Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

Martin Heidegger's overt alliance with the Nazis and the specific relation between this alliance and his philosophical thought--the degree to which his concepts are linked to a thoroughly disreputable set of political beliefs--have been the topic of a storm of recent debate. Written ten years before this debate, this study by France's leading sociologist and cultural theorist is both a precursor of that debate and an analysis of the institutional mechanisms involved in the production of philosophical discourse. Though Heidegger is (...) aware of and acknowledges the legitimacy of purely philosophical issues, Bourdieu points out that the complexity and abstraction of Heidegger's philosophical discourse stems from its situation in the cultural field, where two social and intellectual dimensions--political thought and academic thought--intersect. Bourdieu concludes by suggesting that Heidegger should not be considered as a Nazi ideologist, that there is no place in Heidegger's philosophical ideas for a racist conception of the human being. Rather, he sees Heidegger's thought as a structural equivalent in the field of philosophy of the "conservative revolution," of which Nazism is but one manifestation. (shrink)

"This volume assembles twelve texts published between 1892 and 1915.... The editors allow one to see the genesis of the ideas of Duhem, philosopher and historian, of the variety of his styles, and sometimes also the limits of his work.... A useful index, probably unique in the field of Duhemian studies, completes the book.... The English-language public may be assured an exemplary translation and a reliable critical apparatus." --Jean Gayon, _Revue d'Histoire des Sciences_.

This book compares the range of different contemporary neo-Aristotelian moral theories. It shows that the most successful are those that remain faithful to the program proposed by Elizabeth Anscombe.

Non-cognitive gadgets are fancy tools shaped to meet specific, local needs. Cecilia Heyes defines cognitive gadgets as dedicated psychological mechanisms created through social interactions and culturally, not genetically, inherited by humans. She has boldly proposed that many human cognitive mechanisms are gadgets. If true, these claims would have far-reaching implications for our scientific understanding of human social cognition. Here we assess Heyes’s cognitive gadget approach as it applies to mindreading. We do not think that the evidence supports Heyes’s thought-provoking thesis (...) that human children are taught to read minds the way they are taught to read words. We highlight a potential circularity lurking behind this analogy, and we explain why we are unpersuaded by Heyes’s anti-mentalistic proposal for handling data inconsistent with the gadget view, which others take to be evidence for mindreading in human infancy. We conclude that while human minds may well be filled with gadgets, mindreading is unlikely to be one of them. (shrink)

In this paper we first show that Robin Smith’s ecthetic system SE for Aristotle’s assertoric syllogistic is not complete, despite what is claimed by Smith. SE is then not adequate to establish that ecthesis allows one to dispense with indirect or per impossibile deductions in Aristotle’s assertoric logic. As an alternative to SE, we then present a stronger system EC which is adequate for this purpose. EC is a nonexplosive ecthetic system which is shown to be sound and complete with (...) respect to all valid syllogistic arguments with a consistent set of premises. (shrink)

Like other members of the Vienna Circle, Carnap criticized traditional philosophy for its lack of clarity and precision, as is well-know from such papers as "The elimination of metaphysics through the logical analysis of language" (1932) and many other writings. In 'The Logical Syntax of Language' (1934), while still entertaining the idea that, in some sense, metaphysics is nonsense, Carnap's critique of philosophy is based on different grounds and aimed at different authors. In this book, his critique of philosophy actually (...) takes the form of an attempt at a reconstruction of philosophy on a new basis. I shall try to examine this attempt and to show why it fails. I shall also try to show how Carnap's thought evolved on this point in later writings, in particular in "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" (1950). (shrink)

Some common notions about analytic philosophy - that it is uniformly anti-metaphysical or indifferent to the history of philosophy - are clearly misconceived. However the impression that analytic philosophers are essentially linguistic philosophers is not entirely false and hence less easy to refute.

Emotions imply a revision of our beliefs inasmuch as they are triggered by a discrepancy between our expectancies and new situations. I will study the converse relation: how emotions, particularly recurrent emotions that reappear in similar situations in the long term, are incentives to revise not only our beliefs but also the order of priorities between their related desires. Understanding how affects can revise both beliefs—under their committing aspect—and the order of desires, implies seeing the dynamics of affects as interacting (...) with external dynamics and the order of priorities as a weak one (“pseudo-distance”; Schlechta, 2004). These philosophical considerations shed new light on the diversity of emotions, on their different temporalities, and on the paradox of emotional sharing. (shrink)

Les grands paradigmes des sciences humaines ont été constitués, au fil de l’histoire, par l’éviction progressive de la dimension affective des objets et méthodes scientifiques. Après un long désintérêt, pour partie dû à la préoccupation de l’objectivation des phénomènes retenus par l’analyse sociologique, mais aussi à l’hypostase du social, qui a trouvé notamment chez Durkheim un accomplissement encore plus accentué que dans la plupart des conceptions holistes, la question des émotions est l’...

There are presently three broad approaches the project of naturalizing intentionality: a purely informational approach (Dretske and Fodor), a purely teleological approach (Millikan and Papineau), and a mixed informationally-based teleological approach (Dretske again). I will argue that the last teleosemantic theory offers the most promising approach. I also think, however, that the most explicit version of a pure teleosemantic theory of content, namely Millikan’s admirable theory, faces a pair of objections. My goal in this paper is to spell out Millikan’s (...) pure teleosemantic theory; then to present two objections; and finally to ask the question whether a teleosemantic framework can be saved from the objections. (shrink)

: Fodor was passionately unwilling to compromise. Of his several commitments, I focus here on informational atomism. Fodor staunchly rejected semantic holism for two conspiring reasons. He took it to threaten his commitment to the nomic character of psychological explanation. He also took it to pave the way towards relativism, which he found deeply offensive. In this paper, I reconstruct the strands of Fodor’s commitment to the computational version of the representational theory of mind that led him to informational atomism. (...) I take issue with three features of informational atomism. First, I argue that it deprives content from its expected causal role in psychological explanation. Secondly, I take issue with Fodor’s claim that only informational atomism can meet the requirements of the principle of compositionality. Finally, I argue that informational atomism yields a bloated or unwieldy category of nomic properties. Keywords: Informational Atomism; Representational Theory of Mind; Psychological Explanation; Principle of Compositionality; Jerry A. Fodor Fare i conti con l’atomismo informazionale: uno dei lasciti di Jerry Fodor Riassunto : Fodor è stato fortemente maldisposto al compromesso. Tra le molte cose di cui si è occupato, intendo qui concentrarmi sull’atomismo informazionale. Fodor ha coerentemente rifiutato l’olismo semantico per due ragioni convergenti. Lo vedeva come minaccia per il suo impegno verso il carattere nomico della spiegazione psicologica e come porta aperta verso il relativismo, cosa che considerava profondamente minacciosa. In questo lavoro, intendo riprendere le fila dell’impegno di Fodor verso la versione computazionale della teoria rappresentazionale della mente che lo ha portato all’atomismo informazionale, chiarendo tuttavia che non sono d’accordo con tre aspetti dell’atomismo informazionale. In primo luogo, mostrerò come questo sottragga al contenuto il suo ruolo causale nella spiegazione psicologica. In secondo luogo, non sono d’accordo con l’affermazione di Fodor per cui solo l’atomismo informazionale possa soddisfare i requisiti del principio di composizionalità. Illustrerò infine come l’atomismo informazionale ceda il passo a un insieme di proprietà nomiche ampio o difficile da gestire. Parole chiave: Atomismo informazionale; Teoria rappresentazionale della mente; Spiegazione psicologica; Principio di composizionalità; Jerry A. Fodor. (shrink)

Critiqués pour leur manque d’objectivité et de rationalité, les témoignages d’observations d’ovnis et d’« ufonautes » invitent-ils, dans le contexte de la crise écologique, à reposer la question de la pluralité des mondes extraterrestres ou à ouvrir plutôt celle de la pluralité des mondes terrestres? Invitent-ils à s’interroger sur les preuves de la présence d’E. T. dans notre environnement ou sur la nécessité de cesser de voir le monde dans lequel nous évoluons comme un stock de « ressources », afin (...) d’entrer en contact avec cette pluralité d’êtres et y trouver notre place dans un monde débarrassé du partage entre nature et culture? (shrink)

Legal theories are interesting when they bite, when they organise, when they destroy, when they reveal patterns in the chaos, when they cast form or substance in stark relief, when they relate the...

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