Aristotle famously asserted that the mind is identical with its object in an act of cognition. This “identity doctrine” has caused much confusion and controversy, with many seeking to avoid a literal interpretation in favor of one that suggests that “identity” refers to a formal isomorphism between the mind and its object. However, in this paper I suggest that Aristotle’s identity doctrine is not an epistemological claim about an isomorphism between a representation of an object and the object itself, but (...) is a phenomenological claim about the character of human cognition and intelligible being. Drawing on texts from Edmund Husserl and Aristotle, I offer a phenomenological interpretation of Aristotle’s identity doctrine. I ultimately argue that, for Aristotle, mind and being are essentially unified, for intelligible being is partially constitutive of the mind. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThomas Aquinas argues that the agent intellect's function is to abstract an intelligible species from a phantasm. However, insofar as he claims that the intelligible species is not present in the phantasm, it is unclear how the agent intellect accomplishes this task. In this paper I explore two models of abstraction – the extraction model and the production model – suggesting that each fails to capture Aquinas’ understanding of abstraction. I then offer my own interpretation of the function of the (...) agent intellect – the illumination model – by employing Aquinas’ comparison of the agent intellect to light. I argue that the agent intellect neither extracts nor produces an intelligible species, but rather makes the nature that is already present in the object intelligible by actualizing its passive power of intelligibility. This involves the co-actualization of partner powers in the intellect and in the intelligible object, and ultimately makes it possible to cognize a particular, material object in a universal way. (shrink)

A growing number of scholars have suggested that there is a unique I-You relation that obtains between persons in face-to-face encounters, but while the increased attention paid to the second-person has led to many important insights regarding the nature of this relation, there is still much work to be done to clarify what makes the second-person relation distinct. In this paper we wish to develop recent scholarship on the second-person by means of a phenomenological analysis of a doctor-patient interaction. In (...) such an interaction the doctor and patient continuously shift between the observational I-It and the interactive I-You, and recognizing the difference between observation and interaction not only helps to defend the claim that this relation is sui generis, but also uncovers the co-constitution of experience from within this relation. As we argue, engaging another second-personally involves a shared experience that is a result of incorporating the other’s mental states into one’s own while standing in the second-person relation. (shrink)

One of the most important topics that Thomas Aquinas discusses in his extensive corpus is the love of friendship, which is a unique form of love aimed at persons. Yet Aquinas's teachings on this are perplexing, for he claims that this love always produces union between lover and beloved, and that it is always a mutual love. This implies that one's love depends on reciprocation from the beloved, which seems implausible given the possibility of phenomena such as unrequited love. A (...) common interpretation of Aquinas's account of the love of friendship maintains that it is enough that one desires union and mutuality for such love to obtain even if such desires remain unrealized, but in this paper I reject this reading and argue that achieving union and mutuality is essential to this form of love. This novel interpretation ultimately reveals that the love of friendship is an intrinsically interpersonal act. (shrink)

Perfectionism is the view that what is intrinsically good is the fulfillment of human nature or the development and exercise of the characteristic human capacities. An important objection to the theory is what Gwen Bradford calls the “Deep Problem”: explaining why nature-fulfillment is good. We argue that situating perfectionism within a Thomistic metaethical framework and adopting Aquinas's account of the metaphysical “convertibility” of being and goodness gives us a solution to the Deep Problem. In short, the fulfillment of human nature (...) consists in the actualization of human potentialities or fullness of human being, and because being is ultimately the same thing as goodness, the fulfillment of human nature is good. We show that Thomistic perfectionism meets the requirements for an answer to the Deep Problem, provides the best explanation possible for the goodness of nature fulfillment, and is a natural foundation for perfectionist theories of value. (shrink)

The question of when and how bottom‐up input is integrated with top‐down knowledge has been debated extensively within cognition and perception, and particularly within language processing. A long running debate about the architecture of the spoken‐word recognition system has centered on the locus of lexical effects on phonemic processing: does lexical knowledge influence phoneme perception through feedback, or post‐perceptually in a purely feedforward system? Elman and McClelland (1988) reported that lexically restored ambiguous phonemes influenced the perception of the following phoneme, (...) supporting models with feedback from lexical to phonemic representations. Subsequently, several authors have argued that these results can be fully accounted for by diphone transitional probabilities in a feedforward system (Cairns et al., 1995; Pitt & McQueen, 1998). We report results strongly favoring the original lexical feedback explanation: lexical effects were present even when transitional probability biases were opposite to those of lexical biases. (shrink)

Political leaders engage in alarmism when they inflate threats to the commonweal in order to influence citizens' behavior. A range of democratic theorists argue that alarmism is necessary to maintain political order, with some even contending that alarmism is particularly necessary in democratic polities. Yet there appear to be strong grounds for thinking that alarmism is incompatible with the democratic ethos, namely insofar as it contravenes the principle of collective self-determination. Prima facie, alarmism seems to violate this principle because it (...) involves deception and emotional manipulation, both of which are incompatible with a commitment to autonomous, collective decision-making. However, almost none of the democratic theorists who posit alarmism as a political necessity acknowledge this tension, let alone explore how it might be overcome. In this paper, I rebut the claim that alarmism is essentially anti-democratic and argue that under the right institutional conditions it is broadly compatible with the principle of collective self-determination. I argue that if leaders obtain community consent for their use of alarmism, then the apparent tension with collective autonomy dissolves. In the final section of the paper, I briefly sketch how this consent might feasibly be obtained. (shrink)

This paper investigates hypotheses drawn from two sources: (1) Belsky, Steinberg, and Draper’s (1991) attachment theory model of the development of reproductive strategies, and (2) recent life history models and comparative data suggesting that environmental risk and uncertainty may be potent determinants of the optimal tradeoff between current and future reproduction. A retrospective, self-report study of 136 American university women aged 19–25 showed that current recollections of early stress (environmental risk and uncertainty) were related to individual differences in adult time (...) preference and adult sexual behavior, and that individual differences in time preference were related to adult attachment organization and sexual behavior. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that perceptions of early stress index environmental risk and uncertainty and mediate the attachment process and the development of reproductive strategies. On this view individual differences in time preference are considered to be part of the attachment theoretical construct of an internal working model, which itself is conceived as an evolved algorithm for the contingent development of alternative reproductive strategies. (shrink)

It has become orthodox to read Nietzsche as proposing the ‘sublimation’ of troublesome behavioural impulses. On this interpretation, he is said to denigrate the elimination of our impulses, preferring that we master them by pressing them into the service of our higher goals. My thesis is that this reading of Nietzsche’s conception of self-cultivation does not bear scrutiny. Closer examination of his later thought reveals numerous texts that show him explicitly recommending an eliminatory approach to self-cultivation. I invoke his theory (...) of the will to power in order to explain why he persistently valorises both elimination and sublimation as preconditions of healthy subjective unity. I conclude that which of these two approaches he recommends in a given situation depends on whether or not the impulse in question can be put to use within the overall economy of our drives. (shrink)

We reply to McQueen's commentary by comparing the parsimony of his account of relevant data and the computational model he favors with the explanation and model we favor. His account requires multiple independent explanations and mechanisms. Ours requires one: lexical feedback.

That art historians have felt it necessary to emulate this effort to express personal input can be explained by our need to gain credibility in that aspect of our work that is indistinguishable in method from other historical research: the reconstruction, through documents and artifacts, of past events, conditions, and attitudes. Most of us simply ignore the ambivalence of our position; I cannot recall having heard or read discussions of it, but it is bound to creep out from under the (...) rug. If a student asks me why I think Rembrandt and Picasso are good artists—which most students are too well trained to do—and if I answer that judgments of value are not discussed by historians, I am within my rights, like a witness at a congressional hearing claiming the protection of the Fifth Amendment. But I ought to be found in contempt of the classroom. And if I try to answer seriously, I ought not begin by saying that I chose Rembrandt because he has been acknowledged by generations to have been a great artist but rather because I find more to think, feel, and speak about in his works than in those of, for example, Nicolaes Maes, and because I believe that the student stands to gain more by looking at them. I want the student to have the most rewarding experiences, and, as a result, perhaps to learn to make value discriminations of his own—even ones different from mine and from the so-called consensus of history—and ultimately to explain the grounds on which he makes them. This means having to know and to explain what I think is "rewarding." James S. Ackerman, professor of fine arts at Harvard University, is the author of, among other works, The Architecture of Michelangelo, Art and Archaeology, The Cortile del Belvedere, and Palladio. He is currently writing on Renaissance art, science, and naturalism and making a film on Andrea Palladio and his influence in America. "Transactions in Architectural Design," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Winter 1974 issue. (shrink)

A new interpretation of educational philosophy that traces its origins to both social science and philosophy.

R. Douglas Geivett and James S. Spiegel present a textbook for philosophy courses that uses classic and current films to explore major philosophical themes such as the human condition, mind and knowledge, the moral life, faith and religion.

Halin in 1965 proved that if a graph has [Formula: see text] many pairwise disjoint rays for each [Formula: see text] then it has infinitely many pairwise disjoint rays. We analyze the complexity of this and other similar results in terms of computable and proof theoretic complexity. The statement of Halin’s theorem and the construction proving it seem very much like standard versions of compactness arguments such as König’s Lemma. Those results, while not computable, are relatively simple. They only use (...) arithmetic procedures or, equivalently, finitely many iterations of the Turing jump. We show that several Halin-type theorems are much more complicated. They are among the theorems of hyperarithmetic analysis. Such theorems imply the ability to iterate the Turing jump along any computable well ordering. Several important logical principles in this class have been extensively studied beginning with work of Kreisel, H. Friedman, Steel and others in the 1960s and 1970s. Until now, only one purely mathematical example was known. Our work provides many more and so answers Question 30 of Montalbán’s Open Questions in Reverse Mathematics in 2011. Some of these theorems including ones in Halin in 1965 are also shown to have unusual proof theoretic strength as well. (shrink)

This study analyzes the at-will employment doctrine using a tool that encompasses the complementarity of results-based utilitarian ethics, rule-based duty ethics, and virtue-based character ethics. The paper begins with a discussion of the importance of the problem followed by its evolution and current status. After describing the method of analysis, the central section evaluates the employment at-will doctrine, and is informed by Lord Acton's dictum, "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The conclusion explores the implications of the (...) findings. (shrink)

People around the world are agitating for democracy and individual rights, but there is no consensus on a theory of liberal democracy that might guide them. What are the first principles of a just society? What political theory should shape public policy in such a society? In this book, James S. Fishkin offers a new basis for answering these questions by proposing the ideal of a "self-reflective society"—a political culture in which citizens are able to decide their own fate (...) through unconstrained dialogue. Fishkin offers a comprehensive critique of liberal political theories that do not satisfy the requirements for a self-reflective society. He then explains his own theory of liberalism, showing that the freely self-examining society he advocates can provide the key to issues of political legitimacy and social justice. Fishkin proposes practical applications of his theory that would lead to more participatory democracy. Among these are deliberative opinion polls that would allow ordinary citizens to explore issues directly with candidates before elections, and vouchers that would allow them to organize representation for their interests. Fishkin examines a broad range of topics from the fresh perspective of a self-reflective society: utility and its limits, justice between generations, conflicting ideals of democracy, equal opportunity, the connections between theory and public policy, the notion of moral progress, and the bases for political obligation. His book makes a new contribution to central debates in moral, political, and legal philosophy. (shrink)

At first glance, Fichte and Nietzsche might strike us as intellectual contraries. This impression is reinforced by Nietzsche’s disparaging remarks about Fichte. The dearth of critical literature comparing the two thinkers also could easily lead us to believe that they are, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant to one another. In this paper, however, I argue that their theories of subjectivity are in many respects remarkably similar and worthy of comparison. But I further explain how, despite this convergence, their normative (...) philosophies end up so conspicuously at odds with one another. After examining the resemblance between their denials of the substantial self, I respectively analyse Fichte’s and Nietzsche’s positive accounts of subjectivity, self-cultivation, and the political preconditions of self-cultivation. I locate the conceptual juncture at which their practical outlooks begin to part ways in their divergent drive psychologies and in their distinct conceptions of conscience. These apparently minor theoretical differences generate a large-scale disagreement regarding the political systems they believe best enable self-cultivation, with Fichte favouring a democratic regime, while Nietzsche opts for a markedly more aristocratic one. I close by sketching a possible way out of this dilemma. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Epicurean View of Death Death and Deprivation It's a Good Life… Conclusion Notes.

Theorems of hyperarithmetic analysis occupy an unusual neighborhood in the realms of reverse mathematics and recursion-theoretic complexity. They lie above all the fixed iterations of the Turing jump but below ATR $_{0}$. There is a long history of proof-theoretic principles which are THAs. Until the papers reported on in this communication, there was only one mathematical example. Barnes, Goh, and Shore [1] analyze an array of ubiquity theorems in graph theory descended from Halin’s [9] work on rays in graphs. They (...) seem to be typical applications of ACA $_{0}$ but are actually THAs. These results answer Question 30 of Montalbán’s Open Questions in Reverse Mathematics [19] and supply several other natural principles of different and unusual levels of complexity.This work led in [25] to a new neighborhood of the reverse mathematical zoo: almost theorems of hyperarithmetic analysis. When combined with ACA $_{0}$ they are THAs but on their own are very weak. Denizens both mathematical and logical are provided. Generalizations of several conservativity classes are defined and these ATHAs as well as many other principles are shown to be conservative over RCA $_{0}$ in all these senses and weak in other recursion-theoretic ways as well. These results answer a question raised by Hirschfeldt and reported in [19] by providing a long list of pairs of principles one of which is very weak over RCA $_{0}$ but over ACA $_{0}$ is equivalent to the other which may be strong or very strong going up a standard hierarchy and at the end being stronger than full second-order arithmetic. (shrink)

A consideration of the ethical implications of an aesthetic view of life, _The Question of Value _reintroduces the Nietzschean imperative to weigh the things of the world anew. James S. Hans assumes that we must and do value the world we live in every day. Rejecting the deconstructionist view, which is always willing to defer the question of value because there are no grounds for considering it, he argues that we continue to measure the world in spite of the (...) apparent lack of reason for doing so, and that we ought therefore to give serious thought to the way we make our choices. The book begins with the premise that the major task Nietzsche set for the Western world has yet to be undertaken in its fullest sense and connects this task to Heidegger’s mode of questioning in his later work and to Freud’s reflections on the death instinct and the pleasure principle. The study’s central premise is that Nietzsche was correct in diagnosing the ills of our culture and in prescribing a cure because he came to recognize the essential connection between time and revenge. He saw that the desire for revenge stems from our disgust at being temporal creatures and that a new system of values will only be possible once we overcome that self-loathing and the endless acts of revenge that stem from it. This is the most difficult of human tasks, but it is the only one worth attempting once one is able to see the full consequences of the human desire for revenge. Instead of being a critical discussion of Nietzsche’s, Heidegger’s, or Freud’s work, then, _The Question of Value _is an attempt to think through their ideas and to implement them in our world in a new way. It establishes the necessity to affirm the value of time and seeks to provide a framework through which such an affirmation of temporality can take place on a larger ethical scale. (shrink)

Life history theory’s principle of allocation suggests that because immature organisms cannot expend reproductive effort, the major trade-off facing juveniles will be the one between survival, on one hand, and growth and development, on the other. As a consequence, infants and children might be expected to possess psychobiological mechanisms for optimizing this trade-off. The main argument of this paper is that the attachment process serves this function and that individual differences in attachment organization (secure, insecure, and possibly others) may represent (...) facultative adaptations to conditions of risk and uncertainty that were probably recurrent in the environment of human evolutionary adaptedness. (shrink)

Life history theory suggests that in risky and uncertain environments the optimal reproductive strategy is to reproduce early in order to maximize the probability of leaving any descendants at all. The fact that early menarche facilitates early reproduction provides an adaptationist rationale for our first two hypotheses: that women who experience more risky and uncertain environments early in life would have (1) earlier menarche and (2) earlier first births than women who experience less stress at an early age. Attachment theory (...) and research provide the rationale for our second two hypotheses: that the subjective early experience of risky and uncertain environments (insecurity) is (3) part of an evolved mechanism for entraining alternative reproductive strategies contingent on environmental risk and uncertainty and (4) reflected in expected lifespan. Evidence from our pilot study of 100 women attending antenatal clinics at a large metropolitan hospital is consistent with all four hypotheses: Women reporting more troubled family relations early in life had earlier menarche, earlier first birth, were more likely to identify with insecure adult attachment styles, and expected shorter lifespans. Multivariate analyses show that early stress directly affected age at menarche and first birth, affected adult attachment in interaction with expected lifespan, but had no effect on expected lifespan, where its original effect was taken over by interactions between age at menarche and adult attachment as well as age at first birth and adult attachment. We discuss our results in terms of the need to combine evolutionary and developmental perspectives and the relation between early stress in general and father absence in particular. (shrink)

Debating Deliberative Democracy explores the nature and value of deliberation, the feasibility and desirability of consensus on contentious issues, the implications of institutional complexity and cultural diversity for democratic decision making, and the significance of voting and majority rule in deliberative arrangements. Investigates the nature and value of deliberation, the feasibility and desirability of consensus on contentious issues, the implications of institutional complexity and cultural diversity for democratic decision making, and the significance of voting and majority rule in deliberative arrangements. (...) Includes focus on institutions and makes reference to empirical work. Engages a debate that cuts across political science, philosophy, the law and other disciplines. (shrink)

J. D. Monk has shown that for first order languages with finitely many variables there is no finite set of schema which axiomatizes the universally valid formulas. There are such finite sets of schema which axiomatize the formulas valid in all structures of some fixed finite size.

ABSTRACTAccording to Nietzsche, both modern individuals and societies are pathologically fragmented. In this paper, I examine how he proposes we combat this affliction in his Untimely Meditations. I argue that he advocates a dual struggle involving both instrumental domination and eradication. On these grounds, I claim the following: 1. pace a growing number of commentators, we cannot categorise the species of conflict he endorses in the Untimely Meditations as agonistic; and 2. this conflict is better understood as analogous to the (...) species of struggle that Schopenhauer describes in his account of purposive organisation. (shrink)

Nelson Goodman argues against those who, like Carnap, claim extensional identity is the criterion for correct constructional definition. Goodman argues that internal logical difficulties sink such a criterion, thus he proposes his own criterion of extensional isomorphism. We argue that Goodman's criterion itself falls prey to his own arguments or else extensional identity is not shown faulty.