Harry C. Boyte. Craig Calhoun. Geoff Eley. Nancy Fraser. Nicholas Garnham. JürgenHabermas. Peter Hohendahl. Lloyd Kramer. Benjamin Lee. Thomas McCarthy. Moishe Postone. Mary P.Ryan. Michael Schudson. Michael Warner. David Zaret.

Amit Goswami published his book, "The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World", in 1993. In 1996, he and Henry Swift started up the online newsletter Science Within Consciousness, which carries articles and news features connected with the Goswamian philosophy. Below, I comment on Goswami 's metaphysical theories as represented in his writings in the SWC newsletter, especially in his pieces: Monistic Idealism May Provide Better Ontology for Cognitive Science: A Reply to Dyer, The Hard Question: View from A (...) Science Within Consciousness, Toward an Understanding of the Paranormal, Amit Goswami was a professor at the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. He taught physics for 32 years in the USA, mostly at Oregon. He now is Senior Resident Researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. (shrink)

Elephant 2000 is a proposed programming language good for writing and verifying programs that interact with people (eg. transaction processing) or interact with programs belonging to other organizations (eg. electronic data interchange) 1. Communication inputs and outputs are in an I-O language whose sentences are meaningful speech acts identified in the language as questions, answers, offers, acceptances, declinations, requests, permissions and promises. 2. The correctness of programs is partly defined in terms of proper performance of the speech acts. Answers should (...) be truthful and responsive, and promises should be kept. Sentences of logic expressing these forms of correctness can be generated automatically from the form of the program. 3. Elephant aource programs may not need data structures, because they can refer directly to the past. Thus a program can say that an airline passenger has a reservation if he has made one and hasn't cancelled it. 4. Elephant programs themselves can be represented as sentences of logic. Their extensional properties follow from this representation without an intervening theory of programming or anything like Hoare axioms. 5. Elephant programs that interact non-trivially with the outside world can have both input-output specification, relating the programs inputs and outputs, and accomplishment specifications concerning what the program accomplishes in the world. These concepts are respectively generalizations of the philosophers' illocutionary and perlocutionary speech acts. 6. Programs that engage in commercial transactions assume obligations on behalf of their owners in exchange for obligations assumed by other entities. It may be part of the specification of an Elephant 2000 program that these obligations are exchanged as intended, and this too can be expressed by a logical sentence. 7. Human speech acts involve intelligence. Elephant 2000 is on the borderline of AI, but the article emphasizes the Elephant usages that do not require AI. (shrink)

This article examines the Islamic concept of takfīr as it is used in secular-pluralistic contexts, within a larger delegitimizing discourse against terrorism. I argue that this takfīr as deployed by “liberal” Muslims, functions to legitimate the state’s use of coercive force. Furthermore, the secular state may in turn draw upon these discourses to co-opt the right to determine authentic Muslim identity. However, in doing so the state is forced to enter into a religiously discursive space. Takfīr notably becomes the site (...) of contention over secular state sovereignty for determining the value of life, where religious individuals both challenge and affirm this sovereignty. This reveals the dynamics in the relationship between secular conceptions of sovereignty and religion, as it pertains to the justification of violence. (shrink)

Under representation -- The aesthetic regime of representation -- The pathological sublime: pleasure and pain in the racial regime -- Race under representation -- Representation's coup -- The aesthetic taboo: aura, magic, and the primitive.

The surface appeal of the Social Responsibility theory of the press emerging in the report of the Commission on Freedom of the Press in 1947 has made Social Responsibility theory broadly acceptable. Yet, I declare it inconsistent with the American social system. Three concepts are discussed - societal obligation, individual rights, and interpersonal relationships - as necessary for a new moral theory that serves valid societal goals.

A notable early result of David Makinson establishes that every monotone modal logic can be extended to LI, LV, or LF, and every antitone logic can be extended to LN, LV, or LF, where LI, LN, LV, and LF are logics axiomatized, respectively, by the schemas □α↔α, □α↔¬α, □α↔⊤, and □α↔⊥. We investigate logics that are both monotone and antitone (hereafter amphitone). There are exactly three: LV, LF, and the minimum amphitone logic AM axiomatized by the schema □α→□β. These logics, (...) along with LI, LN, and a wider class of “extensional” logics, bear close affinities to classical propositional logic. Characterizing those affinities reveals differences among several accounts of equivalence between logics. Some results about amphitone logics do not carry over when logics are construed as consequence or generalized (“multiple-conclusion”) consequence relations on languages that may lack some or all of the nonmodal connectives. We close by discussing these divergences and conditions under which our results do carry over. (shrink)

We argue that considering only a few ‘big’ ethical decisions in any engineering design process — both in education and practice — only reinforces the mistaken idea of engineering design as a series of independent sub-problems. Using data collected in engineering design organisations over a seven year period, we show how an ethical component to engineering decisions is much more pervasive. We distinguish three types of ethical justification for engineering decisions: (1) consequential, (2) deontological or non-consequential, and (3) virtue-based. We (...) find that although there is some evidence for engineering designers as ‘classic’ consequentialists, a more egocentric consequentialism would appear more fitting. We also explain how the idea of a ‘folk ethics’ — a justification in the second category that consciously weighs one thing with another — fits with the idea of the engineering design process as social negotiation rather than as technological progress. (shrink)

INTRODUCTION Kierkegaard himself hardly requires introduction, but his thought continues to require explication due to its inherent complexity and its ...

The diverse papers which make up this book are variations on a theme which is based in biological science - yet none of the contributors is really a biologist. Our metaphor for describing what we are doing here is that we have gathered together in a room because that particular room provides us with a certain view of our individual areas of interest - a view that may have been previously obscured. We are visiting the house of biology in the (...) hope that we may see more clearly things that we each find baffling about our particular field of work in education, research, or daily living. (shrink)

Let us sum up. We began with the question, “What is the interest of a model-theoretic definition of validity?” Model theoretic validity consists in truth under all reinterpretations of non-logical constants. In this paper, we have described for each necessity concept a corresponding modal invariance property. Exemplification of that property by the logical constants of a language leads to an explanation of the necessity, in the corresponding sense, of its valid sentences. I have fixed upon the epistemic modalities in characterizing (...) the logical constants: to be a logical constant in the language of a population is to be invariant over a modality describing complete possible epistemic states of that population (or an idealized analogue thereof). The grounds for this characterization are these: (1) It leads, I believe, to an extensionally reasonable demarcation of the logical constants, including clear cases and excluding clear non-cases. It gives a principled criterion for deciding unclear cases. (2) It provides an analysis of the topic-neutrality of logic. (3) It leads to an explanation of the epistemic necessity of the logical truths in terms of the topic-neutrality of the logical constants.All the same, it is reasonable to ask, even if the suggested demarcation of logic is extensionally correct, whether it can reasonably be expected to be fundamental. The epistemic invariance of an expression is a rather striking property, one which we should want to explain. What is missing, then, is an explanation of the distinguishing epistemic properties of the constants in terms of more fundamental properties involving their understanding and use. It would be these that properly define the nature, not just the extent, of logic. (shrink)

This paper discusses the philosophical significance of 'September 11' by relating it to attempts that have been made throughout the history of philosophy to read particular events as symbols of conceptual change. It draws especially on Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought and Giovanna Borradori's dialogues with Derrida and Habermas, in her Philosophy in a Time of Terror, to relate 'September 11' to Kant's versions of Progress, Providence and Cosmopolitanism.

Daniel Kodaj has recently developed a pro-atheistic argument that he calls “the problem of religious evil.” This first premise of this argument is “belief in God causes evil.” Although this idea that belief in God causes evil is widely accepted, certainly in the secular West, it is sufficiently problematic as to be unsuitable as a basis for an argument for atheism, as Kodaj seeks to use it. In this paper I shall highlight the problems inherent in it in three ways: (...) by considering whether it is reasonable to say that “belief in God” causes evil; whether it is reasonable to say that belief in God “causes” evil; and whether it is reasonable to say that belief in God causes “evil.” In each case I will argue that it is problematic to make such claims, and accordingly I will conclude that the premise “belief in God causes evil” is unacceptable as it stands, and consequently is unable to ground Kodaj’s pro-atheistic argument. (shrink)

This discussion explores the possibility of distinguishing a tighter notion of contrariety evident in the Square of Opposition, especially in its modal incarnations, than as that binary relation holding statements that cannot both be true, with or without the added rider ‘though can both be false’. More than one theorist has voiced the intuition that the paradigmatic contraries of the traditional Square are related in some such tighter way—involving the specific role played by negation in contrasting them—that distinguishes them from (...) other pairs of incompatible statements constructed from the same conceptual materials. Prominent among examples, these other nonstandard pairs are the ‘new contraries’ presented by Robert Blanché’s hexagon(s) of opposition. With special, though not exclusive, attention to these cases, we investigate whether contrariety in the distinguished sense can be captured by adding to the incompatibility condition the further demand that the pair of statements concerned can be represented as the results of applying some sentence operator to the content in its scope, for one of the pair, and, for the other, the application of that same operator to the negation of that content. For one of the two cases, a Blanché case, of nonstandard contrariety singled out for attention, the question of whether such a representation is available is settled at the end of Section 4, and then in a more satisfying way in Section 5, though for the other case, noticed by Peter Simons, the question remains open, after some tentative discussion in one subsection, 6.2, of an Appendix (Section 6). (shrink)

A summary of the history of the universe through the lenses of science and the world's religions"--Publisher information.

Lecture 1. What is intellectual history? -- Lecture 2. The scientific origins of the Enlightenment -- Lecture 3. The emergence of the modern intellectual -- Lecture 4. The cultural meaning of the French Revolution -- Lecture 5. The new conservatism in post-revolutionary Europe -- Lecture 6. The new German philosophy -- Lecture 7. Hegel's philosophical conception of history -- Lecture 8. The new liberalism -- Lecture 9. The literary culture of Romanticism -- Lecture 10. The meaning of the romantic hero (...) -- Lecture 11. The Industrial Revolution and classical economics -- Lecture 12. Early critiques of industrial capitalism -- Lecture 13. Hegelianism and the young Marx -- Lecture 14. Marx's social critique -- Lecture 15. Feminism in the 19th century culture -- Lecture 16. Women's rights in a man's world -- Lecture 17. Tocqueville & Mill, rethinking liberal theory -- Lecture 18. Nationalisms and national identities -- Lecture 19. The novel as art and social criticism -- Lecture 20. Science and its literary critics -- Lecture 21. Charles Darwin and the new biology -- Lecture 22. Controversies of social Darwinism -- Lecture 23. The heroic critic in mass society -- Lecture 24. Nietzsche's critique of European culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ontological and Other AssumptionsLloyd A. Wells (bio) and Sandra J. Rackley (bio)Fahrenberg and Cheetham have conducted an immensely thought-provoking study of the assumptions about human nature made by 800 students and pose a question about the future impact of these assumptions on individuals’ practice in professions including medicine and psychotherapy.This work represents a branch of “philosophical anthropology,” which considers assumptions people make about human nature. The authors used a (...) questionnaire, much of which was newly designed, to assess the assumptions made by university students studying psychology, philosophy, sciences, and other disciplines. Most of the respondents were studying at Freiburg, but some were sampled at several other universities in both the former East and West Germanies. Questions involved consciousness and the brain, evolution, free will, belief in God, the meaning of life, and theodicy.Given the importance of these beliefs and assumptions in so many peoples’ lives, it is quite surprising that there are so few modern data available, and this study ventures an important first step in assessing these assumptions. However, there are many problems inherent in this study (and any like it).The first, for us, is the validity of the questionnaire itself, an issue that was not specifically addressed in the paper. Face validity is a problem even in the few questions quoted directly in the paper. For example, some statements contain two clauses, and one could well agree with one without agreeing with another: “I do not know whether a God exists and I do not believe it is possible to know.” This is the most relevant answer for a true agnostic, but the assumption that “I do not know whether a God exists” does not necessarily link at all with “I do not believe it is possible to know.” Similarly, a theist might have trouble with the two clauses, “I know God really exists” and “I do not doubt this.” (Technically, knowledge does imply a lack of doubt, but belief certainly does not.) Particularly in the trilemmas, where various patterns of response were analyzed, these multiple-clause statements may have led students to respond in a manner inconsistent with their true beliefs and assumptions. Furthermore, many of the questions contain terms that may have been unfamiliar to first-year university students. The authors explain their rationale in not defining terms, but the lack of clarity about definitions may have led some of the students to not fully understand the questions asked and to perhaps influence the answers they chose.Misunderstanding of the questions may account for some of the disparities reported in the results. Other apparent inconsistencies, however, do not seem to be a result of unclear questions. For example, sixty percent of the students agreed with the statement that “I believe in … existence after death,” whereas forty-seven percent agreed with the statement that “when my brain is dead my consciousness and my person cease to be.” These [End Page 203] findings do not add up, and this study has several similar sets of data. People contradict themselves in long and complex questionnaires, and this may be a simple explanation for these findings, but is this the only explanation? How seriously did the students take the questionnaire, often given as part of their class? How honest were their responses?How generalizable are the findings of this study? It is very difficult even to speculate about this. The statistics are incomprehensible in light of the data given, and one must essentially take them on faith, wherever one falls on the God/theodicy questions. The design has many flaws, but we do learn how a subsample of German university students rate important factors about the meaning of life. Statements are made in the paper that the students’ results correlate with similar results for the general population, but this assertion seems to be based on a very few questions. One would like much more delineation of this apparent correlation, because we wonder about the juxtaposition of developmental factors with the answers the students gave to this questionnaire. First-year university students are at a critical developmental point, and it would be fascinating to follow this large cohort of students over time to see whether... (shrink)

This collection brings together leading anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and artificial-intelligence researchers to discuss the sciences and mathematics used in various Eastern, Western, and Indigenous societies, both ancient and contemporary. The authors analyze prevailing assumptions about these societies and propose more faithful, sensitive analyses of their ontological views about reality--a step toward mutual understanding and translatability across cultures and research fields. Science in the Forest, Science in the Past is a pioneering interdisciplinary exploration that will challenge the way readers interested in (...) sciences, mathematics, humanities, social research, computer sciences, and education think about deeply held notions of what constitutes reality, how it is apprehended, and how to investigate it. (shrink)

Opposition to physician-assisted suicide is widespread in Christian ethics. However, on a topic as controversial as physician-assisted suicide, no one can reasonably speak for “the Christian” perspective. Natural-law and, specifically, just-war thinking are claimed in the Christian tradition, yet the natural-law contribution to a Christian ethical analysis of physician-assisted suicide requires explanation and defense. Natural-law ethical theory affirms the central role of reason in moral thinking and provides a theoretical resource in contemporary ethics to assist in analyzing specific moral issues, (...) problems, and conflicts. This essay seeks to demonstrate how just-war thinking, derived from natural-law tradition, allows movement from the theoretical world of natural-law theory to the practical world of normative ethics. Here the case is made that the just-war model of ethics helps elucidate the moral problematic involved in physician-assisted suicide while clarifying direction on this particularly thorny and controversial problem. (shrink)

This critical study of Arendt explores the sources and dangers of political alienation in the West from the citizen republics of classical antiquity to the consumer societies of modern liberal democracies. It is a sympathetic appraisal of the high promise and great perils of the political life.