A collection of modern Zen teaching stories, or koans, compiled and commented on by an Australian Zen teacher.

I address an intuition commonly endorsed by metaphysicians, that there must be a fundamental layer of reality, i.e., that chains of ontological dependence must terminate: there cannot be turtles all the way down. I discuss applications of this intuition with reference to Bradley’s regress, composition, realism about the mental and the cosmological argument. I discuss some arguments for the intui- tion, but argue that they are unconvincing. I conclude by making some suggestions for how the intuition should be argued for, (...) and discussing the ramifications of giving the justification I think best. (shrink)

This anthology has been significantly expanded for this edition to include a wider range of contemporary issues.

Simone Weil was a French philosopher and theologian, political activist and mystical writer. She graduated from the Ecole Normale Superieure, and was licensed to teach philosophy in 1931. For the following six years, Weil taught in a number of lycees and was active in radical politics. ;Beginning in late 1937, Weil had a series of mystical experiences which turned her thoughts and actions toward Catholic belief and the Christian way of action. Though never baptized, she recorded in great detail her (...) spiritual insights and reflections in a series of essays and notebooks that reflect the Christian Platonist tradition of Catholic spirituality. She died in England while working on the staff of the office of the Free French Forces. ;The quest to understand the widely divergent paths of Simone Weil's life and thought has led interpreters to characterize her as a Christian Platonist philosopher, a Catholic spiritual innovator, a mystical theologian, a left-wing political theorist, a critic of modern culture, and a martyr to sacrificial, self-emptying love. The central question about the unity of her thought remains unresolved. This dissertation argues that the unifying idea in her life and thought is the understanding and pursuit of the good of others. ;The Introduction briefly summarizes the importance in her career of the good. The first chapter analyzes Weil's discussion of the good in her student years, and the second examines her metaphysical ideas then. ;Chapters three and four discuss Weil's political philosophy in light of her focus on the synergy of thought and action in the process of understanding and pursuing the good. Chapter five takes a look at Weil's discussion of the cultural roles force and science play in opposition to the good. Finally, chapters six and seven examine in some detail Weil's theological account of the good. ;As a contribution to the study of the thought of Simone Weil, the dissertation shows that much of her intellectual, political and religious career can best be understood as a continuous effort to define the good and to integrate this understanding with actions that attend to it. (shrink)

There is widespread disagreement as to what the facts are concerning just when a collection of objects composes some further object; but there is widespread agreement that, whatever those facts are, they are necessary. I am unhappy to simply assume this, and in this paper I ask whether there is reason to think that the facts concerning composition hold necessarily. I consider various reasons to think so, but find fault with each of them. I examine the theory of composition as (...) identity, but argue that the version of this doctrine that entails universalism is implausible. I consider the claim that the a priority of such facts leads to their necessity, but give a defence of substantial contingent a priori truths. I ask whether the contingency of such facts would lead to unwelcome possibilities, but argue that the worrying looking possibilities can be blocked if it is desired. Next, I argue against the thought that the Lewis-Sider argument against restricted composition might give us reason to accept the necessity of universalism. Lastly, I respond to two objections from the 2006 BSPC. I conclude in favour of the contingency of the facts concerning when some things compose some thing. (shrink)

The existing literature treats of several investigations with a certain bearing on the question which is roughly indicated by the title “Imperatives and Logic.” Some of those investigations, however, are entirely outside the scope of the present work.Mally sets himself the task of developing a “Logik des Willens” constituting a parallel to the usual logic, the “Logik des Denkens". In order to emphasize its independence, the author also calls this “Logik des Willens” “Deontik”, and he conceives it as being based (...) on the “Wesensgesetze” of will in the same way as the usual logic is conceived as being based on the “Wesensgesetze” of thought. The author develops a formalistic deductive system on the basis of 5 axioms of demands, including the axiom that there is at least one fact which is unconditionally demanded, and through a lengthy series of theorems he arrives at the sentence that what is unconditionally demanded is identical with what is actually the case: “was sein soll, ist Tatsache”. Similarly, the author develops a system of axioms for “right” volition, including the axiom that right volition is non-contradictory. (shrink)

Martine Nida-Rümelin (1996) argues that color science indicates behaviorally undetectable spectrum inversion is possible and raises this possibility as an objection to functionalist accounts of visual states of color. I show that her argument does not rest solely on color science, but also on a philosophically controversial assumption, namely, that visual states of color supervene on physiological states. However, this assumption, on the part of philosophers or vision scientists, has the effect of simply ruling out certain versions of functionalism. While (...) Nida-Rümelin is quite right to search for empirical tests for claims about the nature of visual states, philosophical issues remain pivotal in determining the correctness of these claims. (shrink)

A wave of recent work in metaphysics seeks to undermine the anti-reductionist, functionalist consensus of the past few decades in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. That consensus apparently legitimated a focus on what systems do, without necessarily and always requiring attention to the details of how systems are constituted. The new metaphysical challenge contends that many states and processes referred to by functionalist cognitive scientists are epiphenomenal. It further contends that the problem lies in functionalism itself, and that, to (...) save the causal significance of mind, it is necessary to re-embrace reductionism. We argue that the prescribed return to reductionism would be disastrous for the cognitive and behavioral sciences, requiring the dismantling of most existing achievements and placing intolerable restrictions on further work. However, this argument fails to answer the metaphysical challenge on its own terms. We meet that challenge by going on to argue that the new metaphysical skepticism about functionalist cognitive science depends on reifying two distinct notions of causality (one primarily scientific, the other metaphysical), then equivocating between them. When the different notions of causality are properly distinguished, it is clear that functionalism is in no serious philosophical trouble, and that we need not choose between reducing minds or finding them causally impotent. The metaphysical challenge to functionalism relies, in particular, on a naïve and inaccurate conception of the practice of physics, and the relationship between physics and metaphysics. Key Words: explanation; functionalism; mental causation; metaphysics; reductionism. (shrink)

In their important book, Causation in the Law, H. L. A. Hart and Tony Honore argue that causation in the law is based on causation outside the law, that the causal principles the courts rely on to determine legal responsibility are based on distinctions exercised in ordinary causal judgments. A distinction that particularly concerns them is one that divides factors that are necessary or sine qua non for an effect into those that count as causes for purposes of legal responsibility (...) and those that do not. Hart and Honore claim that this distinction is often one of fact rather than of legal policy, and that the factual basis is to be found in the ordinary distinction we draw between causes and 'mere conditions'. If this claim is correct, we may hope to illuminate the legal distinction by articulating the principles behind the ordinary one. This is a challenging task since, as in the case of most cognitive skills, we are far better at making particular judgments than we are at stating the general principles that underlie them. Hart and Honore devote the first part of their book to this difficult task. We have, then, two large projects. One is to articulate our ordinary notion of causation, especially the distinction between cause and mere condition. This is the project of constructing an 'ordinary model'. The other is to argue for what we may call the 'shared concept claim', the claim that the concept of legal cause is based on the ordinary notion of causation, that 'causal judgments, though the law may have to systematize them, are not specifically legal. They appeal to a notion which is part of everyday life' (1985, p. lv; all references to follow are from this edition). This essay will focus on Hart and Honore's ordinary model, rather than on their shared concept claim. In my judgment, Hart and Honore's case for some version of the shared concept claim is strong, so they are right to maintain that a better understanding of our ordinary notion of.. (shrink)

This paper outlines Susan James’s analysis of Spinoza’s conception of practical imagination. It argues that there are three problems with her account. 1) The historical location James gives for the supposed shift away from rhetorical communication to egalitarian reasoning is problematic. 2) James uses the term ‘persuasion’ to describe both rational argumentation and rhetorical appeal to emotion as their genus or common denominator. 3) She relies on the traditional opposition between rhetorical capture of the mind through emotionally charged images and (...) empowerment of the mind through reasoning. (shrink)

This book illustrates the extent to which Kant's work has permeated wide areas of learing, across many disciplines, despite a general ignorance, especially in England, of the details of his highly technical philosophy. Consisting of nine major contributions to the Leeds Kant Conference in April 1990, Kant and his Influence shows how Kant's thought has had a marked effect on philosophers, both Continental and Analytic, social and art historians, theologians and Church leaders.

During the past two decades, philosophers of biology have increasingly turned their attention to mechanisms of biological phenomena. Through analyses of mechanistic proposals advanced by biologists, the goal of these philosophers is to understand what a mechanism is and how mechanisms explain. These analyses have generally focused on mechanistic proposals for phenomenon that occur at the cellular or sub-cellular level, such as synapse firing, protein synthesis, or metabolic pathway operation. Little is said about the mechanisms of the macromolecular reactions that (...) underpin these phenomena. These reactions comprise a diverse family of reaction types, and include protein folding, macromolecular complex formation, receptor-ligand interactions, and enzyme catalysis. In this paper, I develop an account of mechanism that focuses exclusively on macromolecular reactions. I begin by reviewing how mechanism is understood in enzymology, and how mechanistic concepts of enzymology apply to macromolecular reactions in general. We will see that the mechanism of a macromolecular reaction is most accurately described as a progression of reaction intermediates, where the evolution of intermediates, from one to the next, is characterized by an energetic coupling between chemistry and protein dynamics. I then make the case that this description necessitates a grounding in a process ontology. To describe the mechanism by which a macromolecular reaction occurs is to describe a process. (shrink)

I propose a strategy for a metaphysical reduction of perceived color, that is, an identification of perceived color with properties characterizable in non-qualitative terms. According to this strategy, a description of visual experience of color, which incorporates a description of the appearance of color, is a reference-fixing description. This strategy both takes color appearance seriously in its primary epistemic role and avoids rendering color as metaphysically mysterious. I’ll also argue that given this strategy, a plausible account of perceived color claims (...) that colors are physical properties of physical objects. (shrink)

We propose a pluralist account of content for predictive processing systems. Our pluralism combines Millikan's teleosemantics with existing structural resemblance accounts. The paper has two goals. First, we outline how a teleosemantic treatment of signal passing in predictive processing systems would work, and how it integrates with structural resemblance accounts. We show that the core explanatory motivations and conceptual machinery of teleosemantics and predictive processing mesh together well. Second, we argue this pluralist approach expands the range of empirical cases to (...) which the predictive processing framework might be successfully applied. This is because our pluralism is practice-oriented. A range of different notions of content are used in the cognitive sciences to explain behaviour, and some of these cases look to employ teleosemantic notions. As a result, our pluralism gives predictive processing the scope to cover these cases. (shrink)

Enzymes are protein catalysts of extraordinary efficiency, capable of bringing about rate enhancements of their biochemical reactions that can approach factors of 1020. Theories of enzyme catalysis, which seek to explain the means by which enzymes effect catalytic transformation of the substrate molecules on which they work, have evolved over the past century from the “lock-and-key” model proposed by Emil Fischer in 1894 to models that explicitly rely on transition state theory to the most recent theories that strive to provide (...) accounts that stress the essential role of protein dynamics. In this paper, I attempt to construct a metaphysical framework within which these new models of enzyme catalysis can be developed. This framework is constructed from key doctrines of process thought, which gives ontologic priority to becoming over being, as well as tenets of a process philosophy of chemistry, which stresses environmentally responsive molecular transformation. Enzyme catalysis can now be seen not as enzyme acting on its substrate, but rather as enzyme and substrate entering into a relation which allows them to traverse the reaction coordinate as an ontologic unity. (shrink)

The roots of cognitivism lie deep in the history of Western thought, and to develop a genuinely post-cognitivist psychology, this investigation goes back to presuppositions descended from Platonic/Cartesian assumptions and beliefs about the nature of thought.

The problem of the nature of color is typically put in terms of the following question about the intentional content of visual experiences: what’s the nature of the property we attribute to physical objects in virtue of our visual experiences of color? This problem has proven to be tenacious largely because it’s not clear what the constraints are for an answer. With no clarity about constraints, the proposed solutions range widely, the most common dividing into subjectivist views which hold that (...) attributed colors are mental properties or mental events} and a variety of realist views, which hold that colors are properties of physical objects. These realist views, in turn, divide into views that hold that attributed colors are dispositions of physical objects to produce color experiences (dispositionalism),° nondispositional relations between objects and perceivers (the relational view)," physical properties of physical objects (physicalism),‘ or sui generis properties of physical objects (primitivism and impressionism).‘ I’ll examine a proposed constraint which Mark Johnston (1992) calls Revelation. According to Revelation, the appearance of color in our ordinary visual experience provides us with unqualified access to the nature of color. While every proposal about the nature of color must take a stand on how the.. (shrink)

Carroll Izard’s theoretical and research contributions to the study of early socioemotional development are profiled. His studies of early emotional expression and the formulations of differential emotions theory have stimulated contemporary inquiry into the organization of early emotional life, the developmental processes by which distinct feelings and facial expressions become progressively concordant, and how the emotional expressions of others become imbued with emotion meaning. His work on emotion, attachment, and emotion–cognition relations has contributed to contemporary study of the emotional bases (...) of attachment organization and the development of the internal working models associated with attachment security. Because of Izard’s contributions, developmental emotions research is theoretically richer, and emotion has a more central place in our understanding of development and motivation. (shrink)

There are two broad views in the epistemology of testimony, conservatism and liberalism. The two views disagree over a particular necessary condition on testimonial justification: the positive reasons requirement (PRR). Perhaps the most prominent objection levelled at liberalism from the conservative camp stems from gullibility; without PRR, the thought goes, an objectionable form of gullibility looms large for liberals. In this paper I aim to make two main contributions: to introduce a new metric for adjudicating this debate; and to argue (...) that, from the perspective of this new metric, the liberal view is stronger than has been appreciated. Drawing on work from James (The Will to believe and other essays in Popular Philosophy, Harvard University Press, 1896), Goldman (Epistemology and Cognition, Harvard University Press, 1986), and Kelp et al. (Synthese 197:5187–5202, 2020), I firstly countenance the distinction between positive and negative epistemic measures. Positive measures concern, roughly, the acquisition of truths, whereas negative measures concern the avoidance of falsehoods. Both, it is argued, are relevant to epistemic justification, but this debate has proceeded in such a way as to overemphasise the importance of the latter over the former. Once this distinction is made, new conceptual terrain opens for the liberal. Rather than being resigned to a predominantly defensive role—of mitigating worries about negative measures—the liberal can go on the offensive, and explore the independent epistemic strengths of their position. The upshot is that liberals have a new way to dispel their most prominent objection. (shrink)

The symptom (which here refers to both the clinical or ‘objective’ sign, that is, the sign that physicians believe cannot lie, and the patient’s subjective revelation of disorder, which is always considered suspect) has been relegated by a number of semioticians to a category of signs often considered of little consequence, a ‘natural’ sign signaling some specific condition or state within the body whose object stands in a strictly biological and securely determined relationship to the symptom. I believe the symptom, (...) however, is deep, rich, and symbolic in every sense, signifying the misadventures of a body impaled by its perceptual skills and history within its own unique Umwelt or sign-world. Unfortunately, the notion of a sign which reflects biologically coded events alone suggests the body is without the ability to think, learn, and produce a story of unlimited semiosis. This should seem especially problematic to those biosemioticians who find analogic codes of much greater importance than the supposedly digital codes of DNA. I suggest that the disordered and disorderly body and the Umwelt within which it survives offer biosemioticians and those who pursue semiotic models in other disciplines an important opportunity to jointly and more fully explore the experienced world of health and illness, a world in which culture and nature are fully interpenetrated. (shrink)

With the success of cognitive science's interdisciplinary approach to studying the mind, many theorists have taken up the strategy of appealing to science to address long standing disputes about metaphysics and the mind. In a recent case in point, philosophers and psychologists, including Robert Kane, Daniel C. Dennett, and Daniel M. Wegner, are exploring how science can be brought to bear on the debate about the problem of free will. I attempt to clarify the current debate by considering how empirical (...) research can be useful. I argue that empirical findings don't apply to one basic dimension of the problem, namely the dispute between compatibilism and incompatibilism. However, I show that empirical research can provide constraints in connection with another fundamental dimension, namely the dispute between libertarianism, which claims that indeterminacy is, in certain contexts, sufficient for freedom, and hard determinism and compatibilism, which deny this. I argue that the source of the most powerful constraint is psychological research into the accuracy of introspection. (shrink)

This is the culmination of a discussion on Berry's Paradox with Graham Priest, over an extended period from 1983 to 2019, the central point being whether the Paradox can be avoided or not by removal of the Law of Excluded Middle (LEM). Priest is of the view that a form of the Paradox can be derived without the LEM, whilst Brady disputes this. We start by conceptualizing negation in the logic MC of meaning containment and introduce the LEM as part (...) of the classical recapture. We then examine the usage of the LEM in some other paradoxes and see that it is applied to cases of self-reference. In relation to Priest's [2019] paper, we go on to find a similar use of the LEM in Priest's derivation of Berry's Paradox. However, it is found to be deeper and trickier than other paradoxes, requiring a special effort to untangle the relationships between the LEM, self-reference and meta-theoretic influence. We then examine Brady's previous formalization of Berry's Paradox, considering Brady's most recent view of restricted quantification and his recursive account of the least number satisfying a property. We show that neither of these methods can be used to formalize the paradox. We also examine the inductive shapes for the Substitution of Identity Rule for intensional and extensional identities, while conceding Priest's point, made in [2019], that his shape of Substitution of Identity is not relevant to his proof of Berry's Paradox. (shrink)

Cecilia Heyes recently developed a novel framework for understanding human cognitive evolution. Contrary to many traditional views, cultural evolutionary psychology argues that distinctively human cognitive traits are transmitted culturally, not biologically. In labeling these mechanisms of thought “cognitive gadgets,” Heyes draws a direct analogy with the cultural artifacts studied by archaeologists. This chapter explores how cultural evolutionary psychology can inform research in cognitive archaeology and vice versa. On the former line of thought, the chapter argues that adopting Heyes’ framework goes (...) some way to addressing the Wynn’s methodological challenge by bringing the categories of the psychological and archaeological sciences closer together. Nonetheless, deep inferential challenges remain. This chapter looks at how we can interpret the record through the lens of cognitive gadgets, using behavioral modernity as a case study. It then examines the way cognitive archaeology can inform research in cultural evolutionary psychology. Using research on the evolution of language, it argues that evidence from cognitive archaeology strengthens Heyes’ case that language is a gadget. -/- . (shrink)