Thirty-four contributors address a variety of topics, from ancestral worship to transsexual masquerades, from metrical verse in the psalms to temples, poetic expression and linguistic performances. They bespeak the unique characteristics of Staal and his ability to break down barriers between academic disciplines. With contributors from around the world, this is a tribute to the forty years of scholarly work Frits Staal has invested in the foundation of a genuinely human science.

Polemisch essay tegen de strekking van het werk "Over zin en onzin in filosofie, religie en wetenschap" door Frits Staal.

This collection of articles and review essays, including many hard to find pieces, comprises the most important and fundamental studies of Indian logic and linguistics ever undertaken. Frits Staal is concerned with four basic questions: Are there universals of logic that transcend culture and time? Are there universals of language and linguistics? What is the nature of Indian logic? And what is the nature of Indian linguistics? By addressing these questions, Staal demonstrates that, contrary to the general assumption among Western (...) philosophers, the classical philosophers of India were rationalists, attentive to arguments. They were in this respect unlike contemporary Western thinkers inspired by existentialism or hermeneutics, and like the ancient Chinese, Greeks, and many medieval European schoolmen, only--as Staal says--more so. Universals establishes that Asia's contributions are not only compatible with what has been produced in the West, but a necessary ingredient and an essential component of any future human science. (shrink)

This thesis investigates the distinction, or distinctions, between response-dependent and response-independent concepts or subject matters. I present and discuss the three most influential versions of the distinction: Crispin Wright’s, Mark Johnston’s, and Philip Pettit’s. I argue that the versions do not compete for a single job, but that they can supplement each other, and that a system of different distinctions is more useful than a single distinction. I distinguish two main paradigms of response-dependence: response-dependence of subject matter, and response-dependence of (...) concepts only. I develop Pettit’s ‘ethocentric’ story of concept acquisition into an account of concept evolution that suggests answers to a range of hard questions about language, reality, and the relation between them. I argue that while response-dependence theses of subject matter can be motivated in very different ways, the resulting theses are less different than they might seem. I suggest that the traditional ways of distinguishing response-dependent subject matters from response-independent ones – in terms of a priori biconditionals connecting facts of the disputed class with responses in subjects in favourable conditions, and fulfilling some further conditions such as non-triviality and sometimes necessity – may not be the best approach. I also discuss two general problems for response-dependence theses: the problem of ‘finkish’ counterexamples, and the problem of specifying the ‘favourable conditions’ a priori, yet in a non-trivial way. The discussion of response-dependence is informed by a framework based on the idea that some realism disputes can be viewed as location disputes: disputes over the correct location of the disputed properties among several levels of candidate properties. The approach taken in this work is a charitable one: I try to make sense of response-dependence. The conclusion is the correspondingly optimistic one that the idea of response-dependence makes sense. (shrink)

A powerful reclamation of everyday conversation as an integral form of political discourse, The Socratic Citizen is an original contribution to political philosophy.

Until less than a century ago, the two prevailing views of dreams as well as of souls were that they are inconsequential or of divine origin. In either case it was assumed that they cannot be objects of rational inquiry. Similar views still prevail regarding mystical experiences and mysticism in general. Modern Western opinion, whether friendly or hostile, holds that the mystical falls squarely within the domain of the irrational. Mr. Staal argues that mysticism can be studied rationally, and that (...) without such study no theory of mind is complete. He exposes the grounds for the belief that mysticism cannot be studied, and shows them to be prejudices issuing from a particular historical development. While his contention has unflattering implications for the contemporary study of the humanities in general, it reveals in particular that existing academic approaches to the study of mysticism, even those that appear sound, are in fact inadequate. This conclusion applies to a variety of dogmatic inquiries and, as becomes clear in these pages, to philological, historical, phenomenological, sociological, physiological, and psychological ones as well. The illustrations in _Exploring Mysticism_ are drawn mainly from Indian forms of mysticism such as Yoga, supplemented with Buddhist, Taoist, Muslim and Christian examples. (shrink)

It is argued that reconstructions of the so-called ‘Master Argument’ of Dideros Cronos to the effect that possibility should be understood as present or future truth, essentially relies on two axioms: i) that every true proposition concerning the past is necessary, and ii) that it follows necessarily from a proposition being true that it always has been the case that it would be true. It is furthermore argued that these two axioms are inconsistent in the sense that any tense/modal semantics (...) which incorporates both collapses either modally (fails to distinguish between truth simpliciter and modalised truth) or temporally (fails to offer a plausible semantical account for propositions about the future). This finding is, furthermore, taken as indicator for the more generel claim that there are principled difficulties involved in construing semantics for combined tense/modal logical systems. (shrink)

Response-dependence theses are usually formulated in terms of a priori true biconditionals of roughly the form 'something, x, falls under the concept 'F' ↔ x would elicit response R from subjects S under conditions C'. Such formulations are vulnerable to conditional fallacy problems; counterexamples threaten whenever the C-conditions' coming to obtain might alter the object with respect to F. Crispin Wright has suggested that such problems can be avoided by placing the C-conditions in a proviso. This ensures that any changes (...) triggered by the C-conditions' coming to obtain will be irrelevant to the truth of the biconditional. I argue that this move leaves the equations vulnerable to counterexamples of a slightly different kind: Cases where the change is triggered, not by the C-conditions' coming to obtain, but by the response. I consider two ways to resist these counterexamples, and argue that both are insufficient. The upshot is a challenge that must be met if provisoed biconditionals are to serve their purpose. (shrink)

In ‘Finkish Dispositions’, David Lewis proposed a revised conditional analysis of dispositions, designed to rule out counterexamples based on finkish dispositions and finkish lacks of dispositions. Bird and Choi have argued that Lewis’s amended analysis is vulnerable to two further types of counterexamples trading on mimicked and masked dispositions. This paper provides a diagnosis of why Lewis’s analysis inherits these problems, and investigates whether the means can be found—in Lewis’s paper or elsewhere—to defend his analysis against the counterexamples. A range (...) of strategies for defending conditional analyses against masking and mimicking counterexamples are assessed. The conclusion is that none of them will save Lewis’s analysis; some strategies fail, while the rest threaten to make Lewis’s amendments redundant. The discussion offers a number of general lessons about how to defend conditional analyses of dispositions. (shrink)

Gettier's reminder that knowledge cannot be identified with justified true belief started a heated debate about what knowledge really is.

This review examines the alleged crisis of trust in environmental science and its impact on public opinion, policy decisions in the context of democratic governance, and the interaction between science and society. In an inter- disciplinary manner, the review focuses on the following themes: the trust- worthiness of environmental science, empirical studies on levels of trust and trust formation; social media, environmental science, and disinformation; trust in environmental governance and democracy; and co-production of knowledge and the production of trust in (...) knowledge. The review explores both the normative issue of trustworthiness and empirical studies on how to build trust. (shrink)

Colin McGinn has argued that consciousness is a nonspatial phenomenon. McGinn’s arguments for the nonspatiality of consciousness are presented and then criticized. It is concluded that consciousness may be as spatial as electric charge and different kinds of abilities.

It has recently been argued that a sensitivity theory of knowledge cannot account for intuitively appealing instances of higher-order knowledge. In this paper, we argue that it can once careful attention is paid to the methods or processes by which we typically form higher-order beliefs. We base our argument on what we take to be a well-motivated and commonsensical view on how higher-order knowledge is typically acquired, and we show how higher-order knowledge is possible in a sensitivity theory once this (...) view is adopted. (shrink)

Pain is a paradigmatic example of a conscious mental state because pain is always accompanied by a conscious experience. One version of the mind-body problem is to explain how physical states can generate conscious experiences. Although we may agree that this is really a hard problem there seems to be an even harder problem of consciousness: why does consciousness exist at all? It has been argued that both problems are so hard that they cannot be understood within a scientific framework. (...) Thus, only theism seems to offer adequate solutions to these problems. However, the paper criticizes these arguments. (shrink)