What are the features of a good scientific theory? Samuel Schindler's book revisits this classical question in the philosophy of science and develops new answers to it. Theoretical virtues matter not only for choosing theories 'to work with', but also for what we are justified in believing: only if the theories we possess are good ones can we be confident that our theories' claims about nature are actually correct. Recent debates have focussed rather narrowly on a theory's capacity to (...) predict new phenomena successfully, but Schindler argues that the justification for this focus is thin. He discusses several other theory properties such as testability, accuracy, and consistency, and highlights the importance of simplicity and coherence. Using detailed historical case studies and careful philosophical analysis, Schindler challenges the received view of theoretical virtues and advances arguments for the view that science uncovers reality through theory. (shrink)

This book locates the paradoxical process of collecting (as an activity that necessarily involves displacement and dispersal) in the ways nineteenth- and twentieth-century German-language literature (and in one case, cinema) attempts to represent ephemeral, discarded, and trivial things.

Samuel Rickless presents a new account of Berkeley's controversial argument, and suggests it is the philosopher's greatest legacy: not only is it valid, but it may well be sound.

In this essay, I attempt to show that the “war on terror” intensifies the use of biopolitical techniques. One such example, which I take as a point of departure, is Guantánamo Bay. We must place this camp in its proper genealogy with the many camps of the twentieth century. However, this genealogy is not a genealogy of the extremes of political space during and after the twentieth century; it is a genealogy of the transformation of political space itself. I will (...) attempt to show this in three steps: first, a description and critique of the biopolitical in both Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, who I take as exemplary in their analyses; second, an analysis of contemporary biopolitical techniques (including the camp), which enables us to avoid the liberal-democratic ideological misunderstanding of the war on terror; and third, a discussion regarding resistance to biopolitical techniques. (shrink)

Much contemporary metaphysics, moved by an apparent necessity to take reality to consist of given beings and properties, presents us with what appear to be deep problems requiring radical changes in the common sense conception of persons and the world. Contemporary meta-ethics ignores questions about logical form and formulates questions in ways that make the possibility of correct value judgments mysterious. In this book, Wheeler argues that given a Davidsonian understanding of truth, predication, and interpretation, and given a relativised version (...) of Aristotelian essentialism compatible with Davidson’s basic thinking, many metaphysical problems are not very deep. Likewise, many philosophers' claims that common sense needs to be modified are unfounded. He argues further that a proper consideration of questions of logical form clarifies and illuminates meta-ethical questions. Although the analyses and arguments he gives are often at odds with those at which Davidson arrived, they apply the central Davidsonian insights about semantics, understanding, and interpretation. (shrink)

Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 3, Page 320-333, July 2022.

Knowledge of mechanisms is critical for causal reasoning. We contrasted two possible organizations of causal knowledge—an interconnected causal network, where events are causally connected without any boundaries delineating discrete mechanisms; or a set of disparate mechanisms—causal islands—such that events in different mechanisms are not thought to be related even when they belong to the same causal chain. To distinguish these possibilities, we tested whether people make transitive judgments about causal chains by inferring, given A causes B and B causes C, (...) that A causes C. Specifically, causal chains schematized as one chunk or mechanism in semantic memory led to transitive causal judgments. On the other hand, chains schematized as multiple chunks led to intransitive judgments despite strong intermediate links. Normative accounts of causal intransitivity could not explain these intransitive judgments. (shrink)

'Que devrions-nous croire?' est la question centrale des débats philosophiques en éthique de la croyance, un champ complexe de philosophie contemporaine où se mêlent la normativité, les théories de la connaissance et la psychologie. Spécifiquement, ce livre aborde la question de si nous devrions croire certaines choses parce qu'elles sont vraies ou parce qu'elles sont utiles. Que croire lorsque les preuves s'opposent aux avantages pratiques d'entretenir une certaine croyance? Sous quelle condition devrions-nous croire quelque chose d'avantageux, bien que faux? Ces (...) questions ne peuvent faire l'économie d'autres débats portant sur notre autonomie et notre responsabilité quant à nos croyances. De par ces chemins sinueux vers les horizons normatifs de la croyance se dévoilent des questions sur les limites de l'activité philosophique."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Bearing Society in Mind disrupts the disciplinary boundaries of economic, political and cultural theory by exploring the theory and politics of the social formation.

By the middle of the twentieth century, many liberals looked glumly at the world modernity had brought about, with its devastating wars, rising totalitarianism, and permanent nuclear terror. They concluded that, far from offering a solution to these problems, the ideals of the Enlightenment, including emancipation and equality, had instead created them. The historian of political thought Samuel Moyn argues that the liberal intellectuals of the Cold War era--among them Isaiah Berlin, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Karl Popper, Judith Shklar, and Lionel (...) Trilling--transformed liberalism but left a disastrous legacy for our time. In his iconoclastic style, Moyn outlines how Cold War liberals redefined the ideals of their movement and renounced the moral core of the Enlightenment for a more dangerous philosophy: preserving individual liberty at all costs. In denouncing this stance, as well as the recent nostalgia for Cold War liberalism as a means to counter illiberal values, Moyn presents a timely call for a new emancipatory and egalitarian liberal philosophy--a path to undoing the damage of the Cold War and to ensuring the survival of liberalism."--Dust jacket. (shrink)

Uno de los motivos recurrentes del pensamiento contemporáneo, es la indagación sobre el concepto, la representación y la valoración de la comunidad como una dimensión de la experiencia, en particular en su incidencia política/impolítica. Pero "comunidad" se ha manifestado como un "semantema" elusivo, es decir, una familia de nociones y asociaciones significativas, que abren y complejizan más y más la búsqueda de un concepto preciso, hasta empujarnos hacia las típicas "vías negativas" para la caracterización o definición del mismo. A modo (...) de hipótesis, sin pretender con ello construir un esquema abarcador, sostendré que hay un núcleo estético en ese semantema, aludiendo con "estética" a la presencia, en el punto pivote de la constelación que delimita "lo comunitario", de términos como sonido/silencio, diferencia, doble, forma, identidad, imagen y semejanza. Se trata mayormente, como es evidente, de significaciones construidas sobre los planos auditivo y visual de lo sensorio. Como una especificación de dicha hipótesis, ensayaré la elaboración de una noción de comunidad a partir de la pregunta acerca de cuándo hay comunidad. La respuesta a articular, es que hay comunidad cuando hay imagen, esto es, corporización de una semejanza y de un sentido, capaces de conjurar tanto la amenaza de lo informe como la de la forma sin semejanza. El fundamento último de esta hipótesis, es que nuestro ser-en-común originario toma consistencia en el plano de lo sensible porque se vincula a la insuficiencia de toda representación para subordinarlo a un concepto, pues se presenta aquí, entre comunidad y concepto, la misma distancia infranqueable que hay entre la existencia y su teorización. One of the recurrent motifs of contemporary thought is the inquiry about the concept, representation and valuation of community as a dimension of experience, particularly in its political/impolitic influence. But "community" has proved to be an elusive semanteme, i.e., a family of notions and significant associations that make the search for a precise concept very complex, pushing us to the typical "negative ways" for its characterization or definition. As a hypothesis, and with no intention of building an all-encompassing frame, I will hold that there is an aesthetic nucleus to this semanteme, understanding "aesthetic" as the presence of terms such as sound/silence, difference, double, shape, identity, image and likeness, occurring at the very pivot point of the constellation that defines "the communitarian". It refers mostly to significances related to the hearing and seeing senses. Following this hypothesis, I will try to define a notion of community answering the question of when a community occurs. The answer to this being that there is a community when there is an image; that is, the embodiment of a likeness and a sense that can thwart the threat of what is shapeless or of a shape with no likeness. The ultimate foundation of this hypothesis is that our original being-in-common becomes consistent to the senses because of its inability to subordinate to a concept, as happens with any representation, being the unbridgeable distance between community and its concept the same there is between existence and its theorization. (shrink)

In this paper we propose the multiple complex systems approach for assessing domain-general complex problem-solving skills and its processes knowledge acquisition and knowledge application. After defining the construct and the formal frameworks for describing complex problems, we emphasise some of the measurement issues inherent in assessing CPS skills with single tasks. With examples of the MicroDYN test and the MicroFIN test, we show how to adequately score problem-solving skills by using multiple tasks. We discuss implications for problem-solving research and the (...) assessment of CPS skills in general. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 570-571, July 2012.

A debate has emerged in the bioethics literature about the use of biotechnology to modify human nature. A failure to define humanness has produced conceptual confusion in this debate. We draw upon recent social psychological work on folk concepts of humanness and dehumanization to analyse the understandings of humanness that underpin the rival positions. We argue that advocates and opponents of human nature modification employ distinct conceptions of humanness, and that their differing evaluations of modification make sense in light of (...) these conceptions. Advocates view modification as the enhancement of a non-essentialist sense of humanness that takes us further from animal nature. Opponents view it as the loss of an essentialist sense of humanness that takes us closer to a robotic state. Recognition that humanness has multiple senses implies that there is no mutually exclusive choice between seeing the outcome of modification as a quantitative gain in humanness or a fundamental, qualitative loss of it. (shrink)