Attempts to discover fundamental traits in the process of experiencing and producing in man. Includes chapters on judgment, query, experience, and meaning.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Therefore, the difference between the natural and the non or supernatural would not be an ontological one. The identification of kinds of complexes or ...

In 17th-century intellectual life, the ideas of the Renaissance humanist Justus Lipsius (1547-1606) were omnipresent. The publication of his 'Politica' in 1589 had made Lipsius's name as an original and controversial political thinker. The sequel, the 'Monita et exempla politica' ('Admonitions'), published in 1605, was meant as an illustration of Lipsius's political thought as expounded in the 'Politica'. Its aim was to offer concrete models of behavior for rulers against the background of Habsburg politics. Lipsius's later political treatise also (...) forms an indispensable key to interpret the place and function of the 'Politica' in Lipsius's political discourse and in early modern political thought. The 'Political admonitions and examples' - widely read, edited and translated in the 17th and 18th centuries - show Lipsius's pivotal role in the genesis of modern political philosophy. (shrink)

Gödel interpreted Heyting arithmetic HA in a “logic-free” fragment T 0 of his theory T of primitive recursive functionals of finite types by his famous Dialectica-translation D . This works because the logic of HA is extremely simple. If the logic of the interpreted system is different—in particular more complicated—, it forces us to look for different and more complicated functional translations. We discuss the arising logical problems for arithmetical and set theoretical systems from HA to CZF . We want (...) to test the thesis: While the functionals take care of the proof theoretic strength of the interpreted system, it is the functional translation that has to cope with the logical complexities of the system. (shrink)

Perhaps no concept has been thought more important to ecological theorizing than the niche. Without it, technically sophisticated and well-regarded accounts of character displacement, ecological equivalence, limiting similarity, and others would seemingly never have been developed. The niche is also widely considered the centerpiece of the best candidate for a distinctively ecological law, the competitive exclusion principle. But the incongruous array and imprecise character of proposed definitions of the concept square poorly with its apparent scientific centrality. I argue this definitional (...) diversity and imprecision reflects a problematic conceptual indeterminacy that challenges its putative indispensability in ecology. (shrink)

It has been argued in the conservation literature that giving conservation absolute priority over competing interests would best protect the environment. Attributing infinite value to the environment or claiming it is ‘priceless’ are two ways of ensuring this priority (e.g. Hargrove 1989; Bulte and van Kooten 2000; Ackerman and Heinzerling 2002; McCauley 2006; Halsing and Moore 2008). But such proposals would paralyse conservation efforts. We describe the serious problems with these proposals and what they mean for practical applications, and we (...) diagnose and resolve some conceptual confusions permeating the literature on this topic. (shrink)

Ecology is indispensable to understanding the biological world and addressing the environmental problems humanity faces. Its philosophy has never been more important. In this book, James Justus introduces readers to the philosophically rich issues ecology poses. Besides its crucial role in biological science generally, climate change, biodiversity loss, and other looming environmental challenges make ecology's role in understanding such threats and identifying solutions to them all the more critical. When ecology is applied and its insights marshalled to address these (...) problems and guide policy formation, interesting philosophical issues emerge. Justus sets them out in detail, and explores the often ethically charged dimensions of applied ecological science, using accessible language and a wealth of scientifically-informed examples. (shrink)

Gottfried Keller's “A Village Romeo and Juliet” contains an astonishing number of neuter terms that are of key importance to this novella. This observation is in line with Keller's predilection for miniaturized worlds and diminutives, played out in this narrative through two basic traits: the reduction of the Shakespearean tragedy to a novella that is a “village story” and the nicknames given to its female protagonist. Around one pole of neutrality the story assembles a cluster of terms that convey things (...) in an abstract, generalized manner. Other neutral nouns make deeply personal concerns look as if they were governed by some overriding, a-personal force. In this vein, the text tends to de-personalize human actions by expressing them in the grammatical form of nominalized infinitives. Inconspicuous idiomatic phrases seem to hide, as in the Freudian Id, the menacing power of the drives. Precisely by revealing that the narrative's sphere is constructed of neutral elementary particles, the text transforms and transubstantiates what it represents into the neutrality of the script. It does so solely, it seems, to make palpable that this literature is charged with the sensuality of the genders. (shrink)

Musical systems develop associations over time between aspects of musical form and concepts from outside of the music. Experienced listeners internalize these connotations, such that the formal elements bring to mind their extra-musical meanings. An example of musical form-meaning mapping is the association that Western listeners have between the major and minor modes and happiness and sadness, respectively. We revisit the emotional semantics of musical mode in a study of 44 American participants (musicians and non-musicians) who each evaluated the relatedness (...) of 96 melody-word pairs. Among the tonal melodies, we manipulated mode (major and minor) and timbre (clarinet and flute) while systematically controlling for other musical factors including pitch register and melodic contour. Similarly, among the English words, we manipulated word affect (happy and sad) while systematically controlling for other lexical factors including frequency and word length. Results demonstrated that participants provided a higher proportion of related responses for major melodies paired with happy words and minor melodies paired with sad words than for the reverse pairings. This interaction between mode and word affect was highly significant for both musicians and non-musicians, albeit with a larger effect for the former group. Further interactions with timbre suggested that while both clarinet and flute conveyed happiness when in the major mode, the clarinet was somewhat more successful than the flute at conveying sadness in the minor mode. Debriefing questionnaires suggested that the majority of the participants, including all of the non-musicians, had no awareness of the major-minor manipulation, and instead directed their attention to register and contour. We argue that the affective character of the major and minor modes is but one example of form-meaning mapping in music, and suggest further exploration of the roles of timbre, register, and contour in conveying musical emotions. (shrink)

Methodological individualism has a long, successful, and controversial track record in the social sciences. Its record in ecology is much shorter but proving as successful and controversial with so-called individual-based models. Distinctions and debates about methodological individualism in social sciences clarify the commitments of this general, individualistic approach to modeling ecological phenomena and show that there is a lot recommending it. In particular, a representational priority on individual organisms yields a cogent albeit deflationary account of ecological emergence and helps reveal (...) how quite disparate models and theories in ecology might be unified. (shrink)

Originally published in 1961 by Columbia University Press.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Robustness concepts are often invoked to manage two obstacles confronting models of ecological systems: complexity and uncertainty. The intuitive idea is that any result derived from many idealized but credible models is thereby made more reliable or is better confirmed. An appropriate basis for this inference has proven elusive. Here, several representations of robustness analysis are vetted, paying particular attention to complex models of ecosystems and the global climate. The claim that robustness is itself confirmatory because robustness analysis employs a (...) Bayesian variety-of-evidence argument is criticized, but recent overwhelming pessimism about robustness may have a silver lining. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Emergence of the Stability‐Diversity—Complexity Debate Mathematization of Ecological Stability The End of the Consensus Contextualization and Classification of Ecological Stability Measures of Ecological Diversity and Complexity Evaluating Stability‐Diversity—Complexity Relationships Acknowledgments References Further Reading.

This book gives a detailed treatment of functional interpretations of arithmetic, analysis, and set theory. The subject goes back to Gödel's Dialectica interpretation of Heyting arithmetic which replaces nested quantification by higher type operations and thus reduces the consistency problem for arithmetic to the problem of computability of primitive recursive functionals of finite types. Regular functional interpretations, i.e. Dialectica and Diller-Nahm interpretation as well as Kreisel's modified realization, together with their Troelstra-style hybrids, are applied to constructive as well as classical (...) systems of arithmetic, analysis, and set theory. They yield relative consistency and conservativity results and closure under relevant rules of the theories in question as well as axiomatic characterizations of the functional translations. Prerequisites are: familiarity with classical and intuitionistic predicate logic, basics of computability theory, Gödel's incompleteness theorems. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the modularity of harmonic expectations that are based on cultural schemata despite the availability of more predictive veridical information. Participants were presented with prime–target chord pairs and made an intonation judgment about each target. Schematic expectation was manipulated by the combination of prime and target, with some transitions being schematically more probable than others. Veridical information in the form of prime–target previews, local transition probabilities, or valid versus invalid previews was also provided. Processing was facilitated when a (...) schematically probable target chord followed the prime. Furthermore, this effect was independent of all manipulations of veridical expectation. A solution to L. B. Meyer's (1967b) query "On Rehearing Music" is suggested, in which schematic knowledge contributes to harmonic expectation in a modular manner regardless of whether any veridical knowledge exists. (shrink)

This chapter reviews the field of music perception and cognition, which is the area of cognitive psychology devoted to determining the mental mechanisms underlying our appreciation of music. The chapter begins with the study of pitch, including the constructive nature of pitch perception and the cognitive structures reflecting its simultaneous and sequential organization in Western tonal‐harmonic music. This is followed by reviews of temporal organization in music, and of musical performance and ability. Next, literature concerning the cognitive neuroscience of music (...) is examined, including studies of neuropsychology, neuroimaging, and event‐related potentials. The chapter concludes with a discussion of developmental music cognition, cross‐cultural music cognition, and the evolutionary psychology of music. (shrink)

Ecologists have proposed several incompatible definitions of ecological stability. Emulating physicists, mathematical ecologists commonly define it as Lyapunov stability. This formalizes the problematic concept by integrating it into a well‐developed mathematical theory. The formalization also seems to capture the intuition that ecological stability depends on how ecological systems respond to perturbation. Despite these advantages, this definition is flawed. Although Lyapunov stability adequately characterizes perturbation responses of many systems studied in physics, it does not for ecological systems. This failure reveals a (...) limitation of its underlying mathematical theory, and an important difference between dynamic systems modeling in physics and ecology. *Received March 2006; revised June 2008. †To contact the author, please write to: Philosophy Department, 151 Dodd Hall, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Abstract Recent criticisms of intuition from experimental philosophy and elsewhere have helped undermine the authority of traditional conceptual analysis. As the product of more empirically informed philosophical methodology, this result is compelling and philosophically salutary. But the negative critiques rarely suggest a positive alternative. In particular, a normative account of concept determination—how concepts should be characterized—is strikingly absent from such work. Carnap's underappreciated theory of explication provides such a theory. Analyses of complex concepts in empirical sciences illustrates and supports this (...) claim, and counteracts the charge explication is only suitable for highly mathematical, axiomatic contexts. Explication is also defended against the influential criticism it is “philosophically unilluminating”. Content Type Journal Article Category Original paper in Philosophy of Science Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s13194-011-0027-5 Authors James Justus, Philosophy Department, Florida State University and University of Sydney, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA Journal European Journal for Philosophy of Science Online ISSN 1879-4920 Print ISSN 1879-4912. (shrink)