Husserl’s first work formulated what proved to be an algorithmically complete arithmetic, lending mathematical clarity to Kronecker’s reduction of analysis to finite calculations with integers. Husserl’s critique of his nominalism led him to seek a philosophical justification of successful applications of symbolic arithmetic to nature, providing insight into the “wonderful affinity” between our mathematical thoughts and things without invoking a pre-established harmony. For this, Husserl develops a purely descriptive phenomenology for which he found inspiration in Mach’s proposal of a “universal (...) physical phenomenology.” To account for applications to any domain, Husserl envisages a theory of all possible deductive systems, which he develops extensively in his Göttingen lectures wherein he engages with Hilbert’s work on deductive systems for geometry, real arithmetic, and physics. This leads Husserl to formulate claims of decidability and proofs of completeness for various arithmetics that result from his analysis of Kronecker’s general arithmetic. Careful attention to these proofs seem to show that Husserl was not oblivious to problems that underlie our incompleteness theorems, namely that of showing that some inversions of his algorithmic arithmetic are undefined. His growing preoccupation with the issue of a pre-established harmony between mathematical thought and reality motivate his pursuit of a “supramathematics” of all possible complete theory forms to demystify such harmony, by having such a form on hand for describing any empirical domain. He soon decides that a transcendental idealism of nature will reveal the wonderful affinity of thoughts and things comprising such harmony, to be a wonderful “parallelism of objective unities and constituted manifolds of consciousness.” But the paradoxes of logic and set theory cloud the clarity of mathematics, which Weyl would restore with Brouwer’s intuitionism and Hilbert with his metamathematics. Husserl informed Weyl that his student Becker had formulated a phenomenological foundation not only for Weyl’s generalization of relativity theory but also for the Brouwer-Weyl continuum. But Weyl eventually rejected much of Becker’s work, especially when it became clear that his phenomenological intuitionism could not account for the success of Hilbert’s transfinite mathematics in quantum physics. Becker responded to this “crisis of phenomenological method” with his mantic phenomenology celebrating the magic of mathematical mysticism, which Husserl finally rejects in favor of a pluralistic phenomenology of mathematics and nature. (shrink)

This book grew out of a graduate student paper [261] in which I set down some criticisms of J. R. Lucas' attempt to refute mechanism by means of G6del's theorem. I had made several such abortive attempts myself and had become familiar with their pitfalls, and especially with the double edged nature of incompleteness arguments. My original idea was to model the refutation of mechanism on the almost universally accepted G6delian refutation of Hilbert's formalism, but I kept getting stuck on (...) questions of mathematical philosophy which I found myself having to beg. A thorough study of the foundational works of Hilbert and Bernays finally convinced me that I had all too naively and uncritically bought this refutation of formalism. I did indeed discover points of surprisingly close contact between formalism and mechanism, but also that it was possible to under mine certain strong arguments against these positions precisely by invok ing G6del's and related work. I also began to realize that the Church Turing thesis itself is the principal bastion protecting mechanism, and that G6del's work was perhaps the best thing that ever happened to both mechanism and formalism. I pushed these lines of argument in my dis sertation with the patient help of my readers, Raymond Nelson and Howard Stein. I would especially like to thank the latter for many valuable criticisms of my dissertation as well as some helpful suggestions for reor ganizing it in the direction of the present book. (shrink)

The metamathematical theorems of Gödel and Church are frequently applied to the philosophy of mind, typically as rational evidence against mechanism. Using methods of Post and Smullyan, these results are presented as purely mathematical theorems and various such applications are discussed critically. In particular, J. Lucas's use of Gödel's theorem to distinguish between conscious and unconscious beings is refuted, while more generally, attempts to extract philosophy from metamathematics are shown to involve only dramatizations of the constructivity problem in foundations. More (...) specifically, philosophical extrapolations from metamathematics are shown to involve premature extensions of Church's thesis. (shrink)

Husserl’s lifelong interest in Kant eventually becomes a preoccupation in his later years when he finds his phenomenology in competition with Neokantianism for the title of transcendental philosophy. Some issues that Husserl is concerned with in Kant are bound up with the works of Lambert. Kant believed that the role played by principles of sensibility in metaphysics should be determined by a “general phenomenology” on which Lambert had written. Kant initially believed that man is capable only of symbolic cognition, not (...) intellectual intuition. Lambert saw an increasing need in mathematics for symbolic cognition as exemplified in his proofs of the irrationality of π and e. Kant takes from Leibniz and Lambert an unrestricted notion of construction, allowing him to view mathematics as constructing its concepts in intuition, while Lambert’s proofs convince him that all mathematical problems are eventually solvable. Husserl criticizes Kant’s intuitionism for its inadequate accommodation of meaning to intuition, which he redresses with his theory of categorial intuition. This may improve on Kant’s intuition of the axiom of parallels but not so clearly on his spatial intuition. Husserl opposes Kant’s view of space as the form of outer intuition with his own view of it as the form of things. Husserl’s exploration of the geometry of visual space, which involves his earliest uses of epoché and reduction, converges however with Hilbert’s logical analysis of Kantian spatial intuition in leading to Euclidean spatial judgments. Hilbert’s analysis leads him to affirm the solvability of all well posed mathematical problems, a thesis complicated by the outbreak of logical paradoxes. Untroubled by such paradoxes, Husserl develops a supramathematics of all possible deductive systems whose completeness implicitly would also provide solutions of all such problems. Husserl’s full transcendental turn coincides with his realization that in effecting his Copernican turn, Kant was really the first to detect the “secret longing” of modern philosophy for a phenomenological clarification of being. Husserl now finds that Kant’s transcendental deductions presuppose a pure ego not adequately analyzed by Kant that survives the phenomenological reduction. Husserl’s idealism leads him to develop his own intuitionism, which adds to Kant’s, a “method of clarification” of mathematical concepts intended to clarify difficult impossibility proofs, but neither Husserl nor Kant base arithmetic on time. Husserl’s critique of the room left in Kant’s idealism, for things in themselves, leads to his own monadological solution of the problem of intersubjectivity. Husserl’s final judgment on Kant is that his form of transcendental idealism did not enable him to achieve absolute subjectivity through a genuine transcendental reduction. (shrink)

Fundamental problems of the uses of formal techniques and of natural and instrumental practices have been raised again and again these past two decades, in many quarters and from varying viewpoints. We have brought a number of quite basic studies of these issues together in this volume, not linked con ceptually nor by any rigorously defined problematic, but rather simply some of the most interesting and even provocative of recent research accomplish ments. Most of these papers are derived from the (...) Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science during 1973-80, the two exceptions being those of Karel Berka (on scales of measurement) and A. A. Zinov'ev (on a non-tradi tional theory of quantifiers). Just how intriguing these results (or conjectures?) seem to us may be seen from some brief quotations: (1) Judson Webb: ".... the abstract machine concept has many of the appropriate kinds of properties for modelling living, reproducing, rule following, self-reflecting, accident-prone, and lucky creatures... the a priori logical results relevant to the abstract machine concept, above all Godel's, could not conceivably have turned out any better for the mechanist. " (2) M. L. Dalla Chiara: "... modal interpretation (of quantum logic) shows clearly that it possesses a logical meaning which is quite independent of quantum mechanics. " (3) Isaac Levi: (as against Peirce and Popper) "... infallibilism is con sistent with corrigibilism, and a view which respects avoidance of error is an important desideratum for science. (shrink)

In a strictly deterministic universe a Laplacian superman undertakes to predict if a certain ongoing Turing machine will ever halt. Well, he may predict that the machine will be struck by lightning tomorrow but Judson Webb invites us to "idealize" the case sufficiently so that it is not any lack of physical knowledge that stymies the Laplacian superman but rather the negative result of Turing's metamathematical or formal "indeterminacy" that suggests to Webb a the-Turing machines are thus (...) seen to enjoy a certain sort of "indeterminacy" or "unpredictability" which, while not physical in character, might readily be styled metamathematical. It is precisely that metamathematical or formal "indeterminacy" that suggests to Webb a theoretical basis for overcoming the traditional dichotomy of mind and mechanism. The ostensibly negative results of Turing, Gödel, and Church, far from showing that minds cannot possibly be machines, Webb interprets positively as supplying us with rich instructions as to what sort of unpredictable machines we have right to expect them to be. (shrink)

Over the past decade, Jacques Rancière’s writings have increasingly provoked and inspired political theorists who wish to avoid both the abstraction of so-called normative theories and the philosophical platitudes of so-called postmodernism. Rancière offers a new and unique definition of politics, la politique, as that which opposes, thwarts and interrupts what Rancière calls the police order, la police — a term that encapsulates most of what we normally think of as politics (the actions of bureaucracies, parliaments, and courts). Interpreters have (...) been tempted to read Rancière as proffering a formally pure conception of politics, wherein politics is ultimately separate from and in utter opposition to all police orders. Here I provide a different account of Rancière’s thinking of politics: for Rancière politics goes on within police orders and for this reason he strongly rejects the very idea of a pure politics. Politics is precisely that which could never be pure; politics is an act of impurity, a process that resists purification. In carefully delineating the politique—police relation I show that the terms of Rancière’s political writings are multiple and multiplied. Rancière consistently undermines any effort to render politics pure, and therein lies his potential contribution to contemporary political theory. (shrink)

When mental health service users are detained under a Section of the Mental Health Act (MHA), they must remain in hospital for a specific time period. This is often against their will, as they are considered a danger to themselves and/or others. By virtue of being detained, service users are assumed to have lost control of an element of their behaviour and as a result their dignity could be compromised. Caring for detained service users has particular challenges for healthcare professionals. (...) Respecting the dignity of others is a key element of the code of conduct for health professionals. Often from the service user perspective this is ignored. (shrink)

In this article I challenge Rainer Forst’s model of critical theory from the point of view of democratic theory. I suggest that his approach is too abstract and hypothetical to address the real world challenges facing democratic polities today.

Current empirical studies of moral behavior of healthcare professionals are almost entirely focused on self-reports, usually collected under the assumption that an ethical disposition characterizes individuals across various contexts. It is well known, however, that individuals adjust their behavior to what they see being done by those in their peer group. That presents a methodological challenge to traditional research within a community of peers because the behavior of each individual is both the result of norms and a contributor to the (...) norms of others. Computer simulations can be used to address this methodological challenge. A Markov replicator model that runs on an Excel spreadsheet was used to investigate a community with four agent types in the dental community: devious practitioners, ethical practitioners who avoid involvement in the poor ethics of others, ethical practitioners who accept it as part of their professional responsibility to challenge colleagues who act unprofessionally, and those who enforce ethical standards. A panel of leaders in the profession independently estimated parameters for the model and criteria for a possible distribution of agent types in the community. The simulation converged on distributions of the agent types that were very similar to the expectations of the panel. The simulation suggests the following characteristics of such moral communities: The structure of such communities is robust across a wide distribution. It appears that reduction in unethical behavior is more sensitive to the way ethical practitioners interact with each other than to sanctions the enforcement community imposes on unethical practitioners, and that large external interventions will be short lived. (shrink)

On the basis of what Aristotle says in the Posterior Analytics about how sciences are differentiated and about the impermissibility of ‘kind-crossing’, many commentators suppose that when it comes to his scientific practice, Aristotle treats the boundaries of the sciences as impermeable, so that if subject-matter X is the business of one science, it simply cannot be the business of another. I call this the impermeable boundary theory of the sciences: knowledge is divided into watertight compartments, determined by their distinct (...) genera, and what goes on in one compartment cannot turn up in another. I argue that, even if this is a correct account of Aristotle’s position in the Analytics, the view that he accepts the impermeable boundary theory when it comes to his scientific and philosophical work outside the Analytics is simply untenable. (shrink)

For those to whom John Bowring's name means anything, the most likely association with it is the complex and question-begging term ‘Benthamite’. Contemporaries certainly used the term, particularly when they wanted to suggest that his actions were narrowly ideological or theoretical. But to some of Bowring's contemporaries another association served hostile intent almost as well: his Unitarianism.

Clare Chambers argues that marriage violates both equality and liberty and should not be trecognized by the state. She shows how feminist and liberal principles require creation of a marriage-free state: one in which private marriages, whether religious or secular, would have no legal status.

The human propensity to take an ethical stance toward oneself and others is found in every known society, yet we also know that values taken for granted in one society can contradict those in another. Does ethical life arise from human nature itself? Is it a universal human trait? Or is it a product of one's cultural and historical context? Webb Keane offers a new approach to the empirical study of ethical life that reconciles these questions, showing how ethics (...) arise at the intersection of human biology and social dynamics. Drawing on the latest findings in psychology, conversational interaction, ethnography, and history, Ethical Life takes readers from inner city America to Samoa and the Inuit Arctic to reveal how we are creatures of our biology as well as our history--and how our ethical lives are contingent on both. Keane looks at Melanesian theories of mind and the training of Buddhist monks, and discusses important social causes such as the British abolitionist movement and American feminism. He explores how styles of child rearing, notions of the person, and moral codes in different communities elaborate on certain basic human tendencies while suppressing or ignoring others."--Publisher's Web site. (shrink)

Lambda, the twelfth book of Aristotle's Metaphysics, is an outline for a much more extended work in metaphysics or, more accurately, in what Aristotle calls 'first philosophy', the inquiry into 'the principles and causes of all things'. Lindsay Judson provides a rigorous translation of this important book and a detailed philosophical commentary.

Tod Chambers suggests that literary theory is a crucial component in the complete understanding of bioethics. _The Fiction of Bioethics_ explores the medical case study and distills the idea that bioethicists study real-life cases, while philosophers contemplate fictional accounts.

Aristotle's Physics is a work of extraordinary intellectual power which has had a profound influence on scientists and philosophers throughout the ages, and on the development of physics itself. This collection of major, previously unpublished, essays by leading Aristotelian scholars examines a wide range of major issues in the Physics and other related works. They offer fresh approaches to Aristotle's work and important new interpretations of his thought.