In this highly accessible book, a distinguished philosopher says current focus on the brain conceals the real powers of the mind. Edward Pols revisits one of the basic topics of philosophy: what is the distinction between mind and body and what is the relation between them? He disagrees fundamentally with the many contemporary philosophers who concentrate on the findings of neurophysiology and cognitive science and so look only to the brain for the causes and explanation of mind. Pols concedes the (...) importance of such scientific studies but maintains that they focus on the infrastructure of mind and ignore the momentous difference between the infrastructure and mind itself. Pols calls upon the reader to attend to mind itself as a concrete and experientially available reality. This kind of attention, he argues persuasively, reveals mind to be at once causally dependent on the brain and causally effective on the physical processes of the brain and the world. Pols also examines the hierarchical view of mind and causality first proposed by Plato and Aristotle, the supersession of that view by the received scientific doctrine of causality, and the mistaken denial of the power of the mind to know an independent reality—a denial that resulted from the philosophical doctrines about knowing developed in the era that began with Descartes and ended with Kant. (shrink)

Introduction A Preliminary Look at the Scandal of Radical Realism: Direct and Indirect Knowing • This book is about the nature and scope of rationality, ...

I The Question of the Authenticity of Responsibility The Prima Facie Explanatory Value of Rational Action When we act, something comes into being : in the...

In this brilliant analysis of mind-body problems Edward Pols adds new dimen­sions to the discussion of basic issues. The prisoner is Socrates, who, in a se­ries of actions involving moral decisions, finds himself under sentence of death, and who has now decided to undergo the sentence rather than accept the opportuni­ty to escape provided by powerful friends. Pols takes as his point of departure Socrates’ nai;ve statement of the contrast be­tween a scientific analysis of a moral action and the point (...) of view taken by the agent himself, and his rejection of the adequacy of the scientific analysis. (shrink)

After a contrast of the the prima facie complexity of the causality of the rational agent with the received scientific doctrine of causality, it is noticed that the prima facie causal authority of rational action belongs to a macroscopic domain in which all science and philosophy takes place and in which the formal/telic nature of that causality must be taken for granted. Any philosophical justification or philosophical criticism of the status of that macroscopic arena must therefore take place within that (...) same arena. It is then argued that a justification of the ontological status of that arena is possible by an exploitation of the reflexive resource of the rational awareness we exercise within that arena. It is claimed that this resource can be fairly described as the justification of our direct knowing of real beings/entities other than the knower and that such realistic knowing is at the same time an exemplary mode of causality having a complexity that is both formal/telic and hierarchical . In short, the rational agent is also a direct knower, and direct knowing requires a sense of "cause' more complex than the received scientific doctrine of causality provides. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

THAT a human action is in some sense identical with its physiological basis is true. The sense in which that identity is properly to be understood is a very subtle one, and although I shall make some suggestions about it here, this paper is designed chiefly to make the negative point that the identity is, at any rate, not properly to be understood in the sense that a physicalist would maintain. The physicalist theory of the identity of A and PB (...) is analogous to the theory of mind-body identity maintained by central state materialists, but I shall not deal directly with the latter theory, for reasons that will soon become clear. All the same, if the present refutation of a physicalist identity of A and PB is successful, it will be seen to be a fortiori effective against the analogous mind-body identity. (shrink)

FOR THE GREATER part of this century a certain dogmatic complex of analytic-linguistic philosophy has prevented philosophers of that persuasion from acknowledging the real foundation question. It has been taken for granted instead that the foundation question begins and ends with the fate of what has come to be called, in the last two decades, foundationalism. If the thesis of this essay should prove persuasive, it will reinforce the dominant conviction that foundationalism is unacceptable. But that is only incidental to (...) my purpose. It is, however, essential to my purpose that two component dogmas of the complex are also principles of foundationalism. It will therefore be convenient to have before us the principles that appear to be common to the various versions of foundationalism: knowledge is a matter of justified true belief; knowledge consists of a system of propositions, and it is therefore these in which the knower has justified true belief; the justification of some of the propositions is direct, or immediate, and these are the foundational ones; the justification of the rest of the propositions is mediated by the foundational ones and so is indirect. (shrink)

COUNTERREVOLUTIONARY RESPONSES to the twentieth-century revolution in logic have usually started from the assumption that there is in fact a body of theory for which the name 'extensional logic' is appropriate. Debate has centered not on that assumption but rather on such questions as whether that logic includes every important feature that belongs in a proper logic and whether it excludes all features that should be excluded from that ordered realm. Revisionist logicians have usually supposed that extensional logic, for all (...) its power and versatility, does not express the tight bond between meanings that is of the very essence of the logical connection; and they have labored to provide an alternative intensional logic that does indeed express it. (shrink)

IN RETURNING again and again, over the years, to the same topics in first philosophy, I have tried on each occasion to justify what I was doing by reassessing our cognitive authority for dealing with such topics. By doing so, I allied myself with an old and familiar tradition: the one that takes it for granted that first philosophy is always under an obligation to justify itself. Its substantive topics, according to this tradition, can be legitimately pursued only if it (...) is also shown in that very pursuit by what right, by what authority, one does so. If, proceeding in this way, we should ever manage to achieve a first philosophy that commanded general respect, it would then be seen to be first not just in its substantive findings but in its rational authority as well. That prospect is enough to make me wish to persuade all those who are interested in bringing the discipline into being to call it, as I do here, by its earliest and most illuminating name. And to say "bring it into being" is no mere flourish, for the discipline has never become fully actual--has never, that is, achieved the pervasive and living authority that continues to be our deepest intellectual need. (shrink)

THE PHILOSOPHIC POSITION of which this essay is a partial expression shows science to be realistic in certain circumstances and antirealistic in others. But the position is not so irenic as this beginning might suggest. For one thing, the realism upon which this view of science depends, which I call radical realism, is different from any of the versions proposed over the years by the forces of realism in that controversy. For another, the antirealism envisioned for some of the multiform (...) occasions of science is not in the least a version of the well-known antirealism of the linguistic consensus but rather a modified antirealism that paradoxically depends for its clarity and force on that same radical realism. I have given some account of radical realism in earlier papers and books, but its full application to science is left for a forthcoming book. The present paper makes the point that it is impossible to reach a just settlement of the realism vs antirealism case--whether construed narrowly, as an issue for philosophy of science, or broadly, as an issue for the entire rational enterprise--if it is tried in the venue of the linguistic consensus. (shrink)

In this essay I will assume that all well-developed discussions of the authenticity of responsibility are metaphysical ones. But as I intend to make use of the notion of being at a number of crucial points, I will call responsibility ontic responsibility rather than metaphysical responsibility. If ontic responsibility should be authentic, both social responsibility and its most important particular instance, legal responsibility, will be qualified by it, and we shall not be able to capture their full meaning in terms (...) of de facto accountability. As for moral responsibility, its status will also depend upon whether or not ontic responsibility is authentic. Indeed, many readers might prefer to say that "ontic responsibility" is simply another name for moral responsibility--that the question whether we are so constituted in our ontological natures as to make accountability appropriate, just, and seemly is merely the question whether moral responsibility is authentic. But there are some grounds for thinking that ontic responsibility is a wider category and that, if it is authentic, moral responsibility is a special case of it--ontic responsibility exercised in certain well-defined and very important circumstances. It is clear, for instance, that ontic responsibility covers all acts whatsoever, or at least all acts that admit of degree of excellence, so that all our work in science, in the arts, and indeed in the entire practical-productive sphere comes under it. Thus, all Max Planck's work in science from his 1879 doctoral dissertation to his famous 1900 paper would exemplify it. But most of us would probably say that only some of the ontically responsible acts performed in the course of his scientific work were also instances of moral responsibility--perhaps only those which involved relations with other persons. At any rate, in this essay I will assume that, if ontic responsibility is authentic, moral responsibility is a special case of it. It will be clear, then, that we want the notion of ontic responsibility to function in many of the ways in which the notion of free will functions in other settings. We shall see that there is some advantage in thus avoiding that vexed notion in what follows. (shrink)

THERE would appear to be no philosophical consensus about the nature of human action, even though discussion of that ancient topic has intensified in the last two decades. I shall nevertheless ask the reader to suppose that the question has at last been settled in its main lines, and settled in a way I shall describe in a moment. The supposition I have in mind is no light matter. The universe it envisions is radically different from what it would be (...) if some other supposition were in its place. A detailed justification of it would require a thoroughgoing reassessment of many of the notions about causality that have prevailed in this century. Though I have offered something of that kind in earlier writings, the most I can hope to do here is to state the supposition in as brief, vivid, and concrete a way as I can manage. After that I shall ask what view of the rational agent it leads us to. No matter how action itself is interpreted, common sense attributes action to an agent. If the actions are those that take place in an atmosphere of rational discourse, it is natural to think of the agent as a rational one. Do we have any right to make this attribution in any way more exacting than that of common sense? Precisely what ontological status does the rational agent have? What, in particular, are we to make of its self-identity, seeing that some actions seem to modify the self-identity in which in a prima facie sense they originate? (shrink)

Edward Pols has made it his purpose in this perceptive study to deal with the aspects of Whitehead's philosophy that belong to traditional metaphysics. Mr. Pols closely examines Process and Reality, Whitehead's chief metaphysical work, and uses Science and the Modern World, Adventures of Ideas, and Modes of Thought to clarify difficulties with some of the doctrines in that work. Mr. Pols's primary concern is with freedom, and he uses this single theme to examine Whitehead's metaphysical system in depth.

The author is a writer of startling productivity: his publisher reminds us that he has written fifty-nine books and two hundred thirteen journal articles. It is not surprising that, as Rescher observes, reviewers of his individual works have generally failed to understand that a systematic whole is at issue. In the projected trilogy of which the present work is the first volume, he intends to present his philosophical ideas "in a sufficiently comprehensive and coordinated form that their systematic interrelatedness becomes (...) clearly manifest". This volume is devoted to epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of nature. It will be followed by a volume dealing with value theory, ethics, and practical philosophy; and a volume dealing with the nature of philosophical inquiry itself. It is thus not easy to give a satisfactory account of the present book in a short space. (shrink)

The general theme of this book is action, so I begin by contrasting two past approaches to action. The first accepts the arena of common sense: the arena in which the term “action” had its first use—and it focuses on what is available in that arena by virtue of the deployment of our rational awareness toward the prima facie level of action. This approach does not feel obliged to regard what is found in that prima facie level as phenomenal. The (...) telic nature of action, for instance, is accepted as what it purports to be rather than taken as something that needs to be explained and even explained away. The ontology of this approach is one of entities/beings that act, and actions are given an explanatory value, as when, for instance, we ascribe some scientific discovery or some work of art to the action of some scientist or artist. This approach is compatible with the ancient notion that, as causes, rational agents are rooted in a transcendent causal/formative power. The other approach, of which analytic action theory is a case in point, regards supposed rational acts as something that awaits explanation by the methods of science or by such philosophical methods as take science as their guide. Most of its practitioners incline toward this or that version of reductionism. Thus, although action theorists regard prima facie intentions, volitions, and the like as an important way of distinguishing actions from other kinds of events, they tend to suppress the telic aspect of an intention in favor of a causal account in which the intention is regarded as an event that stands at the start of a linked series of events understood in terms of efficient causality; and in which the mental aspect of the intention is dismissed by making it identical with, epiphenomenal upon, supervenient upon, or realized in some physical event or events. (shrink)

"This book," the author tells us in his introduction, "rests on two supports, on the thought of Husserl and on the moral philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. We will use issues from classical moral philosophy, issues such as deliberation, choice, character, and action, as a kind of magnet to draw out potentials in Husserl's thought that have not yet been actualized. At the same time we will use the superbly rigorous technique and the powerful insights found in Husserl's writing to (...) refresh the ancient understanding of human conduct". By this point Sokolowski has already introduced the Husserlian terms 'intentionality', 'categoriality', and 'constitute', which roughly define that portion of Husserl's thought he will draw upon. (shrink)

The privacy defined and discussed in this book is not the privacy we are said to have a right to as over against the intrusions of our neighbor or the state or some other corporate body. Weiss, as it happens, is also concerned with our rights and in fact devotes the last chapter to them; but he takes the privacy of the book's title to be the source of all human rights, including the right to privacy just mentioned. In that (...) chapter he makes it clear that in his mind any discussion of rights that does not take account of the metaphysical ground he calls privacy will fall short of full rationality. 'Privacy', as used in this book, is therefore a metaphysical term. No reader of Weiss's earlier work will be surprised to learn that this is a book in metaphysics rather than political theory. It contains, however, many concrete applications, and in some respects it is as close to common sense as a work by Aristotle. Though the author occasionally makes use of terms--for instance, 'finalities', 'actualities'--to which he has given a special metaphysical sense in earlier works, he is always careful to define them, so that the book is self-contained and can be read with profit even by those who have no acquaintance with his work. (shrink)

In this book the author collects a number of "phenomenological studies of various kinds of intentionality" written over the years since the appearance of his Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being. He thinks of that book as a very formal one, and hopes to show in this one how Husserl's style of philosophical thinking illuminates "a range of diverse and more concrete phenomena". Although the book is thus frankly about appearances, the author makes the important reservation (...) that "the things that are can also seem to be as they are"; in that sense he conceives of the project as "a venture into the question of being and a clarification of what we are". Sokolowski sets out to "describe a form of appearance" in each essay, but he supposes that being is the "origin of these forms"; that they are "forms through which being is diffracted at some distance from itself". One wonders, in the case of things that are and "seem to be as they are," whether this diffraction does not take place at all or takes place very close to being. Where the category of appearance plays so dominant a role as it does in phenomenology, the relation between appearance and being is always troublesome: where everything is in some sense appearance, how shall we sort out the things that are what they seem from the things that are seemings and nothing but seemings? (shrink)

The author of this substantial and illuminating book believes that philosophy consists in conceptual analysis, or at least that the appropriate method of philosophy is conceptual analysis, which he does not equate with linguistic analysis. It is the philosopher's job "to attempt to clarify concepts, to attempt to weigh up arguments, and above all, to attempt to discover the presuppositions involved in the vocabularies of the doctrines themselves". Although Shalom acknowledges his indebtedness to Collingwood for this view of philosophy, his (...) own view of the philosopher's interest in presuppositions includes the "justification or invalidation" of presuppositions no less than the discovery and clarification of them. In this he clearly differs from the historicism of Collingwood. (shrink)