Hegel's reading of Hafez as part of his Berlin aesthetics lectures. The jargon of the prosaic world -/- This essay deals with Hegel's reading (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770 - 1831) of Hafez' poetry (Moḥammad Schams ad-Din Hafez Schirazi, around 1315 - 1390) during his lectures on the Aesthetics or Philosophy of Art at the University of Berlin (1820/21; 1823; 1826; 1828/29). Hegel's writings, Lectures on Aesthetics, were published from his remains by Heinrich Gustav Hotho (1802 - 1873) in (...) three volumes (1835 - 1838) and in a second edition from 1842 onwards. The posthumously published writings of Hegel are, considering the preserved archive material and the unreliable editing work by Hotho, a thoroughly complex research topic. Therefore, this problem area also forms the starting point of the present analysis of Hegel's reading of Hafez. -/- Within the framework of this essay, Hegel's categories of historical frameworks (Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic Art), especially that of the "Symbolic Art", are examined in his lectures on Aesthetics . This will do in three steps: starting with the current state of research, problematizing of Hegelian concepts in his Lectures on Aesthetics like "oriental Pantheism" or Vorkunst, ("the threshold of art" or "praeambula": T. M. Knox' translation, 1975, part I); extending the discussion by focusing on similarities and differences between Hegel's reading of Goethe (part II) and Hegel's reading of Hafez (part III) in his Berlin Aesthetics Lectures of the 1820's. For this purpose, material from Goethe's literary remains (II), as well as a masterpiece of Dutch painters van Eyck analyzed by Hegel (Ghent Altarpiece) during his lectures (III), will be included in the analysis and explored from an interdisciplinary and intercultural perspective. In doing so, Goethe's “Space of Experience and Horizon of Expectation” (Koselleck) in imitating Arabic script and calligraphy (II) is linked to Hegel's reading of Hafez during his Berlin lectures on aesthetics (III). Thus, a dialogue of cultures unfolds between poetry and philosophy. The main questions are: How does the German philosopher Hegel interpret and receive Hafiz's poetry in the context of German idealist philosophy as a topic of his lectures on aesthetics? What epistemological aspects can be gained from Hegel's reading of Hafez for a cultural studies analysis, especially regarding the history of the ideas? In addition to analyzing the historical aspects, the aim is also to uncover new perspectives in order to look with Hafez and Rumi at Hegel's problem child of ‘history’. Of particular interest are epistemological aspects and problems of reception and translation studies in sense of interdisciplinary and intercultural research (e. g. connected/entangled histories; boundary objects). Interculturality is understood in the context of the present essay as a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework in the sense of entangled histories research work interwoven with communication, aesthetic and cultural techniques approaches or resilience studies in a historical perspective. (shrink)

Why Human Rights? addresses universal human rights as moral mandates – rights to justice that all m persons have by virtue of their humanity alone. These are not the legal rights of statutes and treaties, but moral rights of the kind Gandhi, King, and Mandela invoked to oppose unjust laws. All such rights presuppose three claims: (1) that some duties of justice apply universally, (2) that all human beings have equal moral status, and (3) that states must protect or serve (...) certain individual interests regardless of the societal impact of doing so. -/- Can these three premises be justified? Is the human equality claim, for example, rationally supportable, or is it no less faith-based than hierarchical doctrines like caste? This book explores the case for these foundational claims along with other philosophical controversies pertaining to human rights. Because these issues lie at the heart of moral and political philosophy, readers will also obtain a broad appreciation of these disciplines and their leading theorists, including Mill, Kant, Rawls, Sandel, Nozick, Rorty, and many others. Written in concise, jargon-free language, this book presents a high-relief map of the philosophical issues surrounding human rights. (shrink)

These are the commentaries (or notes) for Aristotle's Metaphysics V (Delta) 18-30. This file must be read together with the translation into Portuguese, which has been published as a different item, with a different DOI. In the Introduction, I discuss many issues about Aristotle's jargon, Aristotle's style and Aristotle's awareness of many philosophical problems that nowadays we locate within the branch Philosophy of Language.

This essay addresses the notion of self-deception as articulated by Sigmund Freud and Jean-Paul Sartre. More specifically, it provides an analysis of Sartre’s critique of Freud’s depth-psychological account of self-deception. I critically examine his theory of bad faith as an account of self-deception. Sartre’s main objection to the depthpsychological explanation of Freud’s account of self-deception rests on his argument that for self-deception to occur there needs to be conscious awareness of the coexistence of mutually incompatible beliefs, and that Freud had (...) obscured this fact by splitting the self and with a mixture of jargon. (shrink)

This book is both an introduction to and a research work on Meinongianism. “Meinongianism” is taken here, in accordance with the common philosophical jargon, as a general label for a set of theories of existence – probably the most basic notion of ontology. As an introduction, the book provides the first comprehensive survey and guide to Meinongianism and non-standard theories of existence in all their main forms. As a research work, the book exposes and develops the most up-to-date (...) Meinongian theory (called modal Meinongianism), applies it to specific fields, and discusses its open problems. Part I of the book provides a historical introduction to, and critical discussion of, the dominant philosophical view of existence: the “Kantian-Fregean-Quinean” perspective. Part II is the full-fledged introduction to the Meinongian theories of existence as a real property of individuals: after starting with the so-called naïve Meinongian conception and its problems, it provides a self-contained presentation of the main neo-Meinongian proposals, and a detailed discussion of their strengths and weaknesses. Part III develops a specific neo-Meinongian theory of existence employing a model-theoretic semantic framework. It discusses its application to the ontology and semantics of fictional objects, and its open problems. The methodology of the book follows the most recent trends in analytic ontology. In particular, the meta-ontological point of view is largely privileged. (shrink)

This is a brief conceptual analysis of the limitations of 'scientific' empiricism which I tried to convey without any possible scientific or philosophical jargon which are commonly used by scientists or philosophers and which are difficult for others to understand. The terms which appear as jargon here do not need to be understood literally as they are supposed to convey mere examples rather than meaning.

Translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics V.1-8 with a few notes.

Among philosophers working on modality, there is a common assumption that there is a strong connection between temporal possibility and counterfactual possibility. For example, Sydney Shoemaker 1998, 69 70) writes: It seems to me a general feature of our thought about possibility that how we think that something could have differed from how it in fact is [is] closely related to how we think that the way something is at one time could differ from the way that same thing is (...) at a different time. In possible worlds jargon, the ways one and the same thing of a given sort can differ across worlds correspond to the ways one and the same thing of that sort can differ at different times in the same world. Could I have been a plumber or an accountant instead of a philosopher? The answer seems to be yes -- and this goes with the fact that we acknowledge the possibility of a scenario in which someone who was exactly as I was at some point in my life undergoes a series of changes resulting in his eventually being a plumber or an accountant. In a footnote, he acknowledges that this connection between counterfactual and temporal possibility needs to be qualified in response to an objection by Randy Clarke: «The property of being the child of someone who has visited Paris is not one that one can have and then lose; but it is one that one can have in the actual world and not have in some other possible world.» (1998, 75n.9) Therefore, he restricts the inference from temporal to counterfactual possibility and vice versa to «non historical properties.». (shrink)

Philosophers have been contemplating the nature of the mind for centuries and have produced mountains of intricate jargon, thought experiments, and views, that map a landscape of interminable disputes. One such dispute is between philosophers who believe that the mind can be explained as a mechanism and philosophers who insist it cannot. In this paper I take a look at this dispute and argue that it is unique in philosophy and a key to the nature of the mind.

‘Intersectionality’ is one of the rare pieces of academic jargon to make it out of the university and into the mainstream. The message is clear and well-known: your feminism had better be intersectional. But what exactly does this mean? This paper is partly an exercise in conceptual clarification, distinguishing at least six distinct types of claim found across the literature on intersectionality, and digging further into the most philosophically complex of these claims—namely the metaphysical and explanatory. It’s also partly (...) a reply to Sara Bernstein, who argued recently that the best interpretation of the metaphysical claim is explanatory priority. We’ll argue that duly clarified, it’s far from obvious that feminism had better be intersectional. At the very least, it had better not be only intersectional. (shrink)

This paper considers whether the saying, “It’s who you know, not what you know” can be used instead of jargon-laden studies of inequality. I argue that it is not a good replacement in some cases and present a challenge to standard Bourdieusian explanations of inequality in some fields. The paper is written as a pastiche of the distinguished political philosopher Joseph Raz.

Learning from Arguments advances accessible versions of key philosophical arguments, in a form that students can emulate in their own writing, and with the primary aim of cultivating an understanding of the dynamics of philosophical argumentation. -/- The book contains ten core chapters, covering the problem of evil, Pascal’s wager, personal identity, the irrationality of fearing death, free will and determinism, Cartesian skepticism, the problem of induction, the problem of political authority, the violinist argument, the future-like-ours argument, the (...) ethics of eating meat, utilitarianism (both act and rule), and the trolley problem. Additionally, there is an introductory chapter explaining what arguments are and surveying some common argumentative strategies, an appendix on logic explaining the mechanics and varieties of valid arguments, and an appendix providing detailed advice for writing philosophy papers. -/- Each of the ten core chapters offers a sustained argument for some controversial thesis, specifically written for an audience of beginners. The aim is to introduce newcomers to the dynamics of philosophical argumentation, using some of the arguments standardly covered in an introductory philosophy course, but without the additional hurdles one encounters when reading the primary sources of the arguments: challenging writing, specialized jargon, and references to unfamiliar books, philosophers, or schools of thought. (shrink)

A thorough understanding of what needs are is fundamental for design- ing well-behaved information systems for many social applications and in partic- ular for public services. Talking about needs pervades indeed the jargon of Public Administrations when motivating their service offering. In this paper, we propose an ontological analysis of needs, aiming at a principled disentangling of the differ- ent uses of the term. We leverage philosophical tradition on intentionality, for its rich understanding of mental entities, we compare (...) it with the well-established BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) tradition in knowledge representation, and we propose a formalisation of needs within the foundational ontology DOLCE. Throughout the paper, we motivate our analysis focusing on needs in public services. (shrink)

I have two major aims in this chapter, which is philosophical in nature. One is to draw upon values that are salient in the southern African region in order to construct a novel and attractive conception of human dignity. Specifically, I articulate the idea that human beings have a dignity in virtue of their communal nature, or their capacity for what I call ‘identity’ and ‘solidarity’, which contrasts the most influential conception in the West, according to which our dignity (...) inheres in our rationality or autonomy. The second aim is to invoke this Afro-communitarian conception of human dignity in order to advance a new conception of why poverty is morally problematic and of what people, particularly states, are ethically required to do with regard to it. Common conceptions of poverty focus on it in terms of people lacking income, preference satisfaction (‘utility’) or general-purpose means (‘social primary goods’ in the Rawlsian jargon). In contrast, if what is special about human beings is our ability to commune with one another in a certain way, then the respects in which poverty can be an injustice and the ways that it must be fought must be understood in more communitarian or relational terms, which I both specify with several concrete examples in a South African context and contrast with the more dominant approaches. (shrink)

This book is a personal answer to the crisis of the left. The author of this text belongs to a generation habituated to live with global explanations. During our youth, the future of the world was the future of democracy and socialism. We belong to a generation of “leftist” that found in Marx and Freud, phenomenology and structuralism the most important answers that made sense of the everyday world. However, the developments of events during the last sixty years showed that (...) our confidence was ungrounded. The depreciation of the theoretical thought accelerated in direct proportion to the development of technologies, and among them the impact of the digital developments was devastating. One of the most notable consequences of the digitalization of culture was the depreciation of the Marxian thought, but also the less recognized depreciation of all kinds of political-economic thought. The collapse of the world created before the Second World War open for the end of the “grand narratives” and the enthronization of Postmodernism. The production of fragmentary explanations took over the historical perspective with an important influence on social and economic thought. After 60 years of postmodern thinking, we believe that the time of Postmodernism is over. Politicians and economists over the world cannot continue to produce results in small packages. The whole picture must be restituted. Of course it must be done incorporating the lessons of the past to avoid to make the same mistakes. Postmodernism has left behind lots of scattered modernist philosophical remnants. It left a chessboard with only few pieces to work with, and in this allegory, only as references. The philosophical schools remains, but the study of them is strictly for an education in the history of ideas. The situation is aggravating since the most important works from the 1960’s and forth, (post-structuralists) deliberately have avoided obvious identity patterns. A word in Rio de la Plata’s jargon language describes this situation, cambalache, a sort of “flea market” where everything lies higgledy-piggledy. Deconstruction and the focus on differences are vital to Postmodernism. Remaining is therefore the intersections, the contrasts, shadows, and sketches. When trying to orient in such an intellectual environment, the task reminds of patching scatterings, and building with tools of eclecticism. However, we believe that is time to reconstruct instead of deconstruct, moving back to Modernism that we will describe as Cyborgism. (shrink)

Probably the leading exponent of Wittgenstein’s ideas on the language games of inner and outer (the ‘Two Selves’ operation of our personality or intentionality or EP etc.) the prolific Daniel Hutto’s (DH) approach is called ‘Radical Enactivism’ and is well explained in numerous recent books and papers. It is a development of or version of the Embodied Mind ideas now current and, cleansed of its jargon, it is a straightforward extension of W’s 2nd and 3rd period writings (though Hutto (...) seems only intermittently aware of this). -/- The basic idea of the Embodied Mind or Enactivism is that much of behavior is automated and does not involve representations (basically S2 dispositions-see Hutto’s lovely dissection of the ‘representation rats nest’ in his online papers ). To me this is just another way of stating the fact that System 1 precedes the operation of System 2 which is a standard feature of contemporary psychology, which I have explained above and in further detail in my reviews of Wittgenstein (who was the first to see this and explored it in great detail) and Searle (who called it The Phenomenological Illusion in his superb essay of this name in his book Philosophy in a New Century which I have also reviewed). Since these are basic incontrovertible facts of animal behavior and I have already discussed them I won’t dwell on it here. -/- This book is a sustained argument against other similar ways of describing behavior which he calls CEC and CIC in favor of REC (Radical Embodied Cognition), which he characterizes as “the strongest reading of the embodiment thesis—one that uncompromisingly maintains that basic cognition is literally constituted by, and to be understood in terms of concrete patterns of environmental situated organismic activity, nothing more or less” (p11). This is clear as a bell if you understand the two systems view explained above but likely opaque if you don’t. Much clearer is Fodor’s characterization which he quotes as “abilities are prior to theories”, that “competence is prior to content” and that “knowing how is the paradigm cognitive state and it is prior to knowing that” (p10). That is, the unconscious automatisms of S1 are evolutionarily and behaviorally prior to the slow conscious dispositions of S2. -/- This is classic Hutto high level philosophical dialog, which is quite elegant, but somewhat too dense and a tad pretentious for the rest of us. I have not before encountered his coauthor Myin so can’t say how much of this text is really due to him. It is clear from this and the rest of Hutto’s work that (like everyone else) he has not quite kept up with the latest work in psychology nor really grasped the full power of W or S, even though he is one of the top Wittgensteinians alive and as bright as anyone in the field. His discussions of the language games of “information” and “representation” in his other papers and books (and much else including his deconstructions of Dennett and Fodor) should be required reading for anyone interested in behavior. So, I have the greatest respect for him, but one hopes that he will mellow with time and write descriptions of behavior (i.e., all we can really do as philosophers according to W) in more mundane prose such as this lovely summation on p15. “Hence, REC is nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of the very foundations of standard approaches to cognitive science and philosophy of mind.” Yes and what a pity that this great Wittgensteinian (and everyone else) does not realize that W laid it all out with great (and unmatched) clarity in his third period works over 60 years ago. -/- I have much less sympathy for the extended and scaffolded minds of Chap 7. I don’t see how one can lay the burden of explaining how the mind works at Searle’s door, nor how the convoluted prose about “decoupled contentful activities” etc., helps at all. Why not just say that automated unconscious prelinguistic S1 feeds deliberate, conscious linguistic S2, which is axiomatically extended by public language into the myriad wonders of culture? Beginning and end of story. -/- Their last chapter is about “regaining consciousness,” but I would say that if one has understood Wittgenstein and Searle, one has never lost it. And, though this is an excellent book by two of the brightest and the best, I suggest mulling over my thoughts in this and other reviews and reading Johnston and the latest from Searle, along of course with as much of 3rd period W as feasible, is an even better filter for folly. In sum an excellent book with various faults which I try to correct. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my article The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language as Revealed in Wittgenstein and Searle 59p(2016). For all my articles on Wittgenstein and Searle see my e-book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Wittgenstein and Searle 367p (2016). Those interested in all my writings in their most recent versions may consult my e-book Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 662p (2016). -/- All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. -/- Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071HVC7YP. -/- The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P1RP1B. -/- Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711R5LGX . (shrink)

Before commenting in detail on Making the Social World (MSW) I will first offer some comments on philosophy (descriptive psychology) and its relationship to contemporary psychological research as exemplified in the works of Searle (S) and Wittgenstein (W), since I feel that this is the best way to place Searle or any commentator on behavior, in proper perspective. It will help greatly to see my reviews of PNC, TLP, PI, OC,TARW and other books by these two geniuses of descriptive psychology. (...) -/- S makes no reference to W’s prescient statement of mind as mechanism in TLP, and his destruction of it in his later work. Since W, S has become the principal deconstructor of these mechanical views of behavior, and the most important descriptive psychologist (philosopher), but does not realize how completely W anticipated him nor, by and large, do others (but see the many papers and books of Proudfoot and Copeland on W, Turing and AI). S’s work is vastly easier to follow than W’s, and though there is some jargon, it is mostly spectacularly clear if you approach it from the right direction. See my reviews of W S and other books for more details. -/- Overall, MSW is a good summary of the many substantial advances over Wittgenstein resulting from S’s half century of work, but in my view, W still is unequaled for basic psychology once you grasp what he is saying (see my reviews). Ideally they should be read together: Searle for the clear coherent prose and generalizations on the operation of S2/S3, illustrated with W’s perspicacious examples of the operation of S1/S2, and his brilliant aphorisms. If I were much younger I would write a book doing exactly that. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date account of Wittgenstein, Searle and their analysis of behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my article The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language as Revealed in Wittgenstein and Searle (2016). Those interested in all my writings in their most recent versions may download from this site my e-book ‘Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization Michael Starks (2016)- Articles and Reviews 2006-2016’ by Michael Starks First Ed. 662p (2016). -/- All of my papers and books have now been published in revised versions both in ebooks and in printed books. -/- Talking Monkeys: Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071HVC7YP. -/- The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle--Articles and Reviews 2006-2016 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071P1RP1B. -/- Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st century: Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization - Articles and Reviews 2006-2017 (2017) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0711R5LGX . (shrink)

Though almost forty years have elapsed since its first publication, it is a testament to the philosophical acumen of its author that 'The Matter of Chance' contains much that is of continued interest to the philosopher of science. Mellor advances a sophisticated propensity theory of chance, arguing that this theory makes better sense than its rivals (in particular subjectivist, frequentist, logical and classical theories) of ‘what professional usage shows to be thought true of chance’ (p. xi) – in particular (...) ‘that chance is objective, empirical and not relational, and that it applies to the single case’ (ibid.). The book is short and dense, with the serious philosophical content delivered thick and fast. There is little by way of road-mapping or summarising to assist the reader: the introduction is hardly expansive and the concluding paragraph positively perfunctory. The result is that the book is often difficult going, and the reader is made to work hard to ensure correct understanding of the views expressed. On the other hand, the author’s avoidance of unnecessary use of formalism and jargon ensures that the book is still reasonably accessible. In the following, I shall first summarise the key features of Mellor’s propensity theory, and then offer a few critical remarks. (shrink)

This book examines autism from the tradition of analytic philosophy, working from the premise that Autism Spectrum Disorders raise interesting philosophical questions that need to be and can be addressed in a manner that is clear, jargon-free, and accessible. The goal of the original essays in this book is to provide a philosophically rich analysis of issues raised by autism and to afford dignity and respect to those impacted by autism by placing it at the center of the (...) discussion. (shrink)

Probably the leading exponent of W’s ideas on the language games of inner and outer (the ‘Two Selves’ operation of our personality or intentionality or EP etc. ) the prolific Daniel Hutto’s (DH) approach is called ‘Radical Enactivism’ and is well explained in numerous recent books and papers. It is a development of or version of the Embodied Mind ideas now current and, cleansed of its jargon, it is a straightforward extension of W’s 2nd and 3rd period writings (though (...) Hutto seems only intermittently aware of this). -/- The basic idea of the Embodied Mind or Enactivism is that much of behavior is automated and does not involve representations (basically S2 dispositions-see Hutto’s lovely dissection of the ‘representation rats nest’ in his online papers ). To me this is just another way of stating the fact that System 1 precedes the operation of System 2 which is a standard feature of contemporary psychology, which I have explained above and in further detail in my reviews of Wittgenstein (who was the first to see this and explored it in great detail) and Searle (who called it The Phenomenological Illusion in his superb essay of this name in his book Philosophy in a New Century which I have also reviewed). Since these are basic incontrovertible facts of animal behavior and I have already discussed them I won’t dwell on it here. -/- This book is a sustained argument against other similar ways of describing behavior which he calls CEC and CIC in favor of REC (Radical Embodied Cognition), which he characterizes as “the strongest reading of the embodiment thesis—one that uncompromisingly maintains that basic cognition is literally constituted by, and to be understood in terms of concrete patterns of environmental situated organismic activity, nothing more or less” (p11). This is clear as a bell if you understand the two systems view explained above but likely opaque if you don’t. Much clearer is Fodor’s characterization which he quotes as “abilities are prior to theories”, that “competence is prior to content” and that “knowing how is the paradigm cognitive state and it is prior to knowing that” (p10). That is, the unconscious automatisms of S1 are evolutionarily and behaviorally prior to the slow conscious dispositions of S2. -/- This is classic Hutto high level philosophical dialog, which is quite elegant, but somewhat too dense and a tad pretentious for the rest of us. I have not before encountered his coauthor Myin so can’t say how much of this text is really due to him. It is clear from this and the rest of Hutto’s work that (like everyone else) he has not quite kept up with the latest work in psychology nor really grasped the full power of W or S, even though he is one of the top Wittgensteinians alive and as bright as anyone in the field. His discussions of the language games of “information” and “representation” in his other papers and books (and much else including his deconstructions of Dennett and Fodor) should be required reading for anyone interested in behavior. So, I have the greatest respect for him, but one hopes that he will mellow with time and write descriptions of behavior (i.e., all we can really do as philosophers according to W) in more mundane prose such as this lovely summation on p15. “Hence, REC is nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of the very foundations of standard approaches to cognitive science and philosophy of mind.” Yes and what a pity that this great Wittgensteinian (and everyone else) does not realize that W laid it all out with great (and unmatched) clarity in his third period works over 60 years ago. -/- I have much less sympathy for the extended and scaffolded minds of Chap 7. I don’t see how one can lay the burden of explaining how the mind works at Searle’s door, nor how the convoluted prose about “decoupled contentful activities” etc helps at all. Why not just say that automated unconscious prelinguistic S1 feeds deliberate, conscious linguistic S2, which is axiomatically extended by public language into the myriad wonders of S3 culture? Beginning and end of story. -/- Their last chapter is about “regaining consciousness,” but I would say that if one has understood Wittgenstein and Searle, one has never lost it. And, though this is an excellent book by two of the brightest and the best, I suggest mulling over my thoughts in this and other reviews and reading Johnston and the latest from Searle, along of course with as much of 3rd period W as feasible, is an even better filter for folly. In sum an excellent book with various faults which I try to correct. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

Bevor ich mich ausführlich zu making the Social World (MSW) bespreche, werde ich zunächst einige Kommentare zur Philosophie (deskriptive Psychologie) und zu ihrem Zusammenhang mit der zeitgenössischen psychologischen Forschung, wie sie in den Werken von Searle (S) und Wittgenstein (W) exemplarisch dargestellt wird, anbieten, da ich glaube, dass dies der beste Weg ist, Searle oder irgendeinkommentator in die richtige Perspektive zu stellen. Es wird sehr helfen, meine Rezensionen von PNC, TLP, PI, OC, TARW und anderen Büchern von diesen beiden Genies (...) der beschreibenden Psychologie zu sehen. S bezieht sich nicht auf W es vorausschauende Geistesaussage als Mechanismus in TLP und seine Zerstörung in seinem späteren Werk. Seit W. ist S zum Hauptdekonstruktor dieser mechanischen Verhaltensauffassungen und der wichtigste beschreibende Psychologe (Philosoph) geworden, erkennt aber nicht, wie vollständig W ihn vorwegnahm und im Großen und Ganzen andere tun (aber siehe die vielen Papiere und Bücher von Proudfoot und Copeland über W, Turing und KI). S Arbeit ist wesentlich einfacher zu folgen als W,und obwohl es etwas Jargon gibt, ist es meistens spektakulär klar, wenn man sich ihm aus der richtigen Richtung nähert. Siehe meine Bewertungen von W S und anderen Büchern für weitere Details. Insgesamt ist MSW eine gute Zusammenfassung der vielen wesentlichen Fortschritte gegenüber Wittgenstein, die sich aus S' halbes Jahrhundert Arbeit ergeben, aber meiner Meinung nach ist W immer noch unerreicht für die Grundlegende Psychologie, wenn man begreift, was er sagt (siehe meine Rezensionen). Idealerweise, sollten sie zusammen gelesen werden: Searle für die klare kohärente Prosa und Verallgemeinerungen über den Betrieb von S2/S3, illustriert mit W es perspicacious Beispiele der Operation von S1/S2, und seine brillanten Aphorismen. Wenn ich viel jünger wäre, würde ich ein Buch schreiben, das genau das tut. Wer aus der modernen zweisystems-Sichteinen umfassenden, aktuellen Rahmen für menschliches Verhalten wünscht, kann mein Buch "The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mindand Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle' 2nd ed (2019) konsultieren. Diejenigen,die sich für mehr meiner Schriften interessieren, können 'Talking Monkeys--Philosophie, Psychologie, Wissenschaft, Religion und Politik auf einem verdammten Planeten --Artikel und Rezensionen 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019) und Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019) und andere sehen. (shrink)

Materialism, reductionism, behaviorism, functionalism, dynamic systems theory and computationalism are popular views, but they were shown by Wittgenstein to be incoherent. The study of behavior encompasses all of human life, but behavior is largely automatic and unconscious and even the conscious part, mostly expressed in language (which Wittgenstein equates with the mind), is not perspicuous, so it is critical to have a framework which Searle calls the Logical Structure of Rationality (LSR) and I call the Descriptive Psychology of Higher Order (...) Thought (DPHOT). After summarizing the framework worked out by Wittgenstein and Searle, as extended by modern reasoning research, I show the inadequacies in Carruther’s views, which pervade most discussions of behavior, including contemporary behavioral sciences. I maintain that his book is an amalgam of two books, one a summary of cognitive psychology and the other a summary of the standard philosophical confusions on the mind with some new jargon added. I suggest that the latter should be regarded as incoherent or as a cartoon view of life and that taking Wittgenstein at his word, we can practice successful self therapy by regarding the mind/body issue as a language/body issue. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019) . (shrink)

Avant de commenter en détail sur Making the Social World (MSW) Je vais d’abord offrir quelques commentaires sur la philosophie (psychologie descriptive) et son rapport à la recherche psychologique contemporaine comme illustré dans les œuvres de Searle (S) et Wittgenstein (W), puisque je pense que c’est la meilleure façon de placer Searle ou tout commentateur sur le comportement, en perspective appropriée. Il aidera grandement à voir mes critiques de PNC, TLP, PI, OC, TARW et d’autres livres par ces deux génies (...) de la psychologie descriptive. S ne fait aucune référence à la déclaration prémonitoire de L’esprit de W comme mécanisme dans TLP, et sa destruction de celui-ci dans son travail ultérieur. Depuis W, S est devenu le principal déconstructeur de ces vues mécaniques du comportement, et le psychologue descriptif le plus important (philosophe), mais ne se rend pas compte à quel point W l’a anticipé complètement ni, dans l’ensemble, faire d’autres (mais voir les nombreux papiers et livres de Proudfoot et Copeland sur W, Turing et AI). Le travail de S est beaucoup plus facile à suivre que celui de W, et bien qu’il y ait un certain jargon, il est surtout spectaculairement clair si vous l’approchez de la bonne direction. Voir mes commentaires de W S et d’autres livres pour plus de détails. Dans l’ensemble, MSW est un bon résumé des nombreux progrès substantiels sur Wittgenstein résultant du demi-siècle de travail de S, mais à mon avis, W est toujours inégalé pour la psychologie de base une fois que vous saisissez ce qu’il dit (voir mes commentaires). Idéalement, ils devraient être lus ensemble: Searle pour la prose clairement cohérente et les généralisations sur le fonctionnement de S2/S3, illustré avec les exemples perspicaces de W de l’opération de S1/S2, et ses aphorismes brillants. Si j’étais beaucoup plus jeune, j’écrirais un livre faisant exactement cela. Ceux qui souhaitent un cadre complet à jour pour le comportement humain de la vue moderne de deuxemssyst peuvent consulter mon livre 'The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle' 2nd ed (2019). Ceux qui s’intéressent à plus de mes écrits peuvent voir «Talking Monkeys --Philosophie, Psychologie, Science, Religion et Politique sur une planète condamnée --Articles et revues 2006-2019 3e ed (2019) et Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019) et autres. (shrink)

Before commenting in detail on making the Social World (MSW) I will first offer some comments on philosophy (descriptive psychology) and its relationship to contemporary psychological research as exemplified in the works of Searle (S) and Wittgenstein (W), since I feel that this is the best way to place Searle or any commentator on behavior, in proper perspective. It will help greatly to see my reviews of PNC, TLP, PI, OC, TARW and other books by these two geniuses of descriptive (...) psychology. -/- S makes no reference to W’s prescient statement of mind as mechanism in TLP, and his destruction of it in his later work. Since W, S has become the principal deconstructor of these mechanical views of behavior, and the most important descriptive psychologist (philosopher), but does not realize how completely W anticipated him nor, by and large, do others (but see the many papers and books of Proudfoot and Copeland on W, Turing and AI). S’s work is vastly easier to follow than W’s, and though there is some jargon, it is mostly spectacularly clear if you approach it from the right direction. See my reviews of W S and other books for more details. -/- Overall, MSW is a good summary of the many substantial advances over Wittgenstein resulting from S’s half century of work, but in my view, W still is unequaled for basic psychology once you grasp what he is saying (see my reviews). Ideally, they should be read together: Searle for the clear coherent prose and generalizations on the operation of S2/S3, illustrated with W’s perspicacious examples of the operation of S1/S2, and his brilliant aphorisms. If I were much younger I would write a book doing exactly that. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019) . (shrink)

This book is my gift to Albert Einstein on the occasion of his 142nd birthday - and is also a gift to everybody in the world he helped to shape! -/- My book adopts the view that the universe is infinite and eternal - but scientifically created. This paradox of creating eternity depends on the advanced electronics developed by future humanity. Those humans will develop time travel, plus programs that use "imaginary" time and infinite numbers like pi. They'll also become (...) the El or Elohim (names used by various religions to mean "God" or "the gods"). As astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in "Pale Blue Dot", "Many religions teach that it is the goal of humans to become gods." (I think that Elohim would be termed supernatural today, though their infinite abilities are actually natural outcomes of progress.) -/- A look through the book will tell you that some ideas are frequently repeated. This is because each article is meant to be understood without reading the others … so the same ideas show up in more than one. I’ve tried to stay away from jargon and equations unless they’re necessary (I find that they often make a subject harder to understand, not easier). All objects and events on Earth, in space, and in time (including the inevitability of world peace and immortality) are just one thing – strings of electronics' binary digits 1 and 0. -/- -/- TABLE OF CONTENTS -/- CHAPTER 1 - HYPOTHESIS OF QUANTUM GRAVITY -/- CHAPTER 2 - THE PHYSICIST AND THE PHILOSOPHER -/- CHAPTER 3 - ATTENTION MEDICAL DOCTORS! PHYSICS THEORY IMPLIES ALL PATIENTS CAN BE NORMALISED USING GRAVITY -/- CHAPTER 4 - SETI, EVOLUTION, AND TIME -/- CHAPTER 5 - ANYONS - ONE KEY TO UNLOCK GRAVITATIONAL-ELECTROMAGNETIC UNION, THE TOPOLOGICAL UNIVERSE, SPACE-TIME TRAVEL, FUTURE COMPUTERS, DARK MATTER/DARK ENERGY -/- CHAPTER 6 - WHAT CAUSES THE PLANETS TO SPEED UP AND SLOW DOWN WHILE THEY ARE ORBITING THE SUN -/- CHAPTER 7 - A BRIEF OUTLINE OF THE POSSIBLE BASICS OF COSMOLOGY IN THE 22nd CENTURY, AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR RELIGION -/- CHAPTER 8 - THE WORLD'S REAL-LIFE EXPERIMENTS WITH COVID-19 AND PHYSICS ALTER SOCIETY AND GLOBAL ECONOMICS -/- CHAPTER 9 - UNITING TIME -/- CHAPTER 10 - EXTRACTING ENERGY FROM BLACK HOLES -/- CHAPTER 11 - TIME TREK: THE 25TH CENTURY'S ANSWER TO STAR TREK. (shrink)

The strings of physics’ string theory are the binary digits of 1 and 0 used in computers and electronics. The digits are constantly switching between their representations of the “on” and “off” states. This switching is usually referred to as a flow or current. Currents in the two 2-dimensional programs called Mobius loops are connected into a four-dimensional figure-8 Klein bottle by the infinitely-long irrational and transcendental numbers. Such an infinite connection translates - via bosons being ultimately composed of 1’s (...) and 0’s depicting pi, e, √2 etc.; and fermions being given mass by bosons interacting in matter particles’ “wave packets” – into an infinite number of 8-Kleins. Each Klein 1) is one of the universe’s subuniverses (our own is 13.7 billion years old), 2) is made flexible through its binary digits which seamlessly, or almost seamlessly, join it to surrounding subuniverses and eliminate its central hole, and 3) possesses warped time and space because its foundation is the programmed curves in its mathematical Mobius loops (along with the twists they generate [p.7]). The universe functions according to the rules of fractal geometry. So the Mobius does not exist only at the cosmic level. It also manifests at the quantum scale, giving us photons and protons etc. Space and time are no longer separate, but are an indivisible space-time. So if space and the universe are infinite, how can time not be eternal? The past and the future must both extend forever (the idea of time being finite arises from confusion of our subuniverse with the one infinite universe). -/- BITS (Binary digiTS) only suggest existence of the divine if time is linear. Although a non-supernatural God is proposed via the inverse-square law coupled with eternal quantum entanglement, Einstein taught us that time is warped. Warped time is nonlinear, making it at least possible that the BITS composing space-time and all particles originate from the computer science of humans. -/- I suspect many readers will be content with reading this abstract. While there are more details, and mathematics, in the content; my natural style of writing is to avoid jargon and maths. I also tend to get philosophical. While I personally feel that there’s a lot of precious information in the content, I realize it won’t all be to everyone’s liking. Other subjects dealt with in this article are - the “Pioneer anomaly”, refinement of gravitational physics, dark energy and dark matter, quantum phenomena like mass and electric charge and quantum spin, Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, deflection of starlight by the sun, tides, falling bodies, Earth’s orbit, ancient Greek philosophers, Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Aristotle, Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, time travel into the past as well as the future, the elimination of distances in space, humanity’s construction of this universe we live in, The Law of Conservation of Matter-Energy, and support for the science-fiction-like idea of the electronic binary digits of 1 and 0 being the building blocks of our universe. (shrink)

The last two decades have seen the proliferation of the empirical study of philosophy. This dissertation defends the practice and argues that to understand the way contingent features of the practice of philosophy affect the epistemic standing of philosophers, we need to draw upon a wider and more varied set of empirical data than is sometimes supposed. To explore this, the dissertation focuses on two places where the practices of the discipline of philosophy have an effect on the epistemology of (...) philosophy. -/- First, the dissertation discusses the interaction between notable works of philosophy and their readers. In particular, it critiques the method of defending the epistemic standing of philosophers through careful examination of notable works of philosophy to discern the methods in the text. Ultimately this method is epistemically unmotivated. It is instead far more important to study how people have interacted and reacted to works of philosophy. -/- Second, the dissertation defends the use of lexicography in philosophy. Using "intuition" as a case study, the dissertation argues metasemantically and lexicographically that philosophers often use common words with meanings unique to philosophy. -/- Through both discussions it is argued that experimental philosophers and epistemologists of philosophy need to drastically expand the sorts of data they collect and consider in their theorizing. -/- ​. (shrink)

"In the programs of Logic and History of Philosophy in the FHUCE study and introduction to logic is always done on the basis of Western classical Greek tradition, and its development is still exclusively through Western culture. This presentation aims to provide a path parallel to the West is the tradition of Nyaya-Vaisesika schools, which arise in the S. V B.C. like a response to the anti-Vedic Buddhist nihilism, and reached an important technical development at the beginning of S. II (...) D.C. when you know the Nyāyasutras attributed to Aksapada Gautama, and are considered the founding text of Nyāya tradition of Indian philosophy. The great virtue of the achievement of these schools is that although the system has Vaisesika been described as "a synthesis between philosophy of nature, ethics and soteriology" , which also applies to school Nyāya in the latter we are also a great emphasis on epistemology and the rules must be observed in philosophical debates. In their synthesis, Nyāya -Vaisesika system gets his language and jargon will be adopted by all who wish to discuss logical issues in India (especially in discussions Vedanta / Buddhism) without the need to adopt such language should assume his ontological, moral and religious premises. (shrink)

Materialism, reductionism, behaviorism, functionalism, dynamic systems theory and computationalism are popular views, but they were shown by Wittgenstein to be incoherent. The study of behavior encompasses all of human life but behavior is largely automatic and unconscious and even the conscious part, mostly expressed in language (which Wittgenstein equates with the mind), is not perspicuous, so it is critical to have a framework which Searle calls the Logical Structure of Rationality (LSR) and I call the Descriptive Psychology of Higher Order (...) Thought (DPHOT). After summarizing the framework worked out by Wittgenstein and Searle, as extended by modern reasoning research, I show the inadequacies in Carruther’s views, which pervade most discussions of behavior including contemporary behavioral sciences. I maintain that his book is an amalgam of two books, one a summary of cognitive psychology and the other a summary of the standard philosophical confusions on the mind with some new jargon added. I suggest that the latter should be regarded as incoherent or as a cartoon view of life and that taking Wittgenstein at his word, we can practice successful self therapy by regarding the mind/body issue as a language/body issue. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

In The Great Endarkenment, Elijah Millgram argues that the hyper-specialization of expert domains has led to an intellectual crisis. Each field of human knowledge has its own specialized jargon, knowledge, and form of reasoning, and each is mutually incomprehensible to the next. Furthermore, says Millgram, modern scientific practical arguments are draped across many fields. Thus, there is no person in a position to assess the success of such a practical argument for themselves. This arrangement virtually guarantees that mistakes will (...) accrue whenever we engage in cross-field practical reasoning. Furthermore, Millgram argues, hyper-specialization makes intellectual autonomy extremely difficult. Our only hope is to provide better translations between the fields, in order to achieve intellectual transparency. I argue against Millgram’s pessimistic conclusion about intellectual autonomy, and against his suggested solution of translation. Instead, I take his analysis to reveal that there are actually several very distinct forms intellectual autonomy that are significantly in tension. One familiar kind is direct autonomy, where we seek to understand arguments and reasons for ourselves. Another kind is delegational autonomy, where we seek to find others to invest with our intellectual trust when we cannot understand. A third is management autonomy, where we seek to encapsulate fields, in order to manage their overall structure and connectivity. Intellectual transparency will help us achieve direct autonomy, but many intellectual circumstances require that we exercise delegational and management autonomy. However, these latter forms of autonomy require us to give up on transparency. (shrink)

What are the philosophical views of professional philosophers, and how do these views change over time? The 2020 PhilPapers Survey surveyed around 2000 philosophers on 100 philosophical questions. The results provide a snapshot of the state of some central debates in philosophy, reveal correlations and demographic effects involving philosophers' views, and reveal some changes in philosophers' views over the last decade.

In this paper we apply social epistemology to mathematical proofs and their role in mathematical knowledge. The most famous modern collaborative mathematical proof effort is the Classification of Finite Simple Groups. The history and sociology of this proof have been well-documented by Alma Steingart (2012), who highlights a number of surprising and unusual features of this collaborative endeavour that set it apart from smaller-scale pieces of mathematics. These features raise a number of interesting philosophical issues, but have received very (...) little attention. In this paper, we will consider the philosophical tensions that Steingart uncovers, and use them to argue that the best account of the epistemic status of the Classification Theorem will be essentially and ineliminably social. This forms part of the broader argument that in order to understand mathematical proofs, we must appreciate their social aspects. (shrink)

In the 70 years since Alan Turing’s ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ appeared in Mind, there have been two widely-accepted interpretations of the Turing test: the canonical behaviourist interpretation and the rival inductive or epistemic interpretation. These readings are based on Turing’s Mind paper; few seem aware that Turing described two other versions of the imitation game. I have argued that both readings are inconsistent with Turing’s 1948 and 1952 statements about intelligence, and fail to explain the design of his game. (...) I argue instead for a response-dependence interpretation. This interpretation has implications for Turing’s view of free will: I argue that Turing’s writings suggest a new form of free will compatibilism, which I call response-dependence compatibilism. The philosophical implications of rethinking Turing’s test go yet further. It is assumed by numerous theorists that Turing anticipated the computational theory of mind. On the contrary, I argue, his remarks on intelligence and free will lead to a new objection to computationalism. (shrink)

To address the underrepresentation of women in philosophy effectively, we must understand the causes of the early loss of women. In this paper we challenge one of the few explanations that has focused on why women might leave philosophy at early stages. Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich offer some evidence that women have different intuitions than men about philosophical thought experiments. We present some concerns about their evidence and we discuss our own study, in which we attempted to replicate (...) their results for 23 different responses to 14 scenarios . We also conducted a literature search to see if other philosophers or psychologists have tested for gender differences in philosophical intuitions. Based on our findings, we argue that that it is unlikely that gender differences in intuitions play a significant role in driving women from philosophy. (shrink)

This paper explores the theological and philosophical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and Neuroscience research on the Christian’s notion of the human person. The paschal mystery of Christ is the intuitive foundation of Christian anthropology. In the intellectual history of the Christianity, Platonism and Aristotelianism have been employed to articulate the Christian philosophical anthropology. The Aristotelian systematization has endured to this era. Since the modern period of the Western intellectual history, Aristotelianism has been supplanted by the positive sciences (...) as the standard scientific and philosophical interpretative framework for many. This paper argues that there is need for a new Christian anthropology based on the interpretation of the paschal mystery of Christ that is consistent with contemporary science and philosophy, especially as informed by research in AI and neuroscience. Christian anthropology today ought to be fully aware of the theological and philosophical implications of AI and neuroscience research. This paper denotes this new Christian anthropology as neuro-theological Christian anthropology. (shrink)

We chart how neuroscience and philosophy have together advanced our understanding of moral judgment with implications for when it goes well or poorly. The field initially focused on brain areas associated with reason versus emotion in the moral evaluations of sacrificial dilemmas. But new threads of research have studied a wider range of moral evaluations and how they relate to models of brain development and learning. By weaving these threads together, we are developing a better understanding of the neurobiology of (...) moral judgment in adulthood and to some extent in childhood and adolescence. Combined with rigorous evidence from psychology and careful philosophical analysis, neuroscientific evidence can even help shed light on the extent of moral knowledge and on ways to promote healthy moral development. (shrink)

Bilateralists hold that the meanings of the connectives are determined by rules of inference for their use in deductive reasoning with asserted and denied formulas. This paper presents two bilateral connectives comparable to Prior's tonk, for which, unlike for tonk, there are reduction steps for the removal of maximal formulas arising from introducing and eliminating formulas with those connectives as main operators. Adding either of them to bilateral classical logic results in an incoherent system. One way around this problem is (...) to count formulas as maximal that are the conclusion of reductio and major premise of an elimination rule and to require their removability from deductions. The main part of the paper consists in a proof of a normalisation theorem for bilateral logic. The closing sections address philosophical concerns whether the proof provides a satisfactory solution to the problem at hand and confronts bilateralists with the dilemma that a bilateral notion of stability sits uneasily with the core bilateral thesis. (shrink)

This chapter surveys a few of the central questions about philosophical perspectives on the ethics of belief, focusing especially on (1) questions about whether doxastic involuntarism is consistent with the normative approach to epistemology characteristic of any ethics of belief; (2) the status and interpretation of William Clifford's famous injunction against belief on "insufficient" evidence, and broader questions about the role of negative versus positive doxastic norms; (3) whether norms governing belief are distinctively epistemic norms, or are instead moral (...) or practical ones; and (4) how moral and political questions about belief bear on epistemic norms, including a discussion of doxastic wronging, racist beliefs, skepticism and rape culture, and epistemic partiality—whether, for instance, friendship requires beliefs that violate epistemic norms. (shrink)

Much of the recent philosophical discussion about free will has been focused on whether compatibilists can adequately defend how a determined agent could exercise the type of free will that would enable the agent to be morally responsible in what has been called the basic desert sense :5–24, 1994; Fischer in Four views on free will, Wiley, Hoboken, 2007; Vargas in Four views on free will, Wiley, Hoboken, 2007; Vargas in Philos Stud, 144:45–62, 2009). While we agree with Derk (...) Pereboom and others that the compatibilist’s burden should be properly understood as providing a compelling account of how a determined agent could be morally responsible in the basic desert sense, the exact nature of this burden has been rendered somewhat unclear by the fact that there has been no definitive account given as to what the basic desert sense of moral responsibility amounts to. In Sect. 1 we set out to clarify the compatibilist’s burden by presenting our account of basic desert moral responsibility—which we call retributivist desert moral responsibility for purposes of clarity—and explain why it is of central philosophical and practical importance to the free will debate. In Sect. 2 we employ a thought experiment to illustrate the kind of difficulty that compatibilists of any stripe are likely to encounter in attempting to explain how determined agents can exercise the kind of free will needed for retributivist desert moral responsibility. (shrink)

This study aimed to explore the rhetorical moves of article abstracts in Taiwanese Chinese philosophy journals. The most common theory for the discourse analysis of research abstracts is proposed by Hyland（2000）. Most of the research abstracts in the field of social sciences and natural sciences are composed of Hyland’s five rhetorical moves: introduction, purpose, method, results, and conclusion. Therefore, the question to be explored in this research is how to compose the rhetorical moves of abstracts of Chinese philosophy journal articles. (...) What is the frequency and order of each rhetorical move in the abstract of each paper? Do they reflect some particular type of distribution? Are there any rhetorical moves that occur exceptionally rarely? Does the abstract of research articles in Chinese philosophy journals apply the framework of the same five rhetorical moves? What are the conventions of the philosophy writing community reflected in the rhetorical moves of abstracts of academic journal articles in philosophy? -/- To answer the above questions, this research collected the abstracts of 18 papers from the representative Chinese philosophy journal "SOOCHOW JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES " in Taiwan in the past five years (2017-2021) and used the five moves of Hyland（2000） one by one to answer the above questions. The rhetorical moves of each abstract were analyzed and presented in tables to show the frequency, order, and type of each rhetorical move. -/- The results of this study found that "method (M)" and "conclusion (C)" are not the rhetorical moves that constitute the abstract of articles in Taiwanese philosophy journals, but the rhetorical move "purpose (P)" is "necessary" to appear. In the Purpose move, the subject is usually "this article"; the verbs are "argue" or "inquire." Although "introduction (I)" is a "conventional" move, the total number of words in the introduction is the highest in the whole abstract. This study also shows rhetorical move variation of the abstracts of philosophy journal articles, reflecting the writing culture and conventions of the academic philosophy community. -/- Finally, this study proposes three teaching guidelines for abstract writing of academic papers in philosophy, which will be useful for philosophy scholars and graduate students to consult when writing and submitting abstracts of philosophy in conference or journal papers. -/- Keywords: philosophy, journal article, abstract, discourse analysis, rhetorical move . (shrink)

This anthology focuses on “practical” forms and expressions of knowledge, like thinking through artistic media or by crafting things out of materials. The ten chapters follow and review various tracks in conceptions of contemporary knowledge, exploring human knowledge and experience from the perspective of human activities or practices, professional, artistic, domestic, or whatever. A guiding idea is that human knowledge seldom, perhaps never, fits into the traditional dualism between thinking and doing. -/- The chapters are written by philosophers and musicians (...) – some with a double experience as artists and theoreticians. The themes are philosophical, but above all, they touch on questions that are essential for how we understand ourselves as thinking and playing bodies, indeed as parts of nature. The book does not propose one single “theory of knowledge” but steps towards a more diverse and open attitude to the meaning of knowledge. -/- We hope that the texts will be of interest and useful in both disciplinebased and professional education: in philosophy, art schools, tea cher education, and in other programmes where tacit and practical knowledge are essential for the (future) practitioners. It is possible to independently read, and profit from, most of the chapters. (shrink)

In the philosophical literature, self-deception is mainly approached through the analysis of paradoxes. Yet, it is agreed that self-deception is motivated by protection from distress. In this paper, we argue, with the help of findings from cognitive neuroscience and psychology, that self-deception is a type of affective coping. First, we criticize the main solutions to the paradoxes of self-deception. We then present a new approach to self-deception. Self-deception, we argue, involves three appraisals of the distressing evidence: (a) appraisal of (...) the strength of evidence as uncertain, (b) low coping potential and (c) negative anticipation along the lines of Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis. At the same time, desire impacts the treatment of flattering evidence via dopamine. Our main proposal is that self-deception involves emotional mechanisms provoking a preference for immediate reward despite possible long-term negative repercussions. In the last part, we use this emotional model to revisit the philosophical paradoxes. (shrink)

Margaret Macdonald was at the institutional heart of analytic philosophy in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. However, her views on the nature of philosophical theories diverge quite considerably from those of many of her contemporaries. In this article, I focus on Macdonald’s provocative 1953 paper, “Linguistic Philosophy and Perception,” in which she argues that the value of philosophical theories is more akin to that of poetry or art than science or mathematics. I do so for two reasons. First, (...) it reveals just how far Macdonald’s metaphilosophical views diverged from those of many of her contemporaries. Second, the discussion in her article preempts recent literature on the nature of philosophical inquiry and the efficacy of philosophical arguments. Indeed, Macdonald’s paper is just as likely to provoke discussion today as it was in the 1950s. (shrink)

In this article I critically discuss English-speaking philosophical literature addressing the question of what it essentially means to speak of 'life’s meaning'. Instead of considering what might in fact confer meaning on life, I make two claims about the more abstract, meta-ethical question of how to understand what by definition is involved in making that sort enquiry. One of my claims is that over the past five years there has been a noticeable trend among philosophers to try to change (...) our understanding of what talk of 'life’s meaning' connotes. For example, whereas most philosophers for a long while had held that such talk is about a kind of value possible in the life of human beings, recently some have argued that certain non-human parts of nature can exhibit meaningfulness, which, furthermore, is not necessarily something valuable. The second claim I advance is that there is strong reason to reject this trend, and instead for philosophers to retain the long-standing approach. (shrink)

The objective of this work is to explore the notion of “action” and “agency” in artificial intelligence (AI). It employs a metaphysical notion of action and agency as an epistemological tool in the critique of the notion of “action” and “agency” in artificial intelligence. Hence, both a metaphysical and cognitive analysis is employed in the investigation of the quiddity and nature of action and agency per se, and how they are, by extension employed in the language and science of artificial (...) intelligence. The advent of the science of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, and the technological applications of artificial intelligence in the production of agents such as driverless cars and expert systems, have raised the question of moral, ethical and/or legal responsibility in AI agents. This has re-emphasized the importance of the philosophical discourse on the notions of action and agency, which in contemporary intellectual discourse are now perceived to be phenomena within the epistemic competence of the natural sciences. This paper argues that AI systems do not and cannot possess free agency and autonomy, thus cannot be morally and ethically responsible, hence, it recommends a socio-political response to the question of responsibility in AI. It is then the duty of individual nations, or the global community to define and enact policies on who shoulders the responsibility of actions executed by AIs. (shrink)

A counter analysis of David Chalmers' claims about the possibility of mind uploading within the context of the Singularity event.

The two purposes of this essay. The general philosophical problem with most versions of social libertarianism and how this essay will proceed. The specific problem with liberty explained by a thought-experiment. The positive and abstract theory of interpersonal liberty-in-itself as ‘the absence of interpersonal initiated constraints on want-satisfaction’, for short ‘no initiated impositions’. The individualistic liberty-maximisation theory solves the problems of clashes, defences, and rectifications without entailing interpersonal utility comparisons or libertarian consequentialism. The practical implications of instantiating liberty: three (...) rules of liberty-in-practice, 1) initial ultimate control of one’s body, 2) initial ultimate control of one’s used resources, 3) consensual interpersonal interactions and resource transfers. These rules are economically efficient and maximise general want-satisfaction. Private property and legal remedies are additional practical institutional aspects, but to which ‘initiated impositions’ then apply prima facie. Libertarian law is often mistaken for complete libertarianism. Moral explanations are a separate issue. The three main moral theories imply libertarianism, but it can be morally posited independently of them. Critical rationalism and its application. No empirical or argumentative support for theories. An important ambiguity with ‘justification’. How the epistemology applies to the theory of liberty and its application but remains separable in principle. Conclusion: there are further published explanations but this should be enough to generate useful criticism. Appendix replying to some typical comments. (shrink)

In this paper, we give a flavour of how, against the odds, Reggio-Emilia-inspired pedagogical documentation can work in reconceptualizing environmental education, reconfiguring child subjectivity and provoking an ontological shift from autopoiesis to sympoiesis in teacher education. Working posthuman(e)ly and transdisciplinarily across three foundation phase teacher education courses at a university in South Africa, we situate our teaching within current environmental precarities. We show how we stirred up trouble in and outside our university classroom and provoked our students to “make kin” (...) with children, each other, other animals, and the more-than-human, but also to stay with the trouble, that is, to learn to be truly present in colonized spaces. (shrink)

It is, without a doubt, a difficult task to address at once the state of philosophy as embodied by the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and the place of one’s own thought within it. This is the task that a co-director’s address tries to fill. Whether with a critical reexamination of the phenomenological mode of seeing distinctive of SPEP, of philosophical progress, or of the place of transcontinental philosophy, prior co-directors found ways to subtly chart the windings and (...) turns of the many streams that assemble to form this society.We seem to be, however, at a different juncture, so that another... (shrink)