According to non-conceptualist interpretations, Kant held that the application of concepts is not necessary for perceptual experience. Some have motivated non-conceptualism by noting the affinities between Kant's account of perception and contemporary relational theories of perception. In this paper I argue (i) that non-conceptualism cannot provide an account of the Transcendental Deduction and thus ought to be rejected; and (ii) that this has no bearing on the issue of whether Kant endorsed a relational account of perceptual experience.

This book offers a novel account of the relationship of experience to knowledge. The account builds on the intuitive idea that our ordinary perceptual judgments are not autonomous, that an interdependence obtains between our view of the world and our perceptual judgments. Anil Gupta shows in this important study that this interdependence is the key to a satisfactory account of experience. He uses tools from logic and the philosophy of language to argue that his account of experience makes available (...) an attractive and feasible empiricism. (shrink)

This volume reprints eight of Anil Gupta's essays, some with additional material. The essays bring a refreshing new perspective to central issues in philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology.

The Bayesian brain hypothesis provides an attractive unifying framework for perception, cognition, and action. We argue that the framework can also usefully integrate interoception, the sense of the internal physiological condition of the body. Our model of entails a new view of emotion as interoceptive inference and may account for a range of psychiatric disorders of selfhood.

After nearly 20 years of work by activists, fair trade, a movement establishing alternative trading organizations to ensure minimal returns, safe working conditions, and environmentally sustainable production, is now gaining steam, with increasing awareness and availability across a variety of products. However, this article addresses several major remaining challenges: (a) a lack of agreement about what fair trade really means and how it should be certified; (b) uneven awareness and availability across different areas, with marked differences between some parts of (...) Europe and North America that reflect more fundamental debates about distribution; (c) larger questions about the extent of the potential contribution of fair trade to development under the current system, including limitations on the number and types of workers affected and the fair trade focus on commodity goods. (shrink)

In this rigorous investigation into the logic of truth Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap explain how the concept of truth works in both ordinary and pathological..

The standard behavioral index for human consciousness is the ability to report events with accuracy. While this method is routinely used for scientific and medical applications in humans, it is not easy to generalize to other species. Brain evidence may lend itself more easily to comparative testing. Human consciousness involves widespread, relatively fast low-amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical core of the brain, driven by current tasks and conditions. These features have also been found in other mammals, which suggests that consciousness (...) is a major biological adaptation in mammals. We suggest more than a dozen additional properties of human consciousness that may be used to test comparative predictions. Such homologies are necessarily more remote in non-mammals, which do not share the thalamocortical complex. However, as we learn more we may be able to make “deeper” predictions that apply to some birds, reptiles, large-brained invertebrates, and perhaps other species. (shrink)

We are self-conscious creatures thrown into a world which is not of our making. What is the connection between being self-conscious and being related to an objective world? Descartes and Kant, in different ways and with different emphases, argued that self-conscious subjects must be related to an objective world. But many have worried about their starting points. ‘One should say it is thinking, just as one says, it is lightning’, the eighteenth-century philosopher, physicist, and aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg writes. ‘To (...) say cogito is already too much as soon as one translates it as I am thinking. To assume the I, to postulate it, is a practical requirement.’ Lichtenberg raises a question here about our entitlement to think of ourselves as the agent of our thinking. Sometimes thoughts strike us like lightning. When this happens, we are their patient. It is central to our self-conscious lives that this is the exception: we are first and foremost the agents of our thinking. What right do we have to think of ourselves as such? The Practical Self argues that self-consciousness requires faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking. But faith can be undermined and it can be sustained. And this provides us with a connection to the world since our faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking is sustained by practices which relate us to other thinkers. Self-conscious subjects must have faith in themselves as thinking agents and it is our relations to the others which sustain this faith. Self-consciousness connects us to a world of others. (shrink)

A recent report by Persaud et al. [Persaud, N., McLeod, P. & Cowey, A. . Post-decision wagering objectively measures awareness. Nature Neuroscience 10, 257–261] addresses a fundamental issue in consciousness science: the experimental measurement of conscious content. The authors propose a novel technique, ‘post-decision wagering’, in which subjects place bets on the correctness of decisions or discriminations. In this note, I critique the authors’ claim that their method “measures awareness directly”.

Logic-Based Therapy, a modality of Philosophical Counselling, believes that humans suffer because of their faulty thinking patterns. It suggests antidotal reasoning and uplifting philosophies that help counselees refute these thinking patterns and adopt a healthier way of life. This paper investigates the possibility of using the influential ideologies found in Naruto in the framework of LBT, as suitable uplifting philosophies. The anime has been interpreted through the lens of Conversational Model Therapy, Japanese values, violence studies, etc.; there is an unavailability (...) of research on its connection with philosophical counselling. This paper aims to fill the gap by reviewing literature on concepts in counselling, LBT, and philosophical counseling. It also attempts at providing behavioral exercises for the readers to implement in their own life. (shrink)

M. Chirimuuta's Outside Color is a rich and lovely book. I enjoyed reading it and benefitted from reflecting on its provocative ideas. I begin by briefly placing the book's principal thesis in its historical context, and I go on to reflect on two objections that might be lodged against this thesis.

This paper makes attempts to argue that language inevitably affects emotions, and philosophical therapy is possible through deconstruction of language; here the horizon of language is extended not only to its traditional usage, but also as thoughts. Emotions are perceived through our conditioned thoughts and hence by an analysis of the latter, the former will become clearer. The paper is a literature review of a few books by Jiddu Krishnamurti, a contemporary Indian Philosopher; and a book on Buddhist logic. Since (...) the paper is a literature review, it does not have any practical claim to support the points and hence is a speculative approach towards therapy. The paper also does not extend its claims to psychological views on language, rather restricts itself to purely philosophical approach. (shrink)

For Kant, the human cognitive faculty has two sub-faculties: sensibility and the understanding. Each has pure forms which are necessary to us as humans: space and time for sensibility; the categories for the understanding. But Kant is careful to leave open the possibility of there being creatures like us, with both sensibility and understanding, who nevertheless have different pure forms of sensibility. They would be finite rational beings and discursive cognizers. But they would not be human. And this raises a (...) question about the pure forms of the understanding. Does Kant leave open the possibility of discursive cognizers who have different categories? Even if other discursive cognizers might not sense like us, must they at least think like us? We argue that textual and systematic considerations do not determine the answers to these questions and examine whether Kant thinks that the issue cannot be decided. Consideration of his wider views on the nature and limits of our knowledge of mind shows that Kant could indeed remain neutral on the issue but that the exact form his neutrality can take is subject to unexpected constraints. The result would be an important difference between what Kant says about discursive cognizers with other forms of sensibility and what he is in a position to say about discursive cognizers with other forms of understanding. Kantian humility here takes on a distinctive character. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish two ways of raising a sceptical problem of others' minds: via a problem concerning the possibility of error or via a problem concerning sources of knowledge. I give some reason to think that the second problem raises a more interesting problem in accounting for our knowledge of others’ minds and consider proposed solutions to the problem.

In this paper I defend the claim that testimony can serve as a basic source of knowledge of other people’s mental lives against the objection that testimonial knowledge presupposes knowledge of other people’s mental lives and therefore can’t be used to explain it.

iterations of REA operators, as well as extensions, generalizations and other applications are given in [6] while those for the ...

Neural Darwinism (ND) is a large scale selectionist theory of brain development and function that has been hypothesized to relate to consciousness. According to ND, consciousness is entailed by reentrant interactions among neuronal populations in the thalamocortical system (the ‘dynamic core’). These interactions, which permit high-order discriminations among possible core states, confer selective advantages on organisms possessing them by linking current perceptual events to a past history of value-dependent learning. Here, we assess the consistency of ND with 16 widely recognized (...) properties of consciousness, both physiological (for example, consciousness is associated with widespread, relatively fast, low amplitude interactions in the thalamocortical system), and phenomenal (for example, consciousness involves the existence of a private flow of events available only to the experiencing subject). While no theory accounts fully for all of these properties at present, we find that ND and its recent extensions fare well. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner present three experiments which they take to show that people perceive patients in a persistent vegetative state to have less mentality than the dead. Following on from Gomes and Parrott, we provide evidence to show that participants' responses in the initial experiments are an artifact of the questions posed. Results from two experiments show that, once the questions have been clarified, people do not ascribe more mental capacity to the dead than to (...) PVS patients. There is no reason to think that people perceive PVS patients as more dead than dead. (shrink)

The concept of »similarity« lies at the centre of this interview with Anil Bhatti. Distinguishing itself from a culturalistic hermeneutic of the familiar and the strange, it concentrates on the »as-well-as«, on the area »between« theories of difference and such aspects of identity. Through the notions of »translation« and »over-lapping«, of »the vague« and »the preliminary« this concept seeks to ameliorate cultural theory.

This book aims to offer an account of conscious experience and of concepts that help us understand empirical reasoning and empirical dialectic. The account offered possesses, it is claimed, two virtues. First, it provides great theoretical freedom. It allows the theoretician freedom to radically reconceive the world. The theoretician may, for example, begin with the conception that colors are genuine qualities of physical bodies and may, in light of empirical findings, shift to the conception that colors are not genuine qualities (...) at all. Second, the account grants empirical reason a great power to constrain: empirical reason can force a particular conception of the self and the world on the rational inquirer. These seemingly contrary virtues are reconciled through a novel treatment of presentation and appearances in the account offered of conscious experience and a novel treatment of ostensive definitions in the account offered of concepts. The argument of the book is buttressed by a critical study of the principal approaches to experience and reason found in the philosophical literature.--. (shrink)

Quassim Cassam has recently defended a perceptual model of knowledge of other minds: one on which we can see and thereby know that another thinks and feels. In the course of defending this model, he addresses issues about our ability to think about other minds. I argue that his solution to this 'conceptual problem' does not work. A solution to the conceptual problem is necessary if we wish to explain knowledge of other minds.

What is the status of the claims which make up Kant’s arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason? This question seemed to Kant’s contemporaries to require a metacritique. Strawson’s criticisms of Kant should be understood in this context: as raising a metacritical challenge about Kant’s grounds for the claims which make up his arguments. What about the claims which make up Strawson’s own arguments in The Bounds of Sense? I argue in this chapter, against what I take to be the (...) general consensus, that Strawson did not and should not have understood these claims to be analytic. Rather he is somewhat puzzlingly committed to our possessing non-analytic but still a priori knowledge of his claims. What could such knowledge consist in? I’ll extract from G.E. Moore’s early writings on Kant a model for understanding such knowledge, one which enables us to better appreciate the way in which Strawson’s methodology dovetails with Kant’s own. (shrink)

Oncogenic transformation is often associated with aberrant glycosylation in experimental and human tumors. The carbohydrate epitopes, resulting either from incomplete synthesis or neosynthesis, accumulate in high density, possibly in a novel conformation, at the tumor cell surface. A variety of monoclonal antibodies have been developed that recognize tumor‐associated carbohydrate antigens and their aberrant organization at the cell surface. These carbohydrate epitopes and the antibodies specific to these structures are being exploited to develop novel diagnostic tools and therapeutic strategies for cancer.

Adam Marushak raises a dilemma for the proponents of the hypothetical given. On one of its horns, the proponents are said to be committed to rationalism; and on the other horn, to skepticism. I argue, in response, that even if we grant that the arguments of both horns are sound, the commitments incurred are light and unproblematic. I argue also that the dilemma is based on a reading of the hypothetical that, though valuable, needs to be refined in light of (...) certain distinctions. These distinctions concern the different support relations that can obtain between beliefs are various elements of a view. (shrink)

The concept of truth serves in logic not only as an instrument but also as an object of study. Eubulides of Miletus (fl. fourth century BCE), a Megarian logician, discovered the paradox known as ‘the Liar,’ and, ever since his discovery, logicians down the ages ‐ Aristotle and Chrysippus, John Buridan and William Heytesbury, and Alfred Tarski and Saul Kripke, to mention just a few ‐ have tried to understand the puzzling behavior of the concept of truth.

James Van Cleve has argued that Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the categories shows, at most, that we must apply the categories to experience. And this falls short of Kant’s aim, which is to show that they must so apply. In this discussion I argue that once we have noted the differences between the first and second editions of the Deduction, this objection is less telling. But Van Cleve’s objection can help illuminate the structure of the B Deduction, and it suggests (...) an interesting reason why the rewriting might have been thought necessary. (shrink)

In the section ‘Unity and Objectivity’ of The Bounds of Sense, P. F. Strawson argues for the thesis that unity of consciousness requires experience of an objective world. My aim in this essay is to evaluate this claim. In the first and second parts of the essay, I explicate Strawson's thesis, reconstruct his argument, and identify the point at which the argument fails. Strawson's discussion nevertheless raises an important question: are there ways in which we must think of our experiences (...) if we are to self-ascribe them? In the third part of the essay, I use Kant's remarks concerning the passivity of experience to suggest one answer to this question: in self-ascribing experiences, we must be capable of thinking of them as passive to their objects. This can be used to provide an alternative route from unity to objectivity. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 232-235, January 2022.

BackgroundSimilar to many other countries, in Germany patients with alcohol-related liver disease are obliged to prove their abstinence before being accepted on a waitlist for liver transplantation. Health care professionals (HCPs) must both treat patients and ensure that patients have proven their abstinence. The aim of this exploratory study was to develop a deeper understanding of how HCPs deal with this dual role.MethodsThe study used semi-structured interviews as the source of data. 11 healthcare professionals from ten of the 22 German (...) transplant centers were interviewed. After transcription, a qualitative content analysis was performed.ResultsWe found that these HCPs faced an ethical dilemma, as they must balance the roles of being both a treatment provider (the therapist role) and an assessor (the monitoring role). To solve this dilemma, the strategy seems to be a tendency for the HCPs to take on one dominant role amongst these two roles. HCPs who prefer to take on the therapist role seem to feel burdened by the 6-month abstinence rule and the obligation to monitor their patients. HCPs who prefer to take on the monitoring role tend to have negative assumptions about the patients. HCPs also reported the impression that patients perceive HCPs as more involved in monitoring and less open to the therapeutic role. From this it can be deduced that current regulations and structures lead both to stress for HCPs and to suboptimal therapy for those affected.ConclusionsThe results showed that current transplantation guidelines can have a negative impact on both patient care and the burdens on the HCPs. From our point of view, there are various changes that could be made to the current clinical practice that would help solve this dilemma. For instance, integrating other assessment criteria that are more closely adapted to the health status trajectory and psychosocial background of the individual patient would be both possible and would lead to improvements in practice. (shrink)

Papers presented in three conferences, supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Excellence Cluster 16: 'Cultural Foundation of Integration' at the University of Konstanz, and the Institute of German Studies and the Forum Scientairum at the Univesity of Tubingen.