1 Knowledge and Justification This book is an investigation of one central problem which arises in the attempt to give a philosophical account of empirical ...

One of the many problems that would have t o be solved by a satisfactory theory of empirical knowledge, perhaps the most central is a general structural problem which I shall call the epistemic regress problem: the problem of how to avoid an in- finite and presumably vicious regress of justification in ones account of the justifica- tion of empirical beliefs. Foundationalist theories of empirical knowledge, as we shall see further below, attempt t o avoid the regress by locating a (...) class of empirical beliefs whose justification does not depend on that of other empirical beliefs. Extemalist theories, the topic of the present paper, represent one species of foundationalism. (shrink)

My aim in this paper is to explore the dispute between foundationalism and coherentism and attempt a resolution. I will begin by considering the origin of the issue in the famous epistemic regress problem. Next I will explore the central foundationalist idea and the most central objections that have been raised against foundationalist views. This will lead to a consideration of the main contours of the coherentist alternative, and eventually to a discussion of objections to coherentism – including several specific (...) ones that I now judge to be clearly fatal, especially when taken together. This will motivate, finally, a reconsideration of foundationalism. I will argue that the dialectically most serious objection to foundationalism can be successfully answered. While the answer that I will suggest admittedly carries with it the price of aggravating certain other difficulties, especially the venerable problem of showing how belief in an external world of physical objects can be justified, it still seems to me to leave foundationalism as by far the more defensible and promising of the two alternatives. (shrink)

I argue for the use of the adjunction operator (adding a single new element to an existing set) as a basis for building a finitary set theory. It allows a simplified axiomatization for the first-order theory of hereditarily finite sets based on an induction schema and a rigorous characterization of the primitive recursive set functions. The latter leads to a primitive recursive presentation of arithmetical operations on finite sets.

Outlines a tenable version of a traditional foundationalist account\nof empirical justification and its implications for the justification\nof beliefs about physical or material objects. Presupposing the acceptability\nof other beliefs about physical objects; Concept of a basic belief;\nMetabeliefs about one's own occurrent beliefs; Beliefs about sensory\nexperience.

Ordinal addition and multiplication can be extended in a natural way to all sets. I survey the structure of the sets under these operations. In particular, the natural partial ordering associated with addition of sets is shown to be a tree. This allows us to prove that any set has a unique representation as a sum of additively irreducible sets, and that the non-empty elements of any model of set theory can be partitioned into infinitely many submodels, each isomorphic to (...) the original model. Also any model of set theory has an isomorphic extension in which the empty set of the original model is non-empty. Among other results, the relations between the arithmetical operations and the transitive closure and the adductive hierarchy are elucidated. (shrink)

Leibniz's earliest philosophy and its importance for his mature philosophy have not been examined in detail, particularly in the level of detail that one can achieve by placing Leibniz's philosophy in the context of the sources for two of the most basic concerns of his philosophical career: his metaphysics of individuals and the principle oftheir individuation. In this book I provide for the first time a detailed examination of these two Leibnizian themes and trace its implications for how we should (...) interpret other major Leibnizian themes and for how we should read Leibniz and other philosophers of the sixteenth and later centuries as 'modem' philosophers. Leibniz began his philosophical career more than 300 years ago, a fact that shapes fundamentally my attempt in the pages that follow to come to terms now with the texts that he left us. Leibniz's did not do philosophy in a way wholly congenial to twentieth century philosophical methodologies, especially those that have enjoyed some prominence in recent Anglo-American philosophy. Moreover, as we shall see, Leibniz is not a modem philosopher, when 'modem' is understood to mean making a sharp break with medieval philosophy. Indeed, I shall argue, scholars should discard such terms as 'modem' from historical philosophical scholarship, so that old texts can be allowed to remain old - to stand on their own in and from times now long past. (shrink)

It is fairly standard in accounts of the epistemology of perceptual knowledge to distinguish three main alternative positions: representationalism, phenomenalism, and a third view that is called either naïve realism or direct realism. I have always found the last of these views puzzling and elusive. My aim in this paper is to try to figure out what direct realism amounts to, mainly with an eye to seeing whether it offers a genuine epistemological alternative to the other two views and to (...) representationalism in particular. My main thesis will be that it does not—that what is right in direct realist views turns out to have little bearing on the central epistemological issue concerning perceptual knowledge. (shrink)

The influential political philosopher Leo Strauss has been credited by conservatives with the recovery of the great tradition of political philosophy stretching back to Plato. Among Strauss's most enduring legacies is a strongly negative assessment of Nietzsche as the modern philosopher most at odds with that tradition and most responsible for the sins of twentieth-century culture--relativism, godlessness, nihilism, and the breakdown of family values. In fact, this apparent denunciation has become so closely associated with Strauss that it is often seen (...) as the very core of his thought. In Leo Strauss and Nietzsche, the eminent Nietzsche scholar Laurence Lampert offers a controversial new assessment of the Strauss-Nietzsche connection. Lampert undertakes a searching examination of the key Straussian essay, "Note on the Plan of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil." He shows that this essay, written toward the end of Strauss's life and placed at the center of his final work, reveals an affinity for and debt to Nietzsche greater than Strauss's followers allow. Lampert argues that the essay comprises the most important interpretation of Nietzsche ever published, one that clarifies Nietzsche's conception of nature and of human spiritual history and demonstrates the logical relationship between the essential themes in Nietzsche's thought--the will to power and the eternal return. (shrink)

This article defines a hierarchy on the hereditarily finite sets which reflects the way sets are built up from the empty set by repeated adjunction, the addition to an already existing set of a single new element drawn from the already existing sets. The structure of the lowest levels of this hierarchy is examined, and some results are obtained about the cardinalities of levels of the hierarchy.

_The Enduring Importance of Leo Strauss_ takes on the crucial task of separating what is truly important in the work of Leo Strauss from the ephemeral politics associated with his school. Laurence Lampert focuses on exotericism: the use of artful rhetoric to simultaneously communicate a socially responsible message to the public at large and a more radical message of philosophic truth to a smaller, more intellectually inclined audience. Largely forgotten after the Enlightenment, exotericism, he shows, deeply informed Strauss both (...) as a reader and as a philosophic writer—indeed, Lampert argues, Strauss learned from the finest practitioners of exoteric writing how to become one himself. Examining some of Strauss’s most important books and essays through this exoteric lens, Lampert reevaluates not only Strauss but the philosophers—from Plato to Halevi to Nietzsche—with whom Strauss most deeply engaged. Ultimately Lampert shows that Strauss’s famous distinction between ancient and modern thinkers is primarily rhetorical, one of the great examples of Strauss’s exoteric craft. Celebrating Strauss’s achievements while recognizing one main shortcoming—unlike Nietzsche, he failed to appreciate the ramifications of modern natural science for philosophy and its public presentation—Lampert illuminates Strauss as having even greater philosophic importance than we have thought before. (shrink)

The historically most central epistemological issue concerning perception, to which this article will be almost entirely devoted, is whether and how beliefs about physical objects and about the physical world generally can be justified or warranted on the basis of sensory or perceptual experience—where it is internalist justification, roughly having a reason to think that the belief in question is true, that is mainly in question (see the entry justification, epistemic: internalist vs. externalist conceptions of). This issue, commonly referred to (...) as “the problem of the external world,” divides into two closely related sub-issues, which correspond to the first two main sections below. The first of these issues has to do with the nature of sensory experience and its relation to the physical world; it is typically (though as we shall see not altogether perspicuously) formulated as the question of what are the immediate objects of awareness in sensory experience or, in a variant but essentially equivalent terminology, of what is given in such experience. Perhaps the most historically standard, though not currently the most popular answer to this question has been that it is sense-data (private, non-physical entities that actually have the immediately experienced sensory qualities) that are the immediate objects of awareness or that are given. The second issue has to do with the way in which beliefs about the physical world are justified on the basis of such sensory experience. If it is concluded that physical objects are not themselves given, the two main answers to this question are representationalism or indirect realism (the view that the immediate objects of experience represent or depict physical objects in a way that allows one to infer justifiably from such experience to the existence of the corresponding “external” objects) and phenomenalism (the view.. (shrink)

Any set x is uniquely specified by the graph of the membership relation on the set obtained by adjoining x to the transitive closure of x. Thus any operation on sets can be looked at as an operation on these graphs. We look at the operations of ordinal arithmetic of sets in this light. This turns out to be simplest for a modified ordinal arithmetic based on the Zermelo ordinals, instead of the usual von Neumann ordinals. In this arithmetic, addition (...) of sets corresponds to concatenating graphs, and multiplication corresponds to replacing each edge of a graph by a copy of another graph. Characterizations for the von Neumann case are also given. (shrink)

Depuis une quinzaine d'années, on assiste à l'émergence en France d'un modèle de débat public relativement original. Son institutionnalisation progressive, par la création de la Commission nationale du débat public, correspond à la volonté d'intégrer des acteurs différents autour d'une discussion au plus près des instances d'exécution de la politique publique. Elle est révélatrice d'une tension entre deux modes de conception de la communication en politique, l'une délibérative et l'autre instrumentale. Ainsi, bien que la création de la CNDP corresponde incontestablement (...) à un élargissement de la palette des modalités d'expression démocratique et contribue à la diffusion d'une « culture du débat » en France, il reste que son ancrage dans le processus décisionnel reste problématique et encore contesté par de nombreux élus.Past fifteen years have seen the emergence in France of a model of public debate relatively original. Its progressive institutionalization by creating the National Commission for public debate is the desire to integrate different actors around a closer discussion of the enforcement of public policy. It reveals a tension between two modes of communication design in politics, one deliberative and the other instrumental. Thus, although the creation of the CNDP undoubtedly corresponds to a broadening of the range of conditions for democratic expression and contributes to the spread of a "culture of debate" in France, the fact remains that its anchoring in the decision-making process remains problematic and still contested by many elected officials. (shrink)

La société chinoise aujourd’hui peut être définie comme produisant différentes formes de compressed modernities où se contractent et s’entrelacent des temporalités historiques, sociales, politiques, économiques, mais aussi individuelles et collectives. Nous introduisons ici la notion de temporalité « contractée » qui favorise la superposition, l’intensification et la multiplication de risques sociaux, économiques, écologiques et sanitaires. Temporalités et espaces s’agencent en Chine de manière flagrante dans la production de mobilités, migrations et circulations très intenses aujourd’hui. La conquête de soi apparaît comme (...) une question d’intensité liée à l’accélération des temporalités sociales et économiques objectives et subjectives ; se construit alors la figure d’un Individu compressé dans la société chinoise. Les temporalités collectives favorisent des micromobilisations où s’ouvrent des micro-arènes publiques et où se construit, en contexte autoritaire, de la démocratie « par le bas ». (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to discuss and defend an objection to physicalist or materialist accounts of the mind.

Introduction: Adolescence is the most critical life period for the development of eating disorder symptomatology. Although problems in identity functioning and emotion dysregulation have been proven important risk and maintaining factors of ED symptomatology, they have never been integrated in a longitudinal study.Methods: The present study is part of the Longitudinal Identity research in Adolescence -study and aimed to uncover the temporal interplay between identity functioning, cognitive emotion regulation, and ED symptomatology in adolescence. A total of 2,162 community adolescents participated (...) at three measurement points with 1-year intervals. They reported on identity functioning, cognitive emotion regulation, and ED symptomatology.Results: Cross-lagged paths could be fixed for boys and girls and showed bidirectional associations between both dimensions of identity functioning and both rumination and catastrophizing over time. Similarly, these maladaptive cognitive emotion regulation strategies were bidirectionally related to ED symptomatology over time. Finally, indirect pathways pointed to bidirectional associations between both dimensions of identity functioning and bulimia symptoms through rumination and catastrophizing. Only unidirectional associations emerged for drive for thinness and almost no cross-lagged associations were found with positive reappraisal.Conclusion: The present study demonstrates that identity confusion may contribute to the development of ED symptomatology in adolescence through cognitive emotion dysregulation. It also reveals that these ED symptoms hamper identity development through emotion dysregulation. These results stress the importance of targeting both identity functioning and cognitive emotion regulation in the prevention and intervention of ED symptoms. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Grounding Psychiatry in the Body and the Social WorldLaurence J. Kirmayer, MD, FRCPC, FCAHS, FRSC (bio)The sensing body is like an open circuit that completes itself only in things, in others, in the surrounding earth.—David Abram (2012)Giulio Ongaro has written an interesting set of papers that aim to advance our thinking about ‘externalist’ (i.e., social) approaches to psychiatry by rehearsing an enactivist account of mental disorder and elaborating an (...) ethnographic example of social explanation rooted in a different cultural ontology and system of healing. I am completely onboard with his calls for more attention to the social world in psychiatric theory, research, and practice. What is especially novel in his work is the use of ethnographic research to inform philosophical thinking about psychiatry.Despite my enthusiasm for this effort, I have three concerns with his argument that I can only briefly outline in this commentary: i) the lack of attention to a large body of work in social epidemiology, psychosomatics, and cultural psychiatry that speaks directly to the goals of the biopsychosocial (BPS) approach and that vitiates much of the recent critique of that model; ii) the use of an ethnographic example to idealize an ‘externalist’ system of medicine that patently cannot address the many social structural and sociophysiological processes that psychiatry needs to understand; and iii) most importantly from a philosophical perspective, the fact that the enactivist framework he endorses actually breaks down the distinctions between internalist/externalist psychiatry and naturalist/constructivist ontologies around which he organizes his critique and proposed remedy (Kirmayer & Ramstead, 2017).Integration and the BPS ApproachOngaro’s first paper begins by acknowledging the recent critiques of the BPS approach that claim the BPS leaves vague or underspecified the ways in which the biological, psychological and social domains interact to give rise to mental disorders and how they can be included in systematic case formulation to guide assessment and treatment [End Page 315] intervention. Ongaro notes that current efforts to elaborate an embodied, enactivist approach to psychiatry hold the promise of outlining a more systematic approach to the relationship between levels or domains in the BPS. However, he argues this still leaves psychiatry with excessive emphasis on ‘internalizing’ explanations that appeal to biological or psychological processes within the person to characterize mental disorders. He suggests that this needs to be complemented by an externalizing approach that gives due weight to social processes. The dominant approaches leave the social world underspecified and he notes psychiatry lacks an “ontology of the social.”To some extent, this recent critique—not by Ongaro but by some of the authors he cites—reveals a lack of familiarity or engagement with a rich literature in social epidemiology, psychosomatics and sociosomatics that has long demonstrated the close links between social and physiological processes (Krieger, 2021). This research has produced multiple examples of these relationships detailing their mechanisms and dynamics in ways that do not privilege internal processes. There is no problem identifying many specific instances of these links; for example, research has examined how exposure to racism and discrimination results in increased risk for psychiatric disorders (Kirkbride et al., 2024). We have listed many other such mechanisms related to depression in a recent paper (Gómez-Carrillo & Kirmayer, 2023). This work does not yield a single overarching model or explanation but reveals diverse kinds of mechanisms that interact in a multilevel system that includes both dynamic and linguistic modes (Gómez-Carrillo et al., 2023). Integration occurs in the functioning of this system and cannot be captured in any monolithic theory. This is not a limitation of the BPS, simply a reflection of the complexity of human beings.Can we have a general theory of the links between dimensions or domains in the BPS or will it always remain a piecemeal account that depends on the details of specific systems? Given the many different kinds of processes involved, it seems unrealistic to expect a totalizing theory. If so, both research and clinical work need practical ways to assess the myriad pathways and processes involved in psychiatric disorders in order to formulate cases efficiently, identify a manageable subset of factors to consider in a... (shrink)

A survey of the isomorphic submodels of Vω, the set of hereditarily finite sets. In the usual language of set theory, Vω has 2ℵ0 isomorphic submodels. But other set-theoretic languages give different systems of submodels. For example, the language of adjunction allows only countably many isomorphic submodels of Vω.

"Charles "Teenie" Harris photographed the events and daily life of African Americans for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's most influential Black newspapers. From the 1930s to 1970s, Harris created a richly detailed record of public personalities, historic events, and the lives of average people. In 2001, Carnegie Museum of Art purchased Harris's archive of nearly 80,000 photographic negatives, few of which are titled and dated; the archive is considered one of the most important documentations of 20th?century African American (...) life. The book will serve as the definitive publication on the life and work of Teenie Harris, consisting of three significant essays: Cheryl Finley, assistant professor in the history of art at Cornell University, offers the first thorough analysis of Harris as an artist, situating him within the history of 20th?century African American art as well as American documentary and vernacular photography; Larry Glasco, associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh, draws on new research to present a detailed biography of the photographer; and Joe Trotter, professor of history and social justice at Carnegie Mellon University, explores the social and historical context of Harris's photographs. The book will also include a foreword by Deborah Willis, professor at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. In addition to comparative illustrations within the essays, the book includes 100 plates of Harris's signature work and a complete bibliography and chronology"--. (shrink)

Face à la question des modes de distribution inégalitaire de l’honneur social et de la lutte pour la reconnaissance chez des populations objets de mépris social, le « savoir-être avec » l’Autre est devenu pour le sociologue un enjeu scientifique, méthodologique et épistémologique important. Est proposée ici une ethnographie de la reconnaissance où l’Autre est regardé et reconnu avec son expérience, sa compétence, et son identité plurielle, fluctuante, réversible, inscrit dans une diversité de mondes sociaux organisée par des processus culturels (...) producteurs de hiérarchies et d’inégalités.When faced with unequal forms of distribution of social honour and with the struggle for recognition among populations subject to social contempt, knowing how to be with the Other has become a major methodological and epistemological scientific issue. Here, we are proposing an ethnography of recognition, in which the Other is regarded and recognized with his experience, his competence, and his fluctuating, reversible and varied identity, anchored in a diversity of social worlds organized on the basis of structural processes which produce hierarchy and inequalities. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Decolonizing MemoryLaurence J. Kirmayer*, MD (bio)In this far-reaching essay, Emily Walsh explores the significance of memory for coming to grips with the enduring legacy of colonialism in psychiatry. She argues that "for reasons of self-preservation, racialized individuals should reject collective memories underwritten by colonialism." Psychiatry can enable this process or collude with the structures of domination to silence and disable those who bear the brunt of the colonialist history (...) of violence and its current global incarnations. In this brief commentary, I want to underscore the importance of Walsh's argument, link it to contemporary work in cognitive and social science on the dynamics of memory, and point to some resources for implementing these insights in health services and clinical practice.Memory as Psychological Process, Social Practice and Cultural InstitutionMemory is not simply an individual psychological process of accessing images, stories, and knowledge of the past, but a reconstructive process of building a narrative (Kirmayer, 1996). This narrative is profoundly shaped by available templates, metaphors and models that are provided by the tacit, normative and official histories of society (Hirst, Yamashiro & Coman, 2018). But memory is also shaped by cultural affordances that guide attention and by narrative practices, which depend on other people (Ramstead, Veissière, & Kirmayer, 2017). In effect, remembering is not a matter of reaching down into one's memory archive or sedimented experience, but an embodied and enactive process of thinking with and through others (Laanes & Meretoja, 2021; Veissière, Constant, Ramstead, Friston, & Kirmayer, 2020). Memory then depends on community and on a shared understanding of history and of possible futures through which one can anchor and elaborate one's individual story.A direct consequence is that disconnecting a person from others, disembedding them from their social milieu, will lead to disruptions in memory and in the continuity of self. When the environment is toxic, this severance may sometimes be (partly) beneficial—but it always comes at a cost. Figuring out those costs, making them explicit, and ensuring that those whose history is being suppressed or overwritten by others have a chance to reclaim and write their own, is an ethical and pragmatic imperative.The denial of vital memories (recent or remote, personal or collective) causes fractures in the self that may disorganize the individual, install false consciousness, and cement the exclusionary and disvalued position of colonized, racialized, and [End Page 243] marginalized subjects. This process is not only—or even primarily—about memory. It is part of the structure of everyday life, inscribed in institutions and practices where colonial histories, racism, and economic exploitation are deeply entangled. Representations of the past are part of the way we construe the present and anticipate the future—but not every interpretive frame is a memory; there are structures in and of the moment that condition how we think about ourselves in health and illness and these too convey interests and biases disguised as "just the way things are."Fanon's Politics of Postcolonial Memory and IdentityWalsh offers a reading of aspects of Fanon's philosophy to reveal the workings of colonialism in and through memory. She is concerned with specific subsets of collective memories that are affectively charged and related to the identity of a group (Wertsch & Roediger, 2008). These memories are collective not simply they are shared by or distributed among the members of a group but because they define or constitute the collective itself.History is written largely by the powerful who create dominant or 'master' narratives that serve their own projects of legitimation and self-mystification (Trouillot, 2015; Lindqvist, 2021). But the creation of dominant narratives is not solely the province of those in power. There are many kinds of self-serving collective memory (Baumeister & Hastings, 2013)—from those related to the creation of nation states, which may ignore not only colonized peoples, but all ethnicities, religions or linguistic groups subordinated to the ideals of the dominant group (Anderson, 2006; Gunew, 2013; van Alphen & Carretero, 2015), to other forms of collective identity, even to those created by liberatory movements. These are maintained by institutionalization, ceremonial repetition and reenactment... (shrink)

We define an axiom schema for finite set theory with bounded induction on sets, analogous to the theory of bounded arithmetic,, and use some of its basic model theory to establish some independence results for various axioms of set theory over. Then we ask: given a model M of, is there a model of whose ordinal arithmetic is isomorphic to M? We show that the answer is yes if.

De nouvelles théories, pragmatistes en particulier, de l’action collective et de l’expérimentation sociale insistent sur le rôle joué par les résistances locales dans les processus d’innovation politique. Toutefois, cette insistance ne se traduit pas nécessairement, dans les réformes de la démocratie, par une réflexion approfondie sur la manière de faire évoluer en conséquence les mécanismes d’apprentissage institutionnel. Or une telle évolution est une condition pour que le rôle joué par les résistances locales puisse dépasser le stade d’alibi ou de faire-valoir (...) de manière à transformer leur propre rapport au pouvoir et à déstabiliser les contre-résistances institutionnelles au changement. (shrink)

Psychopathology can render people strange and difficult to understand. Communication can lead to empathic understanding, which in turn can guide compassionate action. But communication depends on a shared conceptual world. How can language convey meanings that are not shared, that mark a divide between human beings or whole communities? A consideration of the poetics of Paul Celan sheds light on the power of language to bridge disparate worlds and on the ethical stance needed when empathy fails. Celan’s poetics of alterity (...) has implications for our efforts to understand individuals’ illness experience as a grounding for the ethics of the clinical encounter. (shrink)