[Revised entry by Michaela Boenke on November 4, 2009. Changes to: Bibliography] Bernardino Telesio (1509 - 1588) belongs to a group of independent philosophers of the late Renaissance who left the universities in order to develop philosophical and scientific ideas beyond the restrictions of the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition. Authors in the early modern period referred to these philosophers as 'novateurs' and 'modern'. In contrast to his successors Patrizzi and Campanella,...
Philosophy
-
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
-
Bernardino Telesio
4 Nov 2009 | 3:04 pm -
Space and Time: Inertial Frames
4 Nov 2009 | 2:43 pm[Revised entry by Robert DiSalle on November 4, 2009. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] A "frame of reference" is a standard relative to which motion and rest may be measured; any set of points or objects that are at rest relative to one another enables us, in principle, to describe the relative motions of bodies. A frame of reference is therefore a purely kinematical device, for the geometrical description of motion without regard to the masses or forces involved. A dynamical account of... -
Gilbert Ryle
2 Nov 2009 | 3:27 pm[Revised entry by Julia Tanney on November 2, 2009. Changes to: Main text, Bibliography] Although Gilbert Ryle published on a wide range of topics in philosophy (notably in the history of philosophy and in philosophy of language), including a series of lectures centred on philosophical dilemmas, a series of articles on the concept of thinking, and a book on Plato, The Concept of Mind remains his best known and most important work. Through this work, Ryle is thought to have... -
Classical Logic
2 Nov 2009 | 12:55 am[Revised entry by Stewart Shapiro on November 2, 2009. Changes to: Main text] Typically, a logic consists of a formal or informal language together with a deductive system and/or a model-theoretic semantics. The language is, or corresponds to, a part of a natural language like English or Greek. The deductive system is to capture, codify, or simply record which inferences are correct for the given language, and the semantics is to capture, codify, or record the... -
Russell's Logical Atomism
30 Oct 2009 | 4:21 pm[Revised entry by Kevin Klement on October 30, 2009. Changes to: Bibliography] Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970) described his philosophy as a kind of "logical atomism", by which he meant to endorse both a metaphysical view and a certain methodology for doing philosophy. The metaphysical view amounts to the claim that the world consists of a plurality of independently existing things exhibiting qualities and standing in relations. According to logical atomism, all truths are ultimately...
-
Talking Philosophy
-
Green Beliefs Protected and Philosophical Beliefs Defined
6 Nov 2009 | 3:16 amYou might have heard about the case of Tim Nicholson (Eco Employee wins bid to appeal) — in short, his views on climate change have been afforded much the same protection under Employment and Equality Regulations as religious beliefs. I was a little surprised to learn that ‘philosophical beliefs’ are protected in this way. Interestingly, something called the Employment Appeal Tribunal has attempted to say just what a philosophical belief is. Here’s their definition (fromwww.shoosmiths.co.uk) ‘The EAT recognised that there must be some limit on the meaning… -
The Eighth Deadly Sin: Fastidiousness
5 Nov 2009 | 4:24 pmEveryone knows about the seven deadly sins. The dire consequences that can result from them are well documented. Each is sufficient to send a soul to Hell for all eternity, and all lead to corruption and death. However, there is another sin that goes unnoticed in comparison with the Big Seven. I call it the sin of fastidiousness. The very root of the word brings out its disagreeable qualities. “Fastidiousness” derives from the Latin and Middle English for “disgust,” “arrogance,” “tedium” and “scorn.” Putting together various definitions of the term, we have the following… -
Copenhagen, ethics and economics
4 Nov 2009 | 3:49 amWith Copenhagen looming, I’m doing a lot of thinking about the moral demand for action on climate change. I wrote something about it here, saying that ethics should sometimes trump economics (Copenhagen is an opportunity for ethics to trump economics). It’s not as rigorous as a philosophy paper, but I think it makes a serious point. In the comments, you’ll see that a lot of people object to the claim that the West has to act regardless of what others do. It’s a strong claim, but maybe I really do think it’s true. Moral obligations click in, and you have… -
When the Future Strikes Back
4 Nov 2009 | 1:52 amImage by Getty Images via Daylife While watching the Colbert Report, I learned that two physicists have put forth the theory that the hypothetical Higgs boson particle might be so abhorrent to nature that creating it would cause a temporal backlash that would prevent such a vile spawning. This was put forth as an explanation why the Large Hadron Collider suffered a mechanical failure that put it out of operation for about a year. Interestingly enough, these two physicists are well established in the field. They are Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Masao… -
Norman Levitt, Steve Fuller and Academic Failure
1 Nov 2009 | 5:55 pmNorman Levitt, scourge of postmodernism, and author of books such as Higher Superstition (with Paul Gross) and Prometheus Bedeviled, has died of heart failure aged 66. Steve Fuller, a British sociologist, responded to this sad news by writing an ‘obituary’ that was… well let us say ill-judged. For example: I believe that Levitt’s ultimate claim to fame may rest on his having been a pioneer of cyber-fascism, whereby a certain well-educated but (for whatever reason) academically disenfranchised group of people have managed to create their own parallel universe of what is right and wrong…
-
AskPhilosophers.org | "All"
-
Question about Mind, Rationality - Mitch Green responds
6 Nov 2009 | 9:22 pmDo some people believe their own lies? Response from: Mitch Green Good question. I suspect that the answer is 'yes', but we need to be clear that there are some puzzles about so-called 'self-deception' that need to be avoided. It's not plausible that I could lie to myself, fully knowing that I'm doing so, and also believe what I'm telling myself. Instead, we often *shroud* lots of what we tell ourselves in such a way that its untruth is not self-evident. So here I am with a plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies. I like them a lot, and although I know on some level that I shouldn't eat very many,… -
Question about Mind, Rationality - Mitch Green responds
6 Nov 2009 | 9:22 pmDo some people believe their own lies? Response from: Mitch Green Good question. I suspect that the answer is 'yes', but we need to be clear that there are some puzzles about so-called 'self-deception' that need to be avoided. It's not plausible that I could lie to myself, fully knowing that I'm doing so, and also believe what I'm telling myself. Instead, we often *shroud* lots of what we tell ourselves in such a way that its untruth is not self-evident. So here I am with a plate of oatmeal-raisin cookies. I like them a lot, and although I know on some level that I shouldn't eat very many,… -
Question about Language - Mitch Green responds
6 Nov 2009 | 9:09 pmWhy are some things so difficult to express verbally? In the words of Lao Zi, "The Tao that can be can be expressed is not the eternal Tao". Do we lack the ability to define these sort of things, like art and such, or are the they simply impossible to define? Or do we just lack the appropriate understanding and 'vocabulary' to really say definitively and indisputably what these verbally ambiguous terms are? Is it a question of linguistics, or human limitations? Response from: Mitch Green Thank you for your question. It is not exactly clear to me what sorts of things you are concerned about. -
Question about Language - Mitch Green responds
29 Oct 2009 | 6:41 pmSomething occurs to me: Different people understand the same words differently. So, for example, to my parents, "therapy" might be a self-indulgent activity that only weak people engage in. To me, therapy might be a meaningful activity designed to strengthen myself. Now, if my parents ask me: "are you in therapy", and I knew their understanding of the word, it occurs to me that I would not be lying by saying "no". No - I am not engaged in a self-indulgent activity that only weak people engage in. Now, if what I've said is true, it would seem to have implications for logic. The "if p then q"… -
Question about Animals, Ethics - Jean Kazez responds
29 Oct 2009 | 5:03 pmHello philosophers, there is a vast philosophical literature that defends animal rights and vegetarianism, but the opposite camp doesn't seem to have produced much. What is the equivalent of Singer's "Animal Liberation" in the "meat eating" camp? Or is this a dead subject among philosophers, where those who care write books about the defense of animals, while those who don't simply go ahead and eat their steaks? Thanks in advance for your valuable insight. Response from: Jean Kazez I really don't think there's an equivalent of Animal Liberation on the other side. That's a classic because it's…
-
Leiter Reports
-
Why it is not fruitful to discuss Nietzsche interpretation with postmodernists
6 Nov 2009 | 5:33 amHere and also here. (Thanks to Ryan Lake for the pointer.) -
Do the "Folk" Really Believe in Objective Standards of Moral Right and Wrong...
5 Nov 2009 | 6:56 am...or are they cultural relativists? -
Real Moral Education
4 Nov 2009 | 2:01 pmHere. (Thanks to Adrian Bardon for the pointer.) -
Kierkegaard in the NY Times
4 Nov 2009 | 6:24 amHere. -
The Neoliberal Paradigm in Higher Education...
4 Nov 2009 | 4:02 am...has been preparing the demise of "public" research universities for 25 years now. Those that become de facto privates like Michigan will survive as major research universities, and those that don't will see their former excellence gradually erode--unless, of course,...
-
Ethics Etc
-
Tännsjö on In Defence of Moral Realism
4 Nov 2009 | 4:51 pmProfessor Torbjörn Tännsjö (Stockholm University) will be giving a talk next Monday at the Oxford Moral Philosophy Seminar entitled ‘In Defence of Moral Realism.’ A copy of Torbjörn’s talk can be found here and he would welcome any comments/suggestions. Here’s an abstract of his talk: I will present some ideas from a forthcoming [...] -
CFP: St. Louis Conference on Reasons and Rationality
12 Oct 2009 | 8:02 amThe first St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality (SLACRR) will take place May 23-25, 2010 at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. The conference is designed to provide a forum for new work on practical and theoretical reason, broadly construed. Please submit an abstract of 500-1000 words by December 31, 2009 [...] -
Copenhagen Epistemology Workshop
9 Oct 2009 | 6:00 pmDate: October 29, 2009 Venue: Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen (Amager), Room 14.2.50 Schedule: 10.30-12.00: Adam Carter (Edinburgh/Geneva): Knowledge, Testimony and Philosophical Expertise 13.15-14.45 S. Matthew Liao (Oxford): Disagreeing with Peers 15.00-16.30: Peter Graham (UC Riverside): Reliability and Entitlement 16.45-18.15: Mikkel Gerken (SERG, Copenhagen): Univocal Reasoning and Inferential Presuppositions There is no registration fee. However, if you would like to attend the [...] -
Sentimentalism and Moral Grammar
5 Oct 2009 | 5:45 amIn this post, all too long and speculative, I will examine how a sentimentalist theory of moral thinking could exploit and improve recently popular theories of universal moral grammar, developed by John Mikhail, Susan Dwyer, Marc Hauser’s group, Gilbert Harman and Erica Roedder, and others. I’ll be drawing mostly on Mikhail’s 2009 ‘Moral Grammar and [...] -
Oxford Round Table Discussion and Workshop on McMahan
25 Sep 2009 | 7:32 amThe Oxford Institute For Ethics, Law, and Armed Conflicts is hosting a Round Table Discussion with Jeff McMahan, and a Killing in War Workshop. Proportionality and Noncombatant Immunity: Round Table Discussion Thursday, 8 October, 3.00-5.00pm Oxford University Manor Road Building, Seminar Room D Professor Jeff McMahan (Rutgers University) Dr. Helen Frowe (University of Sheffield) Dr. Seth Lazar (ELAC) Proportionality and noncombatant immunity [...]
-
European Journal of Philosophy
-
Contemporary Arguments for a Geometry of Visual Experience
20 Oct 2009 | 10:43 pmAbstract: In this paper I consider recent attempts to establish that the geometry of visual experience is a spherical geometry. These attempts, offered by Gideon Yaffe, James van Cleve and Gordon Belot, follow Thomas Reid in arguing for an equivalency of a geometry of 'visibles' and spherical geometry. I argue that although the proposed equivalency is successfully established by the strongest form of the argument, this does not warrant any conclusion about the geometry of visual experience. I argue, firstly, that the resistance of this contemporary argument to empirical considerations counts… -
On Hylemorphism and Personal Identity
8 Oct 2009 | 10:56 pmAbstract: There is no such thing as 'the' hylemorphic account of personal identity. There are several views that count as hylemorphic, and these views can be grouped into two main families[mdash]the corruptionist view, and the survivalist view. The differentiating factor is that the corruptionist view holds that the persistence of the soul is not sufficient for the persistence of the person, while the survivalist view holds that the persistence of the soul is sufficient for the persistence of the person. In this paper, I argue that hylemorphists should prefer the corruptionist view. This… -
Intuition and Nature in Kant and Goethe
25 Sep 2009 | 12:30 amAbstract: This essay addresses three specific moments in the history of the role played by intuition in Kant's system. Part one develops Kant's attitude toward intuition in order to understand how 'sensible intuition' becomes the first step in his development of transcendental idealism and how this in turn requires him to reject the possibility of an 'intellectual intuition' for human cognition. Part two considers the role of Jacobi when it came to interpreting both Kant's epistemic achievement and what were taken to be the outstanding problems of freedom's relation to nature; problems… -
Kant's Conception of Inner Value
25 Sep 2009 | 12:30 amAbstract: This article addresses a foundational issue in Kant's moral philosophy, the question of the relation of the Categorical Imperative to value. There is an important movement in current Kant scholarship that argues that there is a value underlying the Categorical Imperative. However, some scholars have raised doubts as to whether Kant has a conception of value that could ground the Categorical Imperative. In this paper I seek to add to these doubts by arguing, first, that value would have to be of a particular kind in order to be the foundation of Kant's moral philosophy. Second, I… -
The Feeling Theory of Emotion and the Object-Directed Emotions
25 Sep 2009 | 12:30 amAbstract: The 'feeling theory of emotion' holds that emotions are to be identified with feelings. An objection commonly made to that theory of emotion has it that emotions cannot be feelings only, as emotions have intentional objects. Jack does not just feel fear, but he feels fear-of-something. To explain this property of emotion we will have to ascribe to emotion a representational structure, and feelings do not have the sought after representational structure. In this paper I seek to defend the feeling theory of emotion against the challenge from the object-directed emotions.
-
Journal of Philosophical Logic
-
Expressive Power and Incompleteness of Propositional Logics
23 Oct 2009 | 12:01 pmAbstract Natural deduction systems were motivated by the desire to define the meaning of each connective by specifying how it is introduced and eliminated from inference. In one sense, this attempt fails, for it is well known that propositional logic rules (however formulated) underdetermine the classical truth tables. Natural deduction rules are too weak to enforce the intended readings of the connectives; they allow non-standard models. Two reactions to this phenomenon appear in the literature. One is to try to restore the standard readings, for example by adopting sequent rules… -
A Routley-Meyer Type Semantics for Relevant Logics Including Br Plus the Disjunctive Syllogism
20 Oct 2009 | 7:26 pmAbstract Routley-Meyer type ternary relational semantics are defined for relevant logics including Routley and Meyer’s basic logic B plus the reductio rule and the disjunctive syllogism. Standard relevant logics such as E and R (plus ) and Ackermann’s logics of ‘strenge Implikation’ Π and Π are among the logics considered. Content Type Journal ArticleDOI 10.1007/s10992-009-9117-7Authors Gemma Robles, Universidad de La Laguna Dpto. de Historia y Filosofía de la CC, la Ed. y el Lenguaje, Facultad de Filosofía Campus de Guajara 38071 La Laguna Tenerife, Canary Islands… -
Symmetric Categorial Grammar
15 Oct 2009 | 11:36 amAbstract The Lambek-Grishin calculus is a symmetric version of categorial grammar obtained by augmenting the standard inventory of type-forming operations (product and residual left and right division) with a dual family: coproduct, left and right difference. Interaction between these two families is provided by distributivity laws. These distributivity laws have pleasant invariance properties: stability of interpretations for the Curry-Howard derivational semantics, and structure-preservation at the syntactic end. The move to symmetry thus offers novel ways of reconciling the… -
Traditional Logic, Modern Logic and Natural Language
13 Oct 2009 | 12:48 pmAbstract In a recent paper Johan van Benthem reviews earlier work done by himself and colleagues on ‘natural logic’. His paper makes a number of challenging comments on the relationships between traditional logic, modern logic and natural logic. I respond to his challenge, by drawing what I think are the most significant lines dividing traditional logic from modern. The leading difference is in the way logic is expected to be used for checking arguments. For traditionals the checking is local, i.e. separately for each inference step. Between inference steps, several kinds of… -
Utility and Language Generation: The Case of Vagueness
10 Oct 2009 | 12:24 amAbstract This paper asks why information should ever be expressed vaguely, re-assessing some previously proposed answers to this question and suggesting some new ones. Particular attention is paid to the benefits that vague expressions can have in situations where agreement over the meaning of an expression cannot be taken for granted. A distinction between two different versions of the above-mentioned question is advocated. The first asks why human languages contain vague expressions, the second question asks when and why a speaker should choose a vague expression when…
-
Linguistics and Philosophy
-
Public proper names and idiolectal identifying descriptions
10 Oct 2009 | 10:58 pmAbstract Direct reference theorists tell us that proper names have no semantic value other than their bearers, and that the connection between name and bearer is unmediated by descriptions or descriptive information. And yet, these theorists also acknowledge that we produce our name-containing utterances with descriptions on our minds. After arguing that direct reference proponents have failed to give descriptions their due, I show that appeal to speaker-associated descriptions is required if the direct reference portrayal of speakers wielding and referring with public names is to… -
On similarity in counterfactuals
17 Sep 2009 | 4:08 pmAbstract This paper investigates the interpretation of counterfactual conditionals. The main goal of the paper is to provide an account of the semantic role of similarity in the evaluation of counterfactuals. The paper proposes an analysis according to which counterfactuals are treated as predications “de re” over past situations in the actual world. The relevant situations enter semantic composition via the interpretation of tense. Counterfactuals are treated as law-like conditionals with de re predication over particular facts. Similarity with respect to particular facts is… -
On the interaction of aspect and modal auxiliaries
16 Sep 2009 | 6:08 amAbstract This paper discusses the interaction of aspect and modality, and focuses on the puzzling implicative effect that arises when perfective aspect appears on certain modals: perfective somehow seems to force the proposition expressed by the complement of the modal to hold in the actual world, and not merely in some possible world. I show that this puzzling behavior, originally discussed in Bhatt (1999, Covert modality in non-finite contexts) for the ability modal, extends to all modal auxiliaries with a circumstantial modal base (i.e., root modals), while epistemic… -
Assessing the modality particles of the Yi group in fuzzy possible-worlds semantics
10 Jul 2009 | 1:20 amAbstract Of late, evidentiality has received great attention in formal semantics. In this paper I develop ‘evidentiality-informed’ truth conditions for modal operators such as must and may. With language data drawn from Luoping Nase (a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the P.R. of China and belonging to the Yi Nationality), I illustrate that epistemic modals clash with clauses articulating first-hand information. I then demonstrate that existing models such as Kratzer’s graded possible-worlds semantics fail to provide accurate truth conditions for modals tagging clauses with… -
Counterfactuals, correlatives, and disjunction
9 Jul 2009 | 5:28 amAbstract The natural interpretation of counterfactuals with disjunctive antecedents involves selecting from each of the disjuncts the worlds that come closest to the world of evaluation. It has been long noticed that capturing this interpretation poses a problem for a minimal change semantics for counterfactuals, because selecting the closest worlds from each disjunct requires accessing the denotation of the disjuncts from the denotation of the disjunctive antecedent, which the standard boolean analysis of or does not allow (Creary and Hill, Philosophy of Science 43:341–344,…
-
Mind - current issue
-
Announcements
13 Oct 2009 | 10:56 pm -
Philosophy ConferencePM@100: Logic from 1910 to 192721-24 May 2010Bertrand Russell Research CentreMcMaster UniversityHamilton, OntarioCanada
13 Oct 2009 | 10:56 pm -
Books Received
13 Oct 2009 | 10:56 pm -
The Possibility of Knowledge, by Quassim Cassam.
13 Oct 2009 | 10:56 pm -
In the Name of Phenomenology, by Simon Glendinning.
13 Oct 2009 | 10:56 pm
-
Oxford Journals: Philosophia Mathematica
-
Exploring the Boundaries of Conceptual Evaluation
5 Nov 2009 | 6:26 am -
BRUNO DE FINETTI. Philosophical Lectures on Probability. Collected, edited, and annotated by Alberto Mura. Translated by Hykel Hosni. Synthese Library; 340
5 Nov 2009 | 3:19 am -
ANDREW D. IRVINE. Philosophy of Mathematics. (Handbook of the Philosophy of Science)
5 Nov 2009 | 3:19 am -
Whitehead and Russell on Points
5 Nov 2009 | 3:19 amThis paper considers the attempts put forward by A.N. Whitehead and by Bertrand Russell to ‘construct’ points (and temporal instants) from what they regard as the more basic concept of extended ‘regions’. It is shown how what they each say themselves will not do, and how it should be filled out and amended so that the ‘construction’ may be regarded as successful. Finally there is a brief discussion of whether this ‘construction’ is worth pursuing, or whether it is better—as in today’s mathematics—to prefer a… -
DAVID BOSTOCK. Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introduction
5 Nov 2009 | 3:19 am
-
Philosophical Studies
-
Field’s logic of truth
3 Nov 2009 | 2:44 pmField’s logic of truth Content Type Journal ArticleDOI 10.1007/s11098-009-9467-6Authors Vann McGee, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Linguistics and Philosophy 77 Massachusetts Ave 32-D931 Cambridge MA 02139-4307 USA Journal Philosophical StudiesOnline ISSN 1573-0883Print ISSN 0031-8116 -
Gupta’s gambit
3 Nov 2009 | 2:44 pmAbstract After summarizing the essential details of Anil Gupta’s account of perceptual justification in his book Empiricism and Experience, I argue for three claims: (1) Gupta’s proposal is closer to rationalism than advertised; (2) there is a major lacuna in Gupta’s account of how convergence in light of experience yields absolute entitlements to form beliefs; and (3) Gupta has not adequately explained how ordinary courses of experience can lead to convergence on a commonsense view of the world. Content Type Journal ArticleDOI 10.1007/s11098-009-9435-1Authors Selim Berker,… -
Replies to commentators on Saving Truth From Paradox
3 Nov 2009 | 3:01 amReplies to commentators on Saving Truth From Paradox Content Type Journal ArticleDOI 10.1007/s11098-009-9470-yAuthors Hartry Field, New York University Philosophy Department 5 Washington Place New York NY 10003 USA Journal Philosophical StudiesOnline ISSN 1573-0883Print ISSN 0031-8116 -
So truth is safe from paradox: now what?
3 Nov 2009 | 3:01 amAbstract The article is part of a symposium on Hartry Field’s “Saving truth from paradox”. The book is one of the most significant intellectual achievements of the past decades, but it is not clear what, exactly, it accomplishes. I explore some alternatives, relating the developed view to the intuitive, pre-theoretic notion of truth. Content Type Journal ArticleDOI 10.1007/s11098-009-9469-4Authors Stewart Shapiro, The Ohio State University Department of Philosophy 350 University Hall, 230 North Oval Mall Columbus OH 43210 USA Journal Philosophical StudiesOnline ISSN… -
Precis of saving truth from paradox
29 Oct 2009 | 12:15 amPrecis of saving truth from paradox Content Type Journal ArticleDOI 10.1007/s11098-009-9466-7Authors Hartry Field, New York University Philosophy Department 5 Washington Place New York NY 10003 USA Journal Philosophical StudiesOnline ISSN 1573-0883Print ISSN 0031-8116
-
Philosophy & Public Affairs
-
Order and Affray: Defensive Privileges in Warfare
14 Oct 2009 | 2:57 am -
Neuroscience and Moral Reasoning: A Note on Recent Research
14 Oct 2009 | 2:57 am -
Information for Contributors
14 Oct 2009 | 2:57 am -
Subscription Information
14 Oct 2009 | 2:57 am -
Notes on the Contributors
14 Oct 2009 | 2:57 am
-
University of Chicago: Philosophy of Science
-
Discerning Elementary Particles
4 Nov 2009 | 9:22 amPhilosophy of Science, Volume 76, Issue 2, Page 179-200, April 2009. We maximally extend the quantum‐mechanical results of Muller and Saunders () establishing the ‘weak discernibility’ of an arbitrary number of similar fermions in finite‐dimensional Hilbert spaces. This confutes the currently dominant view that (A) the quantum‐mechanical description of similar particles conflicts with Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII); and that (B) the only way to save PII is by adopting some heavy metaphysical notion such as Scotusian haecceitas or Adamsian primitive… -
Symmetry and Its Formalisms: Mathematical Aspects
4 Nov 2009 | 9:22 amPhilosophy of Science, Volume 76, Issue 2, Page 160-178, April 2009. This article explores the relation between the concept of symmetry and its formalisms. The standard view among philosophers and physicists is that symmetry is completely formalized by mathematical groups. For some mathematicians however, the groupoid is a competing and more general formalism. An analysis of symmetry that justifies this extension has not been adequately spelled out. After a brief explication of how groups, equivalence, and symmetries classes are related, we show that, while it’s true in some instances that… -
Schaffner’s Model of Theory Reduction: Critique and Reconstruction
4 Nov 2009 | 9:20 amPhilosophy of Science, Volume 76, Issue 2, Page 119-142, April 2009. Schaffner’s model of theory reduction has played an important role in philosophy of science and philosophy of biology. Here, the model is found to be problematic because of an internal tension. Indeed, standard antireductionist external criticisms concerning reduction functions and laws in biology do not provide a full picture of the limits of Schaffner’s model. However, despite the internal tension, his model usefully highlights the importance of regulative ideals associated with the search for derivational, and… -
Epistemic Landscapes and the Division of Cognitive Labor
4 Nov 2009 | 9:20 amPhilosophy of Science, Volume 76, Issue 2, Page 225-252, April 2009. Because contemporary scientific research is conducted by groups of scientists, understanding scientific progress requires understanding this division of cognitive labor. We present a novel agent‐based model of scientific research in which scientists divide their labor to explore an unknown epistemic landscape. Scientists aim to find the most epistemically significant research approaches. We consider three different search strategies that scientists can adopt for exploring the landscape. In the first, scientists work alone… -
Kuhn’s Evolutionary Epistemology and Its Being Undermined by Inadequate Biological Concepts
4 Nov 2009 | 9:20 amPhilosophy of Science, Volume 76, Issue 2, Page 143-159, April 2009. Kuhn made two attempts at providing an evolutionary analogy for scientific change. The first attempt, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is very brief and unstructured; in this article I discuss some of its weaknesses. Alexander Bird takes this attempt more seriously and provides a criticism based on oversimplified evolutionary assumptions. These assumptions prove to be inadequate for the second, more articulate, evolutionary analogy suggested by Kuhn in “The Road since Structure.” I argue, however, that this…
-
Synthese
-
Noesis and the encyclopedic internet vision
4 Nov 2009 | 1:29 pmAbstract Noesis is an Internet search engine dedicated to mapping the profession of philosophy online. In this paper, I recount the history of the project’s development since 1998 and discuss the role it may play in representing philosophy optimally, adequately, fairly, and accessibly. Unlike many other representations of philosophy, Noesis is dynamic in the sense that it constantly changes and inclusive in the sense that it lets the profession speak for itself about what philosophy is, how it is practiced, and why it is important. In this paper, I explain how Noesis is dynamic… -
Mass nouns, vagueness and semantic variation
3 Nov 2009 | 3:02 amAbstract The mass/count distinction attracts a lot of attention among cognitive scientists, possibly because it involves in fundamental ways the relation between language (i.e. grammar), thought (i.e. extralinguistic conceptual systems) and reality (i.e. the physical world). In the present paper, I explore the view that the mass/count distinction is a matter of vagueness. While every noun/concept may in a sense be vague, mass nouns/concepts are vague in a way that systematically impairs their use in counting. This idea has never been systematically pursued, to the best of my… -
Color, context, and compositionality
29 Oct 2009 | 12:15 amAbstract Color adjectives have played a central role in work on language typology and variation, but there has been relatively little investigation of their meanings by researchers in formal semantics. This is surprising given the fact that color terms have been at the center of debates in the philosophy of language over foundational questions, in particular whether the idea of a compositional, truth-conditional theory of natural language semantics is even coherent. The challenge presented by color terms is articulated in detail in the work of Charles Travis. Travis argues that… -
Introduction
26 Oct 2009 | 11:15 amIntroduction Content Type Journal ArticleDOI 10.1007/s11229-009-9682-xAuthors Robert van Rooij, University of Amsterdam ILLC, Faculty of Humanities Nieuwe Doelenstraat 15 1012 CP Amsterdam The Netherlands Journal SyntheseOnline ISSN 1573-0964Print ISSN 0039-7857 -
Measurement theory in linguistics
26 Oct 2009 | 11:15 amAbstract This paper presents a novel semantic analysis of unit names (like pound and meter) and gradable adjectives (like tall, short and happy), inspired by measurement theory (Krantz et al. In Foundations of measurement: Additive and Polynomial Representations, 1971). Based on measurement theory’s four-way typology of measures, I claim that different adjectives are associated with different types of measures whose special characteristics, together with features of the relations denoted by unit names, explain the puzzling limited distribution of measure phrases, as well as…
-
Experimental Philosophy
-
Experimental Philosophy and Grad School?
3 Nov 2009 | 5:27 pmAs it's growing closer to the time when students are applying to philosophy graduate schools, I thought some of the readers might be interested in this list of x-phi friendly graduate programs. The schools listed are an attempt to represent the philosophy departments where students will find professors and other students who are also interested in experimental philosophy.Readers of the blog who are not applying themselves could also help by offering their advice on the different programs in the comments section. (The facebook page that is hosting the list occasionally sends… -
X-Phi 'Lab Meetings' in NYC
1 Nov 2009 | 2:03 pmExperimental philosopher extraordinaire Mark Phelan is organizing a series of experimental philosophy 'lab meetings' for students and faculty in the New York area. The plan is for people from New York area institutions to have a chance to present ideas for experiments and then hone their experimental designs in a collaborative discussion with other lab members. The first meeting will be held in around a week, on Monday, Nov. 9 at CUNY Graduate Center, room 3309. If you are interested, Mark has put up all the details about this first meeting, and there is… -
New Experimental Political Philosophy - But Better!
30 Oct 2009 | 3:57 pmHi all,Bertil just sent me this paper on people's intuitions about meeting needs. I think the methodology should be of interest even to those who are not interested in distributive justice or political philosophy. He says it is posted at Equality Exchange. Here's the title etc.:Cappelen A. W., Moene K. O., Sørensen E. Ø., Tungodden B., Rich meets poor - an international fairness experimentCheers, -Nicole -
Motivated moral reasoning
30 Oct 2009 | 6:13 amHi all-Eric Uhlmann, David Tannenbaum, Peter Ditto and I have just published an empirical paper in Judgment and Decison Making on the motivated use of moral principles (157 kb pdf download can be found here or this paper and others of ours at peezer.net/publications; html version available here). Some of you have seen early drafts of this, but essentially we show that individuals differentially endorse consequentialist or deontological options in moral dilemmas that are structurally similar but that differ only in whether or not the content conflicts with their underlying… -
Where The Wild Things Are...
22 Oct 2009 | 2:23 pmIn the event that some of you missed the following two op-eds by David Brooks in The New York Times, I thought I would pass them along: (a) "The Young and the Neuro," and (b) "Where the Wild Things Are."
-
Feminist Philosophers
-
Down with Shame!
6 Nov 2009 | 10:43 am“I’m in a board meeting. Having a miscarriage. Thank goodness, because there’s a fucked-up three-week hoop-jump to have an abortion in Wisconsin.” Thus ran Penelope Trunk’s tweet, which she defends further here. Liberal Conspiracy provides a vehement defence of her action, in the face of a barrage of outraged responses. There Laurie Penny attacks such outrage as an attempt to police women’s emotional responses, and notes that the shame attached to public airing of biological function is peculiarly inconsistent (when that function is pornographic or… -
More on education and consumers
6 Nov 2009 | 5:16 amExam boards responsible for developing courses at secondary level compete with one another to sell their courses to schools. Unsurprisingly, schools like to buy courses that result in the best grades, since good grades = better position in league tables = more students at school = money to pay teachers and to buy resources. Given these facts, what’s the best way to sell your course? Make it easy, of course. It doesn’t take a genius to see that this brings a big risk of lowering standards. According to the Head of the Royal Society of Chemistry, this is exactly what has happened. -
A contest: Word has reached us
5 Nov 2009 | 11:57 amof little practices in philosophy departments that, well, if not exactly stink, then are definitely off. The prize may go to the department that keeps a web calendar named after urinals you might have seen in Paris, le pissoir.** Can you top that? Get even close? If so, please let us know! ** Many thanks to someone who might not want to be identified. -
Baby and Me
5 Nov 2009 | 7:14 am‘Cause it’s just what girls like, of course. Baby and Me comes with a doll, but not just any doll. This doll features a slot for the Wii remote so that the game can track feeding, playing, and excessive shaking motions. The game also features Balance Board support so that you can rock baby to sleep. (Thanks, CR!) -
Cross-dressing student sent home
4 Nov 2009 | 10:57 amAnother bit of Texas. It’s a shame that the story exists, but there are some good elements in it. Not least of those is the student’s unquestioning assertion of his rights. Schools clearly need diversity consultants! And there’s a nice critical reasoning question, which needs to be asked before you get to the lawyer: Did he break the dress code?
-
Gender, Race and Philosophy: The Blog
-
Symposium on Joshua Glasgow, A Theory of Race
27 Oct 2009 | 8:44 amPlease note that the SGRP has posted its Fall 2009 Symposium on Joshua Glasgow's book, A Theory of RaceCommentaries are by Michael O. Hardimon (UCSD), Sally Haslanger (MIT), Ron Mallon (U. Utah), and Naomi Zack (U. Oregon) with Joshua Glasgow's reply. Please have a look and post your comments! -
Symposium on Ann Cudd, Analyzing Oppression
27 Oct 2009 | 7:50 amPlease note that the SGRP has posted its Spring 2009 Symposium on Ann Cudd's book, Analyzing Oppression. Commentaries are by Sally Scholz (Villanova), Deborah Tollefsen (U. Memphis) and Helga Varden (UIUC). Please have a look and post your comments. Check back for Ann's reply. Apologies to all for the delay in posting this. -
Update on SGRP symposia
3 Aug 2009 | 5:03 amIt may seem that this blog is defunct given that we haven't posted our Winter or Spring symposia. Sincere apologies from the editors. The Winter symposium is a discussion of Ann Cudd's book Analyzing Oppression. The Spring symposium is a discussion of Joshua Glasgow's book A Theory of Race. We are hoping to post them soon, so stay tuned. We will be posting all future symposia directly on this blog and will announce it here and on relevant listservs. -
Interviews with K. A. Appiah, John McWhorter and Tommie Shelby
17 Dec 2008 | 1:13 pmJohn Derbyshire has recently published interviews with Kwame Anthony Appiah, John McWhorter and Tommie Shelby in The Prospect (Dec 2008). The "abstract" reads:To many, Obama's election meant the dawn of a new "post-racial" era for America. But, say many leading black American thinkers, the reality is much more complicated.You can find and download the interviews here:http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10510and the article "Post-racial Kitsch," also by Derbyshire, here:http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10507 -
Philosophers React to the election of Obama
21 Nov 2008 | 10:24 amOn election day I was ecstatic and I read reactions to the election voraciously. I especially appreciated all the articles in the Nov. 17 edition of the New Yorker (especially Remnick's "Joshua Generation"), and Suskind's article in the New York Times Magazine of last Sunday. I was less impressed by the ruminations of philosophers:Simon Critchley:http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/11/0082235Judith Butler: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/11/05/18549195.phprSlavoj Zizek:http://www.lrb.co.uk/webonly/14/11/2008/zize01_.html
-
The Prosblogion
-
"My Ways are Not Your Ways" Conference Videos
5 Nov 2009 | 2:19 amAs most readers of this blog know, the Center for Philosophy of Religion at the University of Notre Dame recently hosted a conference about the moral character of God as portrayed in the texts of the Old Testament & Hebrew Bible. Videos of all of the conference sessions (including Q&A) are now posted online here. -
I was wrong about the Kalam argument (maybe I still am)
4 Nov 2009 | 6:04 pmI've always been somewhat skeptical of the Kalam argument. But recently I've had a change of sentiment: I now think the argument is defensible--at least to someone with my background beliefs about time and causation. Previously, there were three obstacles to my confidence in the argument: (1) seeing how to justify the finitude of the past; (2) seeing how to justify the inference from the finitude of the past to the universe's having a genuine beginning to its existence; and (3) seeing why a cause of our universe should be a personal agent. (Others may face different obstacles.) Those… -
Honors College Faculty Positions
2 Nov 2009 | 10:17 amChrist College, the interdisciplinary honors college of Valparaiso University, invites applications for two tenure track positions at the assistant or associate level, beginning August 2010. Social and Political Thought: Areas of specialization could be political theory, political philosophy, social theory, religion and politics, or international studies. Literature, Ethics, or Religion: Area of specialty in either literature or ethics is open. Area of specialty in religion could be world Christianity, biblical studies, historical or systematic theology, religion and literature. The appointee… -
Photo Contest Winners
30 Oct 2009 | 12:21 pmSo about two weeks ago I noted here that Alvin Plantinga seems to have a mild obsession with the Taj Mahal. I also proposed a photo contest for the best photoshopped pics of Plantinga there "in person" (wonder if he's ever been). Here are the pics (I've titled them) followed by brief bios (not to be confused with BIOS) of their creators (I'll put my fav above the fold and the rest below). BEST IN SHOW (i.e. my personal fav for keepin it classy) "Al in the Alley" Mathis Gries MOST HILARIOUS "Plantinga Rampage" Glenn Peoples MADE ME GIGGLE "Plantinga the Taj Touristl" [Aparently after a trip to… -
Cosmological Arguments and Contingent Gods
29 Oct 2009 | 8:18 amCosmological arguments in general appeal to some version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Rowe’s version of PSR is the following: PSR. There must be an explanation for the existence of any being whatsoever, and there must be an explanation for every positive fact. Now the cosmological argument is supposed to provide us with good reason for believing that there is a necessarily existing being whose existence—as what Rowe calls a ‘self-existent’ being— is explained by it’s necessity and which is the ultimate explanation for contingent events, states of…
-
In Socrates' Wake
-
An Alternative way of Revising
1 Nov 2009 | 2:20 pmThis time of year, many of us find ourselves writing many comments on papers that we have written before, for the same student, and we find that we are writing the same comments throughout the paper. When we do this, we get frustrated, and the students get discouraged. But shouldn't we be marking all the places in the paper that illustrate the particular problems on which we expect students to improve? In addition, we all recognize the value of revision - but full papers are often insufficiently revised, compounding the frustration and disappointment of both teachers and students alike. What… -
On teaching "contemporary" philosophy
26 Oct 2009 | 7:21 amISW acolyte Kevin Timpe writes me with the following query about teaching a contemporary philosophy course:I'm scheduled to teach a Contemporary Philosophy course for the first time in the spring. It is part of the history of philosophy sequence for our major. While none of the courses in the sequence are specifically required, students have to take at least 3 of the 4 courses in the series. My question is this. I'm a typical analytic philosopher. I had a class on Levinas and one on Habermas in grad school, but I haven't taken studied or read Sartre, Heiddeger, Merleau-Ponty, etc., since my… -
Perplexed
24 Oct 2009 | 12:20 pmThis is a continuation of issues raised in the last two threads.I give three critical papers as assignments throughout a semester. They are a major component of the final grade. These papers have a 1000 word maximum limit (no minimum). For the 1st paper, the assignment is to construct an argument using only two premises defending an assigned conclusion, for example, ‘professions should hold their members accountable for their actions’ or ‘the father should not have killed his child.’ As part of the assignment, after the argument is constructed the student is to take the premise that… -
Whatever you do, don't "study"!
21 Oct 2009 | 12:23 pmI really loved Christopher Storm's response to learning how superficially his mathematics students "study" for exams:Storm's situation:All too frequently, a student will arrive at my office, often quite frustrated and worn down, and say they just don't understand the material on the midterm even though they've studied for countless hours. I usually ask how they have "studied" and receive a blank look followed by some comment about reading over notes again and again. This is when I inwardly cringe, for the student has taken a completely passive role in preparing and has not done any… -
Extension
15 Oct 2009 | 6:09 pmI stole my extension policy from one of my graduate school mentors. My policy is this: on any paper, at any time, the student may ask for and receive a week's extension, no excuses required. The only provisos I have are two: first, the student must ask at least three days in advance. Second, she forfeits her right to a timely return.I like this policy because it puts the burden of time management on the student. If a student finds herself in the position of asking for an extension repeatedly, this is good evidence for both of us that she is having problems with time management. On the other…
-
Philosophy by the Way
-
Truth (2)
1 Nov 2009 | 3:40 pmWhen we admit, like I did in my blog last week, that we can never know that a statement is true, and that things expressed in it can always be different from what we originally thought that they are, truth can no longer be something absolute. However, it can serve as a guideline. For when I argue that there are only subjective viewpoints and interpretations of the world around us, I do not want to say that any viewpoint and any interpretation will do. It is a bit like what George Orwell said in his Animal Farm: All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others. In the same way… -
Truth
25 Oct 2009 | 6:51 pmSome people, like Tarski, say that a statement is true if what it says corresponds with reality. But how do we know what reality is so that we can compare this statement with it? For we do not have an objective criterion for determining what is real. How do we know that a statement is true if what we see as real depends in the end on the subjective viewpoints of the observer and on his or her place in the world, so on his or her interpretation of the world? For this reason we can reach an intersubjective idea of what is real at most. Already Plato explained in his Legend of the Cave that what… -
Boxing and the peace movement
16 Oct 2009 | 4:59 amRecently the most important Dutch peace movement IKV Pax Christi held its yearly Peace Week. In order to attract new young people as peace activists a short video has been published on the Internet with a leading role for Jan Pronk, president of IKV and a former Dutch cabinet minister who performed also several high functions for the United Nations. In this video we see Pronk entering the training room of his wrestling school in a boxing outfit. He looks around and sees only an old man there, hardly able to do his exercises. Apparently it is not the right opponent for him. Pronk walks a bit… -
The development of man and the capacity to act
11 Oct 2009 | 4:19 pmA few days ago it was in the news that a new ancestor of man has been found, which has been baptized Ardipithecus ramidus. Actually she has been found already in 1994 (in Ethiopia), but it takes always time to analyze and interpret a new find. This Ardipithecus ramidus lived about one million years before our famous ancestor “Lucy”, so about 4.4 million years ago, and she had physical traits that were already typically human rather than apelike. What for philosophers is more interesting, of course, is not which physical capacities this ancestor had but her mental capacities. Could she… -
The relativity of action
5 Oct 2009 | 4:40 amDefinitions of what an action is are often absolute in the sense that they strictly separate actions from other kinds of doing: A doing is an action or it isn’t. My own definition of action in my dissertation is no exception. I called a doing guided by an intention an action; if it doesn’t have an intention, it is an instance of behaviour. Using intention as criterion for distinguishing action from non-action is quite common among action philosophers. However, other perspectives are possible. Jonathan Dancy distinguishes an action from a mere bodily movement when there is a reason behind…
-
Knowledge and Experience
-
Mathematical Ability and Environment
4 Nov 2009 | 1:26 pmThere's not much empirical evidence identifying systematic biologically-based intellectual differences between girls and boys, women and men, and what evidence there is doesn't reliably rule out the possibility of environmental rather than biological differences. One of the few points that hasn't been disproved is the observation that at the highest levels of mathematical ability (I'll wager, that means better at math than you are!), men and boys outnumber women and girls. This new paper looks at the geography of the distribution of female math whizzes and finds that they come out of a… -
Women Philosophers and Administrative Leadership
3 Nov 2009 | 11:12 amWhen thinking about the gender imbalance in philosophy, I tend to focus on direct support for undergradate students. But it's interesting to look at university leadership, too, as a place where women philosophers can wield influence.I think the street tends to distrust administrators, and why not? While we deal with theory, they deal with nitty-gritty practices: budget decisions, personnel problems, deciding who gets the corner office. Ugh. Who would want a part of that?But there are also certain kinds of (pro-woman, pro-family, pro-student, progressive) changes that can best be managed from… -
Pile It On!
3 Nov 2009 | 4:45 amCross-posted from my Intro to Ethics course blog:In Chapter 3 of The Ethics of Climate Change, James Garvey looks at the difficulties with assigning responsibility for the current climate change crisis. He identifies it as a sort of sorites paradox, also called the paradox of the heap.The general idea is that when something is made up of many, many little things, it's difficult (if not logically impossible) to say that just one of those little things is what makes the big thing itself or, in another context, if very many minor actions cause something, then each of the individual causes is too… -
Conservation Ideology and National Parks
19 Oct 2009 | 7:53 amI've been blogging about women in philosophy but have mostly been thinking about the "problem of people and parks." A recent (July 2009) article by Emily Wakild in Environmental History speaks to a related issue: the history of park planning along the U.S.-Mexico border. In the 1930's, Mexican and U.S. officials tried to plan an international park on the southern U.S. border which would be analogous to the U.S.-Canada Glacier Waterton International Peace Park. The planning ultimately came to naught, partly because the U.S. insisted on locating the park in a place that would be inaccessible to… -
Women Philosophers: Then and Now
13 Oct 2009 | 1:57 pmFeminist Philosophers notices and re-posts an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on women in philosophy.It's marvelous to see articles on this worry of ours appear so prominently (and, it seems, more frequently). Especially since it is not uncommon for my colleagues in other humanities and social sciences to be utterly and completely surprised when they find out that the gender make-up of my department is typical for the discipline as a whole. (The economics department down the hall is the same size but has more women.)One thing we need to (and have been) doing is to 1) identify…
-
The Brooks Blog
-
How bad is the US market in philosophy?
6 Nov 2009 | 7:53 amThe worst I have seen yet. Details here. -
Die Zeit publishes list of political science departments of "excellence"
6 Nov 2009 | 7:36 amDetails are here. They list only European universities. Departments are noted for excellence across the following categories: international doctorates, international master's students, international staff, highly cited books, citations, publications, and other factors. The political science departments noted are:U AarhusU AberystwythU AmsterdamUPF BarcelonaU BelfastFU BerlinHU BerlinU BernU BirminghamU BolognaU BolognaU BristolCEU BudapestU CardiffTU DarmstadtTC DublinU EssexEUI FlorenzU FrankfurtU GlasgowU GöteborgU HelsinkiU JagiellonskiU JenaU KøbenhavnsU KonstanzU LancasterU LausanneU… -
JOB: U Mass (Boston)
6 Nov 2009 | 7:31 amUniversity of Massachusetts, Boston. Assistant or Associate Professor (preference for Associate), tenure track, beginning September 2010.AOS: Frankfurt School/Critical Theory (emphasis on Habermas).AOC: open.The Department places great emphasis on high quality undergraduate teaching from introductory to advanced levels. The University of Massachusetts, Boston, is a non-residential, urban university with a diverse faculty and student body. Ph.D. in Philosophy required prior to appointment. Salary competitive. Summer work available. Send letter, CV, evidence of scholarly promise (a 10-20 page… -
RAE2008 Panel in Philosophy on "impact"
6 Nov 2009 | 7:26 amPublished in the Times Higher Education here:We, the undersigned members of the RAE2008 Philosophy Sub-Panel, wish to register our deep concerns about certain aspects of the research excellence framework Consultation Document which we will be bringing to the attention of the Higher Education Funding Council for England.One concern relates to the use of impact as a measure of research quality in an area such as philosophy, which is largely (though not wholly) theoretical. We are not opposing the idea of measuring or rewarding impact grounded in excellent research; but we do not accept that the… -
CFP: British Society for Ethical Theory
5 Nov 2009 | 4:22 amBritish Society for Ethical TheoryUniversity of Nottingham, 7-9 July 2010Papers are invited for our 2010 annual conference. The subject area is open within normative ethics, metaethics, and moral psychology.Papers on topics in applied ethics or the history of ethics may also be considered provided they are also of wider theoretical interest.For full details, see:http://www.bset.org.uk/nextconference.html
-
fragments of consciousness
-
Singularity Summit
2 Nov 2009 | 12:00 pmIve been in New York for the last two months, teaching at New York University (as I'll do in September-December for the next three years). There's been too much going on to report on in full, but two conferences are worth mentioning.In early October I attended the Singularity Summit. The term "singularity" here means different things to different people, but the core idea is I.J. Good's idea of an "intelligence explosion": if we can create machines more intelligent than us, then they'll be able to create machines more intelligent than them,… -
The extended will
21 Aug 2009 | 7:00 pmJoel Anderson gave a nice talk in CAPPE a few days ago on "Scaffolded Autonomy and the Extended Will". The talk focuses on the role of environmental triggers in facilitating the control of action, and on the ensuing possibility of an extended view of the will. The paper isn't online, but see his "Procrastination and the Extended Will" (co-authored with Joseph Heath) for the general idea.Joel wasn't certain whether he wanted a real extended will thesis, or a weaker embedding thesis on which the environment plays a crucial explanatory role in the… -
Five papers
19 Aug 2009 | 4:06 amFor the last couple of years I have mostly been working on books, so I have not posted many papers here. But I've recently significantly revised three old drafts and written up two new ones (previously circulated as talks), as follows: Verbal Disputes and Philosophical Progress: This is a written-up version of the old Powerpoint on Terminological Disputes (I gave in and went with the more common "verbal dispute"). Still extremely drafty in places. Revisability and Conceptual Change: A written-up version of an earlier handout on Conceptual Analysis meets "Two… -
Conference season wrap-up
16 Aug 2009 | 10:17 pmOK, I haven't been very good about keeping this blog up-to-date. I'll try to do better. First, recent conferences (here "recent" means since April). St. Andrews conference on Philosophical Methodology: I've posted photos. An audio file of my talk on verbal disputes (and also of Jonathan Schaffer's talk on modality and methodology) is online. Fullerton conference on Consciousness and Self: I've posted photos and Powerpoint for my wrap-up talk on "The Varieties of Self-Awareness". Someone uploaded the entire talk to YouTube. -
Attention and Consciousness
22 Jun 2009 | 8:39 pmHere's the program for a workshop on Attention and Consciousness, put on by the ANU Centre for Consciousness. It will be held in the Sparke Helmore Lecture Theatre in the ANU College of Law later this week. If you'd like to attend, please email dicrosse [[at]] coombs.anu.edu.au.Thursday June 259-10:30 Eric Schwitzgebel (Philosophy, UC Riverside), Consciousness and Attention11-12:30 Matthew Finkbeiner (Cognitive Science, Macquarie), Visual Attention and Reportability 2-3:30 Brian Scholl (Psychology, Yale), The Logic of Seeing…
-
Jon Cogburn's Blog
-
final version of sunday school lecture notes for now
5 Nov 2009 | 9:06 amPosting has been light. I've been really digging into no-luck epistemologies, in particular Keith DeRose's fantastic work. But all my thoughts are going into academic papers with Jeff Roland, and I almost never blog arguments that I'm putting into papers.One other cool thing- Me and University Presbyterian Church Associate Pastor Clint Mitchell's notes on biblical interpretation and authority are finalized for the remainder of this semester's class and on-line HERE. A few conclusions: Naive inerrancy (I assume some folks at Baylor have a more sophisticated version than the… -
navel gazing after friends' reports from tour
28 Oct 2009 | 3:31 pmFor all my kind of pseudo-punk rock wingeing, I'm forced to conclude that U2 is one of the handful of big acts who actually are keeping the banner of rock waiving. Whose it going to be next? Billy Joel? Abba?Wait a minute, I already decided those guys wrote some pretty good songs.At least: (1) I still don't like progressive rock (though, disturbingly, two friends whose other aesthetic judgments I put a great deal of creedence in are big fans of the form), and (2) I'm irrationally exuberant about the fact that James Williamson and Iggy Pop have made peace and the former is resuming… -
New York Dolls - Looking for a Kiss
27 Oct 2009 | 10:54 am -
fun with animals
25 Oct 2009 | 9:41 amI wish I'd felt well enough to go to this petting zoo pumpkin sale thingy in Hammond Louisiana with Emily and Thomas yesterday. Nobody make any jokes about Of Mice and Men or the old cartoon that copied it. This being said, you really do have to teach two year olds not to just grab at animals. Thomas is learning pretty well. When I was a kid some of our friends in the country had a turkey that was really foul tempered and who liked to chase kids up into the back of a pick-up truck. I don't know if this turkey will have such a lucky fate. According to Emily, he found Thomas as… -
everybody finally keeping food down
25 Oct 2009 | 9:20 amBoy last week sucked. Luckily Emily and I took turns having the worst of the stomach virus so one of us could watch Thomas while the other one was incapacitated. Now this week is going to be crazy-busy getting caught up on all the stuff we let slide last week.Emily felt good enough to take Thomas to a petty zoo, pumpkin sale thing yesterday. I'll put some pictures up in a bit.
-
Continental Philosophy
-
“The Uses and Misuses of Violence” | Department of Philosophy | Loyola University New Orleans
4 Nov 2009 | 7:08 pmSlavoj Zizek “The Uses and Misuses of Violence” Lecture Date: Tuesday, November 17, 2009 Time: 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm Location: Nunemaker Auditorium, Monroe Hall Slavoj Zizek is a professor at the Institute for Sociology, Ljubljana and at the European Graduate School EGS who uses popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and the theory of Jacques Lacan to explain politics and popular culture. He was born in 1949 in Ljubljana, Slovenia where he lives to this day but he has lectured at universities around the world. He was analyzed by Jacques Alain Miller, Jacques… -
CFP: Cultural Productions of 9/11
27 Oct 2009 | 9:24 pmReconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture requests submissions for Issue 11.2 “Cultural Productions of 9/11” Deadline for proposals: February 1, 2010 (final drafts of invited submissions will be due August 15, 2010) How has the subject of “9/11” been produced? From the moments when people cried “too soon” to the gratuitous preying on the subject in the name of “9/11”—how has this date stamp affected cultural production? This special issue of Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture will present a range of disciplinary responses to the aftereffects—as well as… -
Audio: Philosophers Zone – 17 October 2009 – What would Karl Marx think?
21 Oct 2009 | 7:40 pmPhilosophers Zone – 17 October 2009 – What would Karl Marx think?. Commodities, capitalism and computers. At a time when the Berlin Wall has fallen but Wall Street is decidedly shaky, a self-described lapsed Marxist takes us through some of the key philosophical and practical ideas of Karl Marx and argues for what is still useful today. What is worth keeping in Marx? He had his limitations but later thinkers have built on his core concepts and used his methods to produce results that still speak to the changing nature of work in contemporary Australia. -
Louis Althusser ( New Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Entry)
21 Oct 2009 | 7:32 pmLouis Althusser (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). -
Slavoj Zizek – Hollywood Today: Report from an Ideological Frontline
18 Oct 2009 | 9:24 amfrom lacan dot com http://www.lacan.com/lacan1.htm Slavoj Zizek Hollywood Today: Report from an Ideological Frontline http://www.lacan.com/essays/?page_id=347 […] Les non-dupes errent So when even products of the allegedly “liberal” Hollywood display the most blatant ideological regression, are any further proofs needed that ideology is alive and kicking in our post-ideological world? Consequently, it shouldn’t surprise us to discover ideology at its purest in what may appear as Hollywood at its most innocent: the big blockbuster cartoons. “The truth has the structure of a…
-
Philosophy of information
-
La révolution numérique considérée comme une quatrième révolution
3 Nov 2009 | 6:19 amPatrick Peccatte La révolution numérique considérée comme une quatrième révolution, par Luciano Floridihttp://blog.tuquoque.com/post/2009/11/03/revolution-numerique-quatrieme-revolutionLuciano Floridi's blog on the Philosophy of information -
How information becomes knowledge
1 Nov 2009 | 4:06 amSemantic Information and The Network Theory of Account (forthcoming in Synthese)The article addresses the problem of how semantic information can be upgraded to knowledge. The introductory section explains the technical terminology and the relevant background. Section two argues that, for semantic information to be upgraded to knowledge, it is necessary and sufficient to be embedded in a network of questions and answers that correctly accounts for it. Section three shows that an information flow network of type A fulfils such a requirement, by warranting that the erotetic deficit,… -
Simulations and Their Philosophical Implications
13 Oct 2009 | 10:01 amNACAP 2010 @ Carnegie Mellon University - July 24-26, 2010 Simulations and Their Philosophical Implications Call for Papers/Proposals Deadline: February 1st 2010 (firm) In honor of the 60th Anniversary of the publication of Alan Turing’s groundbreaking article, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” we are centering the 2010 NACAP Conference on simulations and their philosophical implications.Since the inception of the computer, simulations have become ubiquitous tools of the trade in a wide range of disciplines from astrophysics to sociology, machine learning to logic. When… -
Arsenic and e-Health
11 Oct 2009 | 11:20 amMonsieur Homais is one of the less likable characters in Madame Bovary. The deceitful pharmacist fakes a deep friendship for Charles Bovary. In fact, he constantly undermines his reputation with his patients, thus contributing to Charles’ ruin. Monsieur Homais is not merely wicked. A smart man, he has been convicted in the past for practicing medicine without a license and so he worries, very reasonably, that Charles might denounce him to the authorities for the illicit business of health advice and personal consultations that he keeps organising in his pharmacy.The ultimate success of the… -
How to see a masterpiece: Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D minor, organ
7 Oct 2009 | 5:27 amLuciano Floridi's blog on the Philosophy of information
-
In Search of Enlightenment
-
Gene Therapy Success for Brian Disease
6 Nov 2009 | 5:30 amNaturenews reports on another important success for gene therapy-- treatment for ALD (adrenoleukodystrophy), a rare, inherited metabolic disorder that afflicts young males. ALD results in severe degeneration of the structure that is crucial for brain-cell function and most die before adolescence. Here is a sample from the news story:Researchers have halted a fatal brain disease by delivering a therapeutic gene to the stem cells that mature into blood cells.The gene was transferred using a virus derived from HIV, a technique that researchers have pursued for more than a decade but has not been… -
Science Paper on Dynamics of Inequality
5 Nov 2009 | 4:14 amThe latest issue of Science has this interesting article on the intergenerational wealth transmission and the dynamics of inequality. Here is the abstract:Small-scale human societies range from foraging bands with a strong egalitarian ethos to more economically stratified agrarian and pastoral societies. We explain this variation in inequality using a dynamic model in which a population’s long-run steady-state level of inequality depends on the extent to which its most important forms of wealth are transmitted within families across generations. We estimate the degree of intergenerational… -
Nature Editorial on Gene Therapy
30 Oct 2009 | 6:18 pmThe latest issue of Nature has this insightful, and refreshing, editorial on renewing our optimism for gene therapy. Here is a sample:In the early 1990s, when the first human trials got under way, it seemed to many that the era of gene therapy was at hand: the techniques of modern molecular biotechnology would make it possible to repair genetic defects by inserting healthy DNA directly into a patient's cells. The excitement was short-lived. Lasting effects proved difficult to obtain in early trials, and the community quickly grew sceptical. Then, in 2003, when it was announced that several… -
21st Century Humanism
29 Oct 2009 | 10:17 amAs a humanist I believe in the equal worth of all human beings. My humanist sentiments open my eyes to the problem of global poverty, the pervasiveness of patriarchy and the dangers of extremism. My humanist sentiments also open my eyes to the shortcomings of evolution (evident by the prevalence of chronic disease in late life) and the prevalence of "ageism". In this post I will address these latter concerns.If humanists reflected critically and consistently upon their basic moral convictions, I believe they would become strong advocates of aging research and the aspiration to decelerate… -
Biogerontology Paper on Framing the Inborn Aging Process
23 Oct 2009 | 6:50 amMy paper entitled "Framing the Inborn Aging Process and Longevity Science" has been accepted for publication in the journal Biogerontology. This paper integrates insights from economics, psychology, evolutionary biology, demography, and epidemiology in an effort to help equip us for tackling this century's greatest challenge-- the rapid rise of chronic disease that accompanies population aging. This paper is probably my most ambitious paper to date, and was a real labour of love. Here is the abstract:The medical sciences are currently dominated by the “disease-model” approach to health…
-
Manyul Im's Chinese Philosophy Blog
-
New SEP Entry on Neo-Taoism (xuanxue)
23 Oct 2009 | 12:23 amThe Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Neo-Taoism”, by Alan Chan (at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, formerly of National University of Singapore’s philosophy deparment), just became available on October 1. From He Yan and Wang Bi to Guo Xiang — everything you wanted to know about post-Han Daoism, encyclopedically considered; here’s a teaser: Both He Yan and Wang Bi were known for their expertise in the Yijing. Both were deeply interested in the Laozi. The fifth-century work Shishuo xinyu (New Accounts of Tales of the World), which is… -
Hansen’s Tao Te Ching
19 Oct 2009 | 12:19 pmA little blogging while I’m running around and setting up the transition to the group blog… Chad Hansen’s translation of the Daodejing is available now. I happened to see it at the Yale Book Store, did a double-take, and snatched it up. It has a kind of boutique feel to it, literally — the hardcover has an elegant silky-cloth finish with an embossed 道 on the front; the paper quality seems expensive; there are myriad glossy photos and art reproductions throughout. This attention to reader aesthetic experience suggests that the volume is not primarily meant for… -
Ivanhoe’s Lu-Wang School Translation Reviewed
15 Oct 2009 | 12:31 pmReviewed by friend of the blog, Justin Tiwald, at NDPR: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17606 It’s good to see updated translation of Wang Yangming and Lu Xiangshan’s Neoconfucianism. What else would be nice to have in English? -
Transition to Group Blog in the Works
6 Oct 2009 | 7:42 amI’m working on the transformation of things. Thanks for being patient. I may actually blog before the transformation occurs; we’ll see. I’ll take more suggestions here for the name of the new blog, if something strikes your fancy. That’s still up in the air. Names that are named are not constant names… -
More Blogging to Come…
18 Sep 2009 | 7:15 amMy apologies for the long lapse in blogging. As it turns out, I can’t simply sit reverently facing South in order to direct an academic program. I will begin blogging again in earnest next week. Also, in the near future I would like to turn this blog more formally into a group endeavor, with an appropriately more general blog name, and will be seeking a willing and able cadre of co-authors for that purpose. I will make the effort to contact some people I have in mind, but if you are interested and feel qualified, I invite you to send me a message via email.
-
In Living Color
-
Your Dog's Carbon Footprint and the End of the World
6 Nov 2009 | 8:25 amWhat, something else to worry about? Apparently so. Check out Wayne's new blog, where he ponders the problem of your dog's (or cat's) carbon footprint. Here's an uncomfortable truth. Carbon emissions can be reduced through changes in lifestyle. But they can also be reduced by reducing the number of individuals who have lifestyles. We can have fewer children. We can stop breeding livestock -
The Big Schism
4 Nov 2009 | 8:20 amOphelia has a really perceptive editorial on the supposed schism between atheists at Comment is Free-- Many atheists want to be able to be atheists without being dragooned into some boring noisy unsubtle bad-tempered "movement". Many other atheists want to be able to be overt explicit unbashful atheists without constantly being told to be more euphemistic or evasive or respectful or just -
Is Meat Green?
2 Nov 2009 | 9:07 amInteresting article about the question in the New York Times Saturday. If they reject my letter to the editor, I'll be putting it here. My letter-- Re: The Carnivore’s Dilemma, Nicolette Hahn Niman, October 30. Small traditional farms are much better for animals, but from an environmental point of view, they’re not the answer to high-impact industrial farming. In the US alone, we kill 9.5 -
Gotta Get Spooky
1 Nov 2009 | 7:10 am -
Other People's Icons
30 Oct 2009 | 7:52 amThis week Chris Mooney wrote a post about "bridging the divide," and that predictably unleashed another round of accusations about the terribly, terribly unfair things he and Sheril Kirshenbaum said about PZ Myers in the infamous 8th chapter of their recent book Unscientific America. As you may recall, they told a story that made him seem utterly disrespectful toward religion. They did provide a
-
Stephen Law
-
MONSTERS FROM THE DEEP! A Fortean adventure
6 Nov 2009 | 3:42 amIf you are in the vicinity of London and are interested in Fortean and skeptical topics, do please come to Monsters from the Deep! It promises to be a fascinating journey into the deep sea myths and legends, from the perspective of science.Registration 10.30-11am. Finish 3pm (QandA session till 3.30pm if you want to stay longer).No booking required - just show up. Directions here.SPES/CFIUK present:MONSTERS FROM THE DEEP!An interactive skeptical odyssey – with sound effects! University experts investigate tales of sea-monsters, mermaids, etc. Saturday, 7th November, 11am-3pm (with good… -
Let's be fair...
2 Nov 2009 | 1:25 amErroll Treslan sent me this... -
Poll finds over half of Britons support teaching Creationism and Intelligent Design along with Evolution
27 Oct 2009 | 2:47 amFrom IBTimes:"A Mori poll has found that over half of Britons believe Creationism and Intelligent Design should be taught alongside Evolution in science lessons.The poll, which was part of a worldwide study into attitudes to the teaching on the origin of life on earth, saw 1,000 Britons questioned on the subject.Around 54 per cent of those who responded said they thought teachers should talk about “alternative perspectives” to the Theory of Evolution, however only six per cent said they felt Creationism or Intelligent Design should be taught instead of Evolution.Just over one fifth of… -
Battle of Ideas, this Sunday
25 Oct 2009 | 12:49 pmThis coming Sunday I am doing a Battle of Ideas event on Philosophy 4 Kids.Go here and here for details.Sunday 1 November, 10.45am until 12.15pm, Lecture Theatre 2 In Conversation Salons.Philosophy for children (P4C) is a growing movement that seems to many teachers to restore faith in the education system. It is said to be able to create ‘little big minds’ and to enable children to become critical, caring, creative and collaborative. No more learning by rote for endless tests; here is a chance to develop young minds to think for themselves. Philosophy is employed as a key resource to… -
Facebook meltdown
25 Oct 2009 | 10:57 amMy facebook page appears broken. I keep getting friend requests, but when I hit add friend, nothing happens. I cannot respond to friend requests, my inbox page is blank, when I hit friend labels (in "lists")I have set up they all show empty. There appears to be no way to report such problems. Anyone got an idea?
-
Gone Public
-
The Mismeasure of Woman
24 Oct 2009 | 7:28 amOn today’s New York Times op-ed page, financial editor Joanne Lipman asks how it is that women finally make up half the work force and are the major breadwinner in 40 percent of families and yet are still treated as either witches or bimboes. Op-Ed Contributor The Mismeasure of Woman By JOANNE LIPMAN Published: October 24, 2009 Somewhere along the line, especially in recent years, progress for women has stalled. This isn’t simply a woman’s issue; it affects us all…. -
Women in Philosophy
5 Oct 2009 | 8:14 pmKathryn Norlock of St. Mary’s College notes some interesting pieces that have sprung up all at once about the situation of women in philosophy. Took them a while… Here’s her post, copied with her permission from a message sent to the Society for Women in Philosophy email list: Philosophers, It’s a great day when the Philosopher’s Magazine, the New York Times, and the Leiter blog all notice that the situation for women in philosophy is in the news. Note that some reports are more sympathetic than others, but as my president says, I’m looking forward! The New York… -
Town Hall Democracy?
16 Sep 2009 | 4:33 amHere’ s a recipe for debate rather than deliberation. Throw a town hall meeting and put a politician in the middle of the room. In that setting, the people generally come to blame and beseech. They don’t come to do the political work of deliberation, which is to ask themselves, on whatever the issue at hand is, what are we going to do about this? Was it Bill Clinton who took the town hall meeting and put it to the political use of meeting and greeting the public? The language of “town hall” invokes the ideal of face-to-face political decision making. But when… -
Digital Dialogue on Democracy and the Political Unconscious
14 Aug 2009 | 6:36 pmMy book Democracy and the Political Unconscious is the subject of a podcast by Christopher Long’s Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue: Cultivating a Politics of Dialogue in a Digital Age. In episode 8 of the Digital Dialogue, I am joined by Shannon Sullivan, Professor of Philosophy, Women’s Studies and African and African American Studies here at Penn State. Shannon is also the Head of the Department of Philosophy. She has written extensively on American pragmatism, psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy and critical race theory, including two excellent books, Living Across and… -
Civil Society, or the Public Sphere?
24 Jul 2009 | 6:46 pmI am ready to come clean with my worry about these two terms, “civil society” and “the public sphere.” My political theorists friends (trained in political science departments) act and talk as if the difference between the two is patently obvious. I just nod, a bit hesitant to admit that I don’t quite get it. Many others use the terms interchangeably to denote a NONGOVERNMENTAL arena. Okay, yeah, I get that Between the state and the mass of individuals there is this other, nongovernmental realm. Hegel aside, let’s suffice it to say that by the late…
-
Alexander Pruss's Blog
-
Curry sentences
6 Nov 2009 | 5:09 amCurry sentences are of the form: If (1) is true, then p, where I shall stipulate the "If ... then ..." to be a material conditional, and where p abbreviates something not paradoxical. If p is false (in an unparadoxical way—maybe, p is "snow is red"), (1) is paradoxical because it provides an argument for p. Now, it is clear that whatever we say about (1) we should also say about: If not-p, then (2) is not true. Now, go back to my old favorite, the contingent liar paradox. There are many versions. One of them is this. Let D be some definite description of a sentence which picks out different… -
Sex solely for pleasure
5 Nov 2009 | 5:09 amIs there an intrinsic morally significant difference between having sex solely for one's pleasure and having sex solely for money? To sharpen the question, let's ask: Is there a morally significant difference between having sex solely for one's pleasure and having sex for money which one intends to use solely as a means to one's pleasure? Both are cases where the sex is engaged in solely for hedonistic ends, but in the one case the pleasure is achieved more indirectly. Still, in both cases there is some indirectness. Sex, in and of itself, need not be pleasurable. In both cases, it seems to… -
The paradox of Shakespeare's last words
4 Nov 2009 | 5:09 amLet p be the proposition that the last thing asserted by Shakespeare in his life is not true. This is a perfectly good proposition, and it is one that we can easily assert. Moreover, it is a proposition that Shakespeare could easily have asserted many times—but only if these times weren't the last moment of his life. Suppose in our world, w0, Shakespeare asserted p at time t1. (For all we know, he did!) Surely there is a world, w1, which is just like our world, but where Shakespeare is killed instantly after t1. In w1, then, Shakespeare did not assert p, since p is something that it is… -
Fun with substitutional quantification
3 Nov 2009 | 5:09 amStipulate that "x strongly believes p" iff x believes p and it is not the case that x believes not-p. Consider the argument: For anything that Freddie believes, there is a possible world where Sally strongly believes it. Freddie believes the negation of Sally's deepest held belief. Therefore, there is a possible world where Sally strongly believes the negation of Sally's deepest held belief. Isn't it fun to derive an impossibility from two propositions whose conjunction is possible? We learn from this that if we are to read (1) substitutionally, we need a substitutional quantification in… -
Is quantification substitutional?
2 Nov 2009 | 9:40 amConsider: Possibly, something exists which could not be referred to with a linguistic expression. If quantification is at base substitutional, then (1) is false. But the negation of (1) is: Necessarily, everything can be referred to with a linguistic expression. Call this "referential universalism". Now, there presumably are worlds where there is no language. Could there be entities that could exist only in such worlds? If so, then, most likely (2) would be false (some such individuals could be referred to in a cross-worldly way by appropriate definite descriptions, but there is little reason…
-
The Splintered Mind
-
Perplexities of Consciousness, submitted draft
5 Nov 2009 | 5:48 pmI have just submitted my new book manuscript, Perplexities of Consciousness, to MIT Press. The whole thing is now viewable from my homepage.Comments still welcome -- more than welcome! -- either on this post or by email.Now that this manuscript is in, I can focus on catching up with all those other things I should have been doing and didn't! -
Winner's Way
2 Nov 2009 | 8:48 am... a novel written by my father, Kirk Gable (born Ralph Schwitzgebel), is now available at Amazon. I hear his voice on every page, glimpse some piece of his worldview, which so affected my own.Here's the blurb:In this inspiring coming-of-age novel, Mark, a young man who thinks his life is full of walls, obligations and dead-ends, comes to realize that there is something more. Mark is a freshman in college, studying business—a field that doesn’t interest him at all. Family obligations have turned him from his real interests. Boring classes and medical problems make him feel vulnerable and… -
A Very Simple Argument Against Any General Theory of Consciousness
30 Oct 2009 | 3:09 pmSuspiciously simple, you might think. Here it goes:(1.) No general theory of consciousness can be justified except on the grounds that it gets it right about certain facts known independently of that theory. Those facts include facts about the presence or absence of conscious experience in a wide variety of actual and possible beings that are unlike us in potentialy relevant respects -- beings like frogs, insects, weird sea life, computers and robots of various types, alien beings of various types, and collective superorganisms of various types.(2.) Independently of a well-justified theory of… -
Curveball Illusion
28 Oct 2009 | 12:21 pmI hadn't seen this curveball illusion before. Very striking and surprising. I haven't had a chance to look into the theory behind it yet, but it seems to me to suggest something strange about the mapping of visual input into peripheral space.(Thanks to Paul Hoffman for the pointer.) -
Epistemic and Phenomenal Consciousness
21 Oct 2009 | 4:49 pmThe term "conscious" is ambiguous between an epistemic and a phenomenal sense (as I'll explain shortly). So is the term "awareness". And "appears". And (in certain strained uses at least) "seems". There's a pattern here, a suspicious pattern. What's behind it?First, the phenomenon. "Appears" is the clearest case, so let's start there. Sometimes we use the phrase "it appears to me that _____" simply to express a judgment -- a hedged judgment of a sort -- with no phenomenological implications whatsoever, that is, no implications about what's going on in one's stream of experience. If I say, "It…
-
Logic Matters
-
Gödel Without Tears -- 5
6 Nov 2009 | 7:16 amHere now is the fifth episode on the idea of a primitive recursive function. The preamble explains why this matters and where this is going. [As always, I'll be very glad to hear about typos/thinkos.]The previous episodes are available:Episode 1, Incompleteness -- the very idea (version of Oct. 16)Episode 2. Incompleteness and undecidability (version of Oct. 26)Episode 3. Two weak arithmetics (version of Nov. 1)Episode 4. First-order Peano Arithmetic (version of Nov. 1) -
Ruse gets a beta minus.
4 Nov 2009 | 3:00 pmPhilosophers don't get asked often enough to write for the newspapers and weeklies: so it is really annoying when an opportunity is wasted on second-rate maunderings. Michael Ruse writes in today's Guardian on whether there is an "atheist schism". And he immediately kicks off on the wrong foot.As a professional philosopher my first question naturally is: "What or who is an atheist?" If you mean someone who absolutely and utterly does not believe there is any God or meaning then I doubt there are many in this group.Eh? Where on earth has that "or meaning" come from? In what coherent sense of… -
The Autonomy of Mathematical Knowledge -- Chap. 2, §§3-5
4 Nov 2009 | 3:18 amTo return for a moment the question we left hanging: what is the shape of Hilbert's "naturalism" according to Franks? Well, Franks in §2.3 thinks that Hilbert's position can be contrasted with a "Wittgensteinian" naturalism that forecloses global questions of the justification of a framework by rejecting them as meaningless. "According to Hilbert … mathematics is justified in application" (p. 44), and for him "the skeptic's path leads to the death of all science". Really? But, to repeat, if that is someone's basic stance, then you'd expect him to very much want to know which mathematics is… -
The Autonomy of Mathematical Knowledge -- Chap. 2, §§1 & 2
2 Nov 2009 | 7:57 amHilbert in the 1920s seems pretty confident that classical analysis is in good order. "Mathematicians have pursued to the uttermost the modes of inference that rest on the concept of sets of numbers, and not even the shadow of an inconsistency has appeared .... [D]espite the application of the boldest and most manifold combinations of the subtlest techiniques, a complete security of inference and a clear unanimity of results reigns in analysis." (p. 41 -- as before, references are to passages or quotations in Franks' book.) These don't sound like the words of a man who thinks that the… -
Gödel Without Tears -- 4
2 Nov 2009 | 5:20 amHere now is the fourth episode [slightly corrected] which tells you -- for those who don't know -- what first-order Peano Arithmetic is (and also what Sigma_1/Pi_1 wffs are). A thrill a minute, really. Done in a bit of a rush to get it out to students in time, so apologies if the proof-reading is bad!Here are the previous episodes:Episode 1, Incompleteness -- the very idea (version of Oct. 16)Episode 2. Incompleteness and undecidability (version of Oct. 26)Episode 3. Two weak arithmetics (version of Nov. 1)
-
In the Space of Reasons
-
Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy
5 Nov 2009 | 7:14 amI went to the Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Royal Academy in London on Saturday. At Tate Britain (for what turned out to be a disappointing Turner Prize exhibition), Halloween activities had been organised for children who were constructing bats (the flappy sort), masks, hats etc but there was no such obvious reason why the Royal Academy was so busy except for the fact Kapoor has become something of a pop star. Having bought tickets in advance I was spared the queue which was about 50 yards long.Inside there was no escaping the masses. Oddly, for a couple of pieces, this seemed somehow… -
Recovery, values and subjectivity
30 Oct 2009 | 8:44 amI’ve been invited by Joana Ferreira, a psychiatry resident in Coimbra, Portugal and lecturer in psychopathology to psychology students at at the Catholic University of Braga and who attended the INPP conference in Lisbon, to submit a paper based on my grouchy presentation on recovery to their college magazine on psychiatry, psychology, philosophy and religious themes.So here is a very rough first rough stab (coming in at 3,500 words). Recovery, values and subjectivityIntroductionIn the UK, the recovery model has been promoted to guide mental healthcare in reaction against what is perceived… -
The philosophy of the social aetiology of mental illness
28 Oct 2009 | 6:35 amI've been asked to contribute to an initiative to develop training in the area of the social aetiology of mental illness for a Canadian initiative called SAMI. I’ve knocked up an outline which I would develop if I ever get the time (although it wouldn’t be funded work so I am a bit unsure when I could, in good conscience).The philosophy of the social aetiology of mental illnessA proper understanding of the social aetiology of mental illness requires an understanding of causation; its connection to laws of nature; the contrast between a causal explanation and an understanding based on… -
From the 2009 INPP conference in Lisbon
23 Oct 2009 | 10:05 amI am at the INPP conference in Lisbon enjoying, if not the sun I had expected, at least a packed schedule of plenary and parallel sessions from 9am until 8pm each day. The conference is well attended. Martin Baum is selling books from the OUP IPPP book series as though they were hot cakes. This is, I guess, the conference of the book series and a number of OUP authors are speaking.As sometimes happens, I’ve enjoyed the short (perhaps too short in some cases) presentations rather more than the formal plenaries. (They happen in a huge formal hall which doesn’t make for interaction.)Three,… -
Research @ ISCRI
18 Oct 2009 | 3:31 amI’ve been trying write the organisational cv for part of my school at UCLan: ISCRI (the International School for Communities, Rights and Inclusion). The challenge is to try to put as succinctly as I can the two dimensions of overlap that characterises it.At the level of research methods, ISCRI has three overlapping approaches:1) a practically innovative but theoretically minimal (ie adopting no particular social science research method) approach to community engagement. The approach is ideological rather than theoretical: the communities researched are treated as partners in the research,…
-
Sherryx's Weblog
-
Stop the Censorship: In Support of BBC
29 Oct 2009 | 7:43 amShaheryar Ali Today is the third day of censorship being imposed on the BBC in Pakistan BBC news goes on air throughout Pakistan via a series of privately owned FM networks. With the explosion of private TV channels in Pakistan, the standards of journalism have a suffered a great deal. An ideological media fuelled by militant Islamism and Pakistani nationalism is on an ideological crusade in Pakistan whose first victim has been “objective reporting”. Pluralism and democracy has been completely lacking in the local free media of Pakistan. All the news papers and TV channels have exactly… -
Creationism at it Best:Harun Yahya Exposed
28 Oct 2009 | 12:14 pmMuslim creationist, cult leader, Dawkins’ nemesis, messiah. Halil Arda tracks down the real Harun Yahya With thanks: JZ [a friend, reader and contributor] Halil Arda Inspired by the high profile of its Christian American counterpart, Muslim creationism is becoming increasingly visible and confident. On scores of websites and in dozens of books with titles like The Evolution Deceit and The Dark Face of Darwinism, a new and well-funded version of evolution-denialism, carefully calibrated to exploit the current fashion for religiously inspired attacks on scientific orthodoxy and… -
State and Ideology: The Cultural Holocaust
27 Oct 2009 | 6:47 amShaheryar Ali Some Theoretical Considerations: Death of Pluralism “The article is intended to be the theoretical first part of a series of article on the suppressed cultural identities[A Pakistan you never knew] in Islamic Republic of Pakistan, One on the fate of Pakistani Jews has already been published and can be reached here” A couple of years back I was reading a research report by a very intelligent Pakistani academic who works for the International Crisis Group, Dr Samina Ahmed on the rise of sectarianism in Pakistan. Being trained in the progressive tradition myself I was familiar… -
Conversation with a Friend: State, Taliban, Southern Punjab and More
25 Oct 2009 | 1:50 pmShaheryar Ali It was a pleasant evening and I was conversing with a progressive intellectual of Pakistan who was a Marxist revolutionary during the revolutionary times and now is a billionaire who runs an empire of NGOs through out Pakistan. After the collapse of Soviet Union it was quite easy for these “revolutionary” intellectuals who literarily had no roof over their heads to sell their skill and talent to the international donors, a slight twist of language which converted “bourgeoisie” into elites did the trick and now most of them are richer than fellows of traditional… -
Understanding Pakistan: Tariq Ali, A Conversation With History
20 Sep 2009 | 3:53 amShaheryar Ali Cross posted at: Bazm-e-Rinda’n Tariq Ali is one of the icons of progressive movement. He was one of the leaders of the 1968 revolution which gave birth to the “New Left”. Few Pakistanis have influenced global thought as did Tariq Ali. A Marxist with a very strong anti imperialist base Ali is part of the global of Anti globalization movement. I have strong ideological differences with Ali on Left strategy . But what he is saying is very important especially his understanding of Pakistani state and its dependent elites. University of California at Berkeley recorded a…
-
freemasoninformation.com
-
Lodge Twittering…
6 Nov 2009 | 9:39 amIt may come as no surprise to many of you but I, being a techie person, do use Twitter. Surprise, surprise!!! Many people ask me why I use twitter. For the longest time I couldn’t figure it out. I enjoy it and learn from it but I couldn’t figure out how to explain it’s value. Well let me explain now. I enjoy technology and I enjoy being one of the first to experience just about everything. With Twitter you have instant access to the pulse of the global news or even the news from the block over. You can get a glimpse of what people find important, by the links… -
The necissity of Lodge audits
6 Nov 2009 | 3:41 amIt may come as no surprise to many of you but I, being a techie person, do use Twitter. Surprise, surprise!!! Many people ask me why I use twitter. For the longest time I couldn’t figure it out. I enjoy it and learn from it but I couldn’t figure out how to explain it’s value. Well let me explain now. I enjoy technology and I enjoy being one of the first to experience just about everything. With Twitter you have instant access to the pulse of the global news or even the news from the block over. You can get a glimpse of what people find important, by the links… -
Dateline NBC’s “Secret of the Lost Symbol”
3 Nov 2009 | 5:35 pmIt may come as no surprise to many of you but I, being a techie person, do use Twitter. Surprise, surprise!!! Many people ask me why I use twitter. For the longest time I couldn’t figure it out. I enjoy it and learn from it but I couldn’t figure out how to explain it’s value. Well let me explain now. I enjoy technology and I enjoy being one of the first to experience just about everything. With Twitter you have instant access to the pulse of the global news or even the news from the block over. You can get a glimpse of what people find important, by the links… -
Walking the Walk
1 Nov 2009 | 2:00 amIt may come as no surprise to many of you but I, being a techie person, do use Twitter. Surprise, surprise!!! Many people ask me why I use twitter. For the longest time I couldn’t figure it out. I enjoy it and learn from it but I couldn’t figure out how to explain it’s value. Well let me explain now. I enjoy technology and I enjoy being one of the first to experience just about everything. With Twitter you have instant access to the pulse of the global news or even the news from the block over. You can get a glimpse of what people find important, by the links… -
The Iowa Masonic Library
31 Oct 2009 | 8:03 pmIt may come as no surprise to many of you but I, being a techie person, do use Twitter. Surprise, surprise!!! Many people ask me why I use twitter. For the longest time I couldn’t figure it out. I enjoy it and learn from it but I couldn’t figure out how to explain it’s value. Well let me explain now. I enjoy technology and I enjoy being one of the first to experience just about everything. With Twitter you have instant access to the pulse of the global news or even the news from the block over. You can get a glimpse of what people find important, by the links…
