This is a revised and updated version of Swinburne's controversial treatment of the eternal philosophical problem of the relation between mind and body. He argues that we can only make sense of the interaction between the mental and the physical in terms of the soul, and that there is no scientific explanation of the evolution of the soul.

Hilbert’s program was an ambitious and wide-ranging project in the philosophy and foundations of mathematics. In order to “dispose of the foundational questions in mathematics once and for all,” Hilbert proposed a two-pronged approach in 1921: first, classical mathematics should be formalized in axiomatic systems; second, using only restricted, “finitary” means, one should give proofs of the consistency of these axiomatic systems. Although Gödel’s incompleteness theorems show that the program as originally conceived cannot be carried out, it had many partial (...) successes, and generated important advances in logical theory and metatheory, both at the time and since. The article discusses the historical background and development of Hilbert’s program, its philosophical underpinnings and consequences, and its subsequent development and influences since the 1930s. (shrink)

This article presents findings from a new qualitative study of female offenders’ interactions with Nigerian policewomen. Against the position of policing literature and feminists and gender advocat...

The claim that visually masked, unidentifiable words are analyzed at the level of whole word meaning has been challenged by recent findings indicating that instead, analysis occurs mainly at the subword level. The present experiments examined possible limits on subword analysis. Experiment 1 obtained semantic priming from pleasant- and unpleasant-meaning subliminal words in which no individual letter contained diagnostic information about a word’s evaluative valence; thus analysis must operate on information more complex than that contained in individual letters. Experiments 2 (...) and 3 showed that analysis must operate on information more complex than that represented by individual bigrams or trigrams . These findings suggest that while subliminal priming is driven by subword analysis, the effective units of analysis are distributed widely across at least short words. (shrink)

Ponderings II–VI begins the much-anticipated English translation of Martin Heidegger's "Black Notebooks." In a limited edition binding, this series of small notebooks with black covers, Heidegger confided sundry personal observations and ideas over the course of 40 years. The five notebooks in this volume were written between 1931–1938 and thus chronicle Heidegger's year as Rector of the University of Freiburg during the Nazi era. Published in German as volume 94 of the Complete Works, these challenging and fascinating journal entries shed (...) light on Heidegger's philosophical development regarding his central question of what it means to be, but also on his relation to National Socialism and the revolutionary atmosphere of the 1930s in Germany. Readers previously familiar only with excerpts taken out of context may now determine for themselves whether the controversy and censure the "Black Notebooks" have received are deserved or not. This faithful translation by Richard Rojcewicz opens the texts in a way that captures their philosophical and political content while disentangling Heidegger's notoriously difficult language. (shrink)

Richard J. Arneson version 7/27/99 Is having a disability more like being a member of a racially stigmatized group or like lacking a talent? Both analogies might be apt. The Americans with Disabilities Act stresses the former analogy. The framing thought is that people with disabilities are objects of prejudice and prejudiced behaviors which wrongfully exclude them from participation in important social practices such as the labor market. Think for example of a blind person whose job applications are always (...) automatically rejected because she is blind and without any consideration of her aptitude for this or that specific job. Such a person suffers wrongful discrimination and is denied equality of opportunity. (shrink)

The jus ad bellum doctrine of legitimate authority, conceived by St. Augustine and evolved by St. Thomas Aquinas, that a sovereign might identify a just cause and declare war without reference to the nation’s soldiers or citizens, continues to inform thinking about just war. Contesting this claim, the present paper reasons that without the moral confidence of the soldiers who serve, no conflict can be justified. The paper claims that soldiers have relevant and important ideas about the justice of the (...) cause. Soldiers, who enlist in order to advance justice by just means, deserve the chance to fight and perhaps to die with the fully formed moral assurance that their cause is right. (shrink)

Nationalism has become a contested construct because scholars doubt its ideological authenticity and global migratory consciousness, which promotes transcultural / transnational identity, and problematizes its raison d’être. Though Abouet and Oubrerie’s graphic novel could be read as a portrayal of the emerging urban center and its postmodern identities, this study rather investigates how Aya de Yopougon galvanizes juvenile nationalistic consciousness through age-long African communal identity. Using the postcolonial theory, the paper argues that the epistemology of nationalism, as a forerunner of (...) nationhood, has been inherently encapsulated in African communal identity as manifested in the lives of middle-class dwellers of Yopougon, a suburb of Abidjan. It further deconstructs the symbolic Eurocentric paradigms of nationalism because nationalistic consciousness is located in the African definition of “family” and “community” revealed in the setting of Yopougon which contrasts with other spaces that bear the emblem of nationhood in the novel. Yopougon is not Anderson’s “imagined community”; its inhabitants reflect African communal identity that is located in gender complementarities and civic interdependence. The paper concludes that communalism could be an African brand of modern nationalism, used to develop the nationalistic and communalistic consciousness of the Ivorian youths who are faced with crude realities of a postcolonial society. (shrink)

Abstract“…that you must have to stop working here.” How Sergej Chakhotin was forced to leave the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute at Heidelberg in 1933. ‐ In this essay the author presents some basically unpublished material according to the dismissal of the Russian natural scientist Sergej Chakhotin, a former assistant of I. P. Pavlov. Chakhotin, who got a sholarship granted by an American institution, worked since 1930 at the newly established Kaiser Wilhelm Institute at Heidelberg, as a scientist. Moreover, he practically engaged (...) himself in the political struggle of the German Social Democrats against Nazism and, in 1932, created the at that time well‐known symbol of the Three Arrows. But he was ‐ being a Soviet citizen ‐ a guest in Germany. His political activity was the very reason for his discharge in April, 1933, and even the engagement of some prominent academic collegues was not able to stop the administration measure. So Chakhotin became a political refugee like some of his German collegues. (shrink)

What I’m calling “Subjective Logic” is a new approach to logic. Fundamentally it is a theory about what sentences mean, i.e. a theory of the proposition, but it includes an account of logical consequence, the propositional connectives, probability, and the nature of truth.

This distinction between something that is really real and something that is seemingly real is of great moment. It cannot be dismissed, even though the Platonic scheme in its historical form might be abandoned. There are degrees of reality in the contents of our experience. Fleeting impressions or emotions are less real than the eternal nature of things. Errors, falsities, illusions and deceptions are less real than truth. And yet it cannot be denied that the fleeting impressions and emotions, that (...) even erroneous statements, illusions and deceptions have their own mode of reality, though on a lower level. (shrink)

" The Derrida Archive is divided into Critical and Supporting Receptions. This is an analysis of the Functions that the monograph finds working.

In this sequel to his classic study The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes, Popkin examines the important role played by the revival and reformulation of classical scepticism in eighteenth-century philosophy.

Graphical AbstractThe exquisite morphology of a complex body results from the sum of competitive and cooperative interactions among its subsystems. More details can be found in article number 1900245 by Richard Gawne et al. The cover image shows immunohistochemical staining (in red) of the head of a tadpole of Xenopus laevis, showing the brain, nostrils, and peripheral innervation.

Philosophy arose in Greece in a three-fold birth, first in 6th century Ionia, then in 6th century south Italy, and finally in 5th century Athens. This triple-birth, together with the character and differences of these three beginnings, becomes intelligible when the historical background and matrix involved are recalled. Richard Gotshalk begins this work with an extended sketch of that background, emphasizing the emergence of poetry as a truth-revealer beyond myth and the role of Homer and Hesiod in shaping by (...) their poetic achievements, the matrix within which philosophy arose. From that background, Gotshalk then offers an understanding of the origins and initial shapes of philosophy in Greece, taking Heraclitus as exemplifying the Ionian beginning, Parmenides the south Italian, and Plato and Aristotle the Athenian. The work concludes with a brief sketch of the features and emphases which mark the Greek realization of philosophical thought, and distinguish philosophy in its beginnings in Greece from philosophy in its beginnings in India and China. (shrink)

Richard Creel shares a practical gem of wisdom he discovered in the work of Hegel.