(Bonus material: a critique of the genesis myth of Western philosophy as well as of the exclusions and policing practices of both analytic and continental traditions).

Despite a recent surge of interest in philosophy as a way of life, it is not clear what it might mean for philosophy to guide one's life, or how a “philosophical” way of life might differ from a life guided by religion, tradition, or some other source. We argue against John Cooper that spiritual exercises figure crucially in the idea of philosophy as a way of life—not just in the ancient world but also today, at least if the idea (...) is to be viable. In order to make the case we attempt to clarify the nature of spiritual exercises, and to explore a number of fundamental questions, such as “What role does reason have in helping us to live well?” Here we distinguish between the discerning and motivational powers of reason, and argue that both elements have limitations as guides to living well. (shrink)

Plakias has recently argued that there is nothing wrong with publishing defences of philosophical claims which we don't believe and also nothing wrong with concealing our lack of belief, because an author's lack of belief is irrelevant to the merit of a published work. Fleisher has refined this account by limiting the permissibility of publishing without belief to what he calls ‘advocacy role cases’. I argue that such lack of belief is irrelevant only if it is the result of (...) an inexplicable incredulity or the result of a metaphilosophical or epistemic stance that is unrelated to the specific claim. However, in many real-life cases, including Fleisher's advocacy role cases, our doubts regarding the claims we defend arise from reasons that have something to do with the insufficiency of the philosophical evidence supporting the claim, and publishing an unconditional defence of a claim without revealing our doubts is impermissible as it involves withholding philosophically relevant reasons. Plakias has also argued that discouraging philosophers from publishing claims they don't believe would be unfair to junior philosophers with unsettled views. I propose that we should change our academic practices that pressure philosophers to publish articles that pretend to be defences of settled views. (shrink)

This chapter analyzes the relation between brain sciences and philosophy of mind, in order to clarify in what ways philosophy can contribute to neuroscience and neuroscience can contribute to philosophy. Especially since the 1980s and the emergence of “neurophilosophy”, more and more philosophers have been bringing home morals from neuroscience to settle philosophical issues. I mention examples from the problem of consciousness, philosophy of perception and the problem of free will, and I argue that such attempts are not successful (...) in trying to settle questions like whether psychology can be reduced to neuroscience, whether we see the external world directly in perception, or whether we have free will. The failure results from an ability of the philosophical questions to evade the data. What makes these questions persisting philosophical questions is precisely that there is no way to settle them through empirical evidence, as they are conceptual questions and their solution lies in conceptual analysis. (shrink)

What is philosophy? That’s a good question—not because there’s no answer, but because what’s involved in posing it points up something essential to philosophy. ¶ In the *Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect,* Spinoza sets out what’s required by a definition. A circle, a typical definition might run, is a figure in which all lines drawn from the center to the circumference are equal. The problem with this definition, what makes it merely verbal, is that (...) it defines a circle by way of one of its properties, not by way of its essence. Definition, for Spinoza, gets at the essence (from which all properties follow): A complete definition demonstrates how what it defines comes about. The definition of a circle as a figure that is described by any line of which one end is fixed and the other movable, as one commentator has pointed out, “literally generates the circle by providing a procedure whereby we ‘make’ the thing to be defined.” ¶ Philosophy is defined by what takes place in the question of philosophy itself. What Auden said of poetry could also be said of philosophy: it makes nothing happen. *Nothing* happens, or nothing *happens*—and in the space of the same few words both *can.* Philosophy operates that displacement and is defined by it: “what is *philosophy*?” become “*what is* philosophy?”—the question persists, but everything has changed. (shrink)

Perhaps the question “What is philosophy?” can only be posed late in life, when old age has come, and with it the time to speak in concrete terms. It is a question one poses when one no longer has anything to ask for, but its consequences can be considerable. One was asking the question before, one never ceased asking it, but it was too artificial, too abstract; one expounded and dominated the question, more than being grabbed by it. There (...) are cases in which old age bestows not an eternal youth, but on the contrary a sovereign freedom, a pure necessity where one enjoys a moment of grace between life and death, and where all the parts of the machine combine to dispatch into the future a trait that traverses the ages: Turner, Monet, Matisse. The elderly Turner acquired or conquered the right to lead painting down a deserted path from which there was no return, and that was no longer distinguishable from a final question. In the same way, in philosophy, Kant’s Critique of Judgment is a work of old age, a wild work from which descendants will never cease to flow.We cannot lay claim to such a status. The time has simply come for us to ask what philosophy is. And we have never ceased to do this in the past, and we already had the response, which has not varied: philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts. But it was not only necessary for the response to take note of the question; it also had to determine a time, an occasion, the circumstances, the landscapes and personae, the conditions and unknowns of the question. One had to be able to pose the question “between friends” as a confidence or a trust, or else, faced with an enemy, as a challenge, and at the same time one had to reach that moment, between dog and wolf, when one mistrusts even the friend. Gilles Deleuze was professor of philosophy at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes-St.-Denis, until his retirement in 1987. Among his books translated into English are the two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia , the two-volume Cinema , The Logic of Sense , and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza . Daniel W. Smith is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He is at work on a study of the philosophy of Deleuze, and is translating Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation. Arnold I. Davidson, executive editor of Critical Inquiry, teaches philosophy at the University of Chicago and is currently Marta Sutton Weeks Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. (shrink)

In this article, I defend the pragmatic relevance of race in history. Kant and Hegel's racist development thesis assumes that nonwhite, non-European racial groups are defective practical agents. In response, philosophers have opted to drop race from a theory of history and progress. They posit that denying its pragmatic relevance amounts to anti-racist egalitarianism. I dub this tactic “colorblind cosmopolitanism” and offer grounds for its rejection. Following Du Bois, I ascribe, instead, a pragmatic role to race in history. Namely, Du (...) Bois argues that race is an “instrument of progress” that advances emancipatory struggle. He appeals to the writing of history—or historiography—to cultivate group consciousness of historical memory in order to strengthen intragroup bonds among the racially oppressed, especially black Americans, and create intergroup bonds that reconstruct the republic on the basis of universal ideals. I detail Du Bois's defense of the black struggle for freedom in the wake of the U.S. Civil War to provide a concrete illustration of “spirit” in American history. (shrink)

What is philosophy of science? Numerous manuals, anthologies or essays provide carefully reconstructed vantage points on the discipline that have been gained through expert and piecemeal historical analyses. In this paper, we address the question from a complementary perspective: we target the content of one major journal of the field—Philosophy of Science—and apply unsupervised text-mining methods to its complete corpus, from its start in 1934 until 2015. By running topic-modeling algorithms over the full-text corpus, we identified 126 key research (...) topics that span across 82 years. We also tracked their evolution and fluctuating significance over time in the journal articles. Our results concur with and document known and lesser-known episodes of the philosophy of science, including the rise and fall of logic and language-related topics, the relative stability of a metaphysical and ontological questioning (space and time, causation, natural kinds, realism), the significance of epistemological issues about the nature of scientific knowledge as well as the rise of a recent philosophy of biology and other trends. These analyses exemplify how computational text-mining methods can be used to provide an empirical large-scale and data-driven perspective on the history of philosophy of science that is complementary to other current historical approaches. (shrink)

In this article, we philosophically reflect on the nature of business management. We move beyond the political paradigm of the conceptualization of management in order to lay the ground for a philosophy of business management. First, we open-up the self-evident conceptualization of business management in contemporary management practices by comparing ancient and contemporary definitions of management. Second, we develop a framework with six dimensions of the nature of business management that can guide future philosophical and empirical work on the nature (...) of business management: management control, people management, asset management and entrepreneurial action, management as participation, management as responsive action and management as constituting meaning. (shrink)

Art plays a significant role in Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy, a major part of which may be interpreted as a proposal for the revision of religious belief. In this paper, I identify within Murdoch’s philosophical writings five distinct but related ways in which great art can assist moral/religious belief and practice: art can reveal to us “the world as we were never able so clearly to see it before”; this revelatory capacity provides us with evidence for the existence of the (...) Good, a metaphor for a transcendent reality of which God was also a symbol; art is a “hall of reflection” in which “everything under the sun can be examined and considered”; art provides us with an analogue for the way in which we should try to perceive our world; and art enables us to transcend our selfish concerns. I consider three possible objections: that Murdoch’s theory is not applicable to all forms of art; that the meaning of works of art is often ambiguous; and that there is disagreement about what constitutes a great work of art. I argue that none of these objections are decisive, and that all forms of art have at least the potential to furnish us with important tools for developing the insight required to live a moral/religious life. (shrink)

Decadence in philosophy is the reversal between thinking and truth: philosophical truths valued only insofar as they provoke more philosophical thought.

Decadence in philosophy is defined in the relation between thinking and truth, and explored as a conflict between Richard Rorty and Gilles Deleuze.

Computational and information-theoretic research in philosophy has become increasingly fertile and pervasive, giving rise to a wealth of interesting results. In consequence, a new and vitally important field has emerged, the philosophy of information (PI). This essay is the first attempt to analyse the nature of PI systematically. PI is defined as the philosophical field concerned with the critical investigation of the conceptual nature and basic principles of information, including its dynamics, utilisation, and sciences, and the elaboration and application of (...) information-theoretic and computational methodologies to philosophical problems. I argue that PI is a mature discipline for three reasons: it represents an autonomous field of research; it provides an innovative approach to both traditional and new philosophical topics; and it can stand beside other branches of philosophy, offering a systematic treatment of the conceptual foundations of the world of information and the information society. (shrink)

Special Issue: What is Analytic Philosophy.

“Nature” is one of the most challenging concepts in philosophy, and notoriously difficult to define. In ancient Greece, two strategies for coming to terms with nature were developed. On the one hand, nature was seen as a perfect geometrical order, analysable with the help of geometry and deductive reasoning. On the other hand, a more Dionysian view emerged, stressing nature’s unpredictability, capriciousness and fluidity. This view was exemplified by De Rerum Natura, a philosophical masterpiece in verse. In a philosophy course (...) for science students, participants use both approaches. They are asked to give a definition of nature, and subsequently to capture nature in a poem. Quite consistently, their poetry proves more convincing than their definitions. In this paper, an anthology of student poetry is presented and analysed. To what extent may verse-writing as a philosophical assignment enable science students to come to terms with their understanding of nature? (shrink)

What is Functionalism? Functionalism is one of the major proposals that have been offered as solutions to the mind/body problem. Solutions to the mind/body problem usually try to answer questions such as: What is the ultimate nature of the mental? At the most general level, what makes a mental state mental? Or more specifically, What do thoughts have in common in virtue of which they are thoughts? That is, what makes a thought a thought? (...) class='Hi'>What makes a pain a pain? Cartesian Dualism said the ultimate nature of the mental was to be found in a special mental substance. Behaviorism identified mental states with behavioral dispositions; physicalism in its most influential version identifies mental states with brain states. Functionalism says that mental states are constituted by their causal relations to one another and to sensory inputs and behavioral outputs. Functionalism is one of the major theoretical developments of Twentieth Century analytic philosophy, and provides the conceptual underpinnings of much work in cognitive science. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to critically review several interpretations of Kantian sensible intuition. The first interpretation is the recent construal of Kantian sensible intuition as a mental analogue of a direct referential term. The second is the old, widespread assumption that Kantian intuitions do not refer to mind-independent entities, such as bodies and their physical properties, unless they are brought under categories. The third is the assumption that, by referring to mind-independent entities, sensible intuitions represent objectively in the (...) sense that they represent in a relative, perspective-independent manner. The fourth is the construal of Kantian sensible intuitions as non-conceptual content. In this paper, I support the alternative view that Kantian sensible representation is to be seen as iconic de re presentation of objects without representational content. (shrink)

The central question of this paper is: what has Kant’s Refutation of Idealism argument proven, if anything? What is the real scandal of philosophy and universal human reason? I argue that Kant’s Refutation argument can only be considered sound if we assume that his target is what I call ‘metaphysical external-world skepticism.’ What is in question is not the ‘existence’ of outside things but their very ‘nature,’ that is, the claim that the thing outside us, which (...) appears to us as a persistent body in space, exists in itself _as a substantia noumenon_. Assuming the indirect-realist view that we only immediately know ideas and that their putative objects are known by inference, the metaphysical external-world skeptic doubts that the nature of things outside oneself is mind-independent. (shrink)

In the paper, various notions of the logical semiotic sense of linguistic expressions – namely, syntactic and semantic, intensional and extensional – are considered and formalised on the basis of a formal-logical conception of any language L characterised categorially in the spirit of certain Husserl's ideas of pure grammar, Leśniewski-Ajdukiewicz's theory of syntactic/semantic categories and, in accordance with Frege's ontological canons, Bocheński's and some of Suszko's ideas of language adequacy of expressions of L. The adequacy ensures their unambiguous syntactic and (...) semantic senses and mutual, syntactic and semantic correspondence guaranteed by the acceptance of a postulate of categorial compatibility of syntactic and semantic (extensional and intensional) categories of expressions of L. This postulate defines the unification of these three logical senses. There are three principles of compositionality which follow from this postulate: one syntactic and two semantic ones already known to Frege. They are treated as conditions of homomorphism of partial algebra of L into algebraic models of L: syntactic, intensional and extensional. In the paper, they are applied to some expressions with quantifiers. Language adequacy connected with the logical senses described in the logical conception of language L is, obviously, an idealisation. The syntactic and semantic unambiguity of its expressions is not, of course, a feature of natural languages, but every syntactically and semantically ambiguous expression of such languages may be treated as a schema representing all of its interpretations that are unambiguous expressions. (shrink)

In trying to answer the question What is analytic philosophy? I shall follow two methodological principles. (i) The first was suggested by Peter Hacker and reads: ‘Any characterisation of “analytic philosophy” which excludes Moore, Russell and the later Wittgenstein, as well as the leading figures of post War analytic philosophy [for us these are John Wisdom, Ryle, Austin, Strawson and Dummett], must surely be rejected.’ (Hacker 1996a, p. 247) The correct definition of analytic philosophy must cohere with the philosophy (...) of its generally recognized founding fathers. (ii) Any characterisation of ‘analytic philosophy’ which was massively represented in the history of philosophy in the past, must be rejected too. To be sure, Moore, Russell and Wittgenstein, and later also Ryle, Austin and their friends, were doing a type of philosophy which they consciously understood as new—it was intrinsically New Philosophy. The problem was only that this newness was difficult to identify and define. (shrink)

What is it for philosophy to make progress? While various putative forms of philosophical progress have been explored in some depth, this overarching question is rarely addressed explicitly, perhaps because it has been assumed to be intractable or unlikely to have a single, unified answer. In this paper, we aim to show that the question is tractable, that it does admit of a single, unified answer, and that one such answer is plausible. This answer is, roughly, that philosophical progress (...) consists in putting people in a position to increase their understanding, where 'increased understanding' is a matter of better representing the network of dependence relations between phenomena. After identifying four desiderata for an account of philosophical progress, we argue that our account meets the desiderata in a particularly satisfying way. Among other things, the account explains how various other achievements, such as philosophical arguments, counterexamples, and distinctions, may contribute to progress. Finally, we consider the implications of our account for the pressing and contentious question of how much progress has been made in philosophy. (shrink)

The contribution examines Goodman’s conception of philosophy, in particular his remark that his project can be understood as a «critique of worldmaking». It is argued that, despite dealing with epistemological questions, the general theory of symbols and worldmaking does not answer them. Rather, it can be conceived as a practical conception comparable to Kant’s critique of reason or to Wittgenstein’s critique of language games, i. e. , as a philosophy of world orientation. It is claimed that Goodman himself could not (...) articulate this dimension of his position appropriately as he kept using the language of epistemology. Yet many aspects of his thinking become much clearer if they are interpreted within a non-epistemological frame. (shrink)

This book is a collection of essays on the philosophy of life’s meaning in contemporary society. Topics range from antinatalism, meaning of life, the trolley problem, to painless civilization. I am now writing a comprehensive philosophy book on those topics, but it will take several years to complete; hence, I decided to make a handy book to provide readers with an outline of the philosophical approaches to the meaning of life that I have in mind. -/- Chapter One discusses the (...) definition, history, and category of antinatalism. Antinatalism is the thought that all human beings or all sentient beings should not be born. Although I am not an antinatalist, I believe that antinatalism poses an important question about procreation and the meaning of our lives. This is why I presented an overview of antinatalistic thoughts in the past and the present and also performed an analytical examination of their arguments. -/- In Chapter Two, I take up Philosopher Thaddeus Metz’s argument on meaning in life, especially his fundamentality theory, and claim that “the heart of meaning in life,” which is the concept I propose in this chapter, cannot be compared with anything whatsoever. -/- Chapter Three deals with the concept of “birth affirmation,” which means that I can say “yes” to my having been born. I believe that birth affirmation is one of the most promising ideas that can contribute to contemporary philosophical discussions on meaning in life, and I call this approach “an affirmation-based approach to meaning in life.” The concept of birth affirmation has two dimensions: the psychological dimension and the philosophical dimension. I would like to show in this chapter that it is difficult to clarify what it actually means to say “yes” to my having been born. -/- Chapter Four discusses the relationship between the dropping of the atomic bombs and the trolley problem. I argue that the dropping of atomic bombs was a typical example of the events that contained the logic of the trolley problem in both their decision-making processes and justifications. I further argue that the trolley problem has its own unique problems, which I call “the problem of the trolley problem.” This problem has been overlooked in academic discussions of the trolley problem. I also refer to a religious aspect of this problem. -/- In Chapter Five, I talk about the “philosophy of life” as an academic discipline. We have the philosophy of language, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of history, but why don’t we have the philosophy of life in the field of philosophy? Of course, we have Lebensphilosophie, but it does not cover philosophical discourses in ancient worlds, nor current analytical approaches to the concepts of life and death. A new research field is required to advance contemporary philosophy. -/- In Chapter Six, I illustrate an outline of my “painless civilization” theory, a criticism of contemporary civilization that deprives us of a joy of life in exchange for eliminating pain and suffering. I also discuss the concept of “fundamental sense of security,” which is considered indispensable for us to be able to live a life without regret. (shrink)

With essay deadlines looming for many of our students, Matt Parker relives some of the angst involved in writing philosophy. You’re not alone.

I present two senses in which a political philosophy may be an ideal theory. They are not identified by Laura Valentini, in her much-cited paper. The paper is written as a pastiche of the writing style of the distinguished legal and political philosopher Joseph Raz, who recently passed away, with my notes at the foot of the page within square brackets.

The title question arises because the philosophy seems the same as asking, “What if everyone did that?” In this paper, I give a partial response to the question. In an appendix, I consider the question of why should we tell you the answer?

Due to the wide array of phenomena that are of interest to them, psychologists offer highly diverse and heterogeneous types of explanations. Initially, this suggests that the question "What is psychological explanation?" has no single answer. To provide appreciation of this diversity, we begin by noting some of the more common types of explanations that psychologists provide, with particular focus on classical examples of explanations advanced in three different areas of psychology: psychophysics, physiological psychology, and information-processing psychology. To analyze (...) what is involved in these types of explanations, we consider the ways in which law-like representations of regularities and representations of mechanisms factor in psychological explanations. This consideration directs us to certain fundamental questions, e.g., "To what extent are laws necessary for psychological explanations?" and "What do psychologists have in mind when they appeal to mechanisms in explanation?" In answering such questions, it appears that laws do play important roles in psychological explanations, although most explanations in psychology appeal to accounts of mechanisms. Consequently, we provide a unifying account of what psychological explanation is. (shrink)

Logical monism is the view that there is ‘One True Logic’. This is the default position, against which pluralists react. If there were not ‘One True Logic’, it is hard to see how there could be one true theory of anything. A theory is closed under a logic! But what is logical monism? In this article, I consider semantic, logical, modal, scientific, and metaphysical proposals. I argue that, on no ‘factualist’ analysis (according to which ‘there is One True Logic’ (...) expresses a factual claim, rather than an attitude like approval), does the doctrine have both metaphysical and methodological import. Metaphysically, logics abound. Methodologically, what to infer from what is not settled by the facts, even the normative ones. I conclude that the only interesting sense in which there could be One True Logic is noncognitive. The same may be true of monism about normative areas, like moral, epistemic, and prudential ones, generally. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is the design, implementation, and evaluation of concepts. Conceptual engineering includes or should include de novo conceptual engineering (designing a new concept) as well as conceptual re-engineering (fixing an old concept). It should also include heteronymous (different-word) as well as homonymous (same-word) conceptual engineering. I discuss the importance and the difficulty of these sorts of conceptual engineering in philosophy and elsewhere.

This essay argues that a black radical Kantianism proposes a Kantian theory of justice in the circumstances of injustice. First, I describe BRK’s method of political critique and explain how it builds on Kant’s republicanism. Second, I argue that Kant’s original account of public right is incomplete because it neglects that a situated citizenry’s adoption of an ideal contributes to its refinement. Lastly, with the aid of W.E.B. Du Bois’s analysis of American Reconstruction and his proposal of an “abolition democracy,” (...) I offer my refined universalizable standard for political critique. Du Bois reconceptualizes the requirements of justice to protect the political liberties and productive powers of black freedmen and the working poor. While originating with the political demands of black freedmen during the Reconstruction era, the universal protection of political liberties and productive powers offers a novel public standard for political judgment that should still anchor deliberation today. (shrink)

This article adds to the existing descriptive and generalizing studies of the specifics of Ukrainian philosophy an attempt to analyse it. This study examines in which aspects philosophy can be carried out as a national tradition of philosophizing. It is argued that the national peculiarities of philosophy can manifest themselves in the choice of (1) the topic of philosophizing, (2) the standards of logical rigor of philosophical thinking, and (3) certain philosophical methods and forms of thought development. Linguistic and geographical (...) criteria for determining belonging of a philosopher to a national philosophical tradition are analysed and the heuristic limits of these criteria are shown. It is argued that not only personal, but also national peculiarities of this or that philosophizing may exist. These national peculiarities must be connected with the historically formed cultural traditions of this or that nation, in particular with the existing practices of the functioning of philosophy in the society and in its education system. It is also shown that the formation of national specificity of one or another philosophizing is caused by the challenges a given nation faced during its historical development. The study argues that there are two features, the combined presence of which is the sufficient condition for determining any philosophical thought as a Ukrainian philosophical thought. First, this thought must be created in the context of Ukrainian traditions of philosophizing, which manifests itself in using certain philosophical methods and forms of thought development. Second, this thought must be a response to the historical challenges the Ukrainian people faced. It is suggested that not all manifestations of philosophizing in Ukraine can be called Ukrainian philosophical thought. Those manifestations, which do not suffice both the first and the second of the mentioned features, are suggested to be labelled as "philosophy in Ukraine" and not as "Ukrainian philosophy". The study shows that the national specificity of philosophizing manifests itself most clearly in such philosophical areas as political philosophy, social philosophy, and ethics. This study also determines what unites Ukrainian philosophy with European philosophy. (shrink)

In "Mathematical Truth", Paul Benacerraf articulated an epistemological problem for mathematical realism. His formulation of the problem relied on a causal theory of knowledge which is now widely rejected. But it is generally agreed that Benacerraf was onto a genuine problem for mathematical realism nevertheless. Hartry Field describes it as the problem of explaining the reliability of our mathematical beliefs, realistically construed. In this paper, I argue that the Benacerraf Problem cannot be made out. There simply is no intelligible problem (...) that satisfies all of the constraints which have been placed on the Benacerraf Problem. The point generalizes to all arguments with the structure of the Benacerraf Problem aimed at realism about a domain meeting certain conditions. Such arguments include so-called "Evolutionary Debunking Arguments" aimed at moral realism. I conclude with some suggestions about the relationship between the Benacerraf Problem and the Gettier Problem. (shrink)

‘Metaphysics’ is the quest to find the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence. It is about trying to find a decisive and conclusive resolution to the human condition, such that the human condition is fulfilled in some absolute way, and no longer at the mercy of meaningless suffering, or a dreadful sense of uncertainty. All other definitions and determinations of metaphysics are trivial, and irrelevant; and, given the critical importance of the quest for human fulfilment – our lives are not (...) infinite, after all – really quite bewildering. Western philosophy has never understood this, and its entire intellectual history has been characterised by a persistent debasing of any simple, straightforward and direct quest for objective metaphysical self-knowledge, preferring instead always to indulge either in pedantic squabbling over definitions, distinctions and conceptual manoeuvrings, or in flatulent ‘system building’. (shrink)

The IASP definition of 'pain' defines pain as a subjective experience. The Note accompanying the definition emphasizes that as such pains are not to be identified with objective conditions of body parts (such as actual or potential tissue damage). Nevertheless, it goes on to state that a pain "is unquestionably a sensation in a part or parts of the body, but it is also always unpleasant and therefore also an emotional experience." This generates a puzzle that philosophers have been well (...) familiar with: how to understand our utterances and judgments attributing pain to body parts. (The puzzle is of course general extending to all sensations routinely located in body parts.) The present work tackles this puzzle. I go over various options specifying the truth-conditions for pain attributing judgments, and at the end make my own recommendation which is an adverbialist, qualia-friendly proposal with completely naturalistic credentials that is also compatible with forms of weak intentionalism. The results are generalizable to other bodily sensations and can be used to illustrate, quite generally, the viability of a qualia-friendly adverbialist (but naturalist and weakly intentionalist) account of perception. (shrink)

In this article, I reflect on the nature of innovation to lay the groundwork for a philosophy of innovation. First, I contrast the contemporary techno-economic paradigm of innovation with the work of Joseph Schumpeter. It becomes clear that Schumpeter’s work provides good reasons to question the techno-economic paradigm of innovation. Second, I contrast ‘innovation’ with ‘technology’ and identify five differences between the two concepts. Third, I reflect on the process-outcome dimension and the ontic-ontological dimension of innovation to develop four characteristics (...) of the phenomenon of innovation. These four characteristics move beyond the techno-economic paradigm of innovation and highlight, first, the importance of its process dimension understood as ontogenesis, second, the outcome of innovation, and third, the importance of the ontological dimension of innovation, which is considered adjacent to its fourth characteristic, i.e., the ontic level of the outcome of innovation. After drawing conclusions, a research agenda for future research is provided. (shrink)

I argue that the contemporary interplay of cosmology and particle physics in their joint effort to understand the processes at work during the first moments of the big bang has important implications for understanding the nature of lawhood. I focus on the phenomenon of spontaneous symmetry breaking responsible for generating the masses of certain particles. This phenomenon presents problems for the currently fashionable Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong theory and strongly favors a rival nomic ontology of causal powers.

Time is one of humankind’s unanswerable mysteries. Aristotle called time “the most unknown of unknown things.” What time is and even if it objectively exists are unanswerable questions. Time is intangible. -/- There have been and will be countless theories about time. Many, including in science, are simply useful definitions or conventions, and each is looking at time in a particular way and for a particular purpose. This paper looks at a variety of significant perspectives from physics, philosophy and (...) psychology. A key is to demonstrate that there are many different incomplete and subjective ways of looking at what ultimately is beyond our mental grasp. (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)

WHAT is art? Classificatory disputes.. Classificatory disputes about what is art Art historians and philosophers of art have long had classificatory disputes about art regarding whether a particular cultural form or piece of work should be classified as art. Disputes about what does and does not count as art continue to occur today -/- Defining art is difficult if not impossible. Aestheticians and art philosophers often engage in disputes about how to define art. By its original and (...) broadest definition, art (from the Latin ars, meaning “skill” or “craft”) is the product or process of the effective application of a body of knowledge, most often using a set of skills; this meaning is preserved in such phrases as “liberal arts” and “martial arts”. However, in the modern use of the word, which rose to prominence after 1750, “art” is commonly understood to be skill used to produce an aesthetic result (Hatcher, 1999). (shrink)

What is consciousness and why is it so philosophically and scientifically puzzling? For many years philosophers approached this question assuming a standard physicalist framework on which consciousness can be explained by contemporary physics, biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. This book is a debate between two philosophers who are united in their rejection of this kind of "standard" physicalism - but who differ sharply in what lesson to draw from this. Amy Kind defends dualism 2.0, a thoroughly modern version (...) of dualism (the theory that there are two fundamentally different kinds of things in the world: those that are physical and those that are mental) decoupled from any religious or non-scientific connotations. Daniel Stoljar defends non-standard physicalism, a kind of physicalism different from both the standard version and dualism 2.0. The book presents a cutting-edge assessment of the philosophy of consciousness and provides a glimpse at what the future study of this area might bring. (shrink)

This chapter defines "epistemology," introduces the key epistemological questions, and briefly outlines how the field has evolved over time. It serves as the introduction to the edited collection, Introduction to Philosophy: Epistemology (a volume in the Introduction to Philosophy open textbook series edited by Christina Hendricks).

Is there a political philosophy of conservatism? A history of the phenomenon written along sceptical lines casts doubt on the existence of a transhistorical doctrine, or even an enduring conservative outlook. The main typologies of conservatism uniformly trace its origins to opposition to the French Revolution. Accordingly, Edmund Burke is standardly singled out as the ‘father’ of this style of politics. Yet Burke was de facto an opposition Whig who devoted his career to assorted programmes of reform. In restoring Burke (...) to his original milieu, the argument presented here takes issue with 20th-century accounts of conservative ideology developed by such figures as Karl Mannheim, Klaus Epstein and Samuel Huntington. It argues that the idea of a conservative tradition is best seen as a belated construction, and that the notion of a univocal philosophy of conservatism is basically misconceived. (shrink)

The question “What is an organism?”, formerly considered as essential in biology, has now been increasingly replaced by a larger question, “What is a biological individual?”. On the grounds that i) individuation is theory-dependent, and ii) physiology does not offer a theory, biologists and philosophers of biology have claimed that it is the theory of evolution by natural selection which tells us what counts as a biological individual. Here I show that one physiological field, immunology, offers a (...) theory, which makes possible a biological individuation based on physiological grounds. I give a new answer to the question of the individuation of an organism by linking together the evolutionary and the immunological approaches to biological individuation. (shrink)

Confirmation bias is one of the most widely discussed epistemically problematic cognitions, challenging reliable belief formation and the correction of inaccurate views. Given its problematic nature, it remains unclear why the bias evolved and is still with us today. To offer an explanation, several philosophers and scientists have argued that the bias is in fact adaptive. I critically discuss three recent proposals of this kind before developing a novel alternative, what I call the ‘reality-matching account’. According to the account, (...) confirmation bias evolved because it helps us influence people and social structures so that they come to match our beliefs about them. This can result in significant developmental and epistemic benefits for us and other people, ensuring that over time we don’t become epistemically disconnected from social reality but can navigate it more easily. While that might not be the only evolved function of confirmation bias, it is an important one that has so far been neglected in the theorizing on the bias. (shrink)

For agents like us, the feeling of effort is a very useful thing. It helps us sense how hard an action is, control its level of intensity, and decide whether to continue or stop performing it. While there has been progress in understanding the feeling of mental effort and the feeling of bodily effort, this has not translated into a unified account of the general feeling of effort. To advance in this direction, I defend the single-feeling view, which states that (...) the feeling of effort is one and the same for both mental and bodily actions. This feeling represents the subjective costs, both mental and physical, of performing a given action. Cost-based approaches have recently become influential for the feeling of mental effort. Here I focus on arguing that our sense of bodily effort does not simply represent physiological processes, but rather represents the subjective costs of a bodily action. Through this paper I discuss the role of the feeling of effort (and affective states more broadly) in action guidance and the sense of agency. I also define efforts themselves in terms of the feeling of effort. (shrink)