If there are no fictional characters, how do we explain thought and discourse apparently about them? If there are, what are they like? A growing number of philosophers claim that fictional characters are abstract objects akin to novels or plots. They argue that postulating characters provides the most straightforward explanation of our literary practices as well as a uniform account of discourse and thought about fiction. Anti-realists counter that postulation is neither necessary nor straightforward, and that the invocation of pretense (...) provides a better account of the same phenomena. I outline and assess these competing theories. (shrink)

Book synopsis: The most debated issue in aesthetics today Written by an international team of leading experts Addresses growing methodological concerns in the field Includes an extensive introduction which illuminates key issues Through much of the twentieth century, philosophical thinking about works of art, design, and other aesthetic products has emphasized intuitive and reflective methods, often tied to the idea that philosophy's business is primarily to analyze concepts. This 'philosophy from the armchair' approach contrasts with methods used by psychologists, sociologists, (...) evolutionary thinkers, and others who study the making and reception of the arts empirically. How far should philosophers be sensitive to the results of these studies? Is their own largely a priori method basically flawed? Are their views on aesthetic value, interpretation, imagination, and the emotions of art to be rethought in the light of best science? The essays in this volume seek answers to these questions, many through detailed studies of problems traditionally regarded as philosophical but where empirical inquiry seems to be shedding interesting light. No common view is looked for or found in this volume: a number of authors argue that the current enthusiasm for scientific approaches to aesthetics is based on a misunderstanding of the philosophical enterprise and sometimes on misinterpretation of the science; others suggest various ways that philosophy can and should accommodate and sometimes yield to the empirical approach. The editors provide a substantial introduction which sets the scene historically and conceptually before summarizing the claims and arguments of the essays. (shrink)

What is mathematics about? Does the subject-matter of mathematics exist independently of the mind or are they mental constructions? How do we know mathematics? Is mathematical knowledge logical knowledge? And how is mathematics applied to the material world? In this introduction to the philosophy of mathematics, Michele Friend examines these and other ontological and epistemological problems raised by the content and practice of mathematics. Aimed at a readership with limited proficiency in mathematics but with some experience of formal logic it (...) seeks to strike a balance between conceptual accessibility and correct representation of the issues. Friend examines the standard theories of mathematics - Platonism, realism, logicism, formalism, constructivism and structuralism - as well as some less standard theories such as psychologism, fictionalism and Meinongian philosophy of mathematics. In each case Friend explains what characterises the position and where the divisions between them lie, including some of the arguments in favour and against each. This book also explores particular questions that occupy present-day philosophers and mathematicians such as the problem of infinity, mathematical intuition and the relationship, if any, between the philosophy of mathematics and the practice of mathematics. Taking in the canonical ideas of Aristotle, Kant, Frege and Whitehead and Russell as well as the challenging and innovative work of recent philosophers like Benacerraf, Hellman, Maddy and Shapiro, Friend provides a balanced and accessible introduction suitable for upper-level undergraduate courses and the non-specialist. (shrink)

An exploration of neurobiological evidence suggesting that belief is a fundamental property of consciousness.

Adi Da argues that no solutions currently proposed are sufficient to righten the present unsustainable trajectory of life on Earth, because there is no integrated approach to the ordering of society and use of the planet. The presumption of separateness—manifesting collectively as separate “tribes” vying for control—characterizes human affairs, rather than the prior (“a priori”) unity of existence. The struggle for dominance is the “stave in the wheels” of the Earth-system's inherent capacity to self-correct. A new institution, “the Global Cooperative (...) Forum,” is proposed—invoked by “everybody-all-at-once” (a global populace awakened as a single force, capable of cooperatively effecting global change). (shrink)

I argue that judgments of what is ‘true in a fiction’ presuppose the Reality Assumption: the assumption that everything that is true is fictionally the case, unless excluded by the work. By contrast with the more familiar Reality Principle, the Reality Assumption is not a rule for inferring implied content from what is explicit. Instead, it provides an array of real-world truths that can be used in such inferences. I claim that the Reality Assumption is essential to our ability to (...) understand stories, drawing on a range of empirical evidence that demonstrates our reliance on it in narrative comprehension. However, the Reality Assumption has several unintuitive consequences, not least that what is fictionally the case includes countless facts that neither authors nor readers could ever consider. I argue that such consequences provide no reason to reject the Reality Assumption. I conclude that we should take fictions, like non-fictions, to be about the real world. (shrink)

Standard theories define fiction in terms of an invited response of imagining or make-believe. I argue that these theories are not only subject to numerous counterexamples, they also fail to explain why classification matters to our understanding and evaluation of works of fiction as well as non-fiction. I propose instead that we construe fiction and non-fiction as genres: categories whose membership is determined by a cluster of nonessential criteria, and which play a role in the appreciation of particular works. I (...) claim that this proposal captures the intuitions motivating alternative theories of fiction. (shrink)

WHAT SCIENCE REALLY MEANS AN EXPLANATION OF THE HISTORY AND EMPIRICAL METHOD OF GENERAL SCIENCE BY JULIUS W. FRIEND AND JAMES FEIBLEMAN LONDON GEORGE ALLEN ...

Engagement with fiction often inspires emotional responses. We may pity Sethe while feeling ambivalent about her actions (in Beloved), fear for Ellen Ripley as she battles monstrous creatures (in Alien), get angry at Okonkwo for killing Ikemefuna (in Things Fall Apart), and hope that Kiyoaki and Satoko find love (in Spring Snow). Familiar as they are, these reactions are puzzling. Why do I respond emotionally if I do not believe that these individuals exist or that the events occurred? If I (...) merely imagine that my best friend has betrayed me, I do not become angry with him; if I did, I would be considered irrational. Yet although beliefs seem to be necessary for emotions in other contexts, we respond to fiction without the relevant beliefs. These observations prompt two questions about our emotional responses to fiction (henceforth: fictional emotions). The first is descriptive: Should fictional emotions be classified as the same kind of emotions we experience in other contexts? The second is normative: Are fictional emotions irrational or otherwise inappropriate? I take each of these debates in turn. (shrink)

Can the desire for efficiently systematised theories in science be explained from within a powers metaphysics? It is plausible that the traditional ‘Powers Theory of Laws’, endorsed by many friends of powers, does not alone provide such an explanation. This has led a number of recent authors to argue that a ‘Powers Best System Account’ of laws would be a preferable alternative. This account borrows a method for determining laws from the Humean and applies it to a reality of (...) powers. Here I claim, to the contrary, that this account is both internally unworkable and, anyway, completely undermotivated when compared with the traditional view. Apart from some brief suggestions for alternative accounts, I’ll conclude that the powers theorist still has their work cut out to explain systematising in science. (shrink)

Bird’s Ultimate Argument sought to show that Armstrong’s N relationships involving categorical universals can’t entail nomic regularities. In N’s place Bird offered the non-categorical SR relation. Two kinds of objection have been raised: either Bird’s own alternative metaphysics fails in just the same way as Armstrong’s or the target of Bird’s argument may anyway have a way out of the problem. My aim is to reclaim the victory for Bird. I argue that the responses in defence of Armstong’s N relationships (...) fail to acknowledge that Bird was explicitly concerned with Armstrong’s commitment to a categoricalist view of universals. Moreover, Bird’s alternative account does not suffer the same problem since his metaphysics of properties is essentialist. Nevertheless, Bird’s account does need elaborating on to explainwhySR relationships entail their regularities. I offer Schaffer’s Axiomatic Solution as a candidate for this purpose. (shrink)

Statements about fictional characters, such as “Gregor Samsa has been changed into a beetle,” pose the problem of how we can say something true (or false) using empty names. I propose an original solution to this problem that construes such utterances as reports of the “prescriptions to imagine” generated by works of fiction. In particular, I argue that we should construe these utterances as specifying, not what we are supposed to imagine—the propositional object of the imagining—but how we are supposed (...) to imagine. Most other theories of thought and discourse about fictional characters either fail to capture the intentionality of our imaginings, or else obscure the differences between imaginings directed toward fictional characters and those directed toward real individuals. I argue that once we have an account of prescriptions to imagine about real individuals, we can adapt the same framework to specify the contents of prescriptions to imagine about fictional characters, and thereby to account for the truth (or falsity) of statements about fictional characters. (shrink)

In this paper, I compare how it is that inconsistencies are handled in mathematics to how they are handled in chemistry. In mathematics, they are very precisely formulated and identified, unlike in chemistry. So the chemists can learn from the precision and the very well-worked out strategies developed by logicians and deployed by mathematicians to cope with inconsistency. Some lessons can also be learned by the mathematicians from the chemists. Mathematicians tend to be intolerant towards inconsistencies. There are some philosophers (...) of chemistry who attribute to chemists, collectively, a more tolerant attitude towards inconsistency, and so, mathematicians can learn from the chemists’ attitude to inform their choice of strategies. (shrink)

Trust is morally basic. It makes cooperation between persons, to whatever degree, possible. In Chapter One, I define trust as being the relation between people bound by genuine goodwill, competency and vulnerability to each other. ;In Chapter Two, I criticize Thomas Hobbes's understanding of society as founded upon a social contract which exclusively self-interested persons have reason to make in order to escape from the state of nature. I argue that on Hobbes's assumptions about the nature of persons, such a (...) contract cannot be viable. Without the assumption that, prior to the contract, persons have some reason to trust one another, no contract can be expected to be made or survive. ;David Gauthier, who presents a contemporary version of Hobbesian social contract theory in his Morals by Agreement, is vulnerable to a similar argument. In Chapter Three, I argue that given Gauthier's description of persons there does not exist the trust necessary to construct, even hypothetically, the social contract. ;Chapter Four examines the very basic role which trust plays in both personal and civic friendship. I argue that trust is what distinguishes "end friendship" from the instrumental friendships in which we are "used" or taken advantage of by others. I discuss civic friendship and argue that the trust which is basic to it, namely social trust, is a form of trust which can exist between people who are otherwise strangers to one another. ;In Chapter Five I go on to prescribe trust. I argue first, that we should never be untrustworthy, as this implies treating people instrumentally, and hence violates Kant's Categorical Imperative. I argue, however, that we should not always trust, maintaining that trust, for normative purposes, is best understood as an Aristotelian mean, and can be described by the extremes of naivete and cynicism and that we should trust in a way which avoids both these extremes. (shrink)

We are told that there are standards of rigour in proof, and we are told that the standards have increased over the centuries. This is fairly clear. But rigour has also changed its nature. In this paper we as-sess where these changes leave us today.1 To motivate making the new assessment, we give two illustra-tions of changes in our conception of rigour. One, concerns the shift from geometry to arithmetic as setting the standard for rig-our. The other, concerns the notion (...) of effective proof or compu-tations. To make the assessment, we look at one motivation for increasing the rigour of a mathematical argument: explicitness and honesty. We then present a standard of rigour by means of a characterisation developed with reference to what we call ‘an account-proof’. We evaluate the standard with reference to the motivation. With the analysis we discover that, regardless of the motivations for rigour, the standard is almost never met, and that the motivations are not all satisfied. It follows that, in some sense, the motivations have misfired. The misfiring suggests to us that we re-assess our notion of rigour. We think of rigour as a relative term. Moreover, the standard for rigour depends on philosophical underpinnings. The strength of the argument of this paper rests on the plausibility of our selection of motivations and on the plausibility of our standard. (shrink)

Book synopsis: New work on a hot topic by an outstanding team of authors At the intersection of several central areas of philosophy It is the linguistic job of singular terms to pick out the objects that we think or talk about. But what about singular terms that seem to fail to designate anything, because the objects they refer to don't exist? We can employ these terms in meaningful thought and talk, which suggests that they are succeeding in fulfilling their (...) representational task. A team of leading experts presents new essays on the much-debated problem of empty reference and thought. In the 1960s and 1970s Keith Donnellan, David Kaplan, Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam initiated a revolution in the then standard conception of reference—a concept at the core of philosophical inquiry. The repercussions of the revolution, particularly felt in metaphysics and epistemology, were soon refined by other influential writers such as Tyler Burge, Gareth Evans, and John Perry. They argued that some linguistic and mental representations have contents individuated by what they are about—by ordinary referents of expressions such as proper names, indexicals, definite descriptions and common nouns, i.e. by planets, people or natural kinds. The view was at odds with a central philosophical presumption at that time: that cognitive and linguistic access to objective reality is indirect and accidental, mediated by general descriptive characterizations, the only constitutive semantic feature of the expressions; hence its ontological and epistemological repercussions. A turning-point in the debate about how linguistic and mental representation reach external contents concerned the nature of empty mental and linguistic representations, framed by means of the very same expressions crucially invoked in the Donnellan-Kaplan-Kripke-Putnam arguments. The papers in this volume address different aspects of reference and thought about the non-existent. (shrink)

The prevailing economic paradigm, in which a closed circular flow of production and consumption can be described in terms of 'natural laws ' of the equilibrium of market forces, is being challenged by our growing knowledge of complex systems, particularly ecosystems. It is increasingly apparent that neo-classical economics does not reflect social, economic and environmental realities in a world of limited resources. The best way to understand the problems implicit in the concept of 'sustainable development ' is provided by Ecological (...) Economics – a new synthesis in which the traditional virtue of thrift is justified using modern ideas from systems theory and thermodynamics. (shrink)