Responding to recent concerns about the reliability of the published literature in psychology and other disciplines, we formed the X-Phi Replicability Project to estimate the reproducibility of experimental philosophy. Drawing on a representative sample of 40 x-phi studies published between 2003 and 2015, we enlisted 20 research teams across 8 countries to conduct a high-quality replication of each study in order to compare the results to the original published findings. We found that x-phi studies – as represented in our sample (...) – successfully replicated about 70% of the time. We discuss possible reasons for this relatively high replication rate in the field of experimental philosophy and offer suggestions for best research practices going forward. (shrink)

Appendix 1 was incomplete in the initial online publication. The original article has been corrected.

Do the rich descriptions and narrative shapings of literature provide a valuable resource for readers, writers, philosophers, and everyday people to imagine and confront the ultimate questions of life? Do the human activities of storytelling and complex moral decision-making have a deep connection? What are the moral responsibilities of the artist, critic, and reader? What can religious perspectives—from Catholic to Protestant to Mormon—contribute to literary criticism? Thirty well known contributors reflect on these questions, including iterary theorists Marshall Gregory, James (...) class='Hi'>Phelan, and Wayne Booth; philosophers Martha Nussbaum, Richard Hart, and Nina Rosenstand; and authors John Updike, Charles Johnson, Flannery O'Connor, and Bernard Malamud. Divided into four sections, with introductory matter and questions for discussion, this accessible anthology represents the most crucial work today exploring the interdisciplinary connections between literature, religion and philosophy. (shrink)

While philosophers of mind have been arguing over the status of mental representations in cognitive science, cognitive scientists have been quietly engaged in studying perception, action, and cognition without explaining them in terms of mental representation. In this book, Anthony Chemero describes this nonrepresentational approach, puts it in historical and conceptual context, and applies it to traditional problems in the philosophy of mind. Radical embodied cognitive science is a direct descendant of the American naturalist psychology of William James and (...) John Dewey, and follows them in viewing perception and cognition to be understandable only in terms of action in the environment. Chemero argues that cognition should be described in terms of agent-environment dynamics rather than in terms of computation and representation. After outlining this orientation to cognition, Chemero proposes a methodology: dynamical systems theory, which would explain things dynamically and without reference to representation. He also advances a background theory: Gibsonian ecological psychology, "shored up" and clarified. Chemero then looks at some traditional philosophical problems through the lens of radical embodied cognitive science and concludes that the comparative ease with which it resolves these problems, combined with its empirical promise, makes this approach to cognitive science a rewarding one. "Jerry Fodor is my favorite philosopher," Chemero writes in his preface, adding, "I think that Jerry Fodor is wrong about nearly everything." With this book, Chemero explains nonrepresentational, dynamical, ecological cognitive science as clearly and as rigorously as Jerry Fodor explained computational cognitive science in his classic work The Language of Thought. (shrink)

The historical context of the philosophical work of St. Thomas Aquinas, by D. Knowles.--Form and existence, by P. Geach.--Categories, by H. McCabe.--Analogy as a rule of meaning for religious language, by J. F. Ross.--Nominalism, by P. Geach.--St. Thomas' doctrine of necessary being, by P. Brown.--The proof ex motu for the existence of God; logical analysis of St. Thomas' arguments, by J. Salamucha.--Infinite causal regression, by P. Brown.--St. Thomas Aquinas and the language of total dependence, by J. N. Deck.--Divine foreknowledge and (...) human freedom, by A. Kenny.--Intellect and imagination in Aquinas, by A. Kenny.--The immortality of the soul, by H. McCabe.--Aquinas on intentionality, by P. Sheehan.--The scholastic theory of moral law in the modern world, by A. Donagan.--The first principle of practical reason, by G. G. Grisez. (shrink)

Over the past twenty-five years debate surrounding cultural diversity has become one of the most active areas of contemporary political theory and philosophy. The impact of taking cultural diversity seriously in modern political societies has led to challenges to the dominance of liberal theory and to a more serious engagement of political theory with actual political struggles. This 2007 volume of essays by leading political theorists reviews the development of multiculturalism, surveys the major approaches, addresses the critical questions posed and (...) highlights directions in research. Multiculturalism and Political Theory provides an overview for both students and researchers. (shrink)

Introspective evidence is still treated with great suspicion in cognitive science. This work is designed to encourage cognitive scientists to take more account of the subject's unique perspective.

Visual research methods like photography and digital storytelling are increasingly used in health and social sciences research as participatory approaches that benefit participants, researchers, and audiences. Visual methods involve a number of additional ethical considerations such as using identifiable content and ownership of creative outputs. As such, ethics committees should use different assessment frameworks to consider research protocols with visual methods. Here, we outline the limitations of ethics committees in assessing projects with a visual focus and highlight the sparse knowledge (...) on how researchers respond when they encounter ethical challenges in the practice of visual research. We propose a situated approach in relation to visual methodologies that encompasses a negotiated, flexible approach, given that ethical issues usually emerge in relation to the specific contexts of individual research projects. Drawing on available literature and two case studies, we identify and reflect on nuanced ethical implications in visual research, like tensions between aesthetics and research validity. The case studies highlight strategies developed in-situ to address the challenges two researchers encountered when using visual research methods, illustrating that some practice implications are not necessarily addressed using established ethical clearance procedures. A situated approach can ensure that visual research remains ethical, engaging, and rigorous. (shrink)

This study is the first to explicitly assess the connections between welfare state spending and the gendered and classed dimensions of unpaid care work across 29 European nations. Our research uses multi-level model analysis of European Quality of Life Survey data, examining childcare and housework burdens for people living with at least one child under the age of 18. Two key findings emerge: First, by disaggregating different types of unpaid care work, we find that childcare provision is more gendered than (...) classed—reflecting trends toward “intensive mothering”. Housework and cooking, on the contrary, demonstrate both gender and class effects, likely because they are more readily outsourced by wealthier individuals to the paid care sector. Second, while overall social expenditure has no effect on hours spent on childcare and housework, results suggest that family policy may shape the relationship between gender, income, and housework. Specifically, family policy expenditure is associated with a considerably smaller gender gap vis-à-vis the time dedicated to housework: This effect is present across the income spectrum, but is particularly substantial in the case of lower income women. (shrink)

An important work in the debate between materialists and dualists, the public correspondence between Anthony Collins and Samuel Clarke provided the framework for arguments over consciousness and personal identity in eighteenth-century Britain. In Clarke's view, mind and consciousness are so unified that they cannot be compounded into wholes or divided into parts, so mind and consciousness must be distinct from matter. Collins, by contrast, was a perceptive advocate of a materialist account of mind, who defended the possibility that thinking (...) and consciousness are emergent properties of the brain. Appendices include philosophical writings that influenced, and responded to, the correspondence. (shrink)

The first four essays in this guide are devoted to the study of Wittgenstein′s own ideas about philosophy. The remaining six apply his ideas to the work of other thinkers.

The Selfseeker presents a coherent organic and dialectical epistemology to underpin the science of the environmental movement. Stressing the subjective as well as the objective, empsychon theory returns to the ancient Greek approach which was forgotten after Plato. At once organic and rigorously scientific, The Selfseeker is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in environmental questions and who cares for the future of planet Earth.

The ideas of continental philosopher Martin Heidegger have been influential in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, despite the fact that there has been no effort to analyze these ideas empirically. The experiments reported here are designed to lend empirical support to Heidegger’s phenomenology and more specifically his description of the transition between ready-to-hand and unready-to-hand modes in interactions with tools. In experiment 1, we found that a smoothly coping cognitive system exhibits 1/fβ type positively correlated noise and that its correlated (...) character is reduced when the system is perturbed. This indicates that the participant and tool constitute a self-assembled, extended device during smooth coping and this device is disrupted by the perturbation. In experiment 2, we examine the re-organization of awareness that occurs when a smoothly coping, self-assembled, extended cognitive system is perturbed. We found that the disruption is accompanied by a change in attention which interferes with participants’ performance on a simultaneous cognitive task. Together these experiments show that a smoothly coping participant-tool system can be temporarily disrupted and that this disruption causes a change in the participant’s awareness. Since these two events follow as predictions from Heidegger’s work, our study offers evidence for the hypothesized transition from readiness-to-hand to unreadiness-to-hand. (shrink)

Spirituality and Dialectics is a passionate and rigorous argument against nihilism and a manifesto for the party of meaning and hope. It demonstrates how we can ground principles of meaning and value, against the aesthetic and intellectual hegemony of the enlightenment—culminating most currently through postmodernity, as a basis for the critique of all present injustice. What emerges is a vision of a new social order that permits the full development of human social capacities.

Echnaton Tutanchamun: Daten, Fakten, Literatur, 5th edition. By Hermann Alexander Schlögl. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2013. Pp. xiv + 137. €19.

The Medinet Habu Records of the Foreign Wars of Ramesses III. By Donald Redford. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 91. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xi + 197. $122.

This book develops in detail the simple idea that assertion is the expression of belief. In it the author puts forward a version of 'probabilistic semantics' which acknowledges that we are not perfectly rational, and which offers a significant advance in generality on theories of meaning couched in terms of truth conditions. It promises to challenge a number of entrenched and widespread views about the relations of language and mind. Part I presents a functionalist account of belief, worked through a (...) modified form of decision theory. In Part II the author generates a theory of meaning in terms of 'assertibility conditions', whereby to know the meaning of an assertion is to know the belief it expresses. (shrink)

The ArgumentIn Germany during the 1870s and 1880s a number of important scientific innovations in chemistry and biology emerged that were linked to advances in the new technology of synthetic dyestuffs. In particular, the rapid development of classical organic chemistry was a consequence of programs in which chemists devised new theories and experimental strategies that were applicable to the processes and products of the burgeoning dye factories. Thereafter, the novel products became the means to examine and measure biological systems. This (...) took place as a result of two trends. The first was a move toward diversification in the dye industry – made possible by the extensive range of products – which in turn was stimulated by economic and political conditions. The second was the increasing availability of techniques, substances, and processes used in industry. This made possible a concrete program of introducing the qualitative and quantitative methods of chemistry into the domain of laboratory experimentation on biological materials, thereby realizing the abstract desire to transform cell biology into an exact science.Moreover, the conceptualization of biological systems that emerged from this endeavor leaned heavily on a theory of dye chemistry that indicated which particular arrangements of atoms performed specific functions. This biological modeling used the imagery of chemical structural formulae to transform chemical nuclei and their side chains into adequate representations of protoplasmic structure. (shrink)

The question of modernity has provoked a vigorous debate in the work of thinkers from Hegel to Habermas. Our own self-styled postmodern age has seen no end to this debate, which now receives a major and wide-ranging intervention from the theorist and critic Anthony J. Cascardi. Offering an historical account of the origins and transformations of the rational subject or self as it is represented in Descartes, Cervantes, Pascal, Hobbes and the Don Juan myth, he carries his argument across (...) the fields of epistemology, literature, political science, religion and psychology. The modern subject proves to be positioned within conflicting discourses, in a culture characterised by its 'detotalised totality'. Max Weber's concept of 'world disenchantment' enables Cascardi to make a searching critique of modernity's sense of its absoluteness, divorced from an archaic, 'enchanted' world. He advocates in its place a more fruitful relationship between historical analysis and theoretical speculation, offering constructive new alternatives to current orthodoxy regarding subjectivity and modernity. (shrink)

According to quantum mechanics, statements about the future made by sentient beings like us are, in general, neither true nor false; they must satisfy a many-valued logic. I propose that the truth value of such a statement should be identified with the probability that the event it describes will occur. After reviewing the history of related ideas in logic, I argue that it gives an understanding of probability which is particularly satisfactory for use in quantum mechanics. I construct a lattice (...) of future-tense propositions, with truth values in the interval [0, 1], and derive logical properties of these truth values given by the usual quantum-mechanical formula for the probability of a history. (shrink)

The Sustainable Development Goals are an opportunity to address major social and environmental challenges. As a widely agreed framework they offer a potential way to mobilise stakeholders on a global scale. The manner in which the goals, with time-based targets and specific metrics, are set out within a voluntary reporting process adopted by both governments and business, provides a fascinating and important case for organisational studies. It is both about advancing performance measurement and evidence-based policy-making for sustainable development, and also (...) participation and consultation at a wider, more global scale, than has ever been possible before. This paper contributes to the notion of SDGs as a wicked problem, answering calls for deeper theorisation, via synthesis with core ideas in the management field of decision theory. A case study on the wicked problem of deforestation and its links to supply chains, multi-stakeholder initiatives and SDG reporting, provides an illustration of the relevance of the application of decision theory to wicked problems, presented using a novel conceptual framework. This helps to illustrate new avenues for research and practical application regarding the balance of technocratic and participative approaches for sustainable development. (shrink)

Massimo Dell'Utri (1990) provides a reconstruction of Hilary Putnam's argument (1981, chapter 1) to show that the hypothesis that we are brains in a vat is self-refuting. I will explain why the argument Dell'Utri offers us is, on the face of it, quite problematic. Then I will provide a way out of the difficulty.

Is belief in God reasonable? Richard Dawkins is right to say that traditional arguments for the existence of God are flawed; but so is his own disproof of the existence of God, and there are gaps in neo-Darwinian explanations of the origin of language, of life, and of the universe. The rational response is neither theism nor atheism but agnosticism. Faith in a creed is no virtue, but mere belief in God may be reasonable even if false.

By resituating Alexander von Humboldt in the “working world” of mining, this essay offers a case study of the way in which industry has shaped practice and theory in the history of science. While Humboldt’s experience as a miner in Saxony and Prussia provided him a venue in which to study fossilized vegetation, revealing a fundamental link between the migrations of plants and of peoples, industrial concerns about miners’ safety inspired a study of the interplay between plants and people that (...) shaped his later articulation of the verticality of plant distribution. Moreover, the cartographic methods Humboldt employed during his American journey depended as much on drawing practices indebted to mining as they did on patterns of vertical mobility above and below the surface of the earth. These arguments ultimately encourage a departure from “Humboldtian Science,” a term that has veiled an originally Prusso-Saxon science beneath a set of Anglo-American connotations. (shrink)