Many common arguments for physicalism begin with the principle that the cosmos is “causally closed.” But how good are the arguments for causal closure itself? I argue that the deductive, a priori arguments on behalf of causal closure tend to beg the question. The extant inductive arguments fare no better. They commit a sampling error or a non-sequitur, or else offer conclusions that remain compatible with causal openness. In short, we have no good arguments that the physical world is causally (...) closed. (shrink)

Asl. Atthasalinl of Buddhaghosa, ed. PTS. 1897. BB. Bibliotheca Buddhica, Petrograd. BC. Buddhacarita, ed. Cowell, Oxford, 1893. BCA. ...

There is a duality in our everyday view of belief. On the one hand, we sometimes speak of credence as a matter of degree. We talk of having some level of confidence in a claim (that a certain course of action is safe, for example, or that a desired event will occur) and explain our actions by reference to these degrees of confidence – tacitly appealing, it seems, to a probabilistic calculus such as that formalized in Bayesian decision theory. On (...) the other hand, we also speak of belief as an unqualified, or flat-out, state (‘plain belief’ as it is sometimes called), which is either categorically present or categorically absent. We talk of simply believing or thinking that something is the case, and we cite these flat-out attitudes in explanation of our actions – appealing to classical practical reasoning of the sort formalized in the so-called ‘practical syllogism’.1 This tension in everyday discourse is reflected in the theoretical literature on belief. In formal epistemology there is a division between those in the Bayesian tradition, who treat credence as graded, and those who think of it as a categorical attitude of some kind. The Bayesian perspective also contrasts with the dominant view in philosophy of mind, where belief is widely regarded as a categorical state (a token sentence of a mental language, inscribed in a functionally defined ‘belief box’, according to one popular account). A parallel duality is present in our everyday view of desire. Sometimes we talk of having degrees of preference or desirability; sometimes we speak simply of wanting or desiring something tout court, and, again, this tension is reflected in the theoretical literature. What should we make of these dualities? Are there two different types of belief and desire – partial and flat-out, as they are sometimes called? If so, how are they related? And how could both have a role in guiding rational action, as the everyday view has it? The last question poses a particular challenge in relation to flat-out belief and desire.. (shrink)

I offer an examination of a core element in the reflectiveness of Heraclitus’ thought, namely, his rebuke of polymathy . In doing so, I provide a response to a recent claim that Heraclitus should not be considered to be a philosopher, by attending to his paradigmatically philosophical traits. Regarding Heraclitus’ attitude to that naïve form of ‘wisdom’, i.e., polymathy, I argue that he does not advise avoiding experience of many things, rather, he advises rejecting experience of things as merely many (...) independent things in their manifoldness , and, instead, to understand their unity and thereby to unify our knowledge of them. (shrink)

"It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need (...) is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well — better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not." (Syme, in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four) This chapter is about opposites and Newspeak in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Offers a critical examination of Alvin Plantinga's and Richard Swinburne's contemporary attempt to defend traditional theism within the context of analytic philosophy.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Weightiest Knowledge Truth and its Incorporation Knowledge and Self‐Knowledge.

At 14 months, children appear to struggle to apply their fairly well-developed speech perception abilities to learning similar sounding words (e.g., bih/dih; Stager & Werker, 1997). However, variability in nonphonetic aspects of the training stimuli seems to aid word learning at this age. Extant theories of early word learning cannot account for this benefit of variability. We offer a simple explanation for this range of effects based on associative learning. Simulations suggest that if infants encode both noncontrastive information (e.g., cues (...) to speaker voice) and meaningful linguistic cues (e.g., place of articulation or voicing), then associative learning mechanisms predict these variability effects in early word learning. Crucially, this means that despite the importance of task variables in predicting performance, this body of work shows that phonological categories are still developing at this age, and that the structure of noninformative cues has critical influences on word learning abilities. (shrink)

This paper rejects a traditional epistemic interpretation of conditional probability. Suppose some chance process produces outcomes X, Y,..., with probabilities P(X), P(Y),... If later observation reveals that outcome Y has in fact been achieved, then the probability of outcome X cannot normally be revised to P(X|Y) ['P&Y)/P(Y)]. This can only be done in exceptional circumstances - when more than just knowledge of Y-ness has been attained. The primary reason for this is that the weight of a piece of evidence varies (...) with the means by which it is provided, so knowledge of Y-ness does not have uniform impact on the probability of X. A better updating of the probability of X is provided by P(X|Y*), where Y* is not an outcome of the chance process being observed, but the sentence 'the outcome Y has been observed', an 'outcome' of the subsequent observation process. This alternative formula is widely endorsed in practice, but not well recognized in theory, where the oversight has generated some unsatisfactory consequences. (shrink)

The articles by Corlett, McKenna and Waller in the present issue call for some further enlightenment on Lehrer’s defense of classical compatibilism. Ultimate explanation in terms of a power preference, which is the primary explanation for choice, is now the central feature of his defense. This includes the premise that scientific determinism may fail to explain our choices. Sylvain Bromberger showed that nomological deduction is not sufficient for explanation. A power preference, which is by definition a preference over alternatives, is (...) the primary explanation when the power preference explains the choice without the need to appeal to anything else, including even anything that explains it. The author notes that explanation is not generally transitive. The power preference must stand alone as an ultimate explanation independent of other explanations. It is thus the ultimate preference over alternatives of choice. (shrink)

We begin by treating the antinaturalism of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, and follow that by considering the recent project of “naturalizing phenomenology.” As a transitional figure, we treat Hans Jonas and the weakly emergent status he allows organismic life. In a section on “affirmative naturalism,” we treat Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze, emphasizing their relation to Spinoza's ethics of joy. We conclude by considering the antinaturalism of continental philosophy positions in critical race theory (Linda Alcoff), gender theory (Judith Butler), (...) and disability studies (Shelley Tremain). (shrink)

Illusionism is a revisionary view of consciousness, which denies the existence of the phenomenal properties traditionally thought to render experience conscious. The view has theoretical attractions, but some think it also has objectionable ethical implications. They take illusionists to be denying the existence of consciousness itself, or at least of the thing that gives consciousness its ethical value, and thus as undermining our established ethical attitudes. This article responds to this objection. I argue that, properly understood, illusionism neither denies the (...) existence of consciousness nor entails that consciousness does not ground ethical value. It merely offers a different account of what consciousness is and why it grounds ethical value. The article goes on to argue that the theoretical revision proposed by illusionists does have some indirect implications for our ethical attitudes but that these are wholly attractive and progressive ones. The illusionist perspective on consciousness promises to make ethical decision making easier and to extend the scope of our ethical concern. Illusionism is good news. (shrink)

There are those philosophers and historians of science who claim that the acceptance and rejection of scientific theories is underdetermined by experimental results. They conclude that there is no rational method for deciding such matters solely on the basis of empirical information. The acceptance and rejection of scientific theories depends on social influence and is settled by social dominance. This I call the dominance thesis. There are also those who hold, on the contrary, that the acceptance and rejection of theories (...) in science is based solely on empirical information according to a rational method. They conclude that the acceptance and rejection of scientific theories is fully determined by experimental results. This I call the experimentalism thesis. The dominance thesis and the experimentalism thesis are both false. Both share a common premise, to wit, that empirical information is limited to experimental results. There is, however, another source of empirical information, the opinions of experts. When such social information is properly aggregated, the acceptance and rejection of scientific theories, though underdetermined by experimental results, is fully determined by the total information available. (shrink)

Throughout all of Deleuze’s work one finds an extended encounter with the Event of Difference. Deleuze’s extraordinary work on Leibniz is no exception. In the ‘later’ work, and regarding Leibniz, Deleuze remarks, “no philosophy has ever pushed to such an extreme the affirmations of one and the same world, and of an infinite difference and variety in this world”. This positive identification with Leibniz is not found in the ‘earlier’ wave of Deleuzian texts from the sixties where Leibniz is captured (...) hesitating over the possible and the virtual. Any such hesitation over the possible and the virtual is “disastrous” for a philosophy of the event and difference since it abolishes the reality of the virtual and subordinates it to the identical, replacing pure immanence with a ‘theological model’ of creation. Is the Leibniz of Deleuze’s early texts compossible with the later? What is the significance of the event of difference or fold that joins and separates Deleuze’s continuing encounter with Leibniz? We will examine what is at stake in these differing understandings of Leibniz to Deleuze’s philosophy of events of difference. (shrink)

The paper distinguishes between epistemic and ontic divisions of qualities into primary and secondary. It identifies two functions which ontic division has been called upon to fulfill - setting the limits on what a realist philosophy of science must achieve, And providing a means of judging between rival realist philosophies of science. It argues for an interaction pattern criterion of primacy, And concludes that while this enables the first function to be achieved, No primary/secondary distinction can fulfill the second.

The status of life in nature is the modern problem of philosophy and of science. A.N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 1938.

This paper addresses the question of whether mental representations are compositional. Several researchers have claimed recently that there are empirical data that show mental representations to be context-sensitive in a way that threatens compositionality. Some have then gone on to claim that connectionist encoding schemes are well suited to accommodate such noncom-positionality. I argue here that the data do not show that mental representations are noncompositional, and that there are significant problems with the suggested interpretations of connectionist encoding schemes.

This paper argues against a standard view that all deterministic and conservative classical mechanical systems are time-reversible, by asking how the temporal evolution of a system modulates parametric imprecision (either ontological or epistemic). It notes that well-behaved systems (e.g. inertial motion) can possess a dynamics which is unstable enough to fail at reversing uncertainties—even though exact values are reliably reversed. A limited (but significant) source of irreversibility is thus displayed in classical mechanics, closely analogous the lack of predictability revealed by (...) unstable chaotic systems. (shrink)

In the history of thermodynamics, two dates stand out as especially important: 1824, when Sadi Carnot's brilliant memoirRéflexions sur la puissance motrice du feuappeared in print; and 1850, when Rudolf Clausius published his similarly titled paper ‘Ueber die bewegende Kraft der Wärme’. In this paper Clausius narrowly beat the Scottish physicist William Thomson to the solution of a puzzle which had been highlighted in the latter's recent publications: how could Carnot's theory, with all its intellectual attractions, be reconciled with the (...) newly discovered principle of the inter-convertibility of heat and work? Clausius's solution (as is well known) was to replace Carnot's axiom of heat conservation, with the axiom now known as the second law of thermodynamics. (shrink)

Although the literature on Nietzsche is now voluminous one area where there has surprisingly been very little research concerns Nietzsche on the passions. This essay aims to correct this neglect. My focus is on illuminating Nietzsche on the passions in relation to his primary teaching on self-cultivation. To illuminate his position, I focus attention on examining his relation to Stoic teaching on the passions. If for Nietzsche the Christian mind-set involves a disturbing pathological excess of feeling, the Stoic way of (...) living results for him in a petrified of life devoid of movement and growth. After a consideration of his relation to Stoic teaching I then examine his relation to Spinoza on the emotions or affects. Whilst I acknowledge the affinities between the two thinkers and their criticisms of Stoic teaching, I maintain that it is an error to seek to construe Nietzsche and Spinoza as having an identical teaching on the passions. In the final section of the essay, I provide an appreciation of Nietzsche’s recommendation that instead of demonising the passions in the manner of the Christian psyche and its legacy, or extirpating our passions as recommended by the Stoics, we need to learn how to transform them into joys or delights. (shrink)

This paper sets out the case for a two-level theory of human psychology. It takes its start from Daniel Dennett.