How can a persisting object change whilst remaining the same object? Lewis, who frames this as the problem of temporary intrinsics, presents us with the perdurance solution: objects persist by having temporal parts which may have differing properties. And in doing so he characterises the opposing view as persisting but not by having temporal parts – a view he calls endurance. But this dichotomous picture of Lewis, although now widely embraced, misses out the orthodox historic view – a view I (...) call temporal holism: objects persist by having temporal parts to which they are ontologically prior. (In the perduring solution, by contrast, the temporal parts are ontologically prior.) This paper sets out this temporal holist solution and makes clear its differences from perdurantist and endurantist solutions. Although temporal holism has a long and illustrious history, this history has not been explicitly recognised. I begin the task of recognising this history in this paper, in order to make clear the nature of temporal holism, and to show that it is a long-established, well supported and distinctive position. The paper sets out, too, how temporal holism solves other ontological problems so that, despite its current neglect, temporary holism has the potential to greatly enrich contemporary philosophical debates. (shrink)

In this paper, it is shown that an event E can be the cause of an event E* even if there is a less than 100% likelihood that, given an arbitrary E-similar event, an E*-similar event will ensue.

Critical realism has been an important advance in social science methodology because it develops a qualitative theory of causality which avoids some of the pitfalls of empiricist theories of causality. But while there has been ample work exploring the relationship between critical realism and qualitative research methods there has been noticeably less work exploring the relationship between dialectical critical realism and qualitative research methods. This seems strange especially since the founder of the philosophy of critical realism, Roy Bhaskar, employs and (...) develops a range of dialectical concepts in his later work in order to extend the main tenets of critical realism. The aim of this paper is to draw on Bhaskar's later work, as well as Marxism, to reorient a critical realist methodology towards a dialectical approach for qualitative research. In particular, the paper demonstrates how dialectical critical realism can begin to provide answers to three common criticisms made against original critical realist methodology: that the qualitative theory of causal powers and structures developed by critical realists is problematic; that critical realist methodology contains values which prove damaging to empirical research; and that critical realists often have difficulties in researching everyday qualitative dilemmas that people face in their daily lives. (shrink)

In his final book, renowned philosopher Pierre Hadot explores Goethe’s relationship with ancient spiritual exercises—transformative acts of intellect, imagination, or will. Goethe sought both an intense experience of the present moment as well as a kind of cosmic consciousness, both of which are rooted in ancient philosophical practices. These practices shaped Goethe’s audacious contrast to the traditional maxim memento mori (Don’t forget that you will die) with the aim of transforming our ordinary consciousness. Ultimately, Hadot reveals how Goethe cultivated a (...) deep love for life that brings to the forefront a new maxim: Don’t forget to live. (shrink)

Cassirer hat sich — wie der späte Cohen und der späte Natorp — von der Marburger Beschränkung auf Erkenntnistheorie entfernt. In bisher unpublizierten Texten aus der Emigrationszeit befaßte Cassirer sich mit dem Problem der Metaphysik. Goethes Lehre von den Urphänomenen und die Gestalttheorie Kurt Goldsteins beeinflußten Cassirers späte Theorie der « Basisphänomene ». Diese neue Denkrichtung knüpfte an die Symboltheorie Cassirers an und wies auf ihren Ausgang hin. Tout comme Cohen et Natorp dans leur œuvre tardive, Cassirer s'est situé au-delà (...) de la théorie de la connaissance à laquelle l'École de Marbourg entendait se limiter. Dans des textes écrits durant son exil et qui n'ont pas encore été publiés, Cassirer aborde la problématique de la métaphysique. La théorie gœthéenne des phénomènes originaires comme la théorie de la forme développée par Kurt Goldstein ont influencé la réflexion tardive de Cassirer sur les « phénomènes de base ». Cette nouvelle orientation de sa pensée s'articule sur la théorie du symbole, et indique comment la dépasser. (shrink)

This is my response to a book, Globalize Liberation, edited by David Solnit and published in 2004. Media activists James John Bell and Patrick Reinsborough sent me a copy and asked for my thoughts about it; the result turned into an essay of some length, which got a certain amount of exposure and discussion online. Looking at the travails of progressive activism since its publication, I find very little that needs revision, except the tone of relative optimism expressed toward (...) the end. (shrink)

Does the conceit in question expand awareness or narrow it? If it narrows it, then it is pathological. It if expands it, it is non-pathological.

There is no difference between autonomy and non-psychopathy or, equivalently, between psychopathy and non-autonomy. Or rather, there is a difference, but it is tenuous, in that someone who is non-autonomous is non-psychopathic only as long the institution that hosts him is non-psychopathic. So his non-psychopathy, being borrowed, is both weak and ultimately devoid of reality.

It is proved that time travel is not possible.

If a person has done what he should have done, he is satisfied. If he is in the process of doing what he should do, he is happy but not content. If he is trying to do what he should do but he is being thwarted in his efforts, he is frustrated but not depressed. If, having been thwarted in his attempts to do what he should do, he resigns himself to failure, then he is depressed.

A therapist turns very damaged people into moderately damaged people. I turn moderately strong people into very strong people. I am an analyst, not a therapist.

The modern age has not given rise to any new psychopathologies. But modern social configurations have withdrawn some of the constraints that in times past inhibited the development of latent psychopathology.

An analysis of Gibbon's five signs of civilizational decay.

Beobachtung informiert uns, was ist, aber nicht was sein muss. Sie weist uns daher nicht auf logische Normen oder auf Beziehungen logischer Abhängigkeit hin. Darüber hinaus setzt die Umwandlung von sensorischer Information (Bildinformation) in propositionale (konzeptuelle, nicht-bildliche) Information das Wissen voraus, wie man Informationen einer Art in Informationen anderer Art umwandeln kann, und setzt daher die Kenntnis logischer Äquivalenzen voraus. So ist nicht jedes Wissen aus der Sinneswahrnehmung abgeleitet, auch wenn man sich auf die Unterscheidung zwischen wissensartigen, aber nicht wirklich (...) wissensvermittelnden, kognitiven Strukturen einerseits und echtem Wissen andererseits beruft. Eine philosophische Rechtfertigung wird für Freuds tiefgründige Einsichten in Kapitel VII der Traumdeutung über die Grenzen der ikonischen Ideation gegeben. Wittgensteins so genannte "Bildtheorie" der Sprache wird untersucht. (shrink)

A case is made that so-called international law is law in name only and, moreover, that although bona fide international law is theoretically possible, it would not be desirable.

There are nine kinds of number: cardinal (measure of class size), ordinal (corresponds to position), generalized ordinal (position in multidimensional discrete manifold), signed (relation between cardinals), rational (different kind of relation between cardinals), real (limit), complex (pair of reals), transfinite (size of reflexive class), and dimension (measure of complexity.

Les sciences empiriques font des suppositions qu'elles ne sont pas elles-mêmes capables de justifier. La philosophie justifie ces hypothèses; C'est son travail.

For intellectuals, and probably others, one form of escapism is a kind of constricted and shallow hyper-realism—the hyper-realism of having a dead-end job, even though one has a PhD or an IQ of 170. And that sort of hyper-realism is pseudo-realism, because realism is not about having a bad life; it is having the courage to have a good life, which the intellectual with the dead end job does not have.

Chomsky's arguments for the existence of pre-experiential knowledge, and for the existence of sub-personal cognition, are clearly stated and shown to be cogent.

Double-think is more of a threat to psychical integrity than repression.

According to David Hume, the concept of causation and probability are to be understood in terms of the concepts of similarity and repetition. In this book, it is shown that they are to be understood in terms of the concept of continuity. One corollary is that there is no legitimate basis for skepticism concerning the legitimacy of inductive inference. Another is that anti-realism about theoretical entities is misconceived.

Este libro establece y analiza la Teoría de las descripciones de Russell.

The shred of truth in Kuhn's erroneous theory of scientific theories is identified.

Intended for philosophically minded psychologists and psychologically minded philosophers, this book identifies the ways that psychology has hobbled itself by adhering too strictly to empiricism, this being the doctrine that all knowledge is observation-based. In the first part of this two-part work, it is shown that empiricism is false. In the second part, the psychology-relevant consequences of this fact are identified. Five of these are of special importance. First, whereas some psychopathologies (e.g. obsessive-compulsive disorder) corrupt the activity mediated by one’s (...) psychological architecture, others (e.g. sociopathy) corrupt that architecture itself. Second, the basic tenets of psychoanalysis are coherent. Third, all propositional attitudes are beliefs. Fourth, selves are minds that self-evaluate. Fifth, it is by giving our thoughts a perceptible form that we enable ourselves to evaluate them, and it is by expressing ourselves in language and art that we give our thoughts a perceptible form. (shrink)

An analysis of the concepts in terms of which we understand the internal (psychological) and external (physical) realms, with special emphasis being placed on the concepts of causality, interdisciplinary reduction, and the nature of the self. Special attention is given to the nature of psychological explanation, and substantive contentions about the nature of psychopathology are defended, especially in relation to OCD and psychopathy.

According to Frege, n=Kn, where n is any cardinal number and Kn is the class of all n-tuples. According to Von Neumann, n=Kpn, where Kpn is the class of all of n's predecessors. These analyses are prima facie incompatible with each other, given that Kn≠Kpn, for n>0. In the present paper it is shown that these analyses are in fact compatible with each other, for the reason that each analysis can and ultimately must be interpreted as being to the effect (...) that n=Cn, where Cn is the class of all ordered pairs <Kn#,Rn#>, where Kn# is an arbitrary class and Rn# is an arbitrary relation such that a class k has n-many members exactly if k bears Rn# to Kn#. (shrink)

Instead of writing a book or article, which contains at most one paragraph’s worth of actual content, why not just write that one paragraph?

In this short work, Cantor's famous 'diagonal' proof of the non-recursivity of the class of real numbers is stated and discussed.

Academic journals are clogged with gratuitous scholarship. This prevents the advancement of the corresponding disciplines in many ways, five of which are identified in this short work.

Un certain nombre tente de fournir une base rationnelle pour le sentiment religieux sont clairement énoncés et soigneusement critiqué, la plupart d'entre eux étant montré à l'échec. Dans le même temps, on fait valoir que la légitimité du sentiment religieux n'est en aucun cas minée par de tels échecs, puisque toute perspective dont la légitimité dépend du résultat de l'enquête logique ou empirique est pour cette raison même une perspective non-religieuse. Et la raison pour cela n'est pas qu'une perspective religieuse (...) est obstinément irrationnelle. C'est que les fausses doctrines historiques et cosmologiques que les religions exigent que leurs disciples acceptent soient de simples feuilles. En croyant, faute d'un meilleur mot, que le Christ marchait sur l'eau, on accepte les enseignements du Christ; On n'accepte pas réellement le mensonge évident qu'un homme marchait sur l'eau. À moins que l'acceptation de ces enseignements ait pris la forme d'une quasi-acceptation de fictions évidentes, l'acceptation de ceux-ci serait aussi fragile et aussi inerte que toute autre croyance fondée sur la raison. De même, parce que le mensonge en question est invariablement d'un genre enfantin, l'acceptation de celui-ci représente un engagement existentiel de part et d'autre à un certain mode de vie. Ces vérités évidentes sont perdues sur les philosophes de la religion, étant donné leur tendance à prendre toutes les déclarations littéralement et leur défaut conséquent de donner en raison de poids à des informations contextuelles non-affirmées. En général, si le travail actuel démontre, les philosophes qui ont examiné la religion ont réussi seulement à étudier les projections de leur propre rationalisme fragile, qui, semble-t-il, ne fait que masquer un désir sous-jacent de revenir aux mêmes pieties ces mêmes les philosophes prétendent être indentés. Cela ne veut pas dire que la croyance religieuse ne doit pas être analysée, mais plutôt qu'elle tombe dans le bailliage non pas du logicien, mais du psychanalyste. (shrink)

When bad people try to be good, their supposed goodness turns out to be a mere extension of their badness and in fact compounds their badness by giving it a sheen of legitimacy.

It is shown that moral relativism ('morality is culture-specific') and moral conventionalism ('moral laws are agreements among people as to how to behave') both presuppose the truth of moral realism and are therefore false. It is also shown that every attempt to trivialize moral truth or to prove its non-existence is inconsistent with the fact that moral statements have the same truth-conditions as biological statements.

It is clearly explained how quantum physics is deterministic and how it is indeterministic, and it is also clearly said what Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is.

This book concisely states the main laws and precepts of formal logic along with their immediate corollaries. Commentary is kept to a minimum.

This volume contains lively, yet penetrating examinations of issues of crucial importance, including: the nature of rationality, the different ways in which rationality can be corrupted, the nature of persistence in time, the nature of our knowledge of the future, and the nature of purely conceptual truths and our knowledge thereof.

It is clearly stated what time-travel would be, were it possible, and it is thereby shown that the very concept of time-travel is incoherent.

It is made clear what a law of logic is and why the laws of classical logic are true.