One of the central debates in contemporary Kant scholarship concerns whether Kant endorses a “conceptualist” account of the nature of sensory experience. Understanding the debate is crucial for getting a full grasp of Kant's theory of mind, cognition, perception, and epistemology. This paper situates the debate in the context of Kant's broader theory of cognition and surveys some of the major arguments for conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations of his critical philosophy.

In this article, I respond to Augustin Fragnière's recent attempt to understand the demandingness of individual climate duties by appealing to the difference between “concentrated” harm and “spread” harm and the importance of “moral thresholds”. I suggest his arguments don't succeed in securing the conclusion he is after, even from within his own commitments, which themselves are problematic. As this is primarily a critical project, the upshot of this discussion is that if there is a defensible way to justify the (...) intuition that the duty to reduce emissions can't be overly demanding, it has to be found elsewhere. (shrink)

have recently provided a compelling demonstration of enhanced attentional control under post-hypnotic suggestion. Using the classic color-word interference paradigm, in which the task is to ignore a word and to name the color in which it is printed (e.g., RED in green, say ''green''), they gave a post-hypnotic instruction to participants that they would be unable to read. This eliminated Stroop interference in high suggestibility participants but did not alter interference in low suggestibility participants. replicated this pattern and further demonstrated (...) that it is not due to a visual strategy (such as blurring or looking at a different location). As a historical footnote, we describe a ''case study'' from 18 years ago in which we observed the same result using a hypnotic instruction to a single highly suggestible individual that he could not read. The elimination of Stroop interference has important implications for both the study of attention and the study of hypnosis. (shrink)

Abstract:The author considers the Eleatic Stranger's account of being as communing (κοινωνεῖν), an under-recognized aspect of the well-known "dunamis proposal" and Plato's unfolding of the notion of being in the Sophist. The Stranger calls being "the power to act upon or be affected" (247d7-e3), and shortly thereafter describes "being affected or acting upon from a certain power" (248b6) as "communing" (248b2). This marks a shift away from understanding being as capacity toward understanding it as activity. The author identifies two functions (...) of the "being-as-communion" account: (1) a critical response to the previous competing quantitative and qualitative ontologies, and (2) a new ontological notion that plays a key role in the great kinds discussion and what follows, capturing the sense in which to be is to engage actively in relations with structuring, causal kinds. He conclude by speaking to the account's valuable insight into the meaning of being as being-with and being-through. (shrink)

This book focuses on the important work of Karl Mannheim by demonstrating how his theoretical conception of a reflexive sociology took shape as a collaborative empirical research programme. The authors show how contemporary work along these lines, whether derived from Foucault, Bourdieu or other theorists, can benefit from the insights of Mannheim and his students into both morphology and genealogy.

An alienated young man attempts to find himself through an examination of modern philosophy.

Imagination and idealism are particularly important creative epistemic virtues for the medical sciences if we hope to improve the health of the world’s ageing population. To date, imagination and idealism within the medical sciences have been dominated by a paradigm of disease control, a paradigm which has realised significant, but also limited, success. Disease control proved particularly successful in mitigating the early-life mortality risks from infectious diseases, but it has proved less successful when applied to the chronic diseases of late (...) life (like cancer). The time is ripe for the emergence and prominence of a supplementary medical research paradigm, the paradigm of ‘healthy ageing’ which prioritises the goal of rate (of ageing) control rather than disease control. This is the difference between extending the human healthspan versus extending survival by managing (or trying to eliminate) the multi-morbidities, frailty and disability currently prevalent in late life. The idealism of the disease control paradigm is myopic because it ignores the health constraints imposed by the inborn ageing process itself, a biological reality which is already inflicting significant economic and disease burdens on the world’s ageing populations. Unless the medical sciences retard the rate of biological ageing, these problems will continue to be amplified as larger numbers of persons survive into late life. (shrink)

Logical consequence is the relation that obtains between premises and conclusion(s) in a valid argument. Orthodoxy has it that valid arguments are necessarily truth-preserving, but this platitude only raises a number of further questions, such as: how does the truth of premises guarantee the truth of a conclusion, and what constraints does validity impose on rational belief? This volume presents thirteen essays by some of the most important scholars in the field of philosophical logic. The essays offer ground-breaking new insights (...) into the nature of logical consequence; the relation between logic and inference; how the semantics and pragmatics of natural language bear on logic; the relativity of logic; and the structural properties of the consequence relation. (shrink)

Many beginning students in philosophy of language find themselves grappling with dense and difficult texts not easily understood by someone new to the field. This book offers an introduction to philosophy of language by explaining ten classic, often anthologized, texts. Accessible and thorough, written with a unique combination of informality and careful formulation, the book addresses sense and reference, proper names, definite descriptions, indexicals, the definition of truth, truth and meaning, and the nature of speaker meaning, as addressed by Frege, (...) Kripke, Russell, Donnellan, Kaplan, Evans, Putnam, Tarski, Davidson, and Grice. The explanations aim to be as simple as possible without sacrificing accuracy; critical assessments are included with the exposition in order to stimulate further thought and discussion. Philosophy of Language will be an essential resource for undergraduates in a typical philosophy of language course or for graduate students with no background in the field. It can be used in conjunction with an anthology of classic texts, sparing the instructor much arduous exegesis. ContentsFrege on Sense and Reference • Kripke on Names • Russell on Definite Descriptions • Donnellan's Distinction • Kaplan on Demonstratives • Evans on Understanding Demonstratives • Putnam on Semantic Externalism • Tarski's Theory of Truth • Davidson's Semantics for Natural Language • Grice's Theory of Speaker Meaning. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's pragmatism is a distinctively doubled philosophy formed at the twain of a rigorous antifoun‐dational philosophical perspective and a committed postmetaphysical cultural criticism. Rorty instead rigorously held to the line that no particular politics follows from anti‐foundational philosophy. Rorty's arguments against representationalism, foundationalism, and metaphysics‐first philosophy in Mirror are complex and not always easy to navigate without careful guidance. The risk of the approach in Mirror is that it could implicate Rorty in a foundationalist critique of foundationalism, or a (...) metaphysical critique of metaphysics. For ironism is the studied denial not of metaphysics itself, but only of strong forms of pro‐metaphysical argument. Rorty uses liberalism to avoid the metaphysical forbidding of metaphysics – substituting for it instead a liberal, perhaps even a critical, limiting of metaphysics. The most important insight of Contingency boils down to this: liberalism and ironism together give us something to strive for that the metaphysician would otherwise take as settled. (shrink)

Climate change, rising energy costs, and other dilemmas raise the prospect for major change in energy-ecology-society relations. Two prominent proposals for change include: a nuclear power renaissance; and mega-scale renewable energy development. Both suggest that modern society will receive a rising stream of less CO2-rich kilowatt-hours, so that increased energy consumption and economic growth can continue. The article doubts these CO2 claims and finds both options lead to deepening unsustainability and environmental injustice. A third approach is proposed. A new institutional (...) and community strategy called a Sustainability Energy Utility. The SEU looks to reduce energy use and seeks to support remaining energy needs by community-scale renewables. To accomplish deep energy change, the authors show how an SEU can move society from an energy commodity to energy commons regime. Commonwealth economy and community trusts are key means to significant change: a future commons is offered as the more appropriate strategy. (shrink)

This article discusses the concept of spiritual assets or spiritual capital in community development and social transformation. It argues that much of the existing discourse on the subject tends to be reductionist in its approach, often limiting discussion of spiritual assets to the social and cultural capital of religious organizations. The study proposes an understanding of spiritual assets which acknowledges the creative and sustaining work of the Spirit in enabling and motivating communities to envision, and discern paths of renewal and (...) social transformation. (shrink)

We study companies that do not produce a sustainability report in contexts where institutionalisation is assumed. Based on a careful analysis of interaction patterns between non-reporting companies, sustainability interest groups, and peer organisations, we find patterns of discursive and material isomorphism that suggest sustainability reporting is confined to an issues-based field, rather than spreading as an institutionalised practice across the business community. We argue that the issues-based field exerts only weak pressure for sustainability reporting, and that encouraging more firms to (...) report rests on understanding what influences companies to interact more widely to become part of this field. (shrink)

Explains Popper's views on natural and social science, ranging in Part I from metaphysical considerations to his interpretation of the formalism of quantum mechanics, and in Part II from the errors of historicism and holism to the roles of theoretical models, institutions, traditions and history.

The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter data [19]. This paper reports on (...) an open-source reimplementation of their algorithm in Python, optimized to be usable on much larger networks. In addition to the algorithm and package, we also show the ability to scale up our package to large synthetic social network graph profiling, and finally demonstrate its utility in analyzing real-world empirical evidence of ‘echo chambers’ on online social media, as well as evidence of interdisciplinary diversity in an academic communications network. (shrink)

This essay critically examines the idea that "identity " or "difference " might be proper objects of principles of respect. The author suggests that this idea makes sense only at the cost of the egalitarianism to which its adherents usually subscribe. The essay also shows that liberal interpretations of respect can evade this problem and reaches this conclusion on the basis of an analysis of the concept of respect and its connections with notions of status.

In this chapter, McGinn begins with a study of the meaning of monstrosity, in which he considers the view set out in the previous chapters that evil is ugliness of soul. Monsters seem to be visible embodiments of evil: however, the connection between physical ugliness and ugliness of soul is not logically necessary. To pursue this point, McGinn presents a close study of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. McGinn interprets the novel as a metaphorical depiction of the human condition. He argues that (...) the life of Frankenstein's monster can be understood as a model of human life. (shrink)

This paper argues that the passage of time cannot be understood in a certain ‘objective’ manner: it is not something comprehensible as from no one and nowhen by means of generalizations over times, properties, subjects, events etc. This does not mean, however, that its reality should be denied, that we should lower our sights to explaining instead ‘the experience of time as passing’. Rather, time’s passage is to be elaborated within a metaphysics of time of a rather different kind, one (...) which might be presented as an articulation of being in time. (shrink)

Paradoxically, the rise of neoliberal economic thinking and its rejection of concepts of both state intervention in the economy and the pursuit of purposes bybusiness that are not directly related to profit maximization, has been accompanied by intensified social criticism of business and concerns about sustainability. The article explores the implications of these paradoxes and relates them to active consumerism and to the issue of market externalities.

Pruss uses an example of Lester Dubins to argue against the claim that appealing to hyperreal-valued probabilities saves probabilistic regularity from the objection that in continuum outcome-spaces and with standard probability functions all save countably many possibilities must be assigned probability 0. Dubins’s example seems to show that merely finitely additive standard probability functions allow reasoning to a foregone conclusion, and Pruss argues that hyperreal-valued probability functions are vulnerable to the same charge. However, Pruss’s argument relies on the rule of (...) conditionalisation, but I show that in examples like Dubins’s involving nonconglomerable probabilities, conditionalisation is self-defeating. (shrink)

This paper shows how Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit criticizes Kant for positing a realm beyond the scope of finite cognition, a “supersensible” realm of things in-themselves. Hegel not only rejects Kant’s attempt to ground the supersensible through his theoretical philosophy, but also criticizes Kant’s attempt to provide a practical basis for the sensible-supersensible divide. In the second Critique, Kant claims that practical reason extends theoretical reason by showing that the supersensible is more than a “merely problematic thought” since we can (...) populate this realm with the moral postulates of God and the immortality of the soul. Hegel rejects Kant’s attempt to posit a realm beyond theoretical cognition. The moral postulates, Hegel claims, are an “unnecessary hypothesis.” Kant imagines [vorstellt] supersensible realm populated with moral postulates, yet Hegel argues this is a dissemblance [Verstellung] that hides a whole “nest of contradictions” by shifting thoughtlessly between a finite and infinite perspective. (shrink)

Frege's strict alignment between his syntactic and ontological categories is not, as is commonly assumed, some kind of a philosophical thesis. There is no thesis that proper names refer only to objects, say, or that what refers to an object is a proper name. Rather, the alignment of categories is internal to Frege's conception of what syntax and ontology are. To understand this, we need to recognise the pride of place Frege assigns within his theorising to the notion of truth. (...) For both language and the world, the Fregean categories are logical categories, categories, that is, of truth. The elaboration of this point makes clear the incoherence of supposing that they might not align. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical commentary on the claim advanced by Harry Brighouse and Adam Swift in their book Family Values: The Ethics of Parent–Child Relationships that there is an ineliminable conflict between relationship goods and fair equality of opportunity. I argue there need be no conflict between family values and equality of opportunity in a suitably non-hierarchical society. I also argue that the idea that equality of opportunity might be served by abolishing the family is mistaken. Egalitarian justice does (...) not provide an obstacle to the realization of family values. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill’s _Utilitarianism _is a philosophical defense of utilitarianism, a moral theory stating that right actions are those that tend to promote overall happiness. The essay first appeared as a series of articles published in _Fraser’s Magazine_ in 1861; the articles were collected and reprinted as a single book in 1863. Mill discusses utilitarianism in some of his other works, including _On Liberty_ and _The Subjection of Women_, but _Utilitarianism _contains his only sustained defence of the theory. In this (...) Broadview Edition, Colin Heydt provides a substantial introduction that will enable readers to understand better the polemical context for _Utilitarianism_. Heydt shows, for example, how Mill’s moral philosophy grew out of political engagement, rather than exclusively out of a speculative interest in determining the nature of morality. Appendices include precedents to Mill’s work, reactions to Utilitarianism, and related writings by Mill. (shrink)

Being surrounded by bullshit is one thing. Having your mind fucked is quite another. The former is irritating, but the latter is violating and intrusive . If someone manipulates your thoughts and emotions, messing with your head, you naturally feel resentment: he or she has distorted your perceptions, disturbed your feelings, maybe even usurped your self. Mindfucking is a prevalent aspect of contemporary culture and the agent can range from an individual to a whole state, from personal mind games to (...) wholesale propaganda.In "Mindfucking", Colin McGinn investigates and clarifies this phenomenon, taking in the ancient Greeks, Shakespeare and modern techniques of thought control. McGinn assembles the conceptual components of this most complex of concepts - trust, deception, emotion, manipulation, false belief, vulnerability - and explores its very nature. Is philosophy, as a discipline, a type of mindfuck, asks McGinn? Is romantic love a species of mindfuck? The essence is psychological upheaval or disorientation, often abetted by the weaknesses of the victim. Jealousy, insecurity and prejudice can aid the mindfuck. Delusion is the general result, sometimes insanity. How mindfucked are you? It's hard to say from the inside, but being aware of the phenomenon offers at least some protection. (shrink)

Augustine’s Conversion: A Guide to the Argument of Confessions I-IX by Colin Starnes.

In the past decade structures and processes for the ethical review of UK health care research have undergone rapid change. Although this has focused users' attention on the functioning of review committees, it remains rare to read a substantive view from the inside. This article presents details of processes and findings resulting from a novel structured reflective exercise undertaken by a newly formed research ethics review panel in a university school of nursing and midwifery. By adopting and adapting some of (...) the knowledge to be found in the art and science of malt whisky tasting, a framework for critical reflection is presented and applied. This enables analysis of the main contemporary issues for a review panel that is primarily concerned with research into nursing education and practice. In addition to structuring the panel's own literary narrative, the framework also generates useful visual representation for further reflection. Both the analysis of issues and the framework itself are presented as of potential value to all nurses, health care professionals and educationalists with an interest in ethical review. (shrink)

In this response to the work of Michael Dummett, McGinn aims to vindicate the plausibility of a realist outlook. Realism claims that a sentence's truth is ‘epistemically unconstrained’ or ‘knowledge‐transcendent’, in the sense that the world is as it is independently of our knowing truths about it. Contra Dummett's arguments against the tenability of this realist conviction, McGinn's counter‐argument proceeds by showing, first, ‘that it is an empiricist dogma to suppose that we cannot acquire conceptions that transcend our experience,’ and (...) second, ‘that we can connect experience‐transcendent conceptions with linguistic use by making the observation that such conceptions are fit subjects for communicative speech acts’. (shrink)