It is quite clear that sin like any other evil involves the privation of a requisite perfection, that it has what is called a negative malice. But is that all? Even a superficial examination of a sin of transgression shows that there is another element, an act, which is something positive: peccatum non est pura privatio, sed est actus debito ordine privatus; peccatum est actus inordinatus. Is this positive element the formal constituent of sin, so that sin may be said (...) not only to have a negative malice, but also a positive one? Or, in other words, is a sin bad not only on account of what it lacks, of what it is not, but also—and principally—on account of what it is? (shrink)

Husserl seems to have devoted roughly equal amounts of energy and pages to the description of perception, judgement, and imagination. By “description,” he meant the analysis of the traits and components of mental states or acts and their objects. As his views changed over the years about the nature of intentionality and philosophy, the descriptive psychology of the Logical Investigations (1900/01) gave way to descriptive programmes in which the objects of perception and of judgement were conceived of in terms of (...) a new, analytic framework; in particular Husserl lost interest in describing the things and processes in the real world that are the objects of perception and judgement and so too in describing their relations to these acts. His new analytic framework, particularly as it applies to perception, has been thoroughly expounded and discussed in the literature. My aim here is to expound Husserl's first descriptions of perception within the framework of the Investigations and to incorporate as far as possible his later descriptive results to the extent that these are separable from his later turn to idealism. (shrink)

The three young philosophers Kevin Mulligan, Peter Simons and Barry Smith have become well-known in the last few years especially in German-speaking analytical philosophy and phenomenology circles. This is on the one hand as a result of their historical and systematic philosophical work; but it is also because of the provocative way in which they represent their philosophy. Because they often appear in threes, they have become known as the "gang of three" or "three musketeers" or even – and (...) this in an admiring sense – "mafiosi" (Rescher). They are known primarily for the small workshops they have been organizing in uncomplicated Anglo-Saxon manner all over Europe. Their goal has been to show that analytic philosophy as it has been pursued up to now is in need of reform and also that the history of scientific philosophizing is not identical to the history of Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy. Above all, they have tried to make more well known the Austrian tradition of scientific philosophy, and they can be given credit for having done much to promote the current interest in this tradition, which means: the history of Austrian philosophy of the 19th and early 20th centuries and its historical context in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. (shrink)

An existing industrial hydrogen generation and distribution infrastructure is described, and a number of large-scale investment projects are outlined. All of these projects have the potential to generate significant volumes of low-cost, low-carbon hydrogen. The technologies concerned range from gasification of coal with carbon capture and storage to gasification of a range of biomass streams. These biomass streams derive in turn from the supply chains that feed large liquid biofuel production plants—some operational and the others under construction. Having described how (...) such developments are coming together in a particular location to allow accelerated movement toward a hydrogen economy, this article explores the conditions under which similar acceleration could be seen in other locations. (shrink)

Bowler, Gardiner, and Grice have shown a small but significant impairment of autonoetic awareness or remembering involved in the episodic memory experiences of adults with Asperger’s syndrome. This was compensated by an increase in experiences of noetic awareness or knowing. The question remains as to whether the residual autonoetic awareness in Asperger individuals is qualitatively the same as that of typical comparison participants. Three experiments are presented in which manipulations that have shown differential effects on different kinds of conscious awareness (...) in memory in typical populations are employed with a sample of adults with Asperger’s syndrome. The results suggest that the experiences of remembering reported by such individuals, although reduced in quantity, are qualitatively similar to those seen in the typical population. The results are discussed in the context of current theories of awareness in episodic memory. (shrink)

Introduction to Phenomenology is an outstanding and comprehensive guide to an important but often little-understood movement in European philosophy. Dermot Moran lucidly examines the contributions of phenomenology's nine seminal thinkers: Brentano, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. Written in a clear and engaging style, this volume charts the course of the movement from its origins in Husserl to its transformation by Derrida. It describes the thought of Heidegger and Sartre, phenomenology's most famous thinkers, and introduces and (...) assesses the distinctive use of phenomenology by some of its lesser-known exponents, such as Levinas, Arendt and Gadamer. Throughout, the enormous influence of phenomenology on the course of twentieth-century philosophy is thoroughly explored. Clearly explaining technical terms and avoiding jargon, Introduction to Phenomenology is an indispensable introduction to the history and substance of this vital current in intellectual thought. (shrink)

A concise and accessible dictionary of the key terms and concepts in Husserl's philosophy, his major works and philosophical influences.

Sometimes citizens disagree about political matters, but a decision must be made. We have two theoretical frameworks for resolving political disagreement. The first is the framework of social choice. In it, our goal is to treat parties to the dispute fairly, and there is no sense in which some are right and the others wrong. The second framework is that of collective decision-making. Here, we do believe that preferences are truth apt, and our moral consideration is owed not to those (...) who disagree but to the community that stands to benefit or suffer from the decision. In this chapter, I describe and explore these two frameworks. I conclude two things. First, analysis of real-world disagreement suggests that collective decision-making is the right way to model politics. In most, possibly even all, political disagreement, all parties believe (if implicitly) that there is an objective standard of correctness. Second, this matter is connected to the concept of pluralism. If pluralism is true, then collective decision-making cannot be applied to some political disagreements. More surprisingly, pluralism may rule out the applicability of social choice theory as well. (shrink)

The proposal on offer is a radical form of egalitarianism. Under it, each citizen receives the same income, regardless of profession or indeed whether he or she works or not. This proposal is bad for two reasons. First, it is inefficient. It would eliminate nearly all incentive to work, thereby shrinking national income and leaving all citizens poorly off (albeit equally poorly off). I illustrate this inefficiency via an indifference curve analysis. Second, the proposal would be regarded as unjust by (...) almost everyone. The empirical work on justice makes this plain. Equal pay for equal work is desirable; equal pay no matter what is something else entirely. It is an idea not likely to find adherents. (shrink)

Disagreement is a ubiquitous feature of human life, and philosophers have dutifully attended to it. One important question related to disagreement is epistemological: How does a rational person change her beliefs (if at all) in light of disagreement from others? The typical methodology for answering this question is to endorse a steadfast or conciliatory disagreement norm (and not both) on a priori grounds and selected intuitive cases. In this paper, I argue that this methodology is misguided. Instead, a thoroughgoingly Bayesian (...) strategy is what's needed. Such a strategy provides conciliatory norms in appropriate cases and steadfast norms in appropriate cases. I argue, further, that the few extant efforts to address disagreement in the Bayesian spirit are laudable but uncompelling. A modelling, rather than a functional, approach gets us the right norms and is highly general, allowing the epistemologist to deal with (1) multiple epistemic interlocutors, (2) epistemic superiors and inferiors (i.e. not just epistemic peers), and (3) dependence between interlocutors. (shrink)

There are at least three well-known accounts of value and evaluations which assign a central role to emotions. There is first of all the emotivist view, according to which evaluations express or manifest emotional states or attitudes but have no truth values. Second is the dispositionalist view, according to which to possess a value or axiological property is to be capable of provoking or to be likely to provoke emotional responses in subjects characterised in certain ways. Third, there is an (...) epistemology of values that is sometimes invoked by the naïve realist. If the naïve realist is one for whom evaluations are made true by the possession by objects of monadic, mind-independent axiological properties, then one natural question is: What sort of cognitive access do we have to such properties? These value properties, the realist may say, are properties we come to know of by virtue of our emotions. Emotions, he may say, present value properties to us. One variant of this view is the claim that values are the "formal objects" of emotions. Closely related to these claims is the view that our emotions are appropriate to value properties, or not. Indignation and injustice, it is sometimes said, are related in one or more of these three ways. (shrink)

This chapter begins with sketching briefly the emergence of intuition in rationalist philosophy. It focuses on the following problems: First, how are we to understand the defining characteristics of intuition in general, namely immediacy and singularity, and, furthermore, the characteristics of human intuition in particular, namely givenness, passivity and receptivity? Second, what, precisely, is given immediately in intuition? Third, in Immanuel Kant’s distinction between form and content, how can the pure forms of intuition (space and time) be themselves intuitions? The (...) chapter discusses precisely Kant’s intention to overcome Locke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz by introducing a new notion: intuitions as a separate ‘source of knowledge’. Another important feature of Kant’s departure from the Scholastic and rationalist tradition is his rejection of intellectual intuition, of the immediate apprehension of singular objects by intellect without the mediation of sensibility. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological account of the constitution of the social world, in relation to some phenomenological contributions to the constitution of sociality found in Husserl’s students and followers, including Heidegger, Gurwitsch, Walther, Otaka, and Schutz. Heidegger is often seen as being the first to highlight explicitly human existence as Mitsein and In-der-Welt-Sein, but it is now clear from the Husserliana publications that, in his private research manuscripts especially during his Freiburg years, Husserl employs many of (...) the terms associated with Heidegger, e.g. Mitwelt, Weltlichkeit, Alltäglichkeit, Zeitlichkeit, and Geschichtlichkeit, and had detailed discussions of various forms of social constitution. It is clear that Husserl and Heidegger were exploring these themes in dialogue with one another, and that Husserl, in fact, has a rich phenomenology of sociality that is worth exploring in its own right. In this paper, I will outline some of the key aspects of Husserl’s contribution. (shrink)

Dermot Moran provides a lucid, engaging, and critical introduction to Edmund Husserl's philosophy, with specific emphasis on his development of phenomenology. This book is a comprehensive guide to Husserl's thought from its origins in nineteenth-century concerns with the nature of scientific knowledge and with psychologism, through his breakthrough discovery of phenomenology and his elucidation of the phenomenological method, to the late analyses of culture and the life-world. Husserl's complex ideas are presented in a clear and expert manner. Individual chapters (...) explore Husserl's key texts including _Philosophy of Arithmetic_, _Logical Investigations_, _Ideas_ I, _Cartesian Meditations_ and _Crisis of the European Sciences_. In addition, Moran offers penetrating criticisms and evaluations of Husserl's achievement, including the contribution of his phenomenology to current philosophical debates concerning consciousness and the mind. _Edmund Husserl_ is an invaluable guide to understanding the thought of one of the seminal thinkers of the twentieth century. It will be helpful to students of contemporary philosophy, and to those interested in scientific, literary and cultural studies on the European continent. (shrink)

In recent years there have been attempts to integrate first-person phenomenology into naturalistic science. Traditionally, however, Husserlian phenomenology has been resolutely anti-naturalist. Husserl identified naturalism as the dominant tendency of twentieth-century science and philosophy and he regarded it as an essentially self-refuting doctrine. Naturalism is a point of view or attitude (a reification of the natural attitude into the naturalistic attitude) that does not know that it is an attitude. For phenomenology, naturalism is objectivism. But phenomenology maintains that objectivity is (...) constituted through the intentional activity of cooperating subjects. Understanding the role of cooperating subjects in producing the experience of the one, shared, objective world keeps phenomenology committed to a resolutely anti-naturalist (or ) philosophy. (shrink)

The concept of habit enfolds an enormous richness and diversity of meanings. According to Husserl, habit, along with association, memory, and so on, belongs to the very essence of the psychic.1 Husserl even speaks of an overall genetic “phenomenology of habitualities”. In this paper, as an initial attempt to explicate the complexity of phenomenological treatments of habit, want to trace Husserl’s conception of habit as it emerged in his mature genetic phenomenology, in order to highlight his enormous and neglected original (...) contribution in this area. I shall show that Husserl was by no means limited to a Cartesian intellectualist explication of habitual action (as commentators such as Bourdieu and Dreyfus have claimed), but attempted to characterize its complexity across the range of human individual, sub-personal, personal, social and collective experience. Habit, as we shall see, for Husserl, is intimately involved in the constitution of meaningfulness (Husserl’s Sinnhaftigkeit) and forms of sense (Sinnesgestalten) at all levels, from the level of perceptual experience, through the formation of the ego, to the development of society, history and tradition, indeed to our whole sense of the harmonious course of worldly life and to the genetic constitution of worldhood as such. Habituality, furthermore, is a key structural principle in the genetic constitution of the transcendental ego itself, as it unfolds as a concrete living and acting person in an intersubjective, cultural and historical world. (shrink)

In this article I wish to re-examine the vexed issue of the possibility of idealism in ancient and medieval philosophy with particular reference to the case of Johannes Scottus Eriugena (c. 800idealisms immaterialism as his standard for idealism, and it is this decision, coupled with his failure to acknowledge the legacy of German idealism, which prevents him from seeing the classical and medieval roots of idealism more broadly understood.

Politics is rife with motivated cognition. People do not dispassionately engage with the evidence when they form political beliefs; they interpret it selectively, generating justifications for their desired conclusions and reasons why contrary evidence should be ignored. Moreover, research shows that epistemic ability (e.g. intelligence and familiarity with evidence) is correlated with motivated cognition. Bjørn Hallsson has pointed out that this raises a puzzle for the epistemology of disagreement. On the one hand, we typically think that epistemic ability in an (...) interlocutor gives us reason to downgrade our belief upon learning that we disagree. On the other hand, if our interlocutor is under the sway of motivated cognition, then we have reason to discount his opinion. In this paper, I argue that Hallsson's puzzle is solved by adopting a Bayesian approach to disagreement. If an interlocutor is under the sway of motivated cognition, his disagreement should not affect our beliefs--no matter his ability. Because we implicitly and to high accuracy know his beliefs before he reveals them to us, disagreement provides us with no new information on which to conditionalize. I advance a model which accommodates the motivated cognition dynamic and other key epistemic features of disagreement. (shrink)

What is the relation between the intentionality of states and attitudes which can miss their mark, such as belief and desire, and the intentionality of acts, states and attitudes which cannot miss their mark, such as the different types of knowledge and simple seeing? Two theories of the first type of intentionality, the theory of correctness conditions and the theory of satisfaction conditions, are compared. It is argued that knowledge always involves knowledge of formal objects such as facts and values, (...) that emotions are reactions to (apparently) known values and that beliefs are reactions to known or apparently known facts or to the objects of relational states. (shrink)

This introduction presents a state of the art of philosophical research on cognitive phenomenology and its relation to the nature of conscious thinking more generally. We firstly introduce the question of cognitive phenomenology, the motivation for the debate, and situate the discussion within the fields of philosophy, cognitive psychology and consciousness studies. Secondly, we review the main research on the question, which we argue has so far situated the cognitive phenomenology debate around the following topics and arguments: phenomenal contrast, epistemic (...) arguments and challenges, introspection, ontology and temporal character, intentionality, inner speech, agency, holistic perspective, categorical perception, value, and phenomenological description. Thirdly, we suggest future developments by pointing to four questions that can be explored in relation to the cognitive phenomenology discussion: the self and self-awareness, attention, emotions and general the... (shrink)

‘What is characteristic of every mental activity’, according to Brentano, is ‘the reference to something as an object. In this respect every mental activity seems to be something relational.’ But what sort of a relation, if any, is our cognitive access to the world? This question – which we shall call Brentano’s question – throws a new light on many of the traditional problems of epistemology. The paper defends a view of perceptual acts as real relations of a subject to (...) an object. To make this view coherent, a theory of different types of relations is developed, resting on ideas on formal ontology put forward by Husserl in his Logical Investigations and on the theory of relations sketched in Smith's "Acta cum fundamentis in re". The theory is applied to the notion of a Cambridge change, which proves to have an unforeseen relevance to our understanding of perception. (shrink)

Kevin Mulligan has examined in several papers and a book the conceptual relations between the descriptions of mind, language and colours in the philosophies of Brentano’s heirs and the descriptions given later by Wittgenstein. In Chapter 12, he looks at what Bühler and Wittgenstein have to say about the phenomenon of being guided by something and two of their favourite examples – reading and our relations to rules.

This paper examines the pretence theories of irony of Jancke (1929) and Currie (2007) and argues for a pretence theory according to which the evaluations of the ironist are more important than his emotions, negative and positive, and bear principally on cognitive values. The formal object of irony is foolishness and not any ethical, political or aesthetic disvalue. I suggest that the view of irony outlined resembles in many respects the conception of irony to be found in the writings of (...) Robert Musil. (shrink)

The twentieth century was one of the most significant and exciting periods ever witnessed in philosophy, characterized by intellectual change and development on a massive scale. _The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy_ is an outstanding authoritative survey and assessment of the century as a whole. Featuring twenty-two chapters written by leading international scholars, this collection is divided into five clear parts and presents a comprehensive picture of the period for the first time: major themes and movements logic, language, knowledge (...) and metaphysics philosophy of mind, psychology and science phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, and critical theory politics, ethics, aesthetics. Featuring annotated further reading and a comprehensive glossary, _The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy_ is indispensable for anyone interested in philosophy over the last one hundred years, suitable for both expert and novice alike. (shrink)

Research into people’s comprehension of novel noun-noun phrases has long neglected the possible influences of prosody during meaning construction. At the same time, work in conceptual combination has disagreed about whether different classes of interpretation emerge from single or multiple processes; for example, whether people use distinct mechanisms when they interpret octopus apartment as property-based (e.g., an apartment with eight rooms) or relation-based (e.g., an apartment where an octopus lives). In two studies, we manipulate the prosodic emphasis patterns of novel (...) noun-noun combinations (placing stress on the modifier noun, the head noun, or dual stress on both nouns) and ask participants to generate an interpretation for the novel phrase. Results show that people are faster to generate property-based interpretations when dual emphasis stresses both nouns equally, with prosody having little effect on the speed of relation-based interpretations. These findings highlight a role for prosody during meaning construction and underline important differences between relation- and property-based interpretations that are difficult to reconcile with unitary process views of conceptual combination. (shrink)