Once upon a time, the twentieth-century investigations of the behaviors of sub-atomic particles were thought to have established that there can be no such thing as an objective, observer-independent, scientifically realist, empirically adequate picture of the physical world.

This book uses different perspectives on argumentation to show how we create arguments, test them, attack and defend them, and deploy them effectively to justify beliefs and influence others. David Zarefsky uses a range of contemporary examples to show how arguments work and how they can be put together, beginning with simple individual arguments, and proceeding to the construction and analysis of complex cases incorporating different structures. Special attention is given to evaluating evidence and reasoning, the building blocks of (...) argumentation. Zarefsky provides clear guidelines and tests for different kinds of arguments, as well as exercises that show student readers how to apply theories to arguments in everyday and public life. His comprehensive and integrated approach toward argumentation theory and practice will help readers to become more adept at critically examining everyday arguments as well as constructing arguments that will convince others. (shrink)

Summary Historians of all kinds are beginning to return to temporally expansive studies after decades of aversion and neglect. There are even signs that intellectual historians are returning to the longue durée. What are the reasons for this revival of long-range intellectual history? And how might it be rendered methodologically robust as well as historically compelling? This article proposes a model of transtemporal history, proceeding via serial contextualism to create a history in ideas spanning centuries, even millennia: key examples come (...) from work in progress on ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to the present. The article concludes with brief reflections on the potential impact of the digital humanities on the practice of long-range intellectual history. Summary Historians of all kinds are beginning to return to temporally expansive studies after decades of aversion and neglect. There are even signs that intellectual historians are returning to the longue durée. What are the reasons for this revival of long-range intellectual history? And how might it be rendered methodologically robust as well as historically compelling? This article proposes a model of transtemporal history, proceeding via serial contextualism to create a history in ideas spanning centuries, even millennia: key examples come from work in progress on ideas of civil war from ancient Rome to the present. The article concludes with brief reflections on the potential impact of the digital humanities on the practice of long-range intellectual history. (shrink)

Examines the link between nonmonotonic inference relations and theory revision operations, focusing on the correspondence between abstract properties which each may satisfy.

Argumentation is the offspring of logic, dialectic, and rhetoric. Differences among them are matters more of degree than of kind, but each reflects basic underlying assumptions. This essay explicates five key assumptions of rhetorical approaches to argumentation: audience assent is the ultimate measure of an argument’s success or failure; argumentation takes place within a context of uncertainty, both about the subject of the dispute and about the process for conducting the dispute; arguers function as restrained partisans and accept risks that (...) follow from such a status; despite its seemingly adversarial nature, argumentation is fundamentally cooperative, pursuing the shared goal of making the best decision; and argumentation is grounded in the situational context of particular cases. (shrink)

Develops a concept of revision, akin in spirit to AGM partial meet revision, but in which the postulate of 'success' may fail. The basic idea is to see such an operation as composite, with a pre-processor using a priori considerations to resolve the question of whether to revise, following which another operation revises in a manner that protects the a priori material.

We discuss two recent attempts two solve Schrodinger's cat paradox. One is the modal interpretation developed by Kochen, Healey, Dieks, and van Fraassen. It allows for an observable which pertains to a system to possess a value even when the system is not in an eigenstate of that observable. The other is a recent theory of the collapse of the wave function due to Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber. It posits a dynamics which has the effect of collapsing the state of (...) macroscopic systems. We argue that the modal interpretation cannot account for non-accurate measurements and that both accounts have the consequence that in ordinary measurement situations the observables that ends up well defined are not quite the ones that we want to be well defined. (shrink)

Tarzian and ASBH Core Competencies Update Task Force (2013) say that making ethics consultation accountable means examining the abilities and qualifications of health care ethics consultants (HCECs...

In June 2016, David Chalmers delivered the Petrus Hispanus Lectures at the LanCog research group, University of Lisbon, on the subject of objects, properties, and perception in virtual reality environments. The paper resulting from these lectures was subsequently published in Disputatio as “The Virtual and the Real” (vol. IX, 2017, No. 46, pp. 309–52). In it, Chalmers defends virtual realism, according to which virtual objects are bona fide digital objects with virtual counterparts of perceptible properties such as colour and (...) shape, and perception in virtual reality environments is typically veridical rather than illusory. This special issue collects responses to Chalmers due to Claus Beisbart, Jesper Juul, Peter Ludlow, Neil McDonnell and Nathan Wildman, Alyssa Ney, Eric Schwitzgebel, and Marc Silcox; together with a detailed response by Chalmers to each paper. You can read the target article (Chalmers 2017, “The Virtual and the Real”) under discussion in this Special Issue here: https://doi.org/10.1515/disp-2017-0009. (shrink)

A discussion of work formalising Hohfeld's classic taxonomy of rights relations between two parties.

When in 2001 Earth Liberation Front activists drove metal spikes into hundreds of trees in Gifford Pinchot National Forest, they were protesting the sale of a section of the old-growth forest to a timber company. But ELF's communiqu on the action went beyond the radical group's customary brief. Drawing connections between the harms facing the myriad animals who make their home in the trees and the struggles for social justice among ordinary human beings resisting exclusion and marginalization, the dispatch declared, (...) "all oppression is linked, just as we are all linked," and decried the "patriarchal nightmare" in the form of "techno-industrial global capitalism." In Total Liberation, David Naguib Pellow takes up this claim and makes sense of the often tense and violent relationships among humans, ecosystems, and nonhuman animal species, expanding our understanding of inequality and activists' uncompromising efforts to oppose it. Grounded in interviews with more than one hundred activists, on-the-spot fieldwork, and analyses of thousands of pages of documents, websites, journals, and zines, Total Liberation reveals the ways in which radical environmental and animal rights movements challenge inequity through a vision they call "total liberation." In its encounters with such infamous activists as scott crow, Tre Arrow, Lauren Regan, Rod Coronado, and Gina Lynn, the book offers a close-up, insider's view of one of the most important--and feared--social movements of our day. At the same time, it shows how and why the U.S. justice system plays to that fear, applying to these movements measures generally reserved for "jihadists"--with disturbing implications for civil liberties and constitutional freedom. How do the adherents of "total liberation" fight oppression and seek justice for humans, nonhumans, and ecosystems alike? And how is this pursuit shaped by the politics of anarchism and anticapitalism? In his answers, Pellow provides crucial in-depth insight into the origins and social significance of the earth and animal liberation movements and their increasingly common and compelling critique of inequality as a threat to life and a dream of a future characterized by social and ecological justice for all. (shrink)

(1997). What Descartes really told Elisabeth: Mind‐body union as a primitive notion. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 249-273. doi: 10.1080/09608789708570966.

Was ein Gegenstand ist, in welcher Weise seine Gegenständlichkeit begegnet und worin deren Objektivität besteht, bleibt ein zentrales Thema zeitgenössischer Erkenntnistheorie. Deshalb erörtert der vorliegende Band den Begriff des Gegenständlichen im Hinblick auf die Themen Welt, Subjektivität, Personalität, Freiheit, Sprache, Interpretation und Wissenschaft, und dies geschieht im Spannungsfeld einer Neubewertung von Objektivität. Ausgangspunkt und Anlaß der Beiträge dieses Bandes ist ein neuerer Ansatz in der Hermeneutik, wie er von Günter Figal in seinem Werk 'Gegenständlichkeit' vorgelegt worden ist. Da die Reflexion (...) auf die Bedingungen, unter denen Gegenstände gegeben sind, nicht nur ein hermeneutisches Anliegen ist, sondern bereits im Deutschen Idealismus, im Neukantianismus und in der Phänomenologie (Husserl, Heidegger und Merleau-Ponty) ein zentrales Thema philosophischer Reflexion darstellt, ist der Band als sach- und richtungsübergreifender Dialog konzipiert. Mit Beiträgen von:Emil Angehrn, Damir Barbari¿c, Rudolf Bernet, David Espinet, Theodore D. George, Pavel Kouba, Birgit Recki, Friederike Rese, James Risser, John Sallis, Dennis Schmidt, Christian Sommer, Michael Steinmann, Tilo Wesche, Günter Zöller. (shrink)

This is the best overview of Foucault's work to date. A principal architect of poststructuralism, Michel Foucault reshaped the varied disciplines of history, philosophy, literary theory, and social science. David Shumway has provided, for the nonspecialist, a systematic analysis of the works of Foucault that is both thorough and accessible. Shumway connects Foucault's various conceptual and linguistic techniques to the basic critical strategies and purpose of his philosophy.

What is the purpose of a large academic meeting attended by hundreds or thousands of participants? What are the reasons, given current virtual conferencing technology, to hold such meetings in pers...

Figures of Thought looks at how mathematical works can be read as texts and examines their textual strategies. David Reed offers the first sustained and critical attempt to find a consistent argument or narrative thread in mathematical texts. Reed selects mathematicians from a range of historical periods and compares their approaches to organizing and arguing texts, using an extended commentary on Euclid's Elements as a central structuring framework. He develops fascinating interpretations of mathematicians' work throughout history, from Descartes to (...) Hilbert, Kronecker, Dedekind, Weil and Grothendieck. Reed traces the implications of this approach to the understanding of the history and development of mathematics. (shrink)

Early Greek Ethics is the first volume devoted to philosophical ethics in its "formative" period. It explores contributions from the Presocratics, figures of the early Pythagorean tradition, sophists, and anonymous texts, as well as topics influential to ethical philosophical thought such as Greek medicine, music, friendship, and justice.

The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions. By Benatar David.

Draws attention to some unexpected consequences of using a zero-ary connective in modal propositional logic.

Infatuation -- Complication -- Maturation.

En este artículo critico una dicotomía con la que se zanjan muchos debates sobre la libertad de expresión y de estrategia político-cultural: reclamando la necesidad de “más expresión” porque su única alternativa es la censura. Propongo que tras este argumento se encuentra la intuición de que para contrarrestar la dominación hay que garantizar que se pueda “salir” de ella. Una razón del éxito de esta intuición en los ámbitos de la libertad de expresión y la cultura es que la mejora (...) tecnológica en las comunicaciones respalda un presupuesto de superabundancia que ignora la economía política de la esfera pública. Concluyo indicando por qué los proyectos contrahegemónicos o contraculturales deberían cuidarse de no reproducir acríticamente esta perspectiva. (shrink)

My dissertation philosophically analyzes experiments in evolutionary biology, an area of science where experimental approaches have tended to supplement, rather than supercede more traditional approaches, such as field observations. I conduct the analysis on the basis of three case studies of famous episodes in the history of selection experiments: H. B. D. Kettlewell's investigations of industrial melanism in the Peppered Moth, Biston betularia; two of Th. Dobzhansky's studies of adaptive radiation in the fruit fly, Drosophila pseudoobscura; and M. Wade's studies (...) of group selection in the flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum. The case studies analyze the arguments and evidence these investigators used to identify the respective roles of experiments and other forms of inquiry in their investigations. I discuss three philosophical issues. ;First, the analysis considers whether these selection experiments fit models of experimentation developed in the context of micro-and high energy physics by Allan Franklin and Peter Galison . My analysis documents that the methods used in the case studies can be accommodated on both Franklin and Galison's views. I conclude the case studies do not support claims regarding the relative autonomy of biology. ;Second, the analysis documents a number of important roles for life history data acquired by strictly observational means in the process of experimentation, from identification of research problems and development of experimental designs to interpretation of results. Divorced from this context experiments in biology make no sense. Thus, in principle, experimental approaches cannot replace more traditional methods. ;Third, the analysis examines a superficial tension between the use of experiments, which I characterize by the presence of artificial intervention, and the stated goal of most investigations in evolutionary biology, that of understanding how systems behave in the absence of intervention. Experiments involve trade-offs between the control one has over the circumstances of the study and how informative the study is with regard to questions of interest to biologists regarding specific, actual systems in nature. Experimental simulations of natural phenomena in other historical sciences involve similar trade-offs, but there are reasons for believing this tension is more prominent in biology. (shrink)