John Wilkins and Malte Ebach respond to the dismissal of classification as something we need not concern ourselves with because it is, as Ernest Rutherford suggested, mere ‘‘stamp collecting.’’ They contend that classification is neither derivative of explanation or of hypothesis-making but is necessarily prior and prerequisite to it. Classification comes first and causal explanations are dependent upon it. As such it is an important (but neglected) area of philosophical study. Wilkins and Ebach reject Norwood Russell Hanson’s (...) thesis that classification relies on observation that is theory-laden and deny the need for aetiological assumptions and historical reconstruction to justify its arrangement. What they offer instead is a significant (albeit controversial) contribution to the philosophical literature on classification, a pre-theoretic natural classification based on the observation of patterns in data of ready-made phenomena. Their notion of ready-made phenomena rests on a conception of tacit knowledge or know-how. This is evident in their distinction between strong Theory-dependence and na ̈ıve theory-dependence. Their small t-theory-dependence permits patterns of observation that facilitate know-how but does not rely on a domain-specific explanatory theory of their aetiology. Wilkins and Ebach suggest classification differs from theory building in that it is passive (whereas theory building is active). Classification is possible just because it does not require the sieve of theory to capture classes that are ‘‘handed to you by your cognitive dispositions and the data that you observe’’ (p. 18). Finding regularities sans-theory is just something we do and can do without any prior theory about the underlying causes or origins of the resultant regularities. Luke Howard’s classification of clouds serves as an exemplar of a passive, theory-free classification system and the periodic table and the DSM help to illustrate this type of non-aetiological patterning. A recurrent theme is the nature of naturalness. For Wilkins and Ebach, the conception of naturalness is not one that is based on the generation or discovery of natural kind categories popular in both the traditional metaphysics of Mill and Wittgenstein as well as updated notions within philosophy of biology such as Boyd’s Homeostatic Property Cluster kinds. Instead, Wilkins and Ebach define the naturalness of classification as the falling into hierarchical patterns, aligning the search for natural arrangement with the aim of systematics, and as something that is grounded in a cognitive task or activity. However, they leave the question of realism v. antirealism open. ‘‘In natural classification...we must have real relations no matter how we might interpret ‘real’’’ (p. 70). There is tension with regard to their ontological commitments as they vacillate between constructive, operationalist, and realist approaches. Wilkins and Ebach initially define real as that which is causal and important (pp. 70–71), and later as that which ‘‘depends in no way upon a mind or observer’’ (p. 122). This makes their claim that there was ‘‘no real theory involved [in the pre-Darwinian classifications of Jussieu and Adanson]’’ (p. 64) difficult to interpret. Cont’d……. (shrink)

A seminal work on the unconscious and its mechanisms. Examines the interaction between voluntary (conscious) and involuntary (unconscious) human control mechanisms in terms of dissociation of divided consciousness. Delineates a neodissociation interpretation that recognizes historical roots without requiring commitment. Presents a wide range of data on possession states, fugues, multiple personalities, amnesia, dreams, hallucinations, automatic writing, and aggressions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Philosophy of Bishop Stillingfleet RICHARD H. POPKIN EDWARD STILLINGFLEET(1635-1699), the Bishop of Worcester, is known only as Locke's opponent. Although he was a leading figure in seventeenth century intellectual history, he is now almost completely forgotten.1 He is only mentioned once in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy as the first person to write against Deism. 2 His texts have been ditlicult to locate, and have hardly been studied. Although (...) Locke's answers to him comprise a large volume in Locke's Works, little interest has been shown in Stillingfleet's side of the story. His letters to Locke were last printed in the 1710 edition of his works. (I am now publishing a photoreproduction edition of the attacks on Locke, and a photoreproduction of the six volumes of his works is due soon.) In spite of this neglect, Stillingfleet was a quite interesting figure. He was not a simple moss-back, a religious reactionary, fighting progressive theories like Locke's. Rather, he was trying to maintain some basis for religious belief in the face of the intellectual upheavals in the seventeenth century. For over forty years he struggled against a wide range of philosophical and theological developments of the time that he saw as leading to scepticism and infidelity. Stillingfleet attempted to defend the reasonableness of Christianity in an intellectual world dominated by the new science, the new philosophy, the religious wars, the rise of irreligion, Bible criticism, and Spinozism. In the new scientific, philosophical and theological context he sought to show how an intelligent, reasonable man could maintain his religious views as more probable than their denials. And, he tried to show the perils involved in various new lines of thought. As he wrote to Locke, "in an age wherein the Mysteries of Faith are so much exposed by the Promoters of Scepticism and Infidelity, it is a thing of dangerous consequence to start such new methods of Certainty as are apt to leave men's minds more doubtJull than before." 3 Stillingfleet criticized various new views of thinkers like Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Locke, and tried to show that they were unreasonable and x No section is devoted to Stillingfleet in Charles de R~musat's Histoire de la Philosophie en Angleterre depuis Bacon jusqu'gt Locke, 2 vols. (Paris, 1875). He is of course briefly treated by Locke scholars, but only in relation to Locke. 2 Ernest C. Mossner, "Deism," Encyclopedia of Philosophy ('New York, 1967), II, 328. 3 Edward StiUingfleet,The Bishop o~ Worcester's Answer to Mr. Locke's Letter (London, 1697), pp. 37-38. [303] 304 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY destructive. Instead he advocated a commonsense philosophy incorporating Aristotelian and Stoic elements, as an adequate basis for a reasonable view of the world. Stillingflect's critique of empiricism, in its Epicurean and Lockean forms, revealed some of the basic difficulties in this emerging philosophy. His own views in some ways foreshadowed the counter-philosophy that Thomas Reid was to offer a century later against the full-blown empirical scepticism of Hume. And Hume's essay "Of Miracles" can, I believe, be seen as the reductio ad absurdum of Stillingfleet's commonsense philosophy. In this paper I shall try to sketch out Bishop Stilhngfleet's philosophy, and to indicate the role it played in the history of British empirical thought. The Bishop's attack on Locke only occurred at the very end of his long and fruitful intellectual career. (He died during the debate in 1699.) To appreciate why he was so concerned with exposing the sceptical and irreligious tendencies in Locke's thought, and the potential conflicts between empiricism and the tenets of Judeo-Christianity, one has to look at his entire theological and philosophical career. Stillingfleet was one of the most erudite divines of the seventeenth century, a leading member of the brilliant group of Anglican theologians, including, besides himself, William Chillingworth, Bishop John Wilkins (the founder of the Royal Society), and Archbishop John Tillotson.4 Stillingfleet was extremely sensitive to the fundamental issues being raised in the religious, scientific and philosophical debates of the time, and tried, like his fellow Anglican divines, to develop a commonsense semirational, semiempirical defense... (shrink)

Complex demonstratives, expressions of the form 'That F', 'These Fs', etc., have traditionally been taken to be referring terms. Yet they exhibit many of the features of quantified noun phrases. This has led some philosophers to suggest that demonstrative determiners are a special kind of quantifier, which can be paraphrased using a context sensitive definite description. Both these views contain elements of the truth, though each is mistaken. We advance a novel account of the semantic form of complex demonstratives that (...) shows how to reconcile the view that they function like quantified noun phrases with the view that simple demonstratives function as context sensitive referring terms wherever they occur. If we are right, previous accounts of complex demonstratives have misconceived their semantic role; and philosophers relying on the majority view in employing complex demonstratives in analysis have proceeded on a false assumption. (shrink)

Finding a powerful ally in Bertrand Russell, who provided the foreword for this book, Gellner embarked on the project that was to put him on the intellectual ...

The dead have no interests and are beyond both harm or benefit, but warrant for respecting the wishes of the dead may be found in the traditional notion of the social contract.

In Quentin Smith and Aleksander Jokic (eds.), Consciousness: New Philosophical Essays (OUP, 2002).

For more than three decades John Searle has been developing and elaborating a unified theory of language and mind. What has emerged is an impressive and detailed account of intentionality embracing both mental states and linguistic behaviour. Though the developing theory has been presented in a steady stream of books and articles over the last thirty years, two items stand out as major landmarks: the publication of Speech Acts in 1969 and of Intentionality in 1983. Both of these seminal books (...) offer structural theories; that is, they analyze the items within their domains as having a structure which allows for variation along a number of parameters. John Searle and His Critics proceeds from an analysis of the importance and influence of these two works to an overall assessment of Searle's impact in the philosophy of language, of mind, of social explanation, and of reference and intentionality. Each of the chapters has been newly commissioned from a leading scholar in the relevant field and each section concludes with a summary and response from Searle himself. (shrink)

We study the fine structure of the core model for one Woodin cardinal, building of the work of Mitchell and Steel on inner models of the form . We generalize to some combinatorial principles that were shown by Jensen to hold in L. We show that satisfies the statement: “□κ holds whenever κ the least measurable cardinal λ of order λ++”. We introduce a hierarchy of combinatorial principles □κ, λ for 1 λ κ such that □κ□κ, 1 □κ, λ □κ, (...) κ□κ*. We prove that if holds in V. As an application, we show that ZFC + PFA Con. We also obtain one Woodin cardinal as a lower bound on the consistency strength of stationary reflection at κ+ for a singular, countably closed limit cardinal κ such that # exists; likewise for the failure of □κ* at such a κ. (shrink)

This is a new release of the original 1927 edition.

Kitcher and Aspray distinguish a mainstream tradition in the philosophy of mathematics concerned with foundationalist epistemology, and a ‘maverick’ or naturalistic tradition, originating with Lakatos. My claim is that if the consequences of Lakatos's contribution are fully worked out, no less than a radical reconceptualization of the philosophy of mathematics is necessitated, including history, methodology and a fallibilist epistemology as central to the field. In the paper an interpretation of Lakatos's philosophy of mathematics is offered, followed by some critical discussion, (...) and an extension to a social constructivist position (which might well have been unacceptable to Lakatos). (shrink)

This paper is truly a joint effort and it could not have been written without the contribution of both authors. Garson, though, deserves credit (or blame) for first seeing the need for two kinds of quantifier scope, and also for devising essentials of the positive theory.

There is a controversy in contemporary philosophy over the question whether or not knowledge must have a foundation. On one side are the foundationalists, who do accept the metaphor and find the foundation in sensory experience or the like. The coherentists, on the other side, reject the foundations metaphor and consider our body of knowledge a coherent whole floating free of any foundations. This controversy grew rapidly with the rise of idealism many years ago, and it is prominent today not (...) only in epistemology proper but also in philosophy of science and even in ethics. The discussion of this issue has been lamentably hampered by confusion and misunderstanding, and in this neither side is wholly innocent. The reflections that follow are not meant to settle the controversy, but only to help us understand it more clearly. (shrink)

We present a general construction of a □κ-sequence in Jensen's fine structural extender models. This construction yields a local definition of a canonical □κ-sequence as well as a characterization of those cardinals κ, for which the principle □κ fails. Such cardinals are called subcompact and can be described in terms of elementary embeddings. Our construction is carried out abstractly, making use only of a few fine structural properties of levels of the model, such as solidity and condensation.

This paper advances a general argument, inspired by some remarks of Davidson, to show that appeal to meanings as entities in the theory of meaning is neither necessary nor sufficient for carrying out the tasks of the theory of meaning. The crucial point is that appeal to meaning as entities fails to provide us with an understanding of any expression of a language except insofar as we pick it out with an expression we understand which we tacitly recognize to be (...) a translation of the term whose meaning we want to illuminate by the appeal to assigning to it a meaning. The meaning drops out as irrelevant: the work is done, and can only be done, by matching terms already understood with terms they translate. (shrink)

La sociología ecológica de los últimos años, a través de diversos enfoques, ha expresado una grave preocupación: nuestra civilización ha superado los límites naturales para el crecimiento. Población y economía, las dos variables fundamentales en este tema, han traspasado hace tiempo todas las fronteras, incluso las que hablan de un desarrollo sostenible. Esto afectaría a todas las teorías sociológicas contemporáneas. De ello trata el presente ensayo, profundizando en cuatro perspectivas diferentes: la gobernanza de la complejidad, el postdesarrollo y el desarrollo (...) local alternativo, los escenarios de un decrecimiento y cuesta abajo prósperos y, finalmente, las visiones de un colapso catastrófico .The ecological sociology of last years, across diverse approaches, it has expressed a serious worry: our civilization has overcome the natural limits for the growth. Population and economy, both fundamental variables in this topic, have penetrated some time ago all the borders, even those who speak about a sustainable development. This would concern all the sociological contemporary theories. Of it treats the present essay, penetrating into four different perspectives: the gobernanza of the complexity, the postdevelopment and the local alternative development, the stages of a decrease and it costs down prosperously and, finally, the visions of a catastrophic collapse. (shrink)

Professor Reichenbach's writings have repeatedly called attention to the important rôle which probability statements play in all inquiry, and he has made amply clear that no philosophy of science can be regarded as adequate which does not square its accounts with the problems of probable inference. Recently he has brought together in convenient form many reflections on the methodology of science familiar to readers of his earlier works, and at the same time he has set himself the task of solving (...) many well-known problems of epistemology in terms of his theory of probability. His latest book is therefore of great interest, both because of the light it throws on Professor Reichenbach's own views and because it reveals the power and limitations of one approach to the problems of science. In particular, while it does not add to the details of his theory of probability worked out elsewhere, the applications Professor Reichenbach now makes of it supply fresh clues for judging its import and adequacy. The object of the present essay, therefore, is to expound a number of his views on probability and epistemology, with a view to examining his conclusions and their relevance to the problems he aims to resolve. The discussion will try to determine whether several features of his present views do not follow from assumptions which he has not sufficiently considered; whether his logical constructions do not create new puzzles; and whether a different starting-point should not be taken if the clarification of scientific concepts and procedures, to which Professor Reichenbach's devotion is as unexcelled as it is well known, is to be successfully conducted. (shrink)

A traditional problem of ethics in mathematics is the denial of social responsibility. Pure mathematics is viewed as neutral and value free, and therefore free of ethical responsibility. Applications of mathematics are seen as employing a neutral set of tools which, of themselves, are free from social responsibility. However, mathematicians are convinced they know what constitutes good mathematics. Furthermore many pure mathematicians are committed to purism, the ideology that values purity above applications in mathematics, and some historical reasons for this (...) are discussed. MacIntyre’s virtue ethics accommodates both the good mathematician and the ethics of the social practice of mathematics. It demonstrates that purism is compatible with acknowledging the social responsibility of mathematics. Four aspects of this responsibility are mentioned, two concerning the impact of mathematics via education, and two concerning explicit and implicit applications of mathematics. The last of these opens up the performativity of mathematical and measurement applications in society, which change the very processes they are supposed to measure. Although these applications are not explored in detail, they illustrate the importance of considering the ethics and social responsibility of mathematics in society. MacIntyre’s virtue theory opens a broad approach to the controversial topic of the ethics of mathematics encompassing purism, and absolutist and social constructivist philosophies of mathematics, but still enabling ethical critiques of the impact of mathematics on society. (shrink)

Problems for Generic Reliabilism lead to a more specific account of knowledge as involving the exercise of intellectual virtues or faculties.

Baptism is a sacrament that Christ established before His ascension. It symbolizes His death and resurrection, representing the unity of the baptized person with Christ and their acceptance into the body of Christ. This paper explores baptism in the New Testament (NT) by focusing on some specific personalities. The study shows that water baptism, as an outward act, serves as a reminder and symbol of God’s redeeming work through Jesus Christ for the salvation of humanity. Consequently, baptism unites us with (...) Christ and invites us to be part of the Christian community. The study concludes that baptism is not an optional extra, but a command from our Lord Jesus Christ to all generations of believers, regardless of denomination, tribe, race, culture, or ethnicity. The study uses published textbooks, electronic books, and journal articles as secondary sources to examine baptism in the NT. (shrink)