In this introduction to the life and thought of one of the most important French thinkers of the twentieth-century Eric Matthews shows how Merleau-Ponty has contributed to current debates in philosophy, such as the nature of consciousness, the relation between biology and personality, the historical understanding of human thought and society, and many others. Surveying the whole range of Merleau-Ponty's thinking, the author examines his views about the nature of phenomenology and the primacy of perception; his account of human (...) embodiment, being-in-the-world, and his understanding of human behaviour; his conception of the self and its relation to other selves; and, his views on society, politics, and the arts. A final chapter considers his later thought, published posthumously. The ideas of Merleau-Ponty are shown to be of immense importance to the development of French philosophy and the author evaluates his distinctive contributions and relates his thought to that of his predecessors, contemporaries and successors, both in France and elsewhere. This unrivalled introduction will be welcomed by philosophers and cognitive scientists as well as students taking courses in contemporary continental philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that by discarding the significance of philosophical methods and tools, the picture of field philosophy offered in Socrates Tenured is more akin to public interest consulting than to philosophy.

What are the meanings of number expressions, and what can they tell us about questions of central importance to the philosophy of mathematics, specifically 'Do numbers exist?' This Element attempts to shed light on this question by outlining a recent debate between substantivalists and adjectivalists regarding the semantic function of number words in numerical statements. After highlighting their motivations and challenges, I develop a comprehensive polymorphic semantics for number expressions. I argue that accounting for the numerous meanings and how they (...) are related leads to a strengthened argument for realism, one which renders familiar forms of nominalism highly implausible. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Before “applied science” and “technology” became keywords, the concept of art was central to discourse about material culture and its connections to natural knowledge. By the late nineteenth century, a new discourse of applied science had replaced the older discourse of art. This older discourse of art, especially as presented in Enlightenment encyclopedias, addressed the relationship between art and science in depth. But during the nineteenth century the concept of fine art gradually displaced the broader meanings of “art,” thus (...) undermining the utility of the term for discourse on the relationship between knowledge and practice. This narrowed meaning of “art” obscured key aspects of the industrial world. In effect, middle-class agents of industrialism, including “men of science,” used the rhetoric of “applied science” and, later, “technology” to cement the exclusion of artisanal knowledge from the discourse of industrial modernity. (shrink)

According to what I call the Traditional View, there is a fundamental semantic distinction between counting and measuring, which is reflected in two fundamentally different sorts of scales: discrete cardinality scales and dense measurement scales. Opposed to the Traditional View is a thesis known as the Universal Density of Measurement: there is no fundamental semantic distinction between counting and measuring, and all natural language scales are dense. This paper considers a new argument for the latter, based on a puzzle I (...) call the Fractional Cardinalities Puzzle: if answers to ‘how many’-questions always designate cardinalities, and if cardinalities are necessarily discrete, then how can e.g. ‘2.38’ be a correct answer to the question ‘How many ounces of water are in the beaker?’? If cardinality scales are dense, then the answer is obvious: ‘2.38’ designates a fractional cardinality, contra the Traditional View. However, I provide novel evidence showing that ‘many’ is not uniformly associated with the dimension of cardinality across contexts, and so ‘how many’-questions can ask about other kinds of measures, including e.g. volume. By combining independently motivated analyses of cardinal adjectives, measure phrases, complex fractions, and degrees, I develop a semantics intended to defend the Traditional View against purported counterexamples like this and others which have received a fair amount of recent philosophical attention. (shrink)

Reaching from the decline of the Greek Polis to Saint Augustine, this first volume of Eric Voegelin's eagerly anticipated History of Political Ideas fills the gap left between volumes 3 and 4 of Order and History.

In _Civilization and Its Discontents_, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. "Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it," he proposed, "as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment." After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and Yugoslavia, Leviticus 19:18 seems (...) even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined. In _The Neighbor_, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In "Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor," Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt's political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In "Miracles Happen," Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek's "Neighbors and Other Monsters" reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, _The Neighbor_ will prove to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. (shrink)

Recent work within psychology demonstrates that unconscious cognition plays a central role in the judgments and actions of individuals. We distinguish between two basic types unconscious social cognition: unconsciousness of the influences on judgments and actions, and unconscious of the mental states that give rise to judgments and actions. Influence unconsciousness is corroborated by strong empirical evidence, but unconscious states are difficult to verify. We discuss procedures aimed at providing conclusive evidence of state unconsciousness, and apply them to recent empirical (...) findings. (shrink)

A chronological approach that examines the progression of Levinas's deliberations on time over six decades, thus providing new insights about aspects of Levinasian thought that have consistently troubled readers, including the differences between Levinas's early and later writings, his controversial invocation of the feminine, and the blurry line between philosophy and religion in his work"--Provided by publisher.

In the accompanying article in this issue Neuss challenges the explanation that was first suggested by Schwarz for how to teach the relative occupation and ionization of atomic orbitals in the atoms of metals in the first transition series. The present article is a response to Neuss’ critique which includes a detailed examination of his claim that there is no conclusive evidence for the view that the scandium and other first transition metal atoms lose 4s electrons in preference to those (...) located in 3d orbitals. (shrink)

Classical logic is traditionally introduced by itself, but that makes it seem arbitrary and unnatural. This text introduces classical alongside several nonclassical logics (relevant, constructive, quantative, paraconsistent).

The Logic of Metaphor uses techniques from possible worlds semantics to provide formal truth-conditions for many grammatical classes of metaphors. It gives logically precise and practically useful syntactic and semantic rules for generating and interpreting metaphors. These rules are implemented in a working computer program. The book treats the lexicon as a conceptual network with semantics provided by an intensional predicate calculus. It gives rules for finding analogies in such networks. It shows how to syntactically and semantically analyze texts containing (...) metaphors and how to use structural similarities between parts of possible worlds to provide truth-conditions for metaphors. Meanings for metaphors are linked to the modal logics of identity and indiscernibility. The book shows how to extend deductive and abductive inference systems to handle metaphors. It shows how to handle novel metaphorical word-senses. The Logic of Metaphor will be useful to philosophers, logicians, linguists, and computer scientists. (shrink)

The primary argument against mereological singularism—the view that definite plural noun phrases like ‘the students’ refer to “set-like entities”—is that it is ultimately incoherent. The most forceful form of this charge is due to Barry Schein, who argues that singularists must accept a certain comprehension principle which entails the existence of things having the contradictory property of being both atomic and non-atomic. The purpose of this paper is to defuse Schein’s argument, by noting three necessary and independently motivated restrictions on (...) the metalinguistic predicates ‘atom’ and ‘non-atom’: both are sort, property, and context-relative. With these restrictions in place, Schein’s problematic assumption becomes evident: his presumed singularist analysis of ‘non-atom’ conflates the metalanguage with the meta-metalanguage, i.e. the language used to talk about the metalanguage. (shrink)

This paper addresses methodological and metatheoretical aspects of the ongoing debate over the adaptive significance of Tibetan polyandry. Methodological contributions include a means of estimating relatedness of fraternal co-husbands given multigenerational polyandry, and use of Hamilton’s rule and a member-joiner model to specify how inclusive fitness gains of co-husbands may vary according to seniority, opportunity costs, and group size. These methods are applied to various data sets, particularly that of Crook and Crook (1988). The metatheoretical discussion pivots on the critique (...) by evolutionary psychologists of adaptationist accounts of polyandry. Contrary to this critique, I argue that valid adaptationist explanations of such practices do not necessitate cognitive mechanisms evolved specifically to produce polyandry, nor that there must have been exact equivalents of Tibetan agricultural estates and social institutions in human evolutionary history. Specific issues raised when one posits either kin selection or cultural evolution to explain the adaptive features of Tibetan polyandry are also discussed. (shrink)

Digitalists base their thoughts about reality on concepts taken from the sciences of information and computation. For digitalists, these sciences are prior to the physical sciences. Digitalists emphatically reject substance metaphysics. They are neither materialists nor idealists nor dualists. They have their own novel definitions of bodies, minds, lives, and souls. They talk about digital universes running on digital gods, and they regard nature as a recursively self-improving system of computations. They endorse digitized theories of resurrection and reincarnation. But they (...) also argue for deeper and more mathematical approaches to life after death. All these digital ideas are naturalistic. They are consistent with our best sciences. (shrink)

I argue that it is rational and appropriate for atheists to give thanks to deep impersonal agents for the benefits they give to us. These agents include our evolving biosphere, the sun, and our finely-tuned universe. Atheists can give thanks to evolution by sacrificially burning works of art. They can give thanks to the sun by performing rituals in solar calendars. They can give thanks to our finely-tuned universe, and to existence itself, by doing science and philosophy. But these linguistic (...) types of thanks-giving are forms of non-theistic contemplative prayer. Since these behaviors resemble ancient pagan behaviors, it is fair to call them pagan. Atheistic paganism may be part of an emerging ecosystem of naturalistic religions. (shrink)

At the dawn of the new century, Robert Plomin was gloomy. As he recounts in Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, attempts to find the DNA responsible for the heritability of behavior failed. Month after month, journals would report new findings of specific genes for behavioral phenotypes, but they never replicated. One amazing genomic methodology after another was developed in biological genetics and applied to medicine, where it succeeded, and then to human behavior, where it failed. This was (...) the moment of Plomin's despair. He had, with great intellectual courage, staked his reputation on the existence of actionable scientific knowledge of the DNA‐based genesis of twin‐based heritability. But Blueprint is hardly the product of a gloomy author. Quite the opposite: it is a declaration of victory of nature over nurture, a celebration of the vindication of Plomin as a scientist and of behavior genetics as a field of study. What happened between 2000 and 2019 to brighten Plomin's outlook so radically? Were the genes for schizophrenia and intelligence finally discovered? Are we at last on our way to understanding why, at a biological level, all differences in human behavior are substantially heritable? Alas, no. What happened is that Robert Plomin gave up on the search for individual genes that explain heritability and decided to be satisfied with much less. (shrink)

This chapter has two goals. The first is to explain concepts associated with information and computation in physical terms. The other goal of this chapter is to analyze concepts in physics like space, time, and causality in information-theoretic and computational terms.

We prove a 0-1 law for the fragment of second order logic SO over parametric classes of finite structures which allow only one unary atomic type. This completes the investigation of 0-1 laws for fragments of second order logic defined in terms of first order quantifier prefixes over, e.g., simple graphs and tournaments. We also prove a low oscillation law, and establish the 0-1 law for Σ14 without any restriction on the number of unary types.

Les réseaux sociaux numériques ont connu en Chine un engouement massif, et cela dès leur introduction en 2007. On compte aujourd’hui 210 millions d’utilisateurs de « ites d’échanges sociaux », soit exactement la moitié des 420 millions d’internautes chinois, et les autorités chinoises soulignent désormais que ce développement des réseaux sociaux numériques est « irrésistible ». Comme souvent pour la Chine, la tyrannie des nombres n’a d’égale que l’originalité des usages. C’est cette originalité bornant à la singularité des « caractéristiques (...) chinoises » − étroitesse des liens entre réseaux sociaux numériques de socialisation et de navigation, domination des plateformes nationales, « harmonisation » des contenus, prévalence des liens forts, etc. − que nous nous efforçons de mettre au jour en nous intéressant successivement aux utilisateurs, aux plateformes et au rôle particulier joué par l’État-parti chinois dans les structures sociales. Une fois encore, l’héritage communiste s’affiche comme une subtile synthèse entre contrôle des pratiques et mobilisation des individus et des organisations sociales, tout en tolérant les vertus cathartiques et correctives des émois populaires liés aux sentiments d’injustice.Social networking sites have spread like wildfire in China, ever since the first sites appeared there in 2007. There are now some 210 million people using “social exchange sites”, which is exactly half of all Internet users in China, and the Chinese authorities are saying that the development of social networking sites is “irresistible”. As is often the case in China, the weight of numbers is equalled only by the distinctiveness of their Internet uses. It is this distinctiveness, which borders on the singular − very close links between online socialisation and navigation networks, predominance of national sites, content “harmonisation”, prevalence of strong links, etc. − that we attempt to bring out here, by successively investigating users, sites and the particular role played by China’s one-party State in the country’s social structures. The legacy of Communism once again stands out as a subtle mix between control over practices and the mobilisation of individuals and social organisations and a tolerance of the cathartic and corrective virtues of popular emotion aroused by feelings of injustice. (shrink)

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09399-4.

In this paper I call attention to Adam Smith’s “Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages” in order to facilitate understanding Adam Smith from a Darwinian perspective. By ‘Darwinian’ I mean a position that explains differential selection over time through natural mechanisms. First, I argue that right near the start of Wealth of Nations Smith signals that human nature has probably evolved over a very long amount of time. Second, I connect this evidence with an infamous passage on infanticide in (...) The Theory of Moral Sentiments in order to argue that Smith is committed to group selection. Third, I argue that in Dissertation on Languages one can find building blocks for the claim that mind and language co-develop over time. More controversially I claim that in TMS there is a distinction between natural sentiments and moral sentiments. Natural sentiments are evolved (presumably through cultural selection) and moral sentiments are developed (through acculturation within society). Along the way, I argue that this distinction would have improved Darwin’s Descent of Man by blocking a move toward eugenics. (shrink)

How do people pursue rewards in risky environments, where some outcomes should be avoided at all costs? We investigate how participant search for spatially correlated rewards in scenarios where one must avoid sampling rewards below a given threshold. This requires not only the balancing of exploration and exploitation, but also reasoning about how to avoid potentially risky areas of the search space. Within risky versions of the spatially correlated multi‐armed bandit task, we show that participants’ behavior is aligned well with (...) a Gaussian process function learning algorithm, which chooses points based on a safe optimization routine. Moreover, using leave‐one‐block‐out cross‐validation, we find that participants adapt their sampling behavior to the riskiness of the task, although the underlying function learning mechanism remains relatively unchanged. These results show that participants can adapt their search behavior to the adversity of the environment and enrich our understanding of adaptive behavior in the face of risk and uncertainty. (shrink)

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 19, Issue 4, Page 822-826, July 2011.

Annotation In this collection of essays, which covers the years from 1934 to 1939, we see Eric Voegelin in the role of both scholar and public intellectual in Vienna until he was forced to flee the Nazi terror that descended on Austria in 1938. These essays encompass a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from Austrian politics, Austrian constitutional history, and European racism, to questions of the formation and expression of public opinion, theories of administrative law, and the role of (...) political science in public university education. Several essays serve as useful commentaries on, elaborations of, or synopses of arguments Voegelin made in the four books he had published between 1928 and 1936. These essays will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, including constitutional historians, historians of political science, political theorists, and students of Voegelin's later work. (shrink)

Blackwell Companions to Philosophy This outstanding student reference series offers a comprehensive and authoritative survey of philosophy as a whole. Written by todays leading philosophers, each volume provides lucid and.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 12.1 (2005) 55-57 [Access article in PDF] Unconscious Reasons Eric Matthews Keywords reason-explanation, consciousness, purpose It is argued that Church's puzzlement over the idea that we can have reasons that we do not know about is itself puzzling. In daily life, we find no difficulty in understanding this idea. The problems arise only when we try to give a theoretically satisfactory account of the (...) notion of "the unconscious" in the context of a Cartesian picture of the "mind" as synonymous with "consciousness." We need to see the difference between the rational/non-rational distinction and that between the conscious and the unconscious. We (and other animals) act for reasons, not because we have something called "consciousness," but because we have purposes: we are animals, not machines.Jennifer Church finds "something deeply puzzling" about the idea that we can have reasons that we do not know about. I find this puzzlement very surprising, as, I think, would many others. Most of our reasons for doing what we do are not, and could not be, consciously entertained, and we did not need to wait for Freud before we were aware that some of our reasons for acting are so deeply hidden that we need help from others to uncover them. Freud himself is supposed to have said about the unconscious (I'm afraid I can't give the reference for this quotation, which was dredged up from memory), "Das haben die Dichter immer gekannt"—that was always known by the poets.Because human beings are not machines, whose movements can be given a complete causal explanation in terms of the laws of physics, a reason-explanation for most of the ways they behave is called for. That is, they have reasons for doing what they do. If they had to "consciously think through," in Church's words, all of their reasons for acting, they would never get down to doing anything: before they did anything, they would have to think through their reasons for doing it; and, because thinking through is also an action for which they have reasons, they would have to think through their reasons for thinking through, and so on ad infinitum. I owe this point to Gilbert Ryle, and may as well give one of his typical examples (slightly adapted) to illustrate it. The good tennis player acts intelligently: she has reasons for the movements she makes, but of necessity she does not think through these reasons, otherwise the game of tennis would never get started, let alone finished. Indeed, she may well be unable to explain in words, even afterward, why she moves her racket this way or that.As for the "Freudian" sorts of examples, we are all familiar, both from literature and from life, with the phenomena of self-deception, or of simple lack of self-knowledge. Someone, for instance, believes himself to be motivated by the highest moral principle when he gives money to the beggar in the shop doorway: but perhaps his real reason is a desire to cultivate a certain image of himself, or to be seen by others to be doing the right thing, or a fear that the beggar might embarrass [End Page 55] him in some way if he does not give him something substantial. I am not suggesting that people always deceive themselves in this way, only that the situation described is perfectly intelligible to everyone and so not at all puzzling. Nor is it in the slightest degree unintelligible that people should sometimes act without being able to say why: "I did it on impulse," they say, or "I acted instinctively"—which is just another way of saying "I just don't know why I acted as I did."Church herself accepts that our explanations of behavior are "now replete with appeals to unconscious beliefs and desires": but why only "now"—haven't they always been? And if we resort to such appeals so commonly, if indeed, as Searle says, their explanatory power is so great, then that seems to imply that we understand perfectly well what... (shrink)

In this review essay, I examine the second edition of Ursula Goodenough's The Sacred Depths of Nature. I argue that her version of religious naturalism is a kind of Protestantism, and that her work has opened a gate which leads into new and post-theistic forms of religion. Along the way, I invoke Hekate, Loki, and Cernunnos.

Abstract Three recent books on public opinion attempt to map changes in the public's policy preferences over the last few decades. Such changes have clearly occurred, but a single, overriding ?public mood? remains elusive. Rather, different components of the public mood seem to move in different directions. Furthermore, it is unclear how much of the apparent change in public mood is real and how much is an artifact resulting from changes in public policies. Yet elite perceptions, or misperceptions, of public (...) opinion are important determinants of those very policies, raising questions about the coherence of opinion?led government. (shrink)