticize the arguments typically presented in its favor, and sketch an alternative. (shrink)

Much mainstream analytic epistemology is built around a sceptical treatment of modality which descends from Hume. The roots of this scepticism are argued to lie in Hume’s (nominalist) theory of perception, which is excavated, studied and compared with the very different (realist) theory of perception developed by Peirce. It is argued that Peirce’s theory not only enables a considerably more nuanced and effective epistemology, it also (unlike Hume’s theory) does justice to what happens when we appreciate a proof in mathematics.