Much has been written about epistemological skepticism in the last ten or so years, but there remain some unanswered questions concerning the structure of what has become the canonical Cartesian skeptical argument. In this paper, I would like to take a closer look at this structure in order to determine just which epistemic principles are required by the argument.

Cognitive science has wholeheartedly embraced functional brain imaging, but introspective data are still eschewed to the extent that it runs against standard practice to engage in the systematic collection of introspective reports. However, in the case of executive processes associated with prefrontal cortex, imaging has made limited progress, whereas introspective methods have considerable unfulfilled potential. We argue for a re-evaluation of the standard ‘cognitive mapping’ paradigm, emphasizing the use of retrospective reports alongside behavioural and brain imaging techniques. Using all three (...) sources of evidence can compensate for their individual limitations, and so triangulate on higher cognitive processes. (shrink)

Arguments in favor of anti-representationalism in cognitive science often suffer from a lack of attention to detail. The purpose of this paper is to fill in the gaps in these arguments, and in so doing show that at least one form of anti- representationalism is potentially viable. After giving a teleological definition of representation and applying it to a few models that have inspired anti- representationalist claims, I argue that anti-representationalism must be divided into two distinct theses, one ontological, one (...) epistemological. Given the assumptions that define the debate, I give reason to think that the ontological thesis is false. I then argue that the epistemological thesis might, in the end, turn out to be true, despite a potentially serious difficulty. Along the way, there will be a brief detour to discuss a controversy from early twentieth century physics. (shrink)

It also has considerable impact on his ethical ideas: the Machiavellian cosmos has no room for a Ruling Mind or for the Sovereignty of the Good, and humans are left to pursue their appetites for riches and glory as best they can.

Moore's paradox pits our intuitions about semantic oddnessagainst the concept of truth-functional consistency. Most solutions tothe problem proceed by explaining away our intuitions. But``consistency'' is a theory-laden concept, having different contours indifferent semantic theories. Truth-functional consistency is appropriateonly if the semantic theory we are using identifies meaning withtruth-conditions. I argue that such a framework is not appropriate whenit comes to analzying epistemic modality. I show that a theory whichaccounts for a wide variety of semantic data about epistemic modals(Update Semantics) buys (...) us a solution to Moore's paradox as a corollary.It turns out that Moorean propositions, when looked at through the lenseof an appropriate semantic theory, are inconsistent after all. (shrink)

What makes us conscious? Many theories that attempt to answer this question have appeared recently in the context of widespread interest about consciousness in the cognitive neurosciences. Most of these proposals are formulated in terms of the information processing conducted by the brain. In this overview, we survey and contrast these models. We first delineate several notions of consciousness, addressing what it is that the various models are attempting to explain. Next, we describe a conceptual landscape that addresses how the (...) theories attempt to explain consciousness. We then situate each of several representative models in this landscape and indicate which aspect of consciousness they try to explain. We conclude that the search for the neural correlates of consciousness should be usefully complemented by a search for the computational correlates of consciousness. (shrink)

I start from the presupposition that the use of force against another is justified only in self-defence or in defence of others against aggression. If so, the main work of justifying punishment must rely on its deterrent effect, since most punishments have no other significant self-defensive effect. It has often been objected to the deterrent justification of punishment that it commits us to using offenders unacceptably, and that it is unable to deliver acceptable limits on punishment. I describe a sort (...) of deterrent theory which can avoid both of these objections. (shrink)

This book examines the notion of honor with an eye to dissecting its intellectual demise and with the aim of making a case for honor’s rehabilitation. Western intellectuals acknowledge honor’s influence, but they lament its authority. For Western democratic societies to embrace honor, it must be compatible with social ideals like liberty, equality, and fraternity. Cunningham details a conception of honor that can do justice to these ideals. This vision revolves around three elements—character , relationships , and activities and accomplishment (...) . Taken together, these elements articulate a shared aspiration for excellence. We can turn the tables on traditional ills of honor—serious problems of gender, race, and class—by forging a vision of honor that rejects lives predicated on power and oppression. (shrink)

Prominent evolutionary psychologists have argued that our innate psychological endowment consists of numerous domainspecific cognitive resources, rather than a few domaingeneral ones. In the light of some conceptual clarification, we examine the central inprinciple arguments that evolutionary psychologists mount against domaingeneral cognition. We conclude (a) that the fundamental logic of Darwinism, as advanced within evolutionary psychology, does not entail that the innate mind consists exclusively, or even massively, of domainspecific features, and (b) that a mixed innate cognitive economy of domainspecific (...) and domaingeneral resources remains a genuine conceptual possibility. However, an examination of evolutionary psychology's 'grain problem' reveals that there is no way of establishing a principled and robust distinction between domainspecific and domaingeneral features. Nevertheless, we show that evolutionary psychologists can and do live with this grain problem without their whole enterprise being undermined. (shrink)

Following Aristotle's distinction between theoretical and practical rationality, Max Weber holds that beliefs about the world and actions within the world must follow procedures consistently and be appropriately formed if they are to count as rational. Here, I argue that Weber's account of theoretical and practical rationality, as disclosed through his conception of the disenchantment of the world, displays a confessional architecture consistently structured by a nineteenth century German Protestant outlook. I develop this thesis through a review of the concepts (...) of rationality and disenchantment in Weber's major works and conclude that this conceptual framework depicts a Protestant account of modernity. (shrink)

This is a handbook article about indicative conditionals.

In part I of the present work, I used the term 'Kantian transcendental argument' to refer to any argument which purports to establish that the existence of outer objects is a logically necessary condition for the possibility of self-conscious experience. In this second part, then, I examine Kantian transcendental arguments which proceed from the premise that one is the subject of widely construed self-conscious experience.

Emerging New Voices in Critical Animal Studies: Vegan Studies for Total Liberation, co-edited by Nathan Poirier, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Annie Bernatchez of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies, is a brilliant radical engaging intersectional book promoting total liberation from new fresh critical animal studies voices throughout the world. This captivating critical animal studies collection, influenced by historical and ongoing radical movements such as green anarchism, Black liberation, prison abolition, feminism, Queer liberation, disability rights, and decolonization, is one (...) of the most powerful texts in the last decade within the animal liberation movement. We must begin to listen to new and young scholars for social justice to evolve in order to end speciesism and all forms of oppression. Read, share, reflect and act on this interdisciplinary collection of scholar-activists from sociology, anthropology, criminology, economics, philosophy, cultural studies, eco-theology, environmental studies, and education that will transform the global movement for radical social justice and propel total liberation forward. (shrink)

This paper critiques philosophical efforts to biologize race as racial projects (Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States). The paper argues that the deeply social phenomenon of race defies the analytic schema employed by biologizing philosophers. The very (social) act of theorizing race is already in an involuted relationship with its target concept: analyzing race must be seen as a racial project, in that it simultaneously helps to manage how race is represented in society and helps organize society’s (...) resources along particular racial lines. Such biologizing projects are rife with moral and political dimensions and have a depoliticizing effect that has the potential to camouflage, defuse, or explain away the social-structural reproduction of white power/privilege. The paper begins by considering two recent philosophic-scientific biologizations of race, showing how they conform to the analytic schema, reviewing received critical points, and offering several novel ones. (shrink)

According to many philosophers there are only pro tanto oughts to believe relative to a standard of assessment: there are epistemic oughts to believe, moral oughts to believe, prudential oughts to believe etc. But there are no oughts to believe simpliciter. Many of the same philosophers who hold this view, also hold that ought to believe is to be understood deontologically – such that if S violates such an ought without excuse, S is blameworthy for doing so. I here argue (...) that on a deontological understanding of ought to believe there must be ought to believe simpliciter and that it is the violation of this ought that determines whether we are to blame for our beliefs. (shrink)

By promoting total liberation, this volume challenges the reader to think about new approaches to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion. The contributors examine and disrupt many of the exclusionary assumptions and behaviors by those working toward justice and liberation, encouraging the reader to reflect on their own thoughts and actions.

This article addresses a tendency within postcolonial studies to place the work of Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon in opposition. This has obscured the real, and potentially very productive, similarities between them. The most important of these links has to do with their shared critique of the sovereign subject of humanism: for Fanon and Foucault, this critique of the traditional humanist subject provides a way of opposing what they both see as the dangerous nostalgia for a lost moment of origin. (...) Furthermore, Fanon and Foucault both end in a moment of ethics, but it is an ethics without the sort of stable subjects assumed by humanism. I offer a consideration of some of the links that can be found in several texts by Fanon and Foucault. I then attempt to define the term I will be using to describe their shared strategy of an ethics without subjects: the “humanism effect.” I conclude by trying to suggest some of the strategic possibilities of an ethics without subjects in the postcolonial context. (shrink)

Any engagement with Spinoza's views on art is bound to mention his account of the rightful pleasures that the wise man takes in things that appeal to the imagination and delight his senses: beautif...

Neal’s latest book uses Howard Thurman as a window through which to view concepts that shaped black thought in the Modern Era of the African-American Freedom Struggle. Thurman’s grasp of black culture and religious ideas during the period of enslavement allowed him to produce a body of work grounded in the musings and traditions of his ancestors.

In his discussion of the virtue of mercy , Thomas Aquinas draws upon two seemingly opposed sources. On the one hand, Thomas takes Aristotle as an authority on the subject of compassion. Aristotle maintains in his discussion of pity in the Rhetoric that pity is felt for those who suffer undeservedly since we do not pity but rather blame those who suffer as a result of their own wicked actions. On the other hand, Jesus in Matthew's gospel feels pity for (...) the crowds. ‘At the sight of the crowds, his heart was moved with pity for them for they were troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd’ . In his commentary on this text from Matthew, Thomas identifies two possible interpretations for the troubled and abandoned condition of the crowd. The crowd is said to be troubled in so far as it is vexed by demons and abandoned in so far as it lies prostrate because of infirmities. The crowd can also be said to be troubled in so far as it is vexed by errors and to be abandoned in so far as it is fallen because of sin.1 Jesus, then, according to Thomas and contrary to Aristotle's claim, feels pity for the crowds as a result of the crowd's misery brought on by their own sinful deeds.In this paper, I examine how Thomas harmonizes these conflicting sources. More specifically, I hope to show both how Thomas uses Aristotle's observations on pity and at the same time transforms those observations in light of Christ's mercy on sinners. Thomas' use and transformation of Aristotle's account of pity provides an enlightening perspective from which to interpret Thomas' initially troubling claim that God feels no pity over the suffering of creatures, which we will consider briefly by way of a conclusion to this paper. (shrink)

Does Leibniz really worst Locke in respect of innate ideas, as is frequently supposed, or does Locke emerge more or less whole from their epistemological dispute? I shall here argue that Leibniz does far less well than we might like to believe and that his substantive proposals, where not entirely innocuous, contain little that would appeal to anyone interested in a modern form of the innateness thesis.

What kind of mental state is trust? It seems to have features that can lead one to think that it is a doxastic state but also features that can lead one to think that it is a non-doxastic state. This has even lead some philosophers to think that trust is a unique mental state that has both mind-to-world and world-to-mind direction of fit, or to give up on the idea that there is a univocal analysis of trust to be had. (...) Here, I propose that ‘trust’ is the name we give to mental states that we would think of as beliefs if belief was to be thought of in ‘pragmatist’ terms and belief resists ‘pragmatist’ treatment. Only such an account, I argue, can univocally account for all the diverse features of trust. As such, I also propose that the explanation of trust provides us with a case for understanding the limitations of a comprehensively ‘pragmatist’, or ‘Neo-Wittgensteinian’ conception of the mental. (shrink)

In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari muse on that time of life when a philosopher feels compelled to reflect upon the question of the nature of her or his practice. The desire for such reflection, they argue, comes with age. It involves self-reflection, something that concerns one's disposition, and one's place in the world. As such it is properly an ethical process. The idea of reflection, however, is also fundamental to both thought itself and to artistic practice, or the (...) practice of creation. In considering the nature of philosophy, then, Deleuze and Guattari turn, through logical necessity, to the nature of thought and the thought of nature: that is, they also consider science, and art. This chapter argues that this interrelation is at the heart of their understanding of natural being, and links up with the minor traditions of thinking that they trace and extend in their own work. Yet the connection between art and how we should live also occurs in the dominant tradition of thought: rather than ethics, however, this tradition links artistic practice to morals, and the ‘moral’. There are a number of distinctions, then, which involve not so much binary oppositions as differences of perspective, and these are crucial to an understanding of the interrelations Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari develop between art, ethics, and ethology. These distinctions assert an ethics over a morality; thought over consciousness; creation over mimesis. (shrink)

Judith Jarvis Thomson holds that we have a right not be be caused distressful feelingsÑbut only if they are "non-belief- mediated"; we have no right not to be caused belief-mediated distress. I suggest that this view is highly counter-intuitive; and I argue that it is not supported by Thomson's arguments which, if they serve to exclude belief-mediated feelings would equally serve to exclude non-belief-mediated ones. I also suggest that some of the work that Thomson wants this distinction to do can (...) be done in other ways. (shrink)

Much of the current thought concerning mathematical ontology and epistemology follows Quine and Putnam in looking to the indispensable application of mathematics in science. A standard assumption of the indispensability approach is some version of confirmational holism, i.e., that only "sufficiently large" sets of beliefs "face the tribunal of experience." In this paper I develop and defend a distinction between a pure mathematical theory and a mathematized scientific theory in which it is applied. This distinction allows for the possibility that (...) pure mathematical theories are systematically insulated from such confirmation in virtue of their being distinct from the "sufficiently large" blocks of scientific theory that are empirically confirmed. (shrink)

Social Epistemology arose from the recognition that nearly all that we believe or claim to know is second hand and derived from the speech or writing of others. The “we” of “our knowledge” here is, of course, “educated members of advanced industrial societies”. Our remoter, but still identifiably, human ancestors, without speech or writing, picked up such knowledge or belief as they had on their own, apart from what they may have leant from the reactions of others to the presence (...) of quarry or danger. Palaeolithic man, having mastered speech, had access to plenty of second hand knowledge. But it was only of what the people he directly met could tell him. With writing a vast new range of informants is brought into play. Clay tablets and papyrus rolls give way to codices – in other words, books – and another gigantic step forward is made with the invention of printing. We would appear to be going through a comparable information revolution at the present day. We, as defined above, either posses or have ready access to a vast assemblage of common knowledge, actual or claimed. How are we to rationally to decide how much of this we are to accept? It is obviously not all worthy, or equally worthy of acceptance. (shrink)

The contribution that a word makes to the meaning and interpretation of a sentence depends upon access to its meaning, and to general knowledge associated with the word. Evidence is presented to support the argument that accessing lexical meaning, as with general knowledge, is a graded affair. We argue that the contribution a word makes depends upon its relevance to the context, and to focus and related variables. Extensions of the argument are made to other aspects of language processing.

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 412-430, June 2021.

In Common Ground, Anthony Neal examines the role that the ideas of consciousness and consciousness-raising play in the writings of Howard Thurman and Huey Newton. He examines these ideas from a broadly Afrocentric framework in which the concerns, interests, and perspectives of Africans--whether they reside on the continent or live in the African diaspora--are the legitimate and central subjects of scholarly study. This approach warrants Neal’s interpretation of Thurman’s and Newton’s writings as fitting within the “African Freedom Aesthetic,” in (...) which the aesthetic expressions of transcendence, transformation, human consciousness, and collective will have become the means by which Africans living under oppressive conditions during the modern period could work to liberate themselves from those conditions. (shrink)

These twelve essays, together with the editor's introduction, examine the relationship of ideology to philosophy and politics. Part one deals with theoretical underpinnings of ideology: definitions are posited, and the relationship of ideology to thought itself, to use and abuse of theory, to social theory, to the epistemology of politics, to technology, and to political culture are discussed. Part two treats ideology in its historical context, dealing with the word as introduced by Destutt de Tracy in 1798 and looking both (...) forward and backward at such enquirers in the field as Aristotle, Bacon, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Karl Mannheim, and Leo Strauss. The volume presents original and provocative insights into the meanings and uses of ideology, as well as into specific "ideologies." The essays will be of importance to students of philosophy and sociology of knowledge, political scientists, and historians. (shrink)

The essays in this book began as a contributions to a Summer Workshop arranged by the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, and haled at the University of Calgary from July 7 to 14, 1978. The Institute, which was founded by the University in 1976 for the encouragement of humanistic studies, has held such conferences each summer as a part of its programme of research.