Representational and embodied approaches to cognitive science are often presented in opposition to one another, with Merleau-Ponty serving as a historical precursor to embodied approaches. We argue that the two approaches are compatible and complementary, and that both can be used to interpret Merleau-Ponty's (and Husserl's) work. To support our arguments, we describe two forms of representation associated with two distinct processes. Motor intentionality is a process of direct embodied interaction (reflexes, habits, skilled behaviors) which use mediating representations to bind (...) sensory information together and guide behavior. These internal states reliably indicate specific stimuli (even if just during a transient episode), are associated with a determinate phenomenal character (a “typical physiognomy”), and correspond to what Husserl describes as passive synthesis. Higher-level processes like reasoning make use of more explicit representations (what Husserl calls active processes), which are associated with focused attention and “explicated” propositional contents. The two kinds of process can occur independently, but are often fully woven together, as for example when a friend makes explicit suggestions while the two of you cook. We also discuss Merleau-Ponty’s famous Schneider case, which makes vivid what happens when both types of processes (motor intentionality and high-level reasoning; passive and active synthesis) are intact, but when some explicit representations are damaged. A certain stratum of virtual or projected space is lost, and so a certain kind of abstractly guided behavior is unavailable to him. (shrink)

The traditional theory of the just war comprises two sets of principles, one governing the resort to war ( jus ad bellum) and the other governing the conduct of war ( jus in bello). The two sets of principles are regarded, in Michael Walzer’s words, as “logically independent. It is perfectly possible for a just war to be fought unjustly and for an unjust war to be fought in strict accordance with the rules.”1 Let us say that those who fight (...) in a just war are “just combatants,” while those who fight in a war that is unjust because it lacks a just cause are “unjust combatants.” (A just cause is an aim that can contribute to the justification for war and that may permissibly be pursued by means of war.)2 The most important implication of the idea that jus in bello is independent of jus ad bellum is that.. (shrink)

There may be circumstances in which it is morally justifiable intentionally to kill a person who is morally innocent, threatens no one, rationally wishes not to die, and does not consent to be killed. Although the killing would wrong the victim, it might be justified by the necessity of averting some disaster that would otherwise occur. In other instances of permissible killing, however, the justification appeals to more than consequences. It may appeal to the claim that the person to be (...) killed has acted in such a way that to kill him would neither wrong him nor violate his rights, even if he has not consented to be killed or to be subjected to the risk of being killed. In these cases, I will say that the person is liable to be killed. Although I borrow the notion of liability from legal theory, and although much of what I say will be informed by the literature on liability in both tort law and criminal law, my concern in this article is with moral rather than legal liability. (shrink)

This paper defends “moral individualism” against various arguments that have been intended to show that membership in the human species or participation in our distinctively human form of life is a sufficient basis for a moral status higher than that of any animal. Among the arguments criticized are the “nature-of-the-kind argument,” which claims that it is the nature of all human beings to have certain higher psychological capacities, even if, contingently, some human beings lack them, and various versions of the (...) idea that there is a special form of life that all human beings share but of which no animal can be a full participant. The paper concludes that none of these arguments succeeds in demonstrating that there are moral reasons to permit animals to be treated less well than members of our own species whose psychological capacities and potential are no higher than those of the animals. (shrink)

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Attempts to determine or to select what kind of person or people to bring into existence are controversial. This is particularly true of “negative selection” or “selecting against” a certain type of person—that is, the attempt to prevent a person of a certain type, or people of that type, from existing. Virtually everyone agrees that some instances of negative selection are objectionable—for example, that selection against healthy people would be wrong, particularly if this were combined with positive selection of people (...) with serious diseases. But some people believe that all negative selection is objectionable and therefore that all “selection for existence,” whether positive or negative, is objectionable. For if negative selection is objectionable, it seems to follow that positive selection is as well, since the attempt to bring a person of a certain type into existence is simultaneously an attempt not to bring into existence a person who is not of that type. In short, positive selection is implicitly negative as well. (shrink)

Many alleged counter-examples to intentionalism, the thesis that the phenomenology of perceptual experiences of a given sense modality supervenes on the contents of experiences of that modality, can be avoided by adopting a liberal view of the sorts of properties that can be represented in perceptual experience. I argue that there is a class of counter-examples to intentionalism, based on shifts in attention, which avoids this response. A necessary connection between the contents and phenomenal characters of perceptual experiences can be (...) preserved by distinguishing perceptual phenomenology from the phenomenology of attention; but even if this distinction is viable, these cases put pressure on the thesis that phenomenal character can, in general, be explained in terms of mental representation. (shrink)

THERE’S a well-known scene in Shakespeare’s Henry V in which the King, disguised as an ordinary soldier, is conversing with some of his soldiers on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. Hoping to find or inspire support among them, he remarks: “Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the King’s company, his cause being just and his quarrel honorable.” One soldier replies: “That’s more than we know,” whereupon a second says: “Ay, or more than we should (...) seek after; for we know enough if we know we are the King’s subjects: if his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us.”. (shrink)

This paper argues against two prominent accounts of what it is to "promote a desire," found in the work of Stephen Finlay and Mark Schroeder.

Discussions of the morality of the Gulf War have tended to embrace the traditional theory of the just war uncritically and to apply its tenets in a mechanical and unimaginative fashion. We believe, by contrast, that careful reflection of the Gulf War reveals that certain principles of the traditional theory are oversimplifications that require considerable refinement. Our aims, therefore, are both practical and theoretical. We hope to contribute to a better understanding of the ethics both of war in general and (...) of the Gulf War in particular. (shrink)

Alvin Plantinga gave a reductio of the conjunction of the following three theses: Existentialism (the view that, e.g., the proposition that Socrates exists can't exist unless Socrates does), Serious Actualism (the view that nothing can have a property at a world without existing at that world) and Contingency (the view that some objects, like Socrates, exist only contingently). I sketch a view of truth at a world which enables the Existentialist to resist Plantinga's argument without giving up either Serious Actualism (...) or Contingency. (shrink)

This paper concerns the question of how to draw inferences common sensically from uncertain knowledge. Since the early work of Shore and Johnson (1980), Paris and Vencovská (1990), and Csiszár (1989), it has been known that the Maximum Entropy Inference Process is the only inference process which obeys certain common sense principles of uncertain reasoning. In this paper we consider the present status of this result and argue that within the rather narrow context in which we work this complete and (...) consistent mode of uncertain reasoning is actually characterised by the observance of just a single common sense principle (or slogan). (shrink)

In this article, I articulate and respond to an epistemological challenge to meta-normative realism. The challenge has it that, if realism about the normative is correct, and if evolutionary forces have significantly influenced our normative judgments, then it would be a remarkable coincidence if the content of the normative facts and our normative judgments were aligned. I criticize David Enoch's recent attempt to meet this challenge, but provide an alternative response that is structurally similar. I argue that if realism is (...) correct, then it would be remarkable if the content of our normative judgments and the normative facts were not significantly aligned. (shrink)

Since the 1960's, work in the analytic tradition on the nature of mental and linguistic content has converged on the views that social facts about public language meaning are derived from facts about the thoughts of individuals, and that these thoughts are constituted by properties of the internal states of agents. I give a two-part argument against this picture of intentionality: first, that if mental content is prior to public language meaning, then a view of mental content much like the (...) causal-pragmatic theory presented by Robert Stalnaker in Inquiry must be correct; second, that the causal-pragmatic theory is false. I conclude with some positive suggestions regarding alternative solutions to the `problem of intentionality.'. (shrink)

There is a nonabsolute or “contingent” form of pacifism that claims that war in contemporary conditions inevitably involves the killing of innocent people on a scale that is too great to be justified. Some contingent pacifists argue that war always involves a risk that virtually everyone that one might kill is innocent – either because one can never be sure that one’s cause is just or because even most of those who fight in wars that lack a just cause are (...) nevertheless not culpable and are therefore innocent in the relevant sense. Others argue that there is no just cause for war that is sufficiently important to justify the large-scale killing of innocent civilians that is unavoidable in war. I seek to refute contingent pacifism by arguing that its theoretical presuppositions are untenable. (shrink)

The question whether cognition is subserved by internal processes in the brain (internalism) or extends in to the world (active externalism) has been vigorously debated in recent years. I show how internalist and externalist ideas can be pursued in a common framework, using (1) open dynamical systems, which allow for separate analysis of an agent's intrinsic and embodied dynamics, and (2) supervenience functions, which can be used to study how low-level dynamical systems give rise to higher-level dynamical structures.

Some linguistic phenomena can occur in uses of language in thought, whereas others only occur in uses of language in communication. I argue that this distinction can be used as a test for whether a linguistic phenomenon can be explained via Grice’s theory of conversational implicature. I argue further, on the basis of this test, that conversational implicature cannot be used to explain quantifier domain restriction or apparent substitution failures involving coreferential names, but that it must be used to explain (...) the phenomenon of referential uses of definite descriptions. I conclude with a brief discussion of the relevance of this point to the semantics/pragmatics distinction. (shrink)

This paper shows how the dream archive and search engine on DreamBank.net, a Web site containing over 22,000 dream reports, can be used to generate new findings on dream content, some of which raise interesting questions about the relationship between dreaming and various forms of waking thought. It begins with studies that draw dream reports from DreamBank.net for studies of social networks in dreams, and then demonstrates the usefulness of the search engine by employing word strings relating to religious and (...) sexual elements. Examples from two lengthy individual dream series are used to show how the dreams of one person can be studied for characters, activities, and emotions. A final example shows that accurate inferences about a person’s religious beliefs can be made on the basis of reading through dreams retrieved with a few keywords. The overall findings are similar to those in studies using traditional forms of content analysis. (shrink)

This paper explores the central question of why soldiers in democratic societies might decide to fight in wars that they may have reason to believe are objectively or questionably unjust. First, I provide a framework for understanding the dilemma caused by an unjust war and a soldier's competing moral obligations; namely, the obligations to self and state. Next, I address a few traditional key thoughts concerning soldiers and jus ad bellum. This is followed by an exploration of the unique and (...) contradicting moral problems that confront modern soldiers and their officers. I argue that although traditional positions such as invincible ignorance provide a rather dangerous ‘head-in-the-sand’ mentality, soldiers serving a democratic government are nonetheless very limited in their legal and moral ability to interpret what is a justifiable war. However, a very few select senior officers are in positions to make such legal and moral decisions concerning jus ad bellum. (shrink)

In his book, The Scientific Image, van Fraassen lucidly draws an alternative to scientific realism, which he calls "Constructive Empiricism". In this epistemological theory, the concept of observability plays the pivotal role: acceptable theories may be believed only where what they say solely concerns observables. Van Fraassen develops a concept of observability which is, as he admits, vague, relative, science-dependent, and anthropocentric. I draw out unacceptable consequences of each of these aspects of his concept. Also, I argue against his assumption (...) that "empirical adequacy" is the same thing as "saving the phenomena", according to his sense of the expressions. (shrink)

The article features an analytic protocol for examining controversial criminal cases in critical thinking courses. The rubric has been designed to be useful to busy critical thinking teachers who wish to draw on student interest in true crime. Six guidelines are presented that are intended to provide the instructor with a convenient scheme for quickly and easily framing classroom discussions. Due to their generality, the guidelines can be readily applied to a wide-range of cases, giving educators a high degree of (...) flexibility in the selection of criminal affairs. (shrink)

Michael Walzer suggests that our common beliefs about individual responsibility and liability become largely irrelevant in the conduct of war. In conditions of war, everything is changed. Political realists have claimed that war eliminates morality; Walzer claims that war collectivizes it. I believe that conditions of war change nothing at all; they simply make it more difficult to ascertain relevant facts. This is not to say that the principles and laws that do or should govern the activity of war are (...) identical to those governing relations among individuals. Just as domestic law cannot simply restate the principles of individual morality, because the declaration and enforcement of laws have effects that must be taken into account in the formulation of the law, so too the principles, conventions, and laws of war cannot simply restate the principles of individual or international morality. The rules of war have to accommodate our epistemic limitations and to be formulated with a regard for the ways in which their announcement is likely to affect people’s behavior. But they should otherwise reflect as closely as possible the.. (shrink)

This is the written version of a reply to Michael Tye's "Transparency, Qualia Realism, and Representationalism," given at the 40th Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy. It argues that, given one standard way of understanding these theses, qualia realism is trivially true and transparency theses are trivially false. I also discuss four objections to Tye's claim that the phenomenal character of the experience of red just is redness, and conclude by arguing that philosophers of perception should state their claims as about the (...) properties of subjects of experience rather than as about the properties of experiences themselves. (shrink)

Internalists about practical reasons maintain that all of an agent’s reasons for action derive their normative force via some relation in which they stand with that agent’s pro-attitudes, or the pro-attitudes that the agent would have in some idealized set of circumstances. One common complaint against internalism is that the view is extensionally inadequate – that it cannot render the correct verdicts about what reasons agents have in a range of important cases. In this paper, I examine that charge of (...) extensional inadequacy, taking as my starting point an argument that Derek Parfit has recently leveled against internalism. Through a close evaluation of that argument and potential replies to it, I attempt to show that internalists cannot accommodate important pre-theoretical intuitions about what reasons we have. However, I also argue that Parfit’s case is importantly overstated; I set out to show that his argument cannot establish, as he thinks it does, that no reasons derive their normative force in the way that internalists believe that all do. In doing so, I draw attention to the possibility of a hybrid position about practical reasons that, surprisingly, receives little attention in the existing literature. If the arguments of the paper succeed, I will have established a modest theoretical advantage for hybridism over internalism – namely, that it is not vulnerable to the charge of extensional inadequacy. My hope is that this goes some way toward establishing hybridism’s credentials as a serious alternative to its “pure” competitors. (shrink)

One of the most contentious of Castoriadis' ideas is his concept of creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing). This article elucidates and evaluates this concept of creation, contrasting Castoriadis' approach with its classical antithesis in the philosophy of Parmenides, who famously concluded that the universe muct be unchanging since nothing can come to be or cease to be.

I reply to the argument of Caplan (Philos Stud 133:181–198, 2007 ) against the conjunction of Millianism with the view that utterances of sentences involving names often pragmatically convey descriptively enriched propositions.

During mammalian development, maintenance of cell fate through mitotic divisions require faithful replication not only of the DNA but also of a particular epigenetic state. Germline cells have the capacity of erasing this epigenetic memory at crucial times during development, thereby resetting their epigenome. Certain marks, however, appear to escape this reprogramming, which allows their transmission to the offspring and potentially guarantees transgenerational epigenetic inheritance. Here we discuss the molecular requirements for faithful transmission of epigenetic information and our current knowledge (...) about the transmission of epigenetic information through generations. (shrink)

While Roman Ingarden remains best known among English‐speaking philosophers and literary theorists for his work in aesthetics, and primarily for his study of the literary work of art, his studies in aesthetics and art belong in fact to the comprehensive program of phenomenological research in ontology and metaphysics that occupied him for his entire career. In this article I briefly describe this program of phenomenological research, then I discuss some of the major features of Ingarden’s analyses of works of art (...) and the aesthetic experience. (shrink)

Philosophy of mind in the phenomenological tradition / Philip J. Walsh and Jeff Yoshimi -- The mind-body problem in the 20th century / Amy Kind -- A short history of philosophical theories of consciousness in the 20th century / Tim Crane -- 20th century theories of perception / Nico Orlandi -- 20th century theories of personal identity / Jens Johansson -- Introspecting in the 20th century / Maja Spener -- Mental causation / Julie Yoo -- Intentionality: from Brentano to (...) representationalism / Michelle Montague -- Wittgenstein and his legacy / Severin Schroeder -- The boundaries of the mind / Katalin Farkas -- The rise of cognitive science in the 20th century / Carrie Figdor -- Future directions for philosophy of mind / Susan Schneider and Pete Mandik. (shrink)

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Franklin Miller have presented an account of why killing is wrong that implies it can be permissible to kill certain human beings in order to use their organs for transplantation.1 Since I am going to criticise their arguments, I will begin by applauding their willingness to defend an unpopular position and by registering my agreement with their substantive conclusion about organ procurement. The criticisms I will offer are intended to be friendly in spirit; but they are also, (...) of course, meant to be effective.Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller argue that the wrongness of killing is reducible to the wrongness of disabling, in particular, the wrongness of totally disabling. ‘The rule against disabling,’ they write, ‘fully explains all that is bad and wrong with… killing.’1One might think that their view is just a slight modification of the familiar view that the wrongness of killing is reducible to the wrongness of harming. According to this view, killing is normally gravely wrong because it inflicts on its victim a particularly grievous harm by depriving him of all the good that his future life would otherwise have contained. If the authors' view were just a restatement of this harm-based account of the wrongness of killing, one might conclude that their emphasis on disability is needlessly provocative. But in fact their view is quite different. This is because disabling is only one form of harming. On might seriously harm a person—for example, by causing him to experience mild chronic pain for the remainder of his life—without in any way disabling him. He would retain all his abilities but would be less comfortable while exercising them. Because there are thus forms of harming that are not instances of disabling, a rule …. (shrink)

Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons have recently provided an updated presentation and defense of a metaethical view that they call cognitivist expressivism. Expressivists claim that moral judgments express propositional attitudes that do not represent or describe the external world. Horgan and Timmons agree with this claim, but they also deny the traditional expressivist claim that moral judgments do not express beliefs. On their view, moral judgments are genuine, truth-apt beliefs, thus making their form of expressivism a cognitivist one. In this (...) essay, I argue that Horgan and Timmons have failed to demonstrate that moral judgments express sui generis, nondescriptive content by showing that at least some moral content is descriptive. In addition, I show how the descriptivist can account for those properties that Horgan and Timmons consider distinctive of moral belief. In doing so, I remove one of the expressivist's most important lines of motivation for positing nondescriptive moral content in the first place. At the end of the essay, I briefly sketch a view that I call partial or modest moral realism. (shrink)

As part of a multifactorial approach to address weak incentives for innovative antimicrobial drug development, market entry rewards are an emerging solution. Recently, the Duke-Margolis Center for Health Policy released the Priority Antimicrobial Value and Entry Award proposal, which combines a MER with payment reforms, transitioning from volume-based to “value-based” payments for antimicrobials. Here, the PAVE Award and similar MERs are reviewed, focusing on further refinement and avenues for implementation.

In the following article, it will be argued that there are at least four clusters of arguments generally proposed to justify banning doping in sport and that Simon’s contribution has been of a seminal nature to at least two of the clusters.

The present article on John Dewey aims at pursuing the traces of the reception of Dewey’s work in France. It is intended as a survey of the writers who have taken note of Dewey and his ideas, and is meant to function as a sort of additive inventory, with no claim to comprehensiveness. Some of the articles mentioned were unfortunately unavailable for direct examination and are thus listed merely for purposes of information.Although the educational and philosophical writings of John Dewey (...) are actually indivisible, Dewey’s oeuvre has not been read in France and Europe generally as of a piece, but has largely been registered in terms of those parts which have relevance to education and teaching. Indicative of this is the fact that it took until 1975 forDemocracy and Education -the book which, in Dewey’s own view, most clearly presented his linking of pedagogy and philosophy — to be published in France. Gérard Delledalle, the translator ofDemocracy and Education, is the only person so far in France to have dealt systematically with the whole of Dewey’s writings. He has translated other works by Dewey and has written several books on him, dealing expressly with Dewey’s philosophy of pragmatism as the foundation of his theory of education.It is actually inadequate to restrict the reception of Dewey’s work to France alone. Rather, one should speak of francophone Europe, for the first translations of Dewey’s educational writings into French were made by Adolphe Ferrière, Ovide Decroly and édouard Claparède — a Swiss, a Belgian, and a Frenchman. It was thanks to them that Dewey’s thoughts on education began to make an impact on the francophone movement for school reform in the early twentieth century.Discussion of his theory of education is typified in France as well by a division into proponents of a concept of ‘learning by doing’ indebted to Dewey and representatives of authoritarian forms of education, which reject Dewey. Although French thought has not yet concerned itself closely with pragmatism, Dewey’s opponents believed that they could denounce him and his theories simply by levelling the charge of “pragmatism.” This dualistic mode of thinking which appears to be deeply rooted in France has proved to be an obstacle to the reception of Dewey and has led to neglect and rejection of his theories. (shrink)

One of the longest standing objections levied against virtue ethics is the Self-Absorption Objection. Proponents of this objection state that the main problem with neo-Aristotelian accounts is that the virtuous agent’s motive is to promote her own eudaimonia. In this paper, I examine Christopher Toner’s attempt to address this objection by arguing that we should understand the virtuous agent as acting virtuously because doing so is what it means to live well qua human. I then go on to defend Toner’s (...) view from two of Anne Baril’s criticisms: that his account is un-Aristotelian, and that his account does not take seriously the importance of the virtuous agent organizing her life in a way that is good for her. In doing so, I pave the way for neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists to develop an adequate response to the self-absorption objection along Toner’s lines. (shrink)

This is a new release of the original 1941 edition.