Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories (...) and On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is, yet until now there has been no full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. This has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of such classical philosophical (...) concepts as identity, individual, class, substance and accident, matter, form, essence, dependence, and integral whole. It also enables the author to offer new solutions to long-standing problems surrounding these concepts, such as the Ship of Theseus Problem and the issue of mereological essentialism. The author shows by his use of formal techniques that classical philosophical problems are amenable to rigorous treatment, and the book represents a synthesis of issues and methods from the analytical tradition and from the older continental realist tradition of Brentano and the early Husserl. (shrink)

Introduction Max Horkheimer was born on February in Stuttgart. By the time he died, on 7 July in Nuremberg, he had played a decisive role in launching and ...

How can anyone be rational in a world where knowledge is limited, time is pressing, and deep thought is often an unattainable luxury? Traditional models of unbounded rationality and optimization in cognitive science, economics, and animal behavior have tended to view decision-makers as possessing supernatural powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and endless time. But understanding decisions in the real world requires a more psychologically plausible notion of bounded rationality. In Simple heuristics that make us smart (Gigerenzer et al. 1999), we (...) explore fast and frugal heuristics – simple rules in the mind's adaptive toolbox for making decisions with realistic mental resources. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices quickly and with a minimum of information by exploiting the way that information is structured in particular environments. In this précis, we show how simple building blocks that control information search, stop search, and make decisions can be put together to form classes of heuristics, including: ignorance-based and one-reason decision making for choice, elimination models for categorization, and satisficing heuristics for sequential search. These simple heuristics perform comparably to more complex algorithms, particularly when generalizing to new data – that is, simplicity leads to robustness. We present evidence regarding when people use simple heuristics and describe the challenges to be addressed by this research program. Key Words: adaptive toolbox; bounded rationality; decision making; elimination models; environment structure; heuristics; ignorance-based reasoning; limited information search; robustness; satisficing; simplicity. (shrink)

Introduction By the late fifth century BCE Panini had composed the Astadhyayi, consisting of nearly 4000 rules giving a precise and fairly complete ...

In his doctoral dissertation Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles Brentano tried to show that (against criticism of this) one could indeed give a principle defense of Aristotle's table of categories as a coherent system. In later texts Brentano appears sharply critical of Aristotle, mainly in respect to Aristotle's mereology, or theory of part and whole, and to his theory of substance and accident. It is argued that Brentano hadn't observed that Aristotle's belief that there are as many (...) predicative senses of 'be' as there are categories of being is based not on his mereology but on his theory of definition. Overlooking this Brentano was led to far reaching inadequate ontological consequences. (shrink)

This book present research in ethics with topics including a step-by-step guide to students; wellbeing and disadvantage; ethical disposition of accounting and business management students; collegiality of journals and self-citation on annual bibliometric scorings; trends of tainted publications and their authors' publication profiles; from bioethics to biopolitics and the limits of liberalism.

The intertwining careers of William Torrey Harris converge in twelve of the Annual Reports of the Board of Directors for St. Louis Public Schools. Harris formulated most of the essential features of these twelve reports as the Superintendent of Schools from 1867 to 1869. These particular reports—which have been acclaimed nationally and internationally—are said to be among the most valuable official publications in American educational literature. They are far different from the descriptive documents originally intended by their author. This study (...) demonstrates that Harris provided an authentic philosophy of education, a set of interrelated philosophical principles and their applications to educational problems. The substance of Harris's philosophy of education is focused upon a broadly based philosophical anthropology in relationship primarily to the purposes, curriculum, and teaching methods in intellectual, moral, and religious education. (shrink)

In clinical ethics, there remains a great deal of uncertainty regarding the appropriateness of attempting cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for certain patients. Although the issue continues to receive ample attention and various frameworks have been proposed for navigating such cases, most discussions draw heavily on the notion of harm as a central consideration. In the following, I use emerging philosophical literature on the notion of harm to argue that the ambiguities and disagreement about harm create important and oft-overlooked challenges for the (...) ethics of CPR. I begin by elucidating the standard account of harm, called the Counterfactual Comparative Account (CCA). I then show that three challenges to the CCA—preemptive harms, the harm of death, and non-experiential harms—are particularly salient when assessing potential harms for candidates of CPR and likely impact-related decision-making and communication. I extend this argument to explore how the ambiguities of harm might extend to other realms of clinical decision-making, such as the use and limitations of life-sustaining treatments. To address these challenges, I propose two strategies for identifying and minimizing the impact of such uncertainty: first, clinicians and ethicists ought to promote pluralistic conversations that account for different understandings of harm; second, they ought to invoke harm-independent considerations when discussing the ethics of CPR in order to reflect the nuances of such conversations. These strategies, coupled with a richer philosophical understanding of harm, promise to help clinicians and ethicists navigate the prevalent and difficult cases involving patient resuscitation and many other harm-based decisions in the clinical setting. (shrink)

For most of the history of metaphysics, the subject has been dominated by the concept of substance. There is an everyday commonsense notion of substance which is perfectly harmless and which I shall defend against attempts to remove it or revise it away. But I deny that substance has to be construed as a primitive even in everyday terms. Borrowing Strawson’s distinction between descriptive and revisionary metaphysics, I press the legitimate claims of revisionary metaphysics and argue that there is no (...) place for a fundamental concept of substance within it, although aspects of the concept are likely to find their place therein. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next (...) twenty or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

The Intellectual Powers is a philosophical investigation into the cognitive and cogitative powers of mankind. It develops a connective analysis of our powers of consciousness, intentionality, mastery of language, knowledge, belief, certainty, sensation, perception, memory, thought, and imagination, by one of Britain’s leading philosophers. It is an essential guide and handbook for philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists. The culmination of 45 years of reflection on the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the nature of the human person No other book in (...) epistemology or philosophy of psychology provides such extensive overviews of consciousness, self–consciousness, intentionality, mastery of a language, knowledge, belief, memory, sensation and perception, thought and imagination Illustrated with tables, tree–diagrams, and charts to provide overviews of the conceptual relationships disclosed by analysis Written by one of Britain’s best philosophical minds A sequel to Hacker’s Human Nature: The Categorial Framework An essential guide and handbook for all who are working in philosophy of mind, epistemology, psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

This book with an introduction by Witold Marciszewski, views the history of philosophy and logic from 1837 to 1939 from the perspective of the cradle of modern exact philosophy - Central Europe. In a series of case studies, it illuminates the developments in this region, most notably in Austria and Poland, examining thinkers such as Bolzano, Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, Twardowski, Lesniewski, and Tarski, as well as the logicians like Frege and Russell with whom they bore a close resemblance. The book (...) challenges established views about the history of philosophy and logic in Europe, and shows the vitality of the Central European tradition. (shrink)

Wittgenstein presents in the Tractatus a variable purporting to capture the general form of proposition. One understanding of what Wittgenstein is doing there, an understanding in line with the ‘new’ reading of his work championed by Diamond, Conant and others, sees it as a deflationary or even an implosive move—a move by which a concept sometimes put by philosophers to distinctively metaphysical use is replaced, in a perspicuous notation, by an innocent device of generalization, thereby dispersing the clouds of philosophy (...) that formerly surrounded the concept. By asking how Wittgenstein supposed his variable to work, and what work he imagined it was fit for, the paper questions the adequacy of that understanding. (shrink)

Here is a dilemma. By robust common sense, the sun exists. Yet the sun is a vague object, lacking exact identity conditions, and therefore by widely accepted standards of objecthood does not exist. What goes for it goes for almost all other material things. Standard solutions to the problem of vagueness for predicates fall flat for vague objects. This paper attempts a theory which accounts for our common beliefs about vague objects by taking them as well-founded phenomena, founded on collections (...) of more exact objects. The key notions allowing us to assign sensible truth-values to propositions about vague objects are those of truth-value density and expected truth-value. These will be illustrated in use. (shrink)

The three intertwining careers of William Torrey Harris [1835-1909] in philosophy, philosophy of education, and educational administration converge in twelve of the Annual Reports of the board of directors of the St. Louis public schools, most of the essential features of which he formulated as the superintendent of schools from 1867-79. These twelve reports, comprising philosophical and educational principles, have been acclaimed nationally and internationally to be among the most valuable official publications in American educational literature. The major purpose of (...) this paper is to clarify the nature and scope of the philosophical principles of Harris expressed in his Annual Reports. The areas of philosophy represented are metaphysics, anthropology, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of religion. While the motivation and context of these philosophical principles are pedagogical in orientation, it is evident that Harris produced here a philosophical synthesis worthy of consideration in a formal survey of the history of American philosophy. (shrink)

This paper discusses the philosophical background to the paper by lejewski in this issue. lejewski offers an ontologically neutral logic for the first two types (individuals and classes thereof). some peculiarities of the logic used are noted, in particular the distinction between empty individual terms, empty class terms, and non-empty class terms designating the empty class. lejewski ends by denying the truth of the formula meaning "there are classes," but we argue that the way in which truth-conditions for formulae containing (...) class terms are introduced absolves us from taking this as seriously committing us to the existence of classes. the main (inclining but not necessitating) reason for being a platonist lies in the sheer mass of mathematical results for which a non-platonist account has yet to be given. the theory of classes as fictions suggested by our modification of lejewski's view is insufficient to support frege-russell style logicism, but for a non-platonist the upper reaches of cantor's paradise must be regarded as fictitious anyway. (shrink)

0. My aims in this paper are largely expository: I am more interested in presenting the picture theory than deciding its truth. Even so, I hope that the arguments by which I develop the theory will do something to support it, since I believe that what I will present as Wittgenstein's view is indeed the truth. This is not an admission of insanity, though some things that have been thought intrinsic to the picture theory are things it would be insane (...) to believe. So clearly the view I will present, when compared to the most embracing interpretations, is a partial and selective one. It would be another kind of madness, one I am just as eagre to disown, to suppose that my own favoured selection is the only possible one. That is pretty well the last remark in this paper about other commentators. I trust my reticence entitles me to be presumed catholic until proven nonconformist. (shrink)

This paper is a review of work on Newman's objection to epistemic structural realism (ESR). In Section 2, a brief statement of ESR is provided. In Section 3, Newman's objection and its recent variants are outlined. In Section 4, two responses that argue that the objection can be evaded by abandoning the Ramsey-sentence approach to ESR are considered. In Section 5, three responses that have been put forward specifically to rescue the Ramsey-sentence approach to ESR from the modern versions of (...) the objection are discussed. Finally, in Section 6, three responses are considered that are neutral with respect to one's approach to ESR and all argue (in different ways) that the objection can be evaded by introducing the notion that some relations/structures are privileged over others. It is concluded that none of these suggestions is an adequate response to Newman's objection, which therefore remains a serious problem for ESRists. Introduction Epistemic Structural Realism 2.1 Ramsey-sentences and ESR 2.2 WESR and SESR The Objection 3.1 Newman's version 3.2 Demopoulos and Friedman's and Ketland's versions Replies that Abandon the Ramsey-Sentence Approach to ESR 4.1 Redhead's reply 4.2 French and Ladyman's reply Replies Designed to Rescue the Ramsey-Sentence Approach 5.1 Zahar's reply 5.2 Cruse's reply 5.3 Melia and Saatsi's reply Replies that Argue that Some Structures/Relations are Privileged 6.1 A Carnapian reply 6.2 Votsis' reply 6.3 The Merrill/Lewis/Psillos reply Summary CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Accounts of creation in Sanskrit literature include a number of hymns in the R̥gveda principal among which are R̥V 10.72, 10.81–82, 10.90, 10.121, and 10.129. Later accounts appear in the Mānavadhārmaśāstra, the Mahābhārata, and purāṇas. Scholars generally describe these accounts as various, mutually inconsistent myths, or as superseded stages of philosophical thought. Even recent treatments of Indian cosmogony that praise the poetic subtlety and prowess of their composers consider their work as products of individual poetic imagination. Yet, despite the variety (...) of expression in the various accounts, they appear to convey a consistent model of the origin of the world. Moreover, the model of the absolute and the first stages of creation mirror the descriptions of the development of enlightenment in foundational texts of Vedānta and systematic analyses of Yoga. The descriptions of creation may therefore rather be the result of the special insight of enlightened sages than the results of individual imagination. (shrink)